Chris Gentry: Hey, what’s up everybody? It’s Chris with My Service Area and Happy Cans with another video today, one that I think will be very beneficial to you guys out there, especially in the bin cleaning business. When we talk about marketing, it seems like there’s always people asking questions about marketing. How do you do Facebook marketing, Google marketing, maybe some SEO in websites? So lucky to have Cody Owen today. Hey Cody.
Cody Owen: Great to be here, Chris. Thanks for having me.
Chris Gentry: I appreciate it. So now what’s the name of your business? And just give us a little bit of background.
Cody Owen: Yeah. So I run Lightspeed Social Agency. I worked for five years for a software company that makes a CRM for lawn care companies. A lot of residential cleaners use it. Even a few bin cleaners. I remember back in the day when I was there and so I just spent years learning about the marketing needs of home service businesses.
I had a little bit of an idea of how to do it on Facebook and I started looking for a company that was advertising that they did exactly what I wanted to bring to that space, which is what I call “hyperlocal targeting,” helping people target neighborhood by neighborhood because I know that home service business owners know the best neighborhoods, the clients that are the best, like what neighborhoods they live in.
So I wanted to help them target specifically those areas to build route density and to increase profits in the business. I just couldn’t find anyone that was doing it. So I called a few friends and got them to come online with me and we got started just like that.
Chris Gentry: Got you. I mean you’re singing words or speaking words that are very near and dear to the bin cleaning industry, right? Route density. So there is definitely a correlation with lawn care and bin cleaning when it comes to route density because efficiency is the name of the game, right?
So it’s great that you’re doing that. You focus on that. So you’ve got this agency now. So tell us about the actual – like walk us through – if you were to work with Happy Cans, walk me through that process. What does that look like?
Cody Owen: Yeah. So we would schedule a meeting to do some of the like more mundane boring stuff connecting accounts and everything so that we have access to what we need to run the ads.
But then the fun part is we get a map from you and I know that like if someone is using My Service Area, this might be a little bit easier for them to send us essentially a heatmap of neighborhoods where they’re getting quote requests.
But a lot of times people will send us like a custom Google Map with pins dropped to show us these are the neighborhoods I want to go after and some people, bigger businesses, will narrow that to like this is where we want to hit landscaping projects. This is where we want to hit a normal maintenance. So whatever your like upsells are, if there’s something you’re willing to drive a little further for, we can accommodate that. But it’s literally – but …
Chris Gentry: Yes. So let me interrupt you real quick because you – since you mentioned My Service Area or MSA. So if I gave you a screenshot or access to My Service Area that showed outside the territory, like this one little pocket that I said, “Hey, Cody. I think this is where I could expand my services. You know, can you start here?” If I gave you that information, you could take that and then create a targeted ad for me, correct?
Cody Owen: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, the targeting in Facebook is much tighter than Google AdWords. You’re able to target down to a one-mile radius. But then you can eat out of that radius by putting other exclusion circles to cut it down. So I’ve helped target single like condo units, like towers outside of New York City and small neighborhoods, even like down to like very exclusive gated communities that are 8 to 10 houses. Just like, well, we might as well spend 5 to 10 cents a day to get in front of these very like high-end clients.
Chris Gentry: So what – a question for you because I’ve heard this question before from some of the DIY-ers, interests. When you start putting an interest in a Facebook ad, is that really needed? What are the plus and minuses there or what’s a use case that you would put interest? And let’s just focus on the home service. Obviously there are some glaring ones that they play golf and you’re selling golf stuff. You want to put in golf as an interest.
Cody Owen: Yeah. So in the home services industry, I strongly believe that your clients pretty perfectly segment themselves by choosing where they live. We do not do a lot of refinement by interest because there’s not really a reason to. You’re already reducing that audience so small by hitting the neighborhood and largely, the things you can know about a client from the neighborhood they live in, socioeconomic level, you know, income that you already have a dozen clients in that neighborhood.
They’re telling you by moving their – like people like us, people like your best clients do this. They live in that neighborhood like Seth Godin might break it down. So we don’t refine by interest in those top level ads because they’re just – the main interest is they live in the right neighborhood.
Chris Gentry: Right, right. It’s strictly an address thing.
Cody Owen: Yeah. And if you’re going from an audience size of 500 to an audience size of 450 by some magic interest, you’re talking about saving pennies.
Chris Gentry: Right. So let’s – since Happy Cans is an established business, let’s run through the scenario of I’m ABC bin cleaner just starting out. I’ve already – my friends and family have got them onboard. I’m got my territory mapped out. What is that conversation with you? What does that look like? And I don’t want it to – I don’t want to hold you down – tie you down to anything. But like what’s a good average starting monthly spend?
Cody Owen: So I typically encourage people to be anywhere between $500 and $800 a month in ad spend. That is sort of what I think is the sweet spot for kind of the medium-sized service businesses that I’m usually talking to and the reason is like if you can spend $300 a month, we can work with you. It’s just like below that point, it’s much better to kind of be doing a DIY thing because the return on your investment on that much ad spend is probably not going to be enough to cover paying someone else to do it.
But depending on the density of your market, sometimes you can eke out a little bit more out of a smaller ad spend. But yeah, anywhere from $500 to $800 a month is where I like to see businesses that are $300,000 plus in annual revenue.
Chris Gentry: Got you. Good information and so with that type budget, are – when you talk to somebody, is it – you know, Chris, here’s the budget that we want to do monthly. You know, do you ask for any type of commitment? Like hey, let’s – we’ve got to do this for at least 90 days. Give me three months to really get this going and that will give me time to test, have different versions. You know, what does that look like?
Cody Owen: Yeah. So we typically ask for a three-month commitment out of the gate because we need time to localize things to you and if there is something that is just really not working that works in other markets, we want to have time to recover that and to start showing you some ROI, so that you will stick around.
What we’ve been working on for this season that’s really cool is a Google Sheets-based dashboard. So if we are connected to your CRM, so that we can see people coming in, get them tagged correctly for attribution and this is one of the biggest challenges in the marketing industry, especially when you’re working with like non-enterprise level clients is that the systems in the business that you’re working with may not be properly attributing new leads.
A lot of people and – you know, I’m guilty of this in my business – kind of play it by feel. But it’s like, oh yeah, I heard two or three people say that they came in through the ads. So like they’re – in the end they’re profitable and you’re not really tracking specifically everyone coming in through what channel. So by working to put those systems in the business, it really helps me to justify my existence to business owners.
So we build that out and then every two weeks, we go in and update this Google Sheets dashboard that the business owner has access to, so that they can see how many quotes have come in through us, whether – like then any that are one, we take that money out and segment it out and count it against our ROI.
So we add in ad spend and management fees for the month, look at any quotes that were one that month and then give you an ROI percentage on the ads.
Now obviously that doesn’t incorporate your costs on the specific job. So if it’s really thin, then there might need to be a conversation to have there about whether it’s worth it. But typically we’re looking at an ROI like well over 200 percent.
So if you’re losing money on the job anyway, we cannot help you. But other than that, we’re doing great.
Chris Gentry: Right. So one of the things that we – that I hear in the bin cleaning world is that this isn’t lawn care. Everybody knows about lawn care. Everybody knows about carpet cleaning and pest control.
Bin cleaning is relatively new in the US even though it has been – you know, Europe has been doing it for tens of – probably 20 years or more. It’s a common service there. But it’s gaining a lot of traction here. So one of the big topics that I hear is you’ve got to do Facebook ads for a minimum of 30 to 45 days just to get that brand awareness or service awareness going.
Cody Owen: The other thing that you’re doing during that initial spin up there is you’re building your audiences of people that have touched your ads and it’s going to fill that remarketing audience, the retargeting audience of anyone who starts to raise their hand but doesn’t fully come through.
You have to have at least 100 people in that audience who have touched your ad in some way that Facebook thinks that they want to see it again, to start delivering your remarketing ad and that’s where the real magic happens with Facebook, when you can get in front of the same person six, seven times because we know that like statistically, it takes eight to ten touches to make a sale.
Chris Gentry: Yeah.
Cody Owen: So we need to get as many of those out of the way in an automated way before we’re on the phone wasting like an actual human that you’re paying or yourself, your time.
Chris Gentry: That’s a great point and I’m glad you explained that because that’s something that I don’t think is explained in conversations about the importance of time management. It makes perfect sense that – and I didn’t even think about the remarketing part of it.
So that’s where – obviously there’s a lot of power there and your conversion rate has the potential to go extremely high from that group as much as – so what point in – I guess you can – your experience is in the lawn care. But – so like we’ve mentioned before, the similarities are a lot. At what point – does it ever make sense to run any Google ads?
Cody Owen: Yeah, absolutely. So the way that I look at it is Facebook is a very cold marketplace that is very cheap to play in and figure out what works and build from there and the targeting is tighter than AdWords. So it has some advantages. It has some disadvantages compared to AdWords.
When you start getting into AdWords, the important thing to keep in mind is that it’s going to be much more expensive to get a lead and then your targeting cannot be as tight. So if you’re trying to target neighborhoods, like kind of how our model is for Facebook, when you go to AdWords, the window of targeting is a lot broader. So you have to be comfortable hitting a bigger area, which can be fine especially because AdWords is such a hot marketplace.
For someone to see your ad, assuming your keywords are set up correctly, they’re literally searching like “bin cleaning in my area”. Like they are primed and ready to buy. So whereas they’re getting on Facebook to argue with their uncle, they’re a little less primed to buy over there.
Chris Gentry: You know, like wow, what’s this ad? Well, clean my trash can. Let me click on this one. Yeah.
Cody Owen: So that colder on Facebook, warmer on AdWords. Facebook is cheaper. AdWords is much more expensive. So it’s a balancing act of where your marketing budget goes and by – like what I was talking about before with attribution, if you’re tracking your channels and knowing who’s coming from where and what value you’re getting out of what platform, that can help you understand maybe 80 percent of your budget does need to be in AdWords and that works because AdWords is more expensive. Facebook is a little cheaper and you just have to walk that tightrope of where you’re getting the most ROI.
Chris Gentry: Got you. Now that I hear you define the differences between Google and Facebook, if you’re doing Google and you don’t have a tool like you might say, you may end up just wasting dollars because you may have – even though you service a zip code that you may enter in Google, you may not service the entire zip code of that. Like in my case, in my business, I service all the zip codes but I don’t service all the area of the zip codes. I service pockets that I know that are profitable for me. So that could be something to consider as well when you look at Google AdWords.
Cody Owen: Yeah. If your big emphasis is route density, which it should be for bin cleaning and it should be for like lawn care maintenance stuff, it’s hard to run AdWords in a way that plays well with that strategy. What you can do is have a lot of your top of funnel ads. So those are like the first time someone is seeing you. You can run those on Facebook where the targeting is tighter and then when someone hits your website, you can have your Google tracking setup there and have them enter a remarketing audience on Google so that they’re still being served Google ads but you’ve tightened that audience based on what Facebook is sending.
Chris Gentry: Right.
Cody Owen: And that gets – that’s like more of a higher level concept, if you’re starting to work that kind of thing out, DIY. You might be spending a little too much time on your marketing. You might need to outsource it.
Chris Gentry: Yeah.
Cody Owen: And that’s ultimately what that comes down to when deciding whether to work with someone like me is either a skill deficit or a time deficit. So either you know that we can do a better job because this is our bread and butter, it’s what we do every day or you are doing an excellent job. But it’s taking 40 percent of your time and you don’t have time to grow the business in other ways.
Chris Gentry: Got you. So in that first meeting that you have with a new client, what would I need to bring to the table or provide to you to get the ball rolling?
Cody Owen: Yeah. So typically, that first meeting is me walking you through connecting everything because it is a real pain to do that back and forth over email. My first few clients I learned that I shouldn’t send instructions for how to do things on the Facebook backend via email. It takes forever. It’s much faster to just hop on.
But then what we need from you after sign-up is that map of neighborhoods that you want us to target. We need photos of your trucks out at work, guys in uniforms out at work, you in a uniform. Just anything that’s organic photography and that’s super important for ads. You almost want to be using a photo that looks a little bit imperfect or is very clearly – has your logo on shirts, things that are difficult to Photoshop into stock photography because even though a person may not be able to tell you why a photo looks funky to them, we’ve seen so much stock photography in advertisement.
Now we can tell the difference without knowing and so by using that organic photography – and we pull that stuff in to our editing platform and we add some animation to keep things moving, keep people engaged. But we don’t necessarily expect you to have like a video of people at work. So we can get those photos from you.
We build them out into the creative. We write everything so then the next time you hear from us is when I’m like, “Hey, things are ready to go. They’re ready for review. Will you take a look at these? Make sure that they match what you’re looking for so that we don’t go screw up your brand voice?”
Chris Gentry: Right. So to make sure I understand this, so we have that conversation. We get everything connected. Then you say, “Hey Chris, I need all your images. Anything that you think is branded to your business, send it over. The more the better. We will put together the image ads and everything and then we will circle back and write the copy and we will circle back around with you and we will show you what we’ve done and share our recommendations and you sign off and we go live.” Is that …
Cody Owen: Yeah, yeah. It is a very quick, low to the ground process to get things going as quickly as possible. We really try to avoid having six scheduled meetings before we go live because then we’re just – we’re wasting your money in this pool-up. We want to get to proving that we’re doing excellent work and then refining as we go.
I think that it’s really cool – you mentioned earlier testing and I want to talk to people about testing at the audience sizes that we are usually working with in home service businesses. It is very hard to get statistically significant data from an ad platform when your audience size is less than 20,000 people. So for most of our audiences on Facebook, we’re running to neighborhoods where we’re hitting 400 to 800 people. So we’re very far from the threshold of – this was statistically significant and not Bob’s coffee upset his tummy that day.
Chris Gentry: Right.
Cody Owen: So we have to make sure that we’re not expecting like Coca-Cola ad testing levels from a very, very small budget relatively speaking. So what we do is Facebook has a tool called “Dynamic Creative” that they launched a couple of years ago and they were really pushing it on smaller businesses when it launched because it’s much better for them.
What it does is you feed in five options for the copy, five options for the headline and five to ten images and videos for the like middle creative of the ad and then Facebook randomly – not randomly. They would be very upset that I said randomly.
It assembles an ad based on the individual user that’s going to be served the ad and then if that doesn’t work, they don’t click, they don’t engage, the next time it comes around to show it to that user, it’s going to change out pieces of the ad to try to get to one that works. So what we’re relying on there is that Facebook knows everything about all of us and …
Chris Gentry: That is so scary. As you’re walking me through that, I’m like truly realizing how much we are the product, right? It just – it’s so …
Cody Owen: Oh, he likes images that sort of look like this. Maybe he will engage with this one. You know, and just cycle through and the added benefit there is that people are seeing your ads a lot because our audience size is really small. So we’re coming through it frequently for a lower spend.
But then each time they see it, it’s remaining fresh. They’re still seeing your logo in whatever form it’s in attached to this ad. But it’s changing a little bit each time they see it and I’ve had the experience of running ad campaigns that use Dynamic Creative targeting my potential customers and people talk to me and be like, “Man, it just looked like you were running like 30 different ads. Like it seemed like you were really on the ball,” and it was like, “Oh, well, let me tell you about Dynamic Creative.”
Chris Gentry: But that’s what you should have said. Hey, I’ve been working hard.
Cody Owen: Yeah, yeah, right? It keeps things super fresh. It makes it look like you’re – you can make yourself seem a lot bigger than you are by using those sort of tools.
Chris Gentry: Which is key.
Cody Owen: Yeah.
Chris Gentry: Yeah, yeah. All right. So you shared some great information. Oh, let me ask one more on that advertising. What is a tip or maybe a hack that you could share right now that would help somebody if they are a, you know, do-it-yourself? They’ve got the time to invest in this, which I don’t know [0:23:26] [Indiscernible] do have the time to invest in this. But if they do, what’s a good tip or hack that you could share?
Cody Owen: Yeah. The number one thing that I would recommend for people who are trying to jump in to running ads for their own business is actually a blog post of ours, if I can send you the link and drop it …
Chris Gentry: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Cody Owen: Yeah. We have a blog post about copywriting and it is – and that is not like the little C in the circle. It’s copywriting WR. It is how to write compelling sales copy and it is the most important thing you can learn to do and it will help you even when you hand off your marketing to someone else, when you get to that size where you need to do that. It’s still going to help you as you’re considering emails that are going to go out for upsells.
Anytime you’re writing stuff to a client, it’s going to help you put that right spin on it to make it work for them. So the big things there are like emotional words, get people to think about the emotion that’s provided by the service that you’re doing. By saying yes to you and becoming a customer, they’re saying yes to feeling good, not smelling a smelly bin when they go outside.
Chris Gentry: Right.
Cody Owen: You can lean into positive emotions, negative emotions, just whatever you need to do to have that piece of copy perform in the way that you want. So I will have – I will send you that link so it can be down in the description.
Chris Gentry: Definitely.
Cody Owen: Super helpful skill to build.
Chris Gentry: I will even read that because I’m a horrible writer. So let’s talk about Lightspeed. What else do you guys do besides Facebook ads or advertising?
Cody Owen: Yeah. So we handle Facebook and Google ads for a lot of service businesses and then we also offer – you know, if you need your website rebuilt, we’re happy to build that on a modern platform, so that all of your security updates are happening automatically.
The big benefit that you get from us there is that you’re having marketers write your website copy, not web developers writing your sales copy. So God bless them. They’re great. They’re usually not trained copywriters, right?
Chris Gentry: Right.
Cody Owen: We handle that and then we can handle ongoing SEO. So a lot of times that is writing blog posts for your website not because humans read blog posts anymore but because robots still read blog posts and it affects your ranking a lot to have good quality content coming out consistently.
Then we also – and I know this is a big deal in the lawn care industry. I know a little bit less about the bin cleaning industry but I assume that the pain points are similar. We do indeed hirings ads because in my experience, a lot of business owners write pretty boring copy for their hiring post. It’s very much a bullet point. Sometimes it is a bullet-pointed listed of all the ways previous employees have hurt you and that is not a compelling reason to work somewhere.
So we try to take that from a marketing perspective and rewrite those job descriptions so that they are pushing the reasons why someone would want to work at your business, not just what’s required of them. You know, it needs to be thought of as selling someone on coming to work with the team, not just – it’s too competitive to just be like, “Oh, there’s a job. You take it or you don’t,” because more than likely you’re going to lose out to someone who tried a little bit.
Chris Gentry: Got you. That makes sense. Well, this has been fantastic. I’m sure it will be extremely helpful to the people in the bin cleaning world as they always look for help with advertising, whether it be Facebook or Google and even some website help. So greatly appreciate. Now how can somebody get in touch with you if they would like to reach out and have a conversation?
Cody Owen: Yeah. So LightspeedSocialAgency.com, we have a – you know, a contact form on the homepage there. If you would like some help with your Facebook ads or even you want to talk and see if it’s something that’s in the scope of what your business can do right now, absolutely reach out. We would love to talk to you and yeah, I’m new to the bin cleaning industry. But the principles are route density and all that are like yeah, classic Lightspeed.
Chris Gentry: Exactly. I’m having – we’ve got a couple of lawn care people that are using MSA now. We’ve got some more conversations going on with lawn care and it is just – it’s the same principle. You’ve got to be efficient and have tight routes to be profitable in this business and probably even more so on the lawn care side because you’re spending time. You don’t want to travel 45 minutes to somewhere and the lawn takes you 20 minutes to cut or 25 minutes, whatever, you know that short period of time. Then drive another 45 minutes back.
Cody Owen: Yeah.
Chris Gentry: It sounds a little bit crazy.
Cody Owen: The drive time adds up fast.
Chris Gentry: Oh, yeah, yeah, and wear and tear on your equipment, right? Your vehicles. But I will also put in the description notes the link to Cody’s website as well as the blog post and any other important information. So thanks a million Cody for taking the time to talk with me about the Facebook advertising and advertising in the services you provide. Hopefully we can help you get your feet wet in the bin cleaning industry with some bin cleaners.
Cody Owen: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me, Chris.
Chris Gentry: Yeah, thank you. Take care.
Cody Owen: You too.