You can often catch our CEO & Founder, Amanda Wilhelm, on stage at various home service conferences. One of her favorite topics to present is titled Spend Better: Fill Your Schedule & Earn More Profit, and it’s centered around why the last job you book and run in a day is often the most profitable, and thus the most important.
In today’s blog, we’ve broken down her presentation so you can better understand how to make PPC more profitable and fill each of your schedules, while improving profitability at the same time.
Branding & PPC – Balancing The Need For Both
The Value Of Branding
The value of branding is immense. It’s your efforts that keep you top of mind, getting people to know who you are, even when they don’t need your service. And when the time comes and they need your service, you’re the one they’re calling.
For Residential HVAC companies, branding is a necessity. You will never grow your revenue, your customer base or attract new technicians without a good solid brand. You absolutely need to invest a heavy percentage of your marketing budget on “branding” your company.
‘Branding’ is every interaction your customers ever have with your business or brand elements. From your google star rating, your truck wraps, to your ads, your website, your technician uniforms, or how your csr’s answer the phone. All compound to the perception customers have of your brand. Advertising is the effort to keep your brand top of mind, getting people to know who you are, even when they don’t need your service. And when the time comes and they need your service, you’re the one they’re calling.
Branding is also a long-term investment. As you build brand equity, branding will outperform PPC overtime in both sales volume and price sensitivity.
However, branding is usually less flexible, less reliable and less predictable in the short term, and therefore cannot be relied upon alone to fill your marginal capacity.
So how do you handle it?
Start by thinking about branding as a fixed overhead expense, not a variable cost, and base it off of what your revenue goal is going to be this year.
We know that might seem out of the norm, so let us show you what we mean with this example:
Company X has a revenue goal of $5M for this year, and they’re spending 5% of that on branding, which works out to be $250,000 per year, or $21,000 per month.
What should they spend it on?
Start by investing in your creative, your content and your design. Spend money on dedicated designers and writers to bring your ideas to life!
Once you have the creative nailed down, then invest in getting it out there for people to see.
Start small. Own your street, own your neighborhood, then you’ll own your market.
Here’s how that $21,000/mo might break down:
- $3000 on SEO
- $5000 on billboards and bus benches
- $5000 on direct mailers
- $5000 on radio or TV
- $3000 on community sponsorships.
All of that branding, plus your repeat business and referrals should fill up 70% of your schedule’s capacity.
Great right? But what about that remaining portion of your schedule?
The answer is lead generation tactics. In today’s world, these are the only ways to fill gaps. And lead generation means Pay Per Click advertising.
The Value Of PPC
PPC (pay per click) advertising offers your business immediate visibility, precise targeting, and cost-effective control, allowing you to reach potential customers quickly.
You only bid on keywords for the job types you offer, and only pay for clicks when someone searches a keyword on Google for one of your services, like AC Repair for example. Typically searches like “repair” and “service” indicate someone needs help right away.
PPC should also be considered a short term investment and is really good for filling open jobs in today’s schedule, but keep in mind that it doesn’t build long term brand equity and trust.
Marketing For Profits – Understanding How PPC Can be Profitable.
If you’re utilizing branding correctly, 70% of jobs should be filled by those efforts. And your fixed overhead expenses should be covered by the gross profit earned from 70% of the jobs in your schedule.
Meaning most profit is realized on the last 30% of the jobs in your schedule, the one’s filled by PPC.
Let’s dive a little deeper.
How To Make Profit Today
Say your fixed daily overhead is $3000, and the average revenue you receive per job is $800. Typically the cost of goods sold is about 50%, so your total gross profit per job is $400.
This means you’ll need 8 jobs just to cover your overhead. Which also means every job booked today after that 8th job becomes incredibly profitable because your fixed overhead is already covered by those first 8 jobs. You can then use that profit to go toward the cost of PPC and fill the remainder of each of your schedules!
PPC and Google ads seem expensive, we get it. But it might be worth paying Google $200 each for those last 8 leads in your day ($200 x 8 = $1600 daily budget). If your jobs are going unsold, it’s because you’re not willing to pay enough for them.
How ProfitFill Can Help
To run PPC properly, you need to know what types of jobs are needed, as well as understand the needs of your business.
So how are you going to fill your schedule today?
We need ads running only if you need jobs, and paused when you’re full. What if there was a software…
Stop dreaming, we’re here!
ProfitFill is the first software company of its kind, blending AI and a full-service marketing agency to get you results.
Our groundbreaking technology analyzes your data to target the most profitable jobs. We also craft tailored marketing funnels to your specific business units, because each of your services deserves its own strategy.
ProfitFill then reads your capacity for each of your schedules and throttles your ad spend to get you only the jobs you need, when you need them.
But it’s not just software, ProfitFill is bolstered by a full service marketing agency specializing in SEO, and digital marketing. And our inhouse content writers, designers, and ad wizards know what it takes to keep you at the top of Google.
When you combine the power of your branding with the efficiency of PPC you’ll be able to fill your schedules and boost your profit more than you thought possible! When you’re ready to get started, we’ll be here. We can’t wait to see what you can do!
