S01E11 - From Goals to Results: Crafting Effective Home Inspection Marketing Strategies

Transcript

Welcome to Moose Tales. I'm Jon with Two Moose Home Inspections and I have some short home inspection topics I need to share with you. So, let's dive right in.

Since we're going to be talking about marketing, I want to make it clear that I'm not specifically talking about search engine optimization, nor am I talking about the search engine results page, which would basically be SEO and SERP.

Those two things really are a lot more of a deep dive. This is going to be a broader overview of marketing and marketing ideas for you as a home inspection business.

First, it's important to understand who you are, of course, who you are as an individual, but also who you are as a brand or as a business. Depending on the brand you have, you might just be trying to get the most home inspections at the lowest price. And it's all about volume, depending on the type of home inspection company you are.

You might be more interested in less volume, higher quality, therefore higher price per inspection. So, depending on what your interests are, that brand is really going to drive the type of marketing that you're going to end up doing and who you're reaching out to. Now, additionally, who you are as an individual is very important because you may not be interested in doing blog posts.

You may not be interested in making videos. You may not be interested in doing audio. You may be more interested in stepping back as opposed to stepping into the role of your marketing director. And so, should you have a marketing director? Well, I mean, obviously if you can afford it, that would be excellent. But if you can't afford it, a lot of home inspectors are very DIY, DIY whenever it comes to how in marketing, how am I doing search engine optimization, how am I doing all these different things?

And unfortunately, it's really, really challenging to do what you know, that you're supposed to do. So, I think right out of the gate it's important to say, Yeah, I know I'm supposed to be writing a blog post today, but, you know, I really don't like writing essays. You might say, it's really important that I make videos, but, you know, I do not like editing videos.

It might be important for me to have audio, but I don't like recording my own voice. So how do we get around this? While that might be involving your employees or involving a third party to take some of that weight off of your shoulders?

The next thing it's very important to understand your audience.

When I say your audience, your audience might be someone like realtors or homeowners, home sellers, home buyers or inspectors. Depending on who your audience is, you can take a deep dive into each and every one of these. So very briefly, an example would be with realtors, you might have your listing agent, you might have your buyer's agent, you might have an agent that is more in the luxury space.

You might have an agent that's more in the high-volume space, depending on those criteria, you can then dive deeper. Do I want a specific area such as a city or a town? Do I want a specific agency such as? This realtor group is the one that's doing the most volume in this area. So, I'm going to be targeting them as my audience.

Do you want to be specifically talking to women? Do you want to specifically be talking to males? And depending on that, you can change what your messages to reach out to more individuals. Understanding your audience is very important. Now, additionally, there is a very big difference between home buyers and home sellers, and there's also a difference between homeowners because a homeowner is not interested in buying or selling their house.

They're just interested in information about the house. So, the type of information that you're presenting and the services that you may be able to offer are completely different for that. And then if we talk about inspectors, well, why would I want to be marketing out to inspectors? Well, perhaps I do ancillary services, different add-ons that those inspectors could use.

So, if they know about me and the services that I offer, then that means that their success becomes my success. And understanding each one of these audience members or each one of these types of audiences is really going to benefit your ability to market. So, you have to be very, very clear not only on the who, but the why.

Why do I want to reach out to these people? Do I want to make really good relationships with realtors so that way they recommend me? Do I want people who are about to sell their house or people that are buying their house to buy my services or again, with inspectors? Do I want to be able to offer add on services that these inspectors don't offer?

So, it's very important to not only understand who, but why.

Once you understand yourself and you understand your audience, then it's very important to set measurable and specific goals.

The reason why is because we don't want to exert a whole bunch of energy, a bunch of money, whatever it may be, and then not know if there is a benefit. And so, what are these goals? Well, sometimes those goals might be, I want to sell a product. Another goal might be I want a certain amount of visibility.

The next goal maybe I just want to put in a lot of content to my website or other services that will help me with my SERP, which is my search engine ranking page, which is where I am. As far as the rings are concerned, am I on page one? Am I number one on page one, or am I all the way down on page 20 and nobody will ever find my stuff?

So having very specific goals is important. Now, let's say that you did an ad campaign. Let's say you were paying for some kind of ads through like Google AdSense or whatever it may be, and you're paying money for Facebook, for Google, for whatever platform you want. You are spending a lot of money.

and you're spending this money.

So, people will take a look at your business. Now, what we really want to find out is, is that converting is the amount of money that I'm putting out or the amount of effort that I'm putting out converting into a sale, which may be what I'm interested in.

we can utilize a specific link for somebody to click on to be able to schedule an inspection.

We could have a code that if they enter a code, then we knew that that came from a specific ad campaign. And there are a lot of other ways, such as questionnaires, that if I say, hey, how did you hear about us? What made you choose us today?

and if you are diligent about having that questionnaire for every single customer, then.

That data can paint a really good picture of whether or not this particular strategy is a success or failure, whether investing this time, this money, this effort is a success or is a failure, and whether you should move on to the next thing.

Converting the views that you receive into a sale may not always be the primary focus.

It may be that you want to increase the visibility of your company. If you're trying to increase the visibility of your company being on multiple platforms, having a whole bunch of different marketing plans would be a really good way to increase visibility. Now, why would you want to increase visibility? Of course, there is the algorithm we have to feed the algorithm.

But in addition to that, if somebody looks at your website or if somebody is deciding between your business and another business and they say, wow, this person has video content, this person has audio content, this person has a blog post, this person has all of these different things. Look at all these photos that they've taken there and post it on their Google business profile.

They have all this stuff versus somebody who doesn't. It shows that you are real company. It shows that you care about your craft and therefore people may choose you over someone else. And so that amount of visibility may be something that is very beneficial to you and your business as a long term strategy that may not be able to be tracked in a measurable or specific way, except for you can take a look at the number of subscribers, the number of views, the number of followers, and all of that will then boost your business's credibility as far as the algorithm is concerned.

And where that really comes in handy is that

There may be a person who really likes your content and because of that, even though they will never purchase a home inspection from you because they like your content, they might have a friend who just so happens to be in the area that you do home inspections for and you come as a recommendation and now you just got yourself a multi hundred

dollar inspection for what? Making some content that somebody else saw that then told a friend and you won out versus your competition because of your company's visibility.

and visibility is one of those things that it's not just online presence, it's also in person. Are your vehicles branded? Do you have a lot of branding with the way in which you interact with realtors?

Do you have branding whenever you're on site? All of these things can increase visibility. So now the neighbor that's four houses down that's selling their house and wants a prelisting inspection, they might choose you. The person that's renting in the house over here, and they just sell your vehicle whenever they're ready to buy a home. They might choose you because they've seen you.

You're familiar and that's good enough for them.

Now, once you have all of this completed, just don't fall into the sunk cost fallacy. I put all this effort into this one particular campaign. And you know, if I just keep pushing, it's going to be great. And yes, there is that tipping point where sometimes pushing really is beneficial, but it's important to have an exit strategy.

It's important to say, well, my primary goal is that I'm going to spend X amount of dollars on advertising. Anything beyond that, that’s as far as I'm willing to go. So maybe instead of putting it all in one basket, have that go over a longer period of time because you really want your marketing to be ongoing and consistent.

So, let's say instead of monetarily you are then how much effort am I going to put in? Well, you might say I'm going to do X number of videos, I'm going to do X number of podcasts and then do X number of whatever, have that number written down on a piece of paper before you get emotionally invested in the project.

So that way, if you're having a hard time getting through the project, you can look back at that and say, I really did set a goal and I need to reach that goal. Or let's say you aren't having a hard time and you're like, I want to keep on going. And you say, wait a second, this is where I said, Let's pump the brakes for a minute and see if this is actually worth the effort.

And if you're having fun, just keep having fun.

Let's get a little more specific and talk about my business as a business owner. What do I want? Well, first and foremost, I want to have a high SERP ranking. What that means is a high search engine results page ranking, meaning I want to be number one on the first page. That's what I'm interested in. The next thing that I'm interested in is reviews.

I want to have really good reviews, quality reviews, reviews that whenever somebody takes a look at those reviews, they don't say, it's just because somebody was told to do it and they did it. I want those reviews to be heartfelt and I want them to be real. And so how do we do that? Amazing customer service then?

I want to have really, really good relationships with our fellow realtors. That's because those realtors are the ones that are funneling business to us, and it's important to take really good care of your realtors. And of course, I want visibility. I want people to be able to see that my company exists. There are hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of businesses that are out there that you've never heard of that make millions of dollars that you've never heard of.

And so, it's just really, really important to make sure that I have good visibility because all of my customers are coming more than likely from out of town and buying a house in town. And so, for that, they need to know who I am. So how do I get that visibility out there? How do I make sure they're able to see me?

That's what's important to me as a business owner. Now, what is important to me as a person, what do I enjoy? I enjoy education, I enjoy educating people. So, there are things that I do for fun, such as this.

So, with all of that being said, where does that put us? Well, we are currently number one SERP ranking, which is amazing.

We are currently the highest reviewed and best reviewed company in our market. Great. We have really, really good relationships with our realtors. We do presentations with them. We have realtors that are basically our closest friends that will text or share, you know, Instagram reels with or whatever it may be that we are communicating both about business and about family with some of these realtors.

And I think that that's so important. And additionally, visibility wise, we have hundreds of thousands of views, and I think that that is really beneficial because those hundreds of thousands of views have nothing to do with those people buying home inspections from us. But it has everything to do with feeding the algorithm to make sure the algorithm knows not only are we a healthy business, but we are also a vibrant business, we are an engaging business.

And I think all of that is extremely important.

So, let's take this with a grain of salt. There are some companies that survive and some companies that don't, and that is called a survivorship bias.

What that means is that those companies that survive say, well, these are the things that I did and that's why we were so successful. And these companies that fail could do the exact same things. But just because of circumstances outside of their control, their business fails. Now, obviously there are things that we could do better, and we know that.

But there's also a fine line between what we're willing to do with a work life balance and what we're comfortable doing with where our skill sets are. So is a room for improvement always. So, what I want to make very clear is that survivorship bias is real.

and don't just take what we say as gospel because like we're just one example.

There are probably plenty that have failed and probably plenty that have done better than us.

A second thing I want to talk about is luck versus skill. What would happen is if there was complete just random generated computer click, click, click, click, people will sometimes, whenever they win, say, well, it was because of my skill.

I knew it was predestined, that I would be the winner. And it was because of how hard I worked. And I knew to click on this button versus that button. And that was that. Well, it turns out that the researchers were just doing completely random chance. And if they were to pick another person, the other person said the exact same thing was because of all the hard work that I did and all the things and whatever luck is a huge part of whether or not your marketing campaigns are successful or are not successful.

So if you understand yourself, you understand who your audience is, you understand what your goals are and you're executing on those goals, Luck plays a really big part of whether or not the right people see that information at the right time to actually create that tipping point to then make you a really successful business. It's just luck.

so, let's talk about paying for leads. If you're paying for leads, how much money are you paying and how many of those are converting? How good are the leads and where are they getting these leads from? Because if you're paying a significant amount of money for leads, well, then they better be gosh darn good.

Because if they're not, then what you're doing is you're just wasting your money and if you get one, maybe two people out of every 500, every thousand leads, is it even worth your time to be tracking down these leads, emailing them cold, calling them doing all these things? What number makes it valuable for you? How much money are you willing to spend?

And is there another way in which you can organically get these leads to come to you instead of you having to go and get those leads? I think it's very important that if you're going to pay for leads, you need to understand the funnels in which those leads are getting to eventually come across your desk. And if the funnel doesn't make sense, then you can already determine that these leads are not going to be valuable.

If somebody says that they're looking for home repair, they don't want a home inspector. If somebody is just browsing Zillow or Redfin or whatever, and they're just looking at houses just to daydream, that is not a good lead. If somebody has already purchased the house, not a good lead and so where are they getting this information from? And then additionally, who is leaking all of this customer information to determine that these people are good leads?

Because I think there's a little bit of a problem there that most companies want to be as ethical as possible whenever it comes to. You've given me customer data and I don't want to share or sell that customer data to somebody else. Now, a lot of people say, well, there's a lot of money to be made on that, especially if they have high volume.

However, I think that in the home inspection niche, especially in our area, it's very, very challenging to find verified leads that are actually worth the money for a home inspection. Now there are different points where people have not gone under contract, where realtors really do survive and thrive on leads. But what we're looking for is not just a person interested in buying a house.

We are looking for a person who is interested in buying a house. And within the last two days has gone under contract. That's like our ideal person or actually the person who is about to go under contract. How would I actually get those leads? How would they be able to get that information unless somebody was leaking information that they shouldn't be or selling a customer's information as they shouldn't be?

So realistically, for me, I have not been able to find a really good source of leads that is actually worth the money. Most of it is just wasteful. So, lead's something to talk about with marketing.

The last thing I want to talk about is repetition. With repetition. The more that you do something, the better that you get at it, because every time you're going to say, I could have done better.

So, then you just remember that for the next time, and then it gets better and better and better, and eventually you reach a plateau where you can't get any better and that's perfectly acceptable.

so, keep in mind that the first content that you release is probably not going to be very good.

And the last piece of content that you released is probably going to be much better. And so, repetition is extremely important.

don't let perfection get in the way of good enough.

If you're constantly saying, it's not perfect, it's not perfect, I can't release it, then what have you done? You've literally released nothing. It doesn't matter how hard you're working on it until it is out there in the world. It's not out there in the world. So, if it's good enough, get it out there and then you'll do better on the next one.

I mean, the fact is we have several hundred YouTube videos on our YouTube channel, but I think only one of those has actually hit with any amount of actual true viewership. And with that being said, is that a bad thing? No. It just means that during certain seasons, certain videos hit harder than other videos do. And if I can get one that can really boost their visibility, great, because all the rest have been practice and that repetition is key.

So, the last thought that I'll leave you with is marketing is content and content is marketing. What that means is that anything that you're doing for a marketing campaign can then be used on your social media as content and anything that you'd want to post on your social media as content can be used in a marketing campaign.

The key is to be consistent, meaning that you post regularly and that you're always keeping your marketing up to date. And so, if you're always updating your stuff, let's say it's on a weekly basis, a biweekly basis, whatever it may be, that is making sure that the algorithm knows that you're staying consistent. So, make sure perfection does not get in the way of good enough.

And you're going to have a very successful marketing campaign. That's a pod.