For this episode, we are joined by Marc Levesque, CEO and co-founder of Webrunner, which helps contractors improve their lead flow to enhance their sales and win more. As a full-service agency, they know what gets leads through the door and converted into customers. We discuss why you need to invest in marketing your business, focusing on customer experience, how to quickly analyze marketing performance, and more.
To learn more about Webrunner Media visit their site https://webrunnermedia.com/
On the importance of thinking about your customer experience.
“There’s been a lot of companies that have really dropped the ball on the customer experience side of things. And, so, that’s another challenging thing to sort of navigate. Because, through digital it’s very difficult to hide, right? The good comes to the surface, and unfortunately, so does the bad. So, if you’ve got a poor customer experience, well, that’s going to come through when someone’s going through that online, call it, due diligence process right there. They’re vetting a contractor; they’re definitely paying close attention to what people are saying about you, right. What are you doing? How are you? How are you doing it? Sort of thing.”
On what’s foundational to create an organic marketing engine
“So, at the very least, you want to be focusing on everything that’s foundational, right. So, the way you go about delivering your service, the customer experiences, we’re just, you know, talking about and then of course, when you generate a customer. It’s much, much, much easier to turn that customer into sometimes repeat business, if you have a service that’s conducive to getting repeat business at some point down the road, or to drive referral business. So, it’s kind of like trying to build this organic marketing engine. That’s the first thing that contractors need to be thinking of when they’re just getting started. And then, of course, anything that doesn’t have dollars associated to it, but maybe more so time. So, the notion of networking, forging strong ties and relationships with other industry partners, or people who could refer business your way. That would definitely be where I would start. Now, once you’ve got that kind of foundation, you know, well laid, the next step would be to quickly work towards building a customer acquisition model that you can scale. And, with that, I mean, in large part what we do here at Webrunner is we help customers invest advertising dollars online in order to generate leads in a more predictable fashion. So, typically, the dollars that we’re spending are going towards search engines platforms like Google and Bing, and then you’ve got social media platforms. So, we’re talking social networks like Facebook and Instagram and even YouTube at this point, right. So, there’s a way to invest dollars into these platforms to get in front of your ideal audience, your ideal audience. Obviously, they have a need. They’re looking for your products or services. They’re in your market. And, so, we’re leveraging these networks to get in front of them. And, then the idea is that we’re putting out a compelling message that is going to reach them at the right time, such that that’s going to drive, you know, inbound leads for you.”
The importance of reaching out quickly to your leads
“Yeah, there, there are many things that I think you need to be mindful of, if you’re going to start investing dollars into, you know, getting more traffic getting in front of people, in order to generate leads, the last thing you want to do is light money on fire. Right? So, you know, that would be akin to you know, if you’re putting lighting money on fire, right, it’s putting dollars into marketing, driving people to your website, reach out for information, it takes you three days to get back to them. That’s my money on fire.”
On how to create your own ads
“And, so to answer your question, what are the best type of ads, the best type of ads are the ads, for the most part, that aren’t necessarily trying to sell something. And, this is where people get it wrong. It’s okay. I need to do marketing, great, let’s put an ad out there and, you know, position an offer. That will work 3-4% of the time, because that is the number of people that are out there in the market ready to buy today. But, the other 97% of people aren’t buying today. So, you’re neglecting that market if you’re only putting advertisements that speak to somebody willing to commit today. So, that would be the advice. I mean, especially if you’re a small business, small budgets, pull out your phones start documenting what you’re doing. Grab the before and the after shots, you know, walk through with the homeowners and get them on camera talking about you know, their challenge, why they reached out why they decided to hire you. You need to almost create a library of content that you’ll be able to leverage thereafter in your marketing mix, if you will. That’d be the best piece of advice that I can give for anyone who’s really looking to get started.”
