The Only Local Ads Playbook You’ll Ever Need⏐Ep. #232

And this is probably the most underused advertising, in all advertising. And it can be the most profitable if you do it right. A lot of these local businesses, they're not marketers. They're experts and pros at what they do, at HVAC or roofing or cleaning. They don't know the Google platform. So if you know these things, that gives you the edge over 90% of your competitors. I'm like, you're sitting on a gold mine here and it wouldn't take that much. You literally have softwares that do it for you. It's so easy. And he's like, Mark, can you pause ads? I'm like, what do we, let me pause ads. Can you stop printing money, please? If your website can answer those three things in the first three to five seconds, you have a good website. And it doesn't take a lot of effort. (air whooshing) So when I was a dumb teenager growing up in Tattiesville, Florida, I had a good friend named Marcus. Marcus and I would hang out, do dumb stuff together, and then he moved to Australia and we lost touch. But as luck would have it, I got reconnected with Marcus again this year, and I learned he is a Google ads and YouTube ads, absolute savant. So we break down what types of businesses and what types of offers just crush on both Google and or YouTube ads. How to make your landing page convert for YouTube and Google ads to the highest possible extent and what types of business ideas or agencies can you launch with a little bit of Google and YouTube ad knowledge? Also, if you already own a business, how can you explode the growth of your business with Google or YouTube ads? You're gonna love it, please enjoy. This might not be a good question because I know the answer is often it depends. What niches are you seeing just particularly work well for Google ads? Because anecdotally, with all these businesses I've played with, sometimes Facebook ads crush, sometimes Google ads crush, sometimes they both crush. Sometimes like an ad for like an ambulance chasing lawyer just crushes in Abilene, Texas, but two hours down the road in Midland, Texas, it doesn't 'cause there's so many other sophisticated lawyers bidding on the same keyword. So it's very much an, it depends question. I know that roofing is very saturated. They're more sophisticated 'cause it's a higher ticket price. It's very competitive, yadda yadda yadda. In general, what have you seen? Like if someone were to start from scratch and say, I wanna launch a business that wholly relies on YouTube and Google ads, I want to have the greatest chance of success. What niches should I even consider starting? - So you wanna have a business where your, the lifetime value of a client is in the thousands. So it could be a cleaning business. It could be roofing. It could be pressure spraying. - Could be window washing. - Pressure washing, yeah. - Could be gutter cleaning, right? It could be car detailing. Any type of home service business where your client, the lifetime value of a client is in the thousands is a great way to go. Because the more your client is worth, the easier it is to advertise. Like if your client's worth like 50 bucks or 100 bucks, like once off, that's it, it's gonna be tough. - Yeah. So it's gotta either be recurring or high ticket. - Yeah, recurring or high ticket, 100%. - So like, I mean, right now I'm helping some cleaning businesses, roofing businesses, a med spa. I even have an affiliate marketer that's spending $80,000 a month on Google ads, not even joking. - What type of an offer is he an affiliate for? - He's a SaaS. - SaaS offer. - I bet I know what it is. - I think you do. (laughing) - I bet I do. So I need to make a call. See, that's very interesting because people think, people go wanna launch a SaaS business when they don't realize they could be an affiliate for another SaaS business, not have to do any of the work, but basically still have their own SaaS business. - Yeah, yeah. - That makes sense? - Yeah, but that's, he's like a very special case. - So, yeah. - Yeah, so basically any sort of local service business that has a high lifetime value client, Google ads will work for them. - Have you ever taken on a client and you thought it would work it, checked all the boxes and it just didn't work? You probably had clients that gave up too soon. - Yeah, that's it. - But other than that. - So, okay, perfect example. I had a client who did hypnosis, right, hypnosis therapy. She would help people who with smoking and vaping, her keyword prices were just like so sweet, so low, like it was so good. I was like, this is gonna be awesome. There's so much goodness here. And like so like we developed her landing page and everything, so many ads and it started to work, right? But she had a couple of bad experiences. She had one good experience, but then she had two bad experiences and of like people signing up for a call. 'Cause they get like a complimentary 30 minute evaluation or whatever she called it. - Discovery call. - Discovery call, yeah. And she's like, this isn't working. I wanna stop. - 'Cause she wasn't closing them. - Well, she wasn't closing them. - She wasn't a closer. - Yeah. And I think one of them didn't show up or whatever. - Which will happen. Like that's why show rate is a thing that you missed. - I said to her, I said, look, what's your follow-up sequence? Do you have emails going out? Reminder emails, do you have text messages? Do you have text messages going out to them? What is your follow-up sequence? Oh, I just have one email that goes out. That goes out like just like two days before or the day before, like now. Like your email is probably going to spam to the update box and Google. - Yeah. - You need to have a better follow-up date. I mean, I mean, a better follow-up sequence. I started spitting all these facts to her. She was like, not too difficult. I'm like, you're sitting on a gold mine here, you know, and you're not willing to put the effort into, you know, getting to it. And it wouldn't take that much. And like, you literally have softwares that do it for you. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, so easy. Before you take on a client, before you launch a campaign, what type of research do you do and what tools do you use to say, all right, yeah, there's something here, right? 'Cause on one hand it's like, you can sell anything with Google ads. And on the other hand, it's like, yeah, but some things work a lot better than others. And if I'm taking on a client that does, you know, HVAC in Plano, Texas, I really want to make sure that there's not 800 other HVAC companies in Plano bidding on the same keywords 'cause it might not work for him. He might want to think about Facebook or something else in that market, right? - So the first thing I look at is, can I even advertise them? Am I even allowed to advertise that on Google? As far as when you mentioned like HVAC, yeah, there could be a bunch of other competitors, right? But what I do that look at, okay, where are those competitors sending their traffic? What does their website look like? Like a typical website that's not optimized for conversion or is it a website that is clean? And if I go to the website, I can know how they can help me, how I can contact them. Do they have like case studies, testimonials within three seconds? - In other words, even if somewhere is crowded, you like more crowding equals a higher likelihood that people are just doing things wrong where you can have an edge. - Yes, and that's what you look for. You're looking for the edge. And literally the biggest edge you can have is where you send your traffic. A lot of these local businesses, if they're running their own marketing, which a lot of them do, they're not marketers. They're experts and pros at what they do, like at HVAC or roofing or cleaning or pressure spraying or pest spraying or car detailing, whatever. That's where their pros at. They don't know the Google platform. They don't even know what their conversion rate is or what the LTV is, the lifetime value is of one of their clients. If you know these things and you're willing to put in the effort and it doesn't take a lot of effort to optimize your website, that gives you the edge over 90% of your competitors. - What are some outliers that you've seen in the right direction? Where it's like, yeah, this'll work. I've done my research and we could expect to receive $4 back for every $1 spent. And then you get into it and you're like, holy crap, this is much better than I thought it would be. - It went a lot higher than I thought? - Yeah, yeah. - Cleaning businesses? - Really? Residential, commercial, both? - Residential, sorry, residential. Especially since after COVID, like it's when nuts. I think it went nuts. Especially if you're in like, if you do like green cleaning, so like you use like green chemicals. Not like color green, but like-- - Yeah, gotcha, gotcha. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. Since COVID, that's absolutely taken off. - Still, even five years later? - Even now, even now. - Can you attach some numbers to that? Like how well it works? Like what the return on ad spend is like? - Like I'm just gonna give you average. - Return on ad spend for two mother students were, they were getting, they were closing leads at 45%, and they're getting leads for $30, $35. - Whoa. - So, all right. - Yeah, so like $5, $6 per turn. - $60, $60 to close a customer that probably pays three to 500 a month. - Yeah, at minimum. - Minimum. - Yeah, great. 'Cause if they're coming every week, it could be seven, eight, $900. - Yeah, yeah. - So cleaning businesses do really well. They do really well. - What's stopping someone listening to this or watching that doesn't wanna start a cleaning business, but they would love to sell leads to cleaning businesses? Is that viable? - That is viable. I've never actually sold leads before, but yeah, you could do that. But again, it all, it all depends on your landing page, your copy, your process. - It could work. I've never tried that before, but it could work. I have no people that used to do that for solar. And roofing. - Sure. - But I've never actually done it. I've never seen anyone say do it for cleaning. That'd be interesting. - I think that could be a thing. It's like, hey, I'm gonna deliver these leads to you on a silver platter. They'll be all but closed by the time I hand them off to you. And it's 200 bucks a piece, you know? And you're paying 50 bucks to acquire them. - That's it, yeah. Exactly, exactly. - What other niches have you seen this work well for? Like, I know it can work for just about anything, but in your experience, where have you seen success with Google ads and/or YouTube ads? - So solar ads, solar, especially YouTube. Google, it's a lot tougher now with solar with Google because it's just, man, it's just really, really busy. But again, hardly anyone's using YouTube ads. Solar works really well with YouTube. Roofing works really well with YouTube. Yeah, those are probably my two main ones I've most experienced with YouTube. Would be those two out there. - What are you seeing nowadays as far as, like, cost per lead in roofing? - That's a big, big range there. So I have a client that's literally had to pause his campaign. He's backlogged now. - That's a good problem to have. - Yeah, it's a very good first world problem. - What was his cost per lead? - So he was getting leads for, like, anywhere between 15 and 20 bucks. - No. I'm 1,000% serious. - Now, you don't have to say the city. I don't want to dox him. But, like, what type of a market? Is this, like, a city, a suburb? - He was focusing on a radius around his city. - And was the city, like, in a big Metroplex or, like, out in the middle of nowhere? - In Louisiana. I know it wasn't a big, massive-- - Yeah, yeah. - Big, massive metro area. - It's, like, $20 per lead. What was his close rate? - About 25%. - Pfft. - So he's paying $100 to acquire a $7,000 customer. - Once he gets in their house, he gets their house. Yeah, about 25%, 30%. - I love looking at business in a very binary way. There's two problems that every business face. There's two buckets, right, that all problems fall into. You got sales and marketing, and then you got fulfillment. Bringing people in the door and then taking care of them once they're inside the house, right? Pick your problems, right? So most people have, in my opinion, a customer acquisition problem, right? And it's easy to look at these numbers and say, oh, I'm gonna grow a billion-dollar roofing business 'cause I can acquire roofing customers for $100 each. A, the market's not unlimited, right? Louisiana's only so big. B, you gotta hire contractors, subs, your workers' comp insurance goes up. Like, it's not just unlimited scaling, but in my opinion, if I had to choose my problems, I would much rather have a fulfillment problem than a customer acquisition problem, right? 'Cause revenue solves everything. - It does. - Period. - And it solves everything. - Man, 20 bucks a lead. - That was an outlier. - Right, 'cause I know people paying $1 to $300 a roofing lead. - Yeah, and that's usually what it is. That's usually what it is. I've got roofers down to $7 a lead, you know? - Yeah, still. - $67, $67 a lead. Again, it's all on the landing page, man. It's on the website. How are your websites designed? - That's like the theme of this whole episode. It's like, don't ignore the landing. Like, don't spend all your time in the ad platform and then ignore your landing page. Let the algorithm sort itself out. You work on the landing page. - Exactly, like if you are starting a new business, right? If you're starting a new business, or if you're a pre-existing business and you wanna scale it, or you're struggling with getting new customers and new leads, the first place I would look is your website. I have people, I can show you here in a minute, I have a website, it's not pretty, it's ugly, but it converts at like 25%. - Show me, dude. - Right, so. - What are we talking about? - So we have here. - Here's one that I really like. It converts really well. You come on here, okay? And you can see who they are, what their offer is, how to contact them. They got some social proof. They got some more social proof down here, okay? The team, it's a very clean, very simple website, okay? - Trust, authority, they feel good. - Exactly, how can you help me? Does it work and will it work for others? If your website can answer those three things in the first three to five seconds, you have a good website. - Real quick, I know we're blurring out the URL, but it looks to me like the URL is just the domain name. It's not like a special landing page. That is their homepage, right? - Yeah, so yeah, so this is their homepage, right? So I mean, some companies, they have a landing page and a website, but you can have a hybrid. You can have a website that's also designed as the landing page, and it works really well, right? This is the roofing one where I was getting $20 leads. So he was just basically claiming your free inspection will come out, look at your inspection, and we're getting leads off of this for like 20 bucks. - Oh man, dude, okay, there's the testimonials. - Yeah. - What's crazy to me is they both kind of are different. Both of these businesses are different. Like the strategy is different, but they're both crushing it. - Yeah, yeah, and so like, I'm not even kidding. This guy right here had to pause his campaign because he's backlogged. And he's like, Marcus, can you pause ads? I'm like, wait, let me pause ads. I'm like, you don't pause ads. Can you start printing money, please? - Yeah, exactly. So yeah, now here's probably an uglier one, right? So this one still works really well, right? But it could work better, but she's very emotionally attached to this image here. - The brand, yeah. - The brand. I'm like, yeah, that's cool and all, but. - That's a lot of valuable real estate. - Yeah, so her name's Jamie, and this is her cleaning business. I mean, wonderful person, amazing entrepreneur, right? And she's crushing it, man. - Your website, your landing page is gonna be the biggest needle mover in your entire marketing machine. - Yeah. - Okay, these are incredible examples. What about YouTube ads? What are some best practices for YouTube ads? Like, how long should your ad be? What type of video, vertical, horizontal, et cetera? - So with YouTube ads, you want to make sure you're running, first of all, in-stream ads, okay? So those are the ones that pop up in the middle of a video, okay? In-stream ads. The quality of a video is gonna determine a largely, the quality of placements that you get on YouTube, right? - Interesting. - Yeah, so if you have like a bad script. - Bad audio. - Bad audio, bad quality video. And I'm not saying you need like thousands of dollars worth of infection equipment, just need this. Like a good phone, you know, with a nice DJI mic or whatever. But if you have like a bad script and low quality ad, you're gonna get terrible placements. You'll show up in like, you know, Cocoa Mellon and all these kids. I'm not even kidding, bro. I'm not even kidding. - That's crazy. - Right, it's nuts. So with your ad, you don't need a five minute ad. No one's gonna watch your ad for five minutes. Heck, no one's gonna watch your ad for a minute. So with your ad, you need a good hook. - Yeah, right. It's everything. - Yeah, the first five seconds of your ad is gonna be the most important part of the entire thing. Okay, so in your ad, you really wanna call out who you want to talk to and get rid of everyone else. That's the whole point, the first five seconds is who do you want your leads to be? Or who's your dream client? That way everyone else just could skip, right? And then after that, you know, that's when you go into basically the story part of your ad, which is what their problem is, how you can fix their problem. And maybe you show some, you know, like the whole point of the ad is to get a click. It's the whole point. It's not to convince them to buy from you or to just get a click, get to the landing page. You have too many advertisers who are trying to sell their product. I'm talking about e-commerce, talking about lead gen. You have too many people trying to sell their product on the ad, that's not going to work. Okay, your ad generates a click, your landing page generates the lead, and then when they talk to you, you generate the sale. That's how it goes. So you wanna have a high CTR, you wanna have a high view rate on your ad. And if you have a high, a good CTR, a good view rate, then you'll get good placements. - Yeah, yeah. - Right, so you won't be showing up on like Thomas a tank engine and that's your Cocoa Mellon. - I'm picturing like the formula for a good ad. We've been talking about cleaning businesses. I'm picturing like a mom emerging from a pile of trash in a teenager's bedroom, right? And it's like, look familiar? You're a single working mom and your teenage kids are slobs, right? Sound familiar? We can help with that. Check how Angie's cleaning today. - Perfect. - It's like hook. - Perfect. - Hook. - Describe the problem, fix the problem, click here. - Yeah, perfect. - But then your landing page has to convert. You're not done yet. - Your landing page has to convert, okay? - And then your closing call has to convert. You're not done yet. - Yeah, so now one thing I love about YouTube is the targeting. The targeting on YouTube is insane. So what you can do on the Google ad, so just so everyone knows, Google and owns YouTube. So your Google search and your YouTube ads are all on the same platform. When you're running YouTube ads, you can say go to Google and say, hey, Google, I want to target anyone who's typing in these specific search terms on the Google search bar with this ad. Or you can say, hey, Google, anyone who visits this website or websites similar to these ones. Like you can go to websites, for example, I want to target those humans, or humans that are like them, 'cause Google has so much data points on all of us, right? They're gonna be the matrix same, we all know that. And then another thing you can do is you can say, because Google has so many data points on us and knows us really well, it knows what we're in market for, okay? So it has these pre-built in-market audiences, where you can say, hey, Google, I'm gonna target anyone that's in the market for cleaning services, who's in the market for roofing services. So that's what I love about YouTube, is you can have these amazing audiences that you can target with your ads. And another great thing about YouTube, and this is probably the most underused advertising, in all advertising, and it can be the most profitable if you do it right. Remarketing, no one does remarketing, okay? I literally just spent five bucks a click, right? Or two bucks, or sometimes up to $25 a click to get someone to my landing page on my website, and they decided not to convert to a lead. - Yeah, you're just gonna forget about them now? - Oh, forget about them? You freaking kidding me? Set a remarketing, super marketing campaign, right? With remarketing ads, and send them to a different landing page with a special offer that they didn't have before. And this offers only for those who you're remarketing to. Hey, get 20% off your first cleaning. A special offer where you're gonna help them to convert. So if you're an already pre-existing business, and you're already running Facebook ads to a page, right? To your website, to your landing page, or if you're a local business, or in Google ads to your website, okay? You need to set up remarketing, 1,000%. You can do it through YouTube, you can do it through display, right? Display, like the banner ads that pop up over the place that are really annoying. Yeah, that could be you. - I'm trying to put together a framework for this 'cause I see this all the time across all areas of business, and you call it like this one more step, right? Let's say with your Google business profile, sometimes good is the enemy of great, and people hear reviews are everything, reviews are everything. Cleaning business, all right, I'm gonna ask for reviews. Cool, you do it. And then you stop because you're like, I do what I'm supposed to do, I'm doing the right thing. And you're good, you're probably ahead of like 60% of other people, but then they stop, right? Whereas if they were to go one more step and say, I'm going to regularly update my Google business profile and say, hey, just cleaning Angie's house today. Hey, just that sends a signal to Google that like you're extra invested, and like you'll get three times more results out of your Google business profile, right? But sometimes we do one good thing, and then we think we're done. So with this, it's like, all right, I know that Google ads are important. I'm gonna, all right, I know the landing page is important. You can land a page at Google ads, they're converting. I'm done. Now I'll go back to running my business. It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, just one more step and start retargeting. And like you're in the top 10% now, congratulations. But the difference between the top 10% and the top 1% is a factor of 10, right? So just please just take one more step, do the remarketing, and you will be in the top 1%, and you can have a $7 million business instead of a $2 million business. - Yeah, that's right. And it doesn't take a lot of effort. Like the two of these little steps that you're talking, doesn't like to, let's split test top of the fold on our website, right? Let's just, let's split that one thing once a month is the biggest thing, headline, right? Or let's try VSL or whatever, right? There's all these little, let's tweak up our ads to see if we can get a CTR higher. So we tweak our ad copy, there's all these little bits once a month, makes a huge, huge difference. But I just said, good's the greatest enemy of great. But yeah, so YouTube ads is a fantastic avenue for local server businesses, particularly if you're already running Google ads. - Is there a specific type of offer or industry in general that you think works well for YouTube ads? Better than others? - So you really wanna have, you really do wanna have a special offer, right? So if it's like a discount on something, like a special discount, for example, if you're like a carpet cleaner, right? You're running a special offer and you're get one room, you know, you get two rooms clean to get another one for free or whatever or something like that, right? Those are really good. This is the order operation I would do my marketing, right? First thing I do, if I'm local service business, so local service business, I would do run Google ads. Once I got Google ads up and running, and I'm getting regular leads, I know my target cost per acquisition is, right? I will then set up YouTube ads for lead gen, YouTube ads for lead gen to target in market audiences, website visitors and keyword, Google search keywords. Once that started rolling really well, and I wanted to scale it to the next level, I would then run a brand awareness campaigns where now you're just going up to the masses. So there's no targeting, it's all broad. You're going to everyone in a 30 mile radius around Orlando or wherever, okay? And just hitting everyone. And then at the same time though, I would also be setting up a remarketing at the very beginning. Anyone that's coming to any of my websites, my paid websites or my organic website, whatever, I'm tracking all that in Google. And anyone who does not convert, they're gonna see my ad, they're gonna see my YouTube ad, they're gonna see my banner ad when they go to some website. It's my face everywhere. Put my Facebook pixel on there, so they can see you on Facebook. Your brand's gonna be everywhere if you do remarketing. That's how I would do that. - Oh, it's beautiful. Like remarketing is the difference between spending $10 to acquire a customer and $6, right? Like it makes a big difference. - Or even cheaper than that. - Oh, Marcus, I have a headache. That's always a good sign. (laughing) This is very thorough, very exhaustive. Thank you. We're gonna link to your business in the show notes. Anything else you'd like to leave us with? - The only thing, okay, I can't stress this enough. If you're a new business owner and you're doing something you really enjoy doing, okay, in start marketing, you need to be patient. One of the best things that new business owners can do is like reach out to people, people you know in your network and try and do work for them for free for testimonials. That will help your marketing so much better. That will help your conversion rate happens so much more. If you can show that your solution can help other people who have a problem, it's gonna make your conversion rate so much higher. So go out, get those testimonials, work for free. Okay, so I sold my marketing business in Australia when I moved here to the US. I started a new business here in the US. No one knows who I am, no one knows who I am. So what I do, I literally reached out to people in my church. - You reached out to me. - I reached out to you, I did, I did reach out to you, I did, I reached out to my network. I said, hey, this is what I do. I will help you with this. All I want is a testimonial. You have to pay me nothing. All I want is testimonial. Some people will say yes and they'll come through. Some people say yes and they'll fall through or they don't work. Some people say no. But get those testimonials first, okay? Once you have that-- - And a lot of times, those free friends and family customers will end up paying you anyway. - Yeah, they do, they literally do. Like I literally reached out. He is a dental anesthesiologist. I'm in the process of helping him. But see, he knows dentists. So right now I have three dentists that I'm working with and bringing them-- - Those are great clients. - And they're YouTube is right. So take the time, reach out to your network, work for free. And it sucks, but it's an investment in your business. Then work on your landing page. Your landing page needs to solve, say, three things within the first five seconds. How you can help them with their problem, testimonials, like reviews, right? And how they can contact you, right? That's really the three main things you have. Once you have that down, start running ads. And here's the key. You need to be patient. This is like with Google, the Google ads platform. The great thing about Google ads compared to Facebook is the quality that comes from Google is like 10 times higher. So roofing companies, for example, they'll get leads for like-- - Higher intent. - 30 bucks off of these Facebook lead forms. But half of them are, that's really the duds. - Well, it's because they're not on Facebook actively looking for a new roof. - Exactly. - But they go to Google for that. The intent is not there, right? So you need to be patient. This is like a three-month process minimum to really get this humming. That's probably the best way to start out if you want to start a new business. It's the best way to start out. - That's amazing advice. - And then be patient. - For any business, but especially this. - Yeah. - Marcus, you're the man, thank you. - No worries, thanks Chris. - Hey guys, if you're still listening to this, it's probably because you haven't had a chance to take your AirPods out. You're still mowing the lawn, you're still driving, what have you? If you're still here with me, I would really, really love and appreciate a five-star review on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. It would mean a lot if you want to go the extra mile. Share this episode with a friend that might have an interest in starting a business. It would mean a ton. Hope you have the best day of your life today.