Ep125: Layering Reports - Extended Zips Analysis

All right, welcome back here to the moving game. We're going to talk about, I think, the secret sauce here. This is like, this is, I mean, this is like the gold stuff. This is what you would probably pay somebody, you know, 20, 30, 40 grand for in consulting. So, okay, so we're going to talk about layering reports. So we use smart moving, a lot, a lot of people that listen here use smart moving. You can do this with other CRMs though, but I'm going to talk about smart moving because they take care of me and I take care of them and I use them. So it's easier for me to talk about them. So layering reports is a process of taking reports out of smart moving, downloading them, and then plugging them in to any kind of LLM, large language model like a Claude or a chat GPT or whatever you're using, okay, sounds like, you know, a lot of people are really favoring over to Claude nowadays, you know, that are business people, but it's all going to give you a pretty decent data and you're going to plug multiple reports and ask very specific questions to get granular information, okay, that's what layering, layering reports is about, okay. So I'm going to do multiple episodes on this on different layered reports that I do and that I look at. This one I think is very helpful for those of you who struggle with maybe your advertising and maybe dialing it in, understanding where a lot of your volume is, a lot of where the gaps are, what to trim, what to double down on. So this is, I just, there's no names for these, it's just what I call it. You can call it what I call it, you can call it whatever, but I just call this one my extended zip analysis. So this is basically taking two reports. So this is the new leads report and smart moving plus your booked opportunities by service date and plugging both of those in and figuring out and asking basically for, you know, give me leads, book jobs, booking rate, which is, you know, we want booking rate in terms of lead to booked, okay. And revenue, okay, those are like the four columns that you would request. And you can filter both reports and smart moving by referral source to just kind of laser in on one type of marketing channel to just focus on that or you could just keep it broad and like have it spit out everything to you is just like a lot. So let's say that you just started like mail or Google LSA or Google PPC or meta ads or any of those or there's something else, it could be something else. And let's say that I wanted to know better about what towns and cities in my market that I advertised to, do I do really well in which ones do I do poorly, the ones that are in the middle, you're probably not going to change, okay, but the ones that are really, really good, I want to know about and the ones that are really, really bad, I want to know about. And the goal in this is to really just narrow your reach on that advertising to drive your row as up. And so a lot of movers make mistakes by advertising too far out into these extended zip areas. And what happens is they get leads out there. It's working, the marketing's working, but because it's an hour away, hour 15, hour 30 away, you're basically your sales team are getting priced out due to travel unless you do special pricing that doesn't have that travel, but you still have the cost so you know. And we want to just know what are those extended areas that don't do well and then which ones do do well, which ones are worth it, okay. So let's just dive in to what you could learn here. So for example, we did this and we do this pretty much, I don't probably do it every two or three months to be honest with you, you could do it monthly, but about every two or three months. And we started doing, working with a new person for Google PPC. And so you know, I'm wanting to just know as much as I can on the back end with data. And so I layered my new leads report, my booked opportunities by service date, both filtered by that referral source, PPC. And things that I learned were, oh, we're getting leads in this town or city. Well, I don't want leads there because when I then look at the booking rate, I'm like, oh, we're at a 10% booking rate, well, that's not really great. And so, you know, I could keep it. You can keep those lower conversion ones. You have to take a step further and look at what the average ticket is, look at the volume of revenue. What if I'm booking 10% but the, but like I booked one, one job and it really didn't make me that much money over like a pretty decent long period of time, like two or three months, right? Or, let's say there's a different extended zip that's like an hour away, but we're crushing it. We're booking almost 40% over there. It's like, wow, okay, you're getting some insight to the market over there. Maybe I want to put a little more emphasis over there. Maybe that now tells me that I should do more advertising over there, like maybe I'm not mailing over there. Maybe I need to mail over there, maybe I need to mail more. Maybe I need to lower the home price that I mail to over there, open that up. Maybe I need to, maybe open a pilot office over there. Maybe I need to put a GBP profile over there. There's just so many things that you start learning on these towns and cities that are about an hour to an hour and a half away. Okay, stuff that's 30 minutes, you know, an end, 45, even 45 minutes and then like that's kind of your core market. So you start going over the one hour mark and you're starting to slip into this extended market. And so as a moving company, think about that. If you're an hour, customers an hour and a half away and it's a local job moving in that same area, I got a, I got three hours of travel in this thing and what gets difficult is, okay, I'm going to budget a nine hour move, eight or nine hour move plus three hours of travel. Got a long day and you're rocking more miles on your truck, it's just starting to kind of like, is it worth it, right, or what if I just took that advertising money and doubled down on my core market, okay, which is what I would recommend, unless you have some high performing extended market areas, right, extended zips. And so yeah, we did this and we found to my surprise, you know, you never know. There was certain things that I kind of, I had maybe suggestion, like I think this is probably true and then the data verified, you know, it, but it, I didn't always know to what extent, but there were some areas that I had no clue how well we were doing it. That were an hour away, an hour, 15 minutes away, I was like, huh, okay. So leave those ones on, but like with PPC or LSA, we can exclude even with meta, meta as well, you can exclude areas, right. And so like, okay, I've got this little area, you know, maybe forest, all right, nobody know, you know, if you don't live around here in a Ron ochre, Lensper, you know what I'm talking about. But if you looked on a map, forest is a little over an hour away from me, it's probably an hour, hour 10, and it's a, it's a high net worth zip code, and it would be great to go get it, but we just were booking terribly over there. There's a lot of new housing development, there are a lot of apartments, there's a lot of town homes. And so I think there was a lot of, probably, I don't want to say low end, but, but, but 1500 maybe 2500 moves, and with three hours of travel, it's just like hard to compete when we're already the most expensive by far, okay. So just learning more about where do you price out on travel, where do you get a lot of leads? That's the next thing that we start learning. It's like, where do we develop a lot of leads in these, these extended markets? And then you start kind of developing maybe a more long-term game plan, right? Like we talked about, GBPs, secondary offices, okay. So this is just one layering report that's very basic, but it gives you a lot of insight. I've found a ton of value in stacking these, understanding a lot more about, you know, where places perform well, and then in your core market, if you really want to maximize your wins, okay. If you want to maximize your wins, wherever you're booking super high, from a booking rate perspective, plus where you're booking very high revenue volume. areas that's what you're doing. where I would be going and doing my business development. That's where I'm on those realtor offices there. I'm gonna focus on those. Those self-storage facilities I'll focus on those. Those apartments, that's where I'm gonna focus, is the places where I book really well. And you're probably gonna book exceptionally well in your backyard. Your backyard is whatever town or city you're in, right where your office is, where you dispatch. You're gonna book exceptionally well there 'cause you have like no travel. And it just makes sense, right? And you come up all the time on organic because your GVPs literally sitting on top of it, right? So you book super well there, right? You might book 50%, 55% there, all right? But in other areas, you'll find little surprising things like this place is 45 minutes away, but we book 40%. Wow, interesting. There must not be other movers advertising there. Wow, how would I have ever learned that without doing this layering of reports, right? And so I think it just gives you all the clues for us as business owners to make those decisions on where do I spend advertising dollars, where do I put physical boots on the groundwork and where is the money in my market? Where are the towns and cities that really respond well to me? This is also another reason why you should advertise because if you were one of these people that were like, well, I don't believe in advertising, it's like, okay, but you have so much less data. You have so less, so much less insights in my opinion on how the market responds to you and your brand, in your sales process and your service. So to me, it's just one of these things that makes sense. Anyways, I hope this helps. We'll do more of these little episodes where it's about layering reports 'cause there's a bunch that you can do, but I hope that helps and we will catch you on the next episode.