Google Call Ads Are Generating The Hottest Leads In the Remodeling Industry 

Hey, it’s Mike Goldstein here with a crushing it with kitchen remodeling podcast and today we are so lucky to have with us one of the foremost experts in google call ads and facebook advertising, josh wheeler. We’re going to talk to josh, he’s gonna give us some outstanding tips in just a moment. Are you looking for some fresh ideas to jump start your kitchen remodeling business? Welcome to the crushing it with kitchen remodeling podcast, your host Michael Goldstein, founder of Kitchen Remodeling S. C. O, the digital marketing agency, working exclusively with kitchen remodeling contractors and also the author of the ultimate internet marketing guy for kitchen remodeling contractors will provide insights on proven tips and strategies from top experts in this space so that you can take advantage of industry best practices. Your host Michael Goldstein joined Mike as he shares his knowledge each week with an insightful interview or educational segment about how to turn your online marketing efforts into more kitchen remodeling leads and sales opportunities than ever before. And today, like I said, we have with us, josh wheeler uh and josh is gonna talk to us a little bit about some of the hottest topics in google advertising. One of them that we are seeing just a fantastic outcome in is call only ads. So josh, welcome to the podcast. Hey, Mike, thanks for having me uh really appreciate the opportunity to come in and talk with you and your viewers about some of the things that we’re passionate about. Obviously we do a lot of stuff with ads and we want to make sure that everybody has an opportunity to use those things as effectively as possible to help them grow their business. Yeah, that’s fantastic. So josh, you know what one of the things that we have noticed a lot in, you know, in our industry is that folks, typically they want to talk to somebody right away, right, You know, they don’t want to fill out a form, they don’t want to wait for someone to call back. Are you seeing that across a lot of different industries? Or is that really just something that, you know, we’re finding only in the home services field? No, I think that that’s going to be something that you’re going to find across the board. I mean as we get more technologically advanced as a society, sometimes people want that personal touch now, what you’re gonna find is is that as you get into the younger ages, that’s going to skew a little bit too where they’ll text or their message or they’ll do something like that. But as we all know, we’re in the, we’re in the remodeling space most of the time. Um those are that age bracket is going to fall on the upper side of where that says, so people just want to talk to people and get those questions answered as quickly as possible to really start that conversation, that that makes sense. You know, and I know there’s a couple different avenues that you can go with that even when you’re talking about, you know, instant communication on the facebook side, we have the messenger campaigns and you know, we have the ability for people to interact with even A I. S. And then on the google side of course we, you know, we have the the call only ads and call ads. And I think you know the difference between those obviously is the pull versus push. Um and presuming that we’re looking at the proactive searches, so shifting towards the google side of it, is there really a difference between the call only ads and just call extension? Well I think there is because primarily when you’re talking about call only ads on google, you’re talking about running ads in a way to where it’s only going to really focus on trying to get that phone call versus if you have a call extension, that’s an option that’s available, but it’s not the only option that’s available. So a call extension for example, and and for those of you who don’t know what to call extension is it’s simply whenever you see a google ad and it has the phone number listed right there close to the ad and say, hey you can call this now. So obviously you can achieve the same results looking at that type of thing. But when we talk about call only ads, it’s going to be primarily focused on just generating the phone call. We don’t care if they visit a website, we don’t care if they fill out a form, we don’t care about any of that stuff. So in order to do that, we like to run those things on mobile only because that’s where, you know, they’re searching on their phones and whenever they tap the add, it actually comes up and says, hey, would you like to call this phone number? Of course they say yes. And the calls initiated. So it is literally the shortest path in order to be able to talk to somebody. And to me it’s no different than what may be the old yellow pages, you know, might have looked like in a digital realm and said, okay, listen, I just want to make the phone call them, my fingers are just doing the walking, that makes total sense. You know, and I think also one of the points of that is that people now are more and more long in mobile phones and less on the desktop. In fact, if I would, you know, to count, you know, I probably do it on on one hand, the amount of people I know who even have a desktop computer still who are not in the digital marketing or some sort of financial industry. Um so you know, obviously we, you know, you want to pick up and go after the folks who have that ability to communicate right away. Um and I also think there’s a lot to be said though for targeting people who do have that direct communication ability, You know, I mean, oftentimes especially with, you know, with Display ads on Google or, or even on Facebook, you’re showing it to somebody who the idea is, you just want them to remember you, hopefully, you know, they see your ad about 10, 15 times eventually they’ll remember a call to contact you. Um, whereas with a call add, you know, you have the ability to get that to draw them in right now and say, Hey, do you want to talk to somebody right now? I mean let’s let’s do it. Absolutely. And you know, there’s there’s a good, it’s a good thought process whenever they’re trying to find people that are ready to go. Now, that’s the difference between google and facebook primarily is that google is going to drive a lot of traffic that people are in research mode because they’re, they’re trying to make a buying decision. So you can help facilitate that decision making process. Using google properties, facebook is going to be more of the, hey, I’m going to drive demand. I’m going to pique your interest. I’m going to work through that process. So it helps and it’s equally as important because it helps you build that longer term pipeline because what most people do and most businesses, um, that we see is that you try to focus on those now buyers right? You’re going to focus on what you can get right to second. That’s where google google meets the demand, right? They’re going to be searching, they’re going to be trying to find somebody to talk to. So when we look at call only ads, that is the thing that’s okay. Again, we want to generate the phone call and we want to talk to people who are pretty far down the path. You know, if you’re looking at a buying cycle like this, we’ll get here on screen here. If you’re looking at from 0 to 100 right at zero over here, they’re not ready to buy it. All right there just in the process and the research. So if you’re trying to uh saying, hey, you know, I have, I may want to have my kitchen uh remodeled at some point here in the next little bit, let’s start looking around and see the types of things that we like. You know, it kind of worked through that. And of course with facebook, that’s what you can do before and after photos and that type of thing because you’re looking at transformation and saying, hey, you really, you know, plant a seed, do you want this whenever you have this? So, but as they work through that process, they’re gonna eventually need to be able to talk to somebody now, if you’ve done a good job between all of your ads and all of the content that you put out and kind of helping to nurture those pipelines, then your ads are gonna be incredibly effective because you’ve helped facilitate the decision making process to a point that either one, they’re familiar with your name already Or # two, you’ve become the only option or you become the primary option For them to go with because you helped them out throughout the process. So there is a, it is good to build that entire thing. But again, as we talked about call only ads, it really focuses on the people, the 3% of people that’s really right on the outside and said, hey, I’m ready to do something or I’m closer, well closer to do something than maybe in the early research phases. Yeah. Now with that in mind though, I think there’s also a little caveat to it too, which is, you know, if you’re, if you’re a solo, you know, if you, if you’re a remodeler and you’re more of a handyman or your one man show oftentimes that means you are right on a job or you’re on a sales call and you can’t pick up the phone right then and there. So with that in Miami, if, if you don’t have the ability to answer the phone literally 24/7 or at least during business hours, there’s still a good idea. So it depends on, it depends on how you view business, in my, in my take on it. Uh, if I were going to go through, I think the phone call is, is important enough that I think every business should be doing it. Even if you can’t answer the phone, I would much rather pay $100 for a virtual receptionist to answer those phone calls and make sure they get answered. Because at least you’re like listen if you don’t answer the phone they’re going on to the next place. But if you answer the phone and say hey you know we’re out on a were out on a project. Tell me a little bit about what you and there’s plenty of services available. Mike. We could probably uh spend all day just talking about the variety of people that that are there like that probably good topic for blog posts at some point. But as you work through that process I would probably do that before I would say no let’s not do that at all because what you’re really looking for and this is kind of the death cycle that you see in some uh some smaller companies. You know if your your one man show or if you’ve got a small team is that you sell the work then you go do the work and then okay now that we’re done we have to find more work to do now in in the current market that we’re in. We all know that things are you know it’s pretty busy where people are having a lot of projects but it’s not always that way. You know and there’s some people that are really busy all the time and there’s some people that are still fighting for work. So, you know, whenever you work through that process, I think that every size of business can benefit from that now, how you manage, that may be slightly different, but it’s not too much of an inconvenience to figure that part out when you compare to the results that you can get. Yeah, and we, some of my clients, what we do with them often is that we have them in our in our crm system and then if somebody doesn’t pick up the phone right away, they get an automatic text message and says, hey, hey, so you just called um is there a bit of time for me to connect with you in a meeting right now or something? To that extent. In addition to that, you know, once they call their in your system now you can put them into an email automation and test automation and you know, and they’re they’re part of that long term nurture, you know what, you know, whether or at least until such time as they say, hey, stop bothering me. Right? Absolutely. And if you’ve got, if you got the automation tools to be able to plug in on the back end, that only helps that part of it now, remote people say automation, they get a little, you know, we can’t, you know, we can’t make them talk to computer, we can’t make them talk to a phone services, press one, press two, press three. But if you have the right automation play on the back end and you kind of sandwich that together, it’s like, okay, well just as you, you know, if you get a text message, if if for some reason you miss a call that says, hey sorry we missed your call, we’re on a job, um uh what can we help you with and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible. That’s pretty ingenious whenever you look across the board, because most of time people just don’t get anything, it’s just like, okay, we’re onto the next so with with and I think that that’s some of the different things that you bring to the table for your clients, that just not a lot of people have options and access to uh and you make those kind of things available. So I know that you’ve shared with me a few of those things in the past, on on the back end of that and uh and it’s really cool with some of the stuff that you do with that. Yeah. You know, and when when you look at the the way that you have that automation set up and kind of the almost a you know, a I type, you know, on the on the texting on on the response side, if you shift over here into the facebook side of it. and the, to the instant messaging and the message sent message campaigns. I mean you have the ability to really build out a very intelligent bought a very intelligent system, you know, even where you can put in place, you know, wait times and you know, it really makes, I think the end consumer feel like they’re talking to a human being even if they’re not, um, and not that we ever want to trick anybody, that’s, that’s never the goal, but you do want to give the experience that they feel that someone’s paying attention to them. You know, and I think if you can, if you can start asking questions like hey, you interested, you know, in a, in a kitchen or your bathroom, your whole house being remodeled and they say, well it’s in our bathroom, you know, now you can start having asking questions about, you know, you’re looking to replace the shower at the top, you know what type of flooring and do it and all of that. So I think going down that road as well is a really interesting play because it does give the feeling that even if you are a one man show you’re not well and you know, kind of tying that back into the ads. I know some people that have done facebook ads were like, well we’ve used facebook ads before and they just don’t work for us whenever we go through. And I had mentioned this earlier that, you know, facebook creates demand it plants the seeds google usually meets the demand. Um, when you have leads coming through facebook, a system like you’re talking about is what makes that most effective to say, okay, well we can get these leads coming in, they’re relatively inexpensive as compared to cost per click with google and those types of things, which by the way, if you’re doing a call only ad, they’re substantially less expensive than your standard traditional click. I don’t know why it doesn’t make any sense to me whatsoever that they would be less expensive than a click, but hey, we’ll take it for what it’s worth. But having a kind of an automated system that you describe and bringing those facebook leads in to help nurture them and bring them along. So that, okay, well we weren’t ready to buy, but we’re helping facilitate that decision. That’s those are the core critical pieces that most places like hey, we can put ourselves not necessarily on autopilot, but we can help people out along the process wherever they’re at in the process. So hey, are you just in the very beginning stages? Hey we cool. We’ve got a checklist for you on how to, on what the kitchen remodel process looks like. Here’s you know, setting the expectations. Oh, we’re moving down the line a little bit further now you’re in like, okay, well what kind of design style do we want? Okay, well hey, we have a kitchen design guide that you can download and it’s going to give you a variety of styles and things that you can go through. If you’ve got a planning guide, maybe you’ve incorporated some of your pricing and God forbid. I know a lot of people like, well no we can’t put pricing in there, but what it does is it gives people an option to kind of look through and say, okay well this is a range, right? You don’t have to put pricing, but as you work through that you can, you can take those ads and eventually they’re going to come from facebook, they’re going to come over to your website, they interact there a little bit and then you’re going to see ads between facebook and google that’s going to basically show them more things that helps facilitate that. And that’s the, that’s the beauty in having a good ad system running because if you design it right, it’s faucet on faucet off, you can scale it as much as what you want and you get super busy, you just throttle it back and you can control it. You know, most businesses that we talked to uh end up being something in the lines of, well we get a lot of our business from referrals or word of mouth and for me, most of the time I I call that the hope and pray method of marketing, which is I hope and pray that somebody tells somebody else about me so that they’ll come and you know, and use our services and whenever you have that, it’s not scalable. And if you really want to grow and you want to be able to add employees, you want to be a bigger impact in your community because you’re making more revenue and those types of things that, you know, ads are certainly one of the key components to your marketing system that allows you to be able to bring in, not just jobs but bring in the better jobs or the jobs you actually want because you’ve done all that heavy lifting and of course mike I know that that’s the types of things that you help people with is designing all that stuff. You know, it’s funny you say that because I mean one of the tagline is, you know, don’t just take the job, take the job that you want uh because so many times and some, Some people come in and they’ll say, Hey listen, I, I’d love to have my bathroom done. I have a $750 budget. Well that’s that’s great if a $750 budget, but most of the people who I work with at least they don’t lose money on that there’s, there’s just no possible way, you know, even if they went to home depot and bought the, you know, the cheapest stock stuff couldn’t get it done. Um, so it’s, it’s really important that I think the ad campaign that you’re using really speaks to the target audience speaks of the right audience. Um, and not just to anybody under the sun, you know, and what, that’s one of the things that I like about being able to really target is you’re not just going out and saying, hey, show my ad to anybody who lives in the boston massachusetts area or showing anybody and you know, just in Houston, but rather, you know, it can really target people based on, you know, have they come to your site before, what are they looking for things to that extent? And that, that’s kind of an interesting question there. So if you are looking at kind of facebook and instagram and youtube and then people drawing people to your site, but they haven’t, they’re not ready to buy it when they are ready to buy their going to actually search on google most likely is there a way that you can actually target on google for these calls with these call ads to people who have been to your site to kind of be a little more proactive and go after folks who might be more um, likely early recognized the name right away there is now google is a little interesting and they’re going through some changes right now, I think they’re going through some of the changes because you know, if you have been in the news cycle all, you know, people understand that the difficulties and issues that facebook as a company is having uh in terms of privacy and all those things, which, you know, I want to put your minds at ease. It’s really not near as big as deals, what what the news tries to make it out to be. Uh, but whenever you have those types of things, google used to be that if you had 1000 people in your audience, you could retarget them with those types of ads. Um the problem is, is that, you know, how long does it take for you to get 1000 visitors over to your website? Right sometimes in a smaller local market, it can take a while um, right now uh there in transitioning that to where it puts a minimum of 100 people in that audience and they haven’t rolled that out completely yet, but that is going to be something that it should be available. So that okay people that go to the website here, hey, we’re going to re target you with with other things. Now on the search side, there’s the ways that we set that up is going to be a little bit different. But what you can do is you can also take and put some stuff on google display advertising, which is going to take that and that’s when you go to CNN ESPN, you know, any major website will have some of these things on there and you can make sure that you’re basically everywhere all the time with people versus just facebook. So there’s a lot of opportunities there. Now. We use that a lot just to make sure that were top of mind that when people are ready to make the decision, they’ve already checked your website out. So we know that they’re, you know, they’re kind of interested. Uh and what we’ll do is we’ll usually break that up into a 30 day, a 60 day and 90 day type approach. And then once they get outside of 90 days will usually just let them fall off and go into more of a long term sequence. Um, but it’s really interesting again, from an ad system standpoint, you can, you can really say, okay, if they’ve been in my website within the last 30 days, show them these ads and then if they’ve been there within the last 60 days or 30 to 60 days showing this at and then from 60 to 90 days from this at and at that point you might have different offers going through to say, okay, well they get more aggressive as they get longer, further out to try to push them over the edge to go ahead and come in and incentivize them anyway. That’s a, that’s a little bit of a different story and we can get into the weeds on that part of it. I won’t do that to you today because everybody’s eyes will just be like, right, so we won’t do that to you today. But there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of things that you can do to re engage your audience. Once they come over, you’ve already paid to get them to your website or you’ve already paid to engage with them, you might as well go ahead and make sure that you’re getting the most opportunity out of each spot that you can, that’s, you know, that’s that’s really good information and and something else that people need. You know what you’re talking about. You already paid to get them on, you paid to have them go to your website, they have established established that they have at least some interest at some level in the service that you provide. I think one of the pieces that’s really interesting is the price to retarget somebody is often considerably less than the cost to go get him in the first place. And that, that’s, that’s kind of the nice piece is, it’s not like you’re paying, you know, the same $10 a click every tip to get him back in. You’ve already got him in. And that retargeting is just a fraction of the cost. Absolutely. Uh Well, well, and we’ll see it, we’ll see a decrease on the actual cost to get your ads back in front of anywhere from 60 to 80%. I mean it’s substantial when you look at that now, you’re not gonna show it to as many people and that’s part of the process because, okay, well you have 100 people over to website. I’m taking this big group of people that I’m trying to convince to come talk to us and now we’ve just got this little pocket and a lot of times that’s okay because you’ve got this little bucket of people and really this is your warm audience, right? They don’t have an interest in you. You know, I mean, that’s, that’s the difference. You know, as far as I see, you know, it’s kind of like if you, if you ever certain and in the kitchen remodeling space, it’s not really where you’re going to have repeat customers, you know, every six months or so, but I mean it’s always easier to resell somebody I find than it is to get a brand new customer. You know, that’s what I’m sorry. No, no, as you go, it’s a lot easier to do that or it’s a lot easier to convince them to refer you. There are outbound referral opportunities that you can use a little outside the scope of what we’re talking about today, but it is a lot easier to, I mean we do ad campaigns all the time that are largely based on referral campaigns to your existing customers to say, hey, you know, if you’re super happy with what you have, we would certainly appreciate the referral. And if you do, you know, we’re going to give you a referral finder’s fee of 10% or whatever it is. So there’s, you know, you can use literally, if you’ve got a message that you need to get to somebody, you can use the ads to do that in a pretty effective way. Most people, you can combine an email blast out to your clients and that type of thing. But uh, you know, don’t, don’t sleep on the add component to that, just making sure you’re staying in front of your current customers. No, no, no doubt about it. That’s, I mean, that’s really great information to have because so many people and they just look at ad campaigns as, you know, I have one goal, I have one target and once I need to go to accomplish it or I’m not. Um, and you know, it really is much more than that. I mean, the whole army present approach to marketing I think is is something that people need to really take to heart and you know, and they don’t just, you know, I know, you know, you’re in a little bit of a different industry, you’re in that, you know, you’re in that sign industry, there were all those companies, so it’s, it’s almost marketing to market there and no doubt and you know, where, you know, where you are, I’m sure they’re, you know, they have all of that, you know, the retargeting and uh trying to get the referrals is just so critical to expanding the business. You know, what’s really, what’s really funny is that whenever you get to the point where you’re understanding the buyer, right? So, um, you can use your ads and just about anything whether it’s business business, business, consumer products, you know, in your client’s case, you got a lot of the Modelers and of course we’re modeling. That’s the funny thing that, you know, that you’ve shared with me. It could mean a lot of different things, you know, just because the kitchen modeler, all kitchen modelers are all kitchen bathroom dollars are not the same. Uh, in terms of, you know, in terms of what they, in terms of what they do, I didn’t even know you were telling you were talking to me about a client that you had in California that does, that does re facing, you know, of cabinets and uh, you know, the, the ads for them just because the lower price points are lower cost points in terms of that and quicker turns that you can have on, that really blew my mind that you could, you could basically get a new kitchen or a new look kitchen. Uh, and in a week, instead of So anyway, is it, it was really, it was really interesting to hear about a lot of those things, but regardless of what type of remodeler that you’re into. You know, it doesn’t matter what type of jobs that you want, that’s a perfect example. Some people are okay with the lower jobs quicker turn some people want that, you know, demo tear it all out, put it all back in new and those are two vastly different things. But it doesn’t matter whenever you’re looking at the ads because your buyers, you’re always going to have, somebody is going to be interested in that high end work or that high end stuff and you’re always gonna have people that are interested in. You know, listen, I wanted to look new, but a fresh coat of paint is fine by me, you know, no doubt. And you know, and I do think, I mean five people aren’t going the fresh coat of paint on replacing the cabinet doors. But the yeah is it’s you know, every, you know, everyone has their own niche market and they’re on their own opportunities and you just got to kind of use these ads and and that’s the beauty of google ads. And especially if the call only ads as they really do allow you to target what you want, go after your existing audience. You know, not waste ad spend on this massive, you know, entire geographic region. You know, demographics be damned. It’s just if you live within 50 miles, I want to show it to you and you know, honestly that’s why a lot of people come to us because they were using, you know, they’re using companies uh, you know, like home adviser who will just send, you know the same. You know, they’ll advertise, they’ll throw their Google adds up and you know, someone within 100 miles. Hey? Yeah, I’m gonna give it to you and we’re gonna just six other people. So one of the benefits by the record where you’ve got to give us your firstborn for that leave. Yeah, that’s too so it was just, it was really great having you on the on the show today. My pleasure if anybody does want to, can I get a hold of, because I know, like I said, you’re in the sign industry, you know, is what’s the website? How do they get in touch with you? Yeah, Well, you know, if your kitchen modular, the needs uh needs a new sign and you’re trying to find a sign company. Hey, that’s the kind of, we help the sign company make sure that they, you know who they are. But you can always go over to sign shop marketing pros dot com if you’re interested in that kind of stuff. Hey, sometimes it’s just cool to go look at the pictures, right? Listen, I’m not a kitchen, I’m not a kitchen model guy, but I can appreciate, I can appreciate the artistry that goes into that. And I love looking at pictures, especially those before and afters. Listen guys, I’m telling you, if you don’t do anything else, take this advice, make sure that you put an X on the floor, take a picture, take a picture before you get started and come back to that X. And take another picture after you get done. Because I’m telling you a video that has those things just kind of merge and morph from one to the other, man. It’s uh it it really does the trick whenever you when you’re trying to get across the actual transformations that you help people with. Uh And again, it doesn’t matter if it’s just paint or if it’s I mean it will have the same effect. So if you do want to do ads, make sure that you’re getting those things every single time he goes out on a job as a matter of fact and and not to promote anything else. But there is a program and its software that I had come across uh that will help you do this because I have my sign guys doing the same things. Uh a company called Company Camp. Uh Where do you go in? And it’ll give you a resource or place to where it’s just an app on your phone and you can plug in the before and afters and it makes it really easy to keep all those things nice and tidy instead of going through like the 10,000 pictures I know you have on your phone, right? Uh So anyway, but yeah, just sign shop marketing pros, if you ever have any questions, feel free reach out at josh at sign shop marketing pros dot com. All right, well josh. Thanks again for joining us today. It was great having, you know, maybe we can have to come back, you know, in a few months and talk about some of the updates to google and uh, we’ll see how things are. Yeah, man, look forward to it. Thanks. Hey, you have a great day, guys. Thanks. Alright, bye everybody. This is Mike Goldstein with the crushing it with the kitchen remodeling podcast. See you later.

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