5 Minutes to Better Home Services Marketing

What day of the week are your customers most likely to contact you? How can you use that insight to implement strategies that give you a competitive edge? 

This 5-minute episode goes into detail about an 11,000 PPC lead sample that revealed what days of the week customers are most likely to contact HVAC businesses. 

If you enjoy the episode and want to read more about the study and analysis, you can see the full article here: https://thedatadriventrades.substack.com/p/hvac-lead-trends-day-of-the-week

Chat is growing in popularity as it adds another way for your customers to convert on your website. 

But should you and your staff commit to answering chat leads or should you hire someone to do it? 

In this 5-minute episode, I break down the revenue flow analytics to help give you data to make that choice. 

Bing PPC doesn't drive as much volume as Google PPC, but it still generated a more than 20x return on ad spend in the month of August. 

In this episode I dive deep into the Bing data and reveal why it's an ad channel that you should look at activating ASAP if it's something you haven't done already. 

If you want to read the full data breakdown, make sure to subscribe to my e-mail newsletter, which you can find here: https://thedatadriventrades.substack.com/p/bing-vs-google-revenue-performance

Each month, we will break down and benchmark performance for Google PPC to help you gauge how well your marketing strategy is performing relative to an average of HVAC contractors small and big across the US. 

We saw an uncharacteristic drop in demand for July for HVAC contractors across the US. 

Here's the data we're seeing, how bad it is and what you can do about it. 

In this episode, we look at historical installation data and how much of a downturn the Great Recession caused to make some predictions about the future. 

It's not all doom and gloom and it's better to be prepared and on offense during these times, regardless of what the future may bring! 

While Google has 86.6% of the global search market share, Bing still commands 6.7% of the market and is an opportunity for you to take advantage of the underutilized channel. 

Our data found that booked jobs from Bing were 8% less expensive than Google and Bing generated a 10.5x ROAS versus an 8.2x ROAS for Google. 

Google still has the volume, but don't let the conversation about your marketing investments be Google OR Bing, let it be Google AND Bing! 

In this episode, we summarize our analysis of over 1,500 HVAC phone leads from Google Ads to see what percentage were click-to-call, how well those calls matched to new work in the CRM, what percentage of them were new customers and how much revenue they drove compared to website-to-call. 

In this episode, I use data to shed light on revenue leaks from your HVAC marketing strategy and what you can do about it. 

Just about everyone we've used this data with has found fixable gaps that allowed them to improve the return on their digital marketing investments. 

Without it, we find a lot of issues that no one knew existed because it simply wasn't being tracked. 

Cost per Lead is overused in the trades as a metric for measuring marketing impact. 

In this short episode, I talk about match rates, booked job rates and share data from over 18,000 leads that we tracked so that you are armed with benchmarks. 

We need to move away from cost per lead as a metric to understand our marketing investments. 

Marketing attribution will play a bigger role in the trades even if it's new today. 

We've seen it get pretty complicated in other industries and are here to simplify how you can use marketing attribution to get an edge over your competition with real-life examples. 

In this episode, I go into detail about what match rate is and how you can use the metric to help you improve your business. 

I also provide some benchmark data from nearly 19,000 leads that we measured from the point of conversion all the way through to revenue. 

We are so tied to leads and cost per lead in our marketing but understanding match rates will open your eyes to whole new way to think about your marketing and operational investments. 

Dark Social is a hot topic in Business to Business marketing, but is it just as important in home services? 

Yes and No. 

I explain why and offer some data to help you decide if and when the right time is to invest more resources into content creation where it counts. 

In this episode we dive deep into the data of PPC performance in terms of closed revenue and cost per completed job. 

There's a narrative going around our industry that PPC is too expensive, competitive and doesn't work. 

This couldn't be further from the truth and the clients who follow the data have been able to reap the benefits of investing in the channel. 

Revenue potential helps us understand how well customers flow to revenue from lead to consult to estimate to close. 

We provide some benchmarks to help you identify red flags and focus your energy on the right things to help grow your business. 

Impression share can provide really insightful data about demand in your market, but it is sometimes used as a sales tool by marketing agencies that want you to spend more money (hint: they're usually paid as a % of spend). 

There's a right way to do this and a wrong way. 

We break down both so you know what to look for if someone is selling you more budget spending using impression-share as their core metric. 

In this episode, I speak about how to re-frame the way you value new customers. 

I've spent hundreds of hours listening to thousands of inbound phone calls to HVAC businesses and one common theme that popped up again and again is that new customers in different neighborhoods and markets can spark a cluster of business in that area. 

Whether it's through referrals or seeing a van at the neighbor's, getting new customers are worth more than just the value of their ticket. 

One of the most common questions we get from HVAC contractors is how much to spend on digital marketing channels like Google, Bing and Facebook. 

Should you increase budget? Decrease it? Are you losing out on opportunity? Should you trust impression-share as a data point to make decisions about your investment? 

We break it down step-by-step with data to help you figure out the right budget to help you achieve your goals. 

In this episode we discuss Facebook and whether or not it is a viable ad change after recent changes make it harder to explicitly target homeowners and other key attributes on the platform. 

As always, we bring revenue data to the table to help determine Facebook's place in your marketing strategy. 

In the episode we take a look at Schedule Engine revenue data to see if it is worth considering for your HVAC business. 

We believe that customer behavior is changing and that they will expect easy online appointment bookings, but are we too early? 

Listen in to find out how much revenue Schedule Engine's booking tool drove for some of our clients. 

The short answer is: yes. 

We explain why and dive into some data supporting the point. 

If you don't believe us, search "plumber near me" on Bing and see if any local competition shows up or if it is all aggregators. 

It's important to know what advertising channels drive revenue from your business, but we'd argue that it's even more important to know which conversion tools your customers prefer in order to get in contact with you. 

We dive into the data in this episode and some of what we found may surprise you. 

It's important that we learn how customer's want to get in touch with us and do the best job we can at making it easy for them do it across phone calls, chat tools, scheduling tools and form options. 

Most marketers talk about generating demand (using channels like Facebook and YouTube) and capturing demand (using channels like Google and Bing), but there's a third category called demand nurturing. 

You can generate and capture demand all day long, but if you aren't properly nurturing it, then it won't matter much for the growth of your business. 

In this episode, I talk about what demand nurturing is and how you can improve it to help you grow your HVAC business. 

One of the best ways to grow your HVAC business is to improve the way you nurture demand from phone calls. 

In this short episode I break down 5 steps to a better phone presence that can help you close more business. 

We cheated on this episode by clocking in at nearly 7 minutes, but I promise the extra 2 minutes of content are worth it! 

We get this question a lot and there will be a part 2 for scenarios where your business depends on getting new leads to survive. 

Before you spend any more time, energy and money on generating new leads, you need to first get a handle on how well you convert them because chances are, there's revenue in your backyard but you just haven't been looking for it. 

I run through a few examples that you can implement in your home services business today. 

The internet is the great equalizer and the businesses who understand their customer's behavior from discovery through purchasing a replacement installation can make better decisions to deliver a better experience. 

We think of this concept as "Revenue Flow". 

Revenue should flow through your business as efficiently as possible, and you need the right data to understand where it's getting stuck so that you can spend time solving the right problems that will have a meaningful impact to your business. 

If you are a home services contractor and are spending money on digital marketing channels like Google, Bing and Facebook to advertise your business, this episode explains why conversions are one of the worst metrics to evaluate that performance. 

We provide data points for the booked job rates of conversions (the data will surprise you) and why all conversions aren't created equally. 

It's easy for your vendors to inflate conversion numbers to make themselves look good, but you should be asking for their booked job rate, average cost per booked job, average ticket and return on ad spend.