Ep #2 - Stop Copying The Competition

What's going on, y'all, Clay here with the Home Improvement Lead Generation Secrets Podcast, and in this episode I want to talk about why you should stop copying the competition. Okay, so what I want to talk about here is there's this huge thing that goes on, especially in the Home Improvement Industry, is people, actually it's in every industry, but I see it so much with contractors and Home Improvement businesses, is they see what their competition is doing, or they see what another successful business is doing outside of their area, their service area, and without looking too deeply into it, or really understanding the mechanics of what goes into it, they copy it, and they just duplicate it, or they take it almost at a duplicate, and they just turn around and put it out there, whether it's the offer, whether it's the sales message, whether it's the unique selling proposition of how quickly it can be done, or how they do it, or their unique process, or whatever it is, they copy it, or even their ads, the exact abs, similar picture, everything. They copy it, and then they put it out there, and it doesn't work. And the reason it doesn't work is because they don't understand the mechanics, they don't understand why it works for that company, going on after the lead comes in, or after somebody expresses interest, or how they run through their sales process, they literally just take the front end of it, and I mean they also a lot of times don't even know that it's working. They just seem like it's working, the company is successful, and the company might be successful for a completely different reason than what they attribute it to. And I see this so often, and I also see it, and I talked about this in the first episode, is I also see people doing this where they see the gurus in the space of home improvement growth, and marketing, and tactics. And they basically copy what they did, and they put it out there, and they're like, "Oh, the leads are no good. This isn't working for me, whatever." And the reason that is is because a lot of times it doesn't. It's not always meant for every business, it doesn't always apply to every market. It also has a lot to do with your competition, and what other businesses are around that really dictates the success of these things that you try to implement. And so I really want to make this episode about why you shouldn't try to mimic and copycat everyone else, okay? You need to really have a firm grasp on the foundation, so that you can do it yourself, and really understand why something's working. See the gears turning behind the screen of, "Okay, what's going on here, right?" And I wanted to do this by really telling you a quick story, so I was working with a client recently, a remodeler. And there was recently a post that some guy did in one of these groups on Facebook, right? Another marketer like myself, a lot of them are shameless. And he puts out there this post that shows results that he got for a client. It was, "Oh yeah, look at me, I'm generating leads for $11." And for a lot of you guys, and there was people commenting on this, like, "Whoa, how'd you do it? I'm interested." And I just had to pop in and ask the question, "How many of them closed?" Because you have this thing with so many contractors where they're looking at one of these gurus or one of these successful businesses puts out some numbers. Like, "Oh yeah, this is how many leads we generated," or, "This ad generated us, this many leads." And they're like, "Oh, I'm going to do that, I'm going to do that ad, if I could just see it, I would duplicate it and it would work for me." And that's, I mean, it might work, there's a lot of ads that do work, and this is where my story goes, okay? So we had this post by this guy, and he's all interested. I said, "How many of them closed?" And he never responded, so I'm going to assume none. But basically, we've then done that, where I've had clients, including this remodel, where they're like, "Oh, let's try this," something similar to what this guy posted in regards to the format of it. And I'm not going to get too technical with you here. My goal is not to get too technical in this episode. It's really to actually focus on the 30,000-foot view. And the client of mine was like, "Oh, I'd love to try this out," right? Which was basically having people fill out a form on Facebook as opposed to going to a landing page, because this guy was getting $11 leads, and wow. And I go, "Okay, we can test it, because I'm a big fan of testing, I want to test everything, I have tested it, but every market's different and so forth." So we test it, and we start getting leads. Look at that, $11, $11 leads, $12 leads. Oh, this is awesome, cool. And then he starts calling them, and they aren't closing. In fact, a lot of them aren't even really interested, or they did it by accident, which I don't really believe, but regardless. And all of a sudden, you're seeing the mechanics behind this stuff. So this guy comes in, and he is telling all these people, "Look at all these leads I generated. Let me do it for you, or you can copy it, it'll sell you the course, or whatever he's trying to do." But the thing is, is that you don't realize the mechanics behind the scenes. Okay, and that's what you really need to do when you're trying to implement something in your business, is you can't just take what you see at face value, right? The ads that somebody's running, or whatever, and just turn around and do it yourself, because you're gonna have something go wrong. Because a lot of times, here's one of two things that is going on with that person's ads, or website, or whatever it is that you're looking at that you're thinking about copying. One of two things are happening. Number one, it's not working, and you think it's working. Okay, so you're looking at this person's stuff, wow, that looks so good, wow, it looks so professional, wow, it looks so awesome, and you're thinking to yourself, I should copy that. But the thing is, is that there's a lot of things that look really nice that don't work. And you might be copying something, and adding something into your business, and spending dozens of hours, or hiring somebody, and spending thousands of dollars to get something done that might not work. And it isn't working for that company either, and now you guys are like pooling your own ignorance, because everyone's copying somebody that isn't, that it's not working for, right? So that's number one, it's that it's not working for them, and because it looks cool and shiny, you're doing it, and now it's not going to work for you. The other thing is that it might be working really well for them, but you don't know the mechanics that go on behind the scenes, okay? So for example, with an ad, let's say they have an ad running, and it's for savings, a thousand dollars off something, or whatever, right? And you go and duplicate that, what you don't know is the sales process that they have going on, and how they reach out to their leads, are they texting them, are they calling them, are they emailing them? Is it all three? How often are they doing it? How many of those leads are closing? You don't know all the numbers. And so you're left to just go, okay, like, this looks awesome, and you don't have all the processes in the background. So it's working for them, but it probably won't work for you, because you don't have the foundation, okay? So that's why I would really recommend, strongly recommend, that you should not just blindly copy people, okay? You need to know the foundations, you need to know why something might be working, you need to be able to break these things down. It's not to say you can't take inspiration from other ads, right? In fact, I do that a lot, I have a whole swipe file of ads that I've seen that I either know are successful, or that I've run it, and I knew are successful, or that I like elements of, and I don't know necessarily that they worked, but I look at it as inspiration to test later, right? And so that's what I would really recommend doing, is get strong with the foundations of marketing, of the sales process, of really looking into who their customer basis is. It's similar to yours, do they have the same type of business, what is their competition doing, really looking into this stuff, and then ultimately, which I would always recommend this, is test it, right? If you're like, oh, this is awesome, I really think this will work, whether it's an element of your website, or a whole new website, or a specific word, words, or a type of slogan, or a type of ad, or whatever, a specific offer, a thousand dollars off, or whatever, test it. And the best way to test it, is to send people to it, right? And so, you know, you got to send potential prospects, or people that would be interested in what you're doing. Don't just ask your mother-in-law, or, well, you'd probably never do that, but, or your brother, or your friend, or whoever, what you want to do is ask people that would be interested to see if it's something that's interesting to them. And if you don't have those people readily available, then what you need to do, is you need to, the cheapest way to test this stuff, is to run a Facebook ad, okay? And I'm not saying run like thousands of dollars of ads, I'm saying like, take whatever it is that you're thinking about doing, whether it's, you know, I do this all the time, with e-book titles, I do it with offers, I do it with ad copy, you know, the words that I'm using in my ads, I do it with ad creative, I do it with landing pages, I do it with so many different elements of what I call validation, and what you do is you run ads to this thing, and, you know, within like $50, you have a pretty good idea of if people are interested in it or not, right? You can see how many clicks it's getting, you can see if you've had any opt-ins, or people interested, or whatever. And so that's how you get feedback really quickly, so you test it, and then if it doesn't work, you throw it out, okay? But don't just go around, and I see this so much, is people are like, oh yeah, well this is what this John over here is doing, and this is what Mac over here is doing. So I'm going to do these things, and it's going to work, because I'm going to Frankenstein together, a, you know, a working business model based off of the successes of other people, and what I like that they're doing. And then you end up with these people that go, why isn't this working? Why isn't this working? And it's because you didn't understand the mechanics, you didn't understand the background of it, you didn't understand the sales process, or the software that goes into it, or even down to the targeting on Facebook, right? So there's so many elements that you need to really be figuring this stuff out, you can take inspiration from, but you've got to test it, you've got to validate it, you've got to see if the market wants it, okay? So ultimately, stop copying the competition, and start learning the stuff on your own, and testing it to see what works, okay? Don't just try something, and it's like, ah, it doesn't work, ah, it's trash, ah, I'm never going to succeed, I'm always going to be stuck where I'm at, you've got to keep testing and trying stuff, okay? And this podcast is going to give you a lot of stuff to test and try, as I'm continuing to test, as I'm continuing to give you guys the feedback and the results of these tests. It's going to give you a lot of stuff that I think is pretty tried and true, but again, I've had experiences, and I will tell you this, where I will have copied myself in different markets. I will take something that worked for one client in another location, and I know the entire process of this thing, and I will move it to another client in another location, okay? And the same exact thing in a different location won't work, it will not work. It's not always the case, so a lot of times it does work, but my point is that you have to test, and if it doesn't work, it doesn't mean that your business model sucks, or that you're never going to be able to succeed, or all these people are lying, they may have had success, but it doesn't mean that it will always equate to your success with the same thing, okay? So that's all I have for today. Stop copying the competition, stop looking at the face value of what people are telling you, whether it is businesses, business owners, and your arena, whether it's marketers that are going out there, and Facebook groups, or ads, or whatever are saying, look at this, look how many leads I got. Wow, nobody cares about leads, I mean leads are nice, but ultimately closed jobs matter, right? You cannot pay your mortgage with a lead, you can't exchange it in the bank for a certain amount of money, I'm sorry, I wish you could, but you can't, okay? And so what you have to do is test things, and make sure that you're asking the end result, and figuring out the entire process, all the gears that are moving in this mechanism, okay? So that's what I got for you today, and until next time, guys, I'm going to try to post, publish this daily, haven't done a really good job so far, I've been really busy, but that's all I got. So until next time y'all.