Episode 29: What Your Marketing Company Should Be Doing

Something that gets our team especially fired up is when our industry doesn’t hold to the same high standards of transparency and quality that we feel is right for our valued clients. We’re here to hold our industry accountable, and help you understand the difference between real value and smoke and mirrors with your marketing company. That way, you can keep your marketing agency honest and know exactly what you’re paying for.

Smoke and Mirrors

When digital marketing companies or any marketing companies for that matter aren’t forthcoming with their results, it can be difficult to tell for an untrained eye. The real results of what you’re paying for can be hidden behind dishonest reporting practices. We’ve been in this space for over a decade and pride ourselves on providing clear, accurate data so when other companies don’t adhere to those standards, it gives us all a bad rap. You have to know exactly what your marketing is doing for you. Not just “feel” like you’re doing well, you have to actually know. In 2020, there’s no reason not to know. There’s every tool out there to find out.

This isn’t just a RYNO pitch, this is an accountability pitch. This is so that when you’re shopping and comparing marketing agencies or looking at your current team you can be getting exactly what you should be getting. If anyone tells you that they’re crushing it every single month, they’re just plain lying. We find that most clients appreciate the honesty, and you as a contractor should be holding your marketing agency accountable so you know the true CPL they’re providing. That goes for us, too!

Identifying a True Lead

In the early days of RYNO, in order for Chris to improve his service he was listening to every phone call that came in for his customers. He had no other way to really know how well the marketing was working. He was also looking for how the CSR handled the call. The real reason was so he could know exactly how well his marketing was doing, and exactly how many leads he was generating for his clients. He wanted to know in raw, simple numbers how many leads he was bringing in, and the exact cost for those leads. That means not past or current customers, not just a call, and not just a contact form. A true lead is an actual booked service from a brand new customer. We could listen to a thousand calls coming in for you, and most of those are probably yours already as a repeat or referral customer. Why would you let your marketing company call that a lead?

What most agencies are doing is providing very simple data on how they’re performing. They add the total number of phone calls, contact forms, and online chats coming in, and call all of them leads. If you have 400 phone calls come in, they say, “400 leads”. These are multi-million dollar companies working with multi-million dollar companies trying to get away with telling them that the number of calls + the number of contact forms = the number of leads. If you were to go back and listen to every one of those calls, 300 are probably going to be repeat customers, a few are going to be a technician coming in late, and some other miscellaneous calls. If you really get down to the core, only maybe 80 of those are new customers. Sure, this makes the CPL higher, but now you’re able to get to the true, exact value of your marketing and a real CPL. That’s why defining a true lead is so important. Otherwise, your marketing agency can take credit for leads that aren’t necessarily the result of their efforts.

Call Listening and Reporting

Call listening is an integral part of identifying the value of your marketing. RYNOTrax, our call listening and reporting division, is our biggest team. That’s no mistake! If you’re only looking at booked leads, you’re missing the entire front half. You might have calls coming in that are blown by a CSR, and you’d never know about it if you weren’t paying attention, and that’s exactly what we do.

When we listen to a phone call that’s coming in, our process involves determining what types of leads are coming in. Here’s some of what we listen for:

• New service leads
• Brand new customers
• Different types of leads
• Coaching opportunities
• Missed calls
• CSR booking rate
• Repeat calls
• Referral calls

By keeping an organized and separated list of leads and call details, we can gather real data on what’s coming in. We can see how many true leads have been generated, and for which services. All of this information is used to optimize our strategy for a client, and gives the client transparent data and how their marketing is actually doing; not simply a big number of calls with no meaning behind it other than how many times the phone rang that month. If that’s all we did, we could just outsource our jobs to the phone company.

We also record the calls, and provide a simple transcript of the calls so our client can refer to it without having to spend time listening to it. If you use a call coaching agency to work with your CSRs, this is a great way to help them out. We’re happy to send our info to that agency to help you CSRs and company grow.

Accurate, Unfiltered Data

We have an account management team that reviews all of this data and the numbers every month to get an exact idea of what’s going on to the dollar. If you use Service Titan or Housecall Pro or another FMS (field management system), we can then take it all the way to ROI to know exactly what your return was. This way, you always know where you stand. You spent X this month, and got Y in return. That’s how your agency should be doing it, but most don’t because it takes an incredible amount of people and work to get it done.

Get Your Marketing in Gear

There should be no grey area in 2020 about your marketing. You’re an expert at what you do, and your marketing agency is experts in what they do, but they should not be bullshitting the numbers.

If you need any direction, any help, just reach out to us! We’re happy to help. We do offer a consultation service to keep other agencies accountable. Even if you’re in the middle of a contract, we can certainly come alongside you and help you keep your current agency accountable, and you can make informed decisions about moving forward.

We appreciate all of the recent reviews and kind comments. If you get value out of our podcast and know someone else in the home services that could use this information, let them know! We’re here to help as many people as possible.