Not all customers drop several thousand dollars plus on a new roof, exterior repaint or whatever home service you’re offering right off the bat. They need some time. Time in the sales cycle. Nurturing. Reaching back out customers in the sales cycle, can be effective, but it is also time consuming and frustrating as many customer simply don’t want to be contacted, but would rather wait until they feel the urge to contact you. I know many sales ‘experts’ will disagree with me on that, but seriously have you ever had a sales person ‘reach out’ to ‘nurture you’ and just made you say “I’ll buy”?.
Nurturing leads with Facebook is technically called ‘Remarketing, with Facebook advertising. It is a powerful way to nurture leads, without being invasive. You can reach thousands of people (all your customers?) for literally a few dollars a day. Lets just say this, if I ever had to trim my marketing budget, remarketing with facebook ads would be one of the last things to go.
I’ve been remarketing with Facebook ads for 2 years. Here’s what to expect once you get your home service business set up and rolling.
You’ll get some negative feedback.
Yep, some people will feel the need to comment that “you price was too high” or they got a “better deal elsewhere”. Relatively speaking the negative feedback will be minimal compared to that of remarketing with email where customers feel they have a direct line, or doing phone calls. If you’ve done either one of those, you know how painful they can be. Fortunately, on Facebook, you can also click the ‘block button’.
Results won’t happen immediately.
I know you like things quick; so do I, but it will take a few weeks of consistently running ads until you see some positive results. Don’t give up after 3 days, when customers aren’t flocking back.
Consider how long your sales cycle is. With most home services that don’t serve an immediate need, like fixing a home HVAC unit shutting off and leaving customers sweating on a midsummer Florida night, the sales cycle is 30 days +. You’ll need to have all your leads in the Facebook remarketing process for that long.
You’ll get some free organic reach.
If your remarketing content is engaging and valuable, you’ll get some likes and shares. A good chunk of their friends and family will see it. Thats the beauty of Facebook advertising and the extra punch of social proof.
Customers will start following up with you.
The leads you’re nurturing will start calling back and mentioning they seen you Facebook. That’s the cool part! Rather than you being the pesky sales guy, they’ll come back. They might have questions about their scope, or their materials. It doesn’t matter. The important part is you have a point of contact that takes you one step closer to the sale!
Cold leads, will submit a new inquiry.
This was the real shocker for me. I thought that once customers inquired to request an estimate, and then interacted with us to get an estimate, and then had a copy of the estimate, that they would certainly remember us. Boy was I wrong
After getting remarketing rolling with proper lead & source tracking metrics, I found the line “actually we’ve already got an estimate for your in our system” was getting dropped a lot. Turns out many customers simply forgot who we were. I can’t imagine how many estimates we did, that were totally forgotten about over the years.
They’ll Buy.
With high quality ads, the highlight your brand, most leads will become buyers. The consistent subtle reminders and content will resonate.
Moving Forward With Facebook Remarketing As a Home Service Business.
Getting it set up and rolling is tricky. Customers come in, by phone, online, from 3rd party lead generation sources, and sometimes even walk into the office. Reaching them on Facebook will be tricky. The short explanation of how to do that is with the Facebook pixel. You’ll need to set up the Facebook Pixel on your website, and then send them to a ‘secret page’ on the website to identify them. I cover ways of doing that in my Facebook Advertising course.
The other tricky part is creating good advertisements. I do not run ads offering discounts or promotions. I don’t run ads saying ‘call us to finalize the deal’. Instead, I run ads that put faces behind the brand, and highlight our quality of work and reputation.