Jacob Ransom: Secrets to Running Effective Ads to Grow Your Home Service Business

keywords

home service marketing, digital marketing, lead generation, business growth, reputation management, messaging, marketing strategies, hiring professionals, marketing knowledge, diversification, neighborhood marketing, A/B testing, digital marketing, authenticity, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, content creation, lead generation, SEO, home services, digital marketing, business growth, reviews, contracts, agency expectations, marketing strategies, client relationships, advertising, home services, agency partnerships

summary

In this conversation, Branden Sewell and Jacob Ransom discuss the critical aspects of digital marketing for home service businesses, focusing on effective messaging, the importance of reputation management, and the necessary mindset shift from contractor to business owner. They explore how to prepare for business growth, the value of hiring professionals, and the significance of understanding marketing processes. The discussion emphasizes the need for a diversified marketing strategy and provides actionable steps for those looking to manage their own digital marketing efforts. In this conversation, Branden Sewell and Jacob Ransom discuss various strategies for effective marketing in the home services industry. They emphasize the importance of neighborhood marketing, A/B testing for campaigns, and the balance between content and copy in ads. Authenticity in digital marketing is highlighted as a key factor for success, especially in a world increasingly filled with AI-generated content. The discussion also covers the effectiveness of Google Ads versus Facebook Ads, with a strong recommendation for focusing on Google My Business and customer reviews. In this conversation, Jacob Ransom discusses the importance of online reviews for business growth, emphasizing how they can enhance visibility and trust. He also addresses the complexities of digital marketing contracts, highlighting the need for clear expectations and communication between agencies and clients. Ransom shares insights on how to navigate these relationships effectively, ensuring both parties are aligned in their goals and commitments.

takeaways

• Effective messaging is crucial for successful ads.
• Reputation management can significantly impact ad performance.
• Business owners must prepare for growth to avoid pitfalls.
• A mindset shift is necessary to transition from contractor to business owner.
• Understanding marketing is essential for business success.
• Hiring professionals can save mone

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Transcript

Branden Sewell (00:00.92)
Hi everybody, I'm Brandon Sewell. I'm the owner of Seal Pro Painting located in central Florida. I'm also the host of the Off the Ladder podcast and we exist to help home service business owners learn so that they can lead well and ultimately live life off of the ladder. Today's guest is Jacob Ransom and he is the owner and founder of Ransom Digital. Welcome to the show, Jacob. I appreciate you being here.

Jacob Ransom (00:26.856)
Hello, hello. Thanks for having me.

Branden Sewell (00:28.78)
Yeah, absolutely. If you could really quick for the listeners, could you just give a brief introduction to who you are, the services that you offer and how long you've been in business.

Jacob Ransom (00:39.87)
Sure, I've been in business for about six years doing marketing specifically, but I've been in the painting world for going on eight years working in a painting business before that. A quick overview of what we do is I help painting businesses attract their ideal client and never worry about leads again, either by setting that up and running that for you through our agency, working directly with me, or coming up here soon teaching and training the business owner or their team to do it themselves.

Branden Sewell (01:10.168)
That's awesome. So as I talked about before the show started, obviously our goal and our mission is to help home service business owners who are working in the field do the things that are necessary to get out of the field, to get off the ladder, to get off the truck and, you know, be a business owner, work on their business and not in it. And a huge part of that, as we talked about, is being able to bring the work in and stay busy.

And obviously marketing is a huge factor in that and selling. And so you have to know how to bring leads in. I think one of the most challenging things to learn and understand is digital marketing and how to run a ad campaign that is going to be successful and is going to actually work.

So just some questions that I have on the digital marketing side of things is, you know, when you're trying to create ads, what are some of the like specific things that make an ad successful? What do you think are like some of those things that you need to be thinking about? And how do you how do you run successful ads for your painting company?

Jacob Ransom (02:33.468)
Yeah, it's a good question. So there's a couple of components that will make an ad work versus not work. To put this in perspective, I just launched ads for actually a company that I have some ownership in. And it took about three different launches for it to actually work. And what's interesting is we only adjusted a couple of things. And it made a world of difference between the success versus it not working. The first thing is going to be your messaging.

And that is being intentional about the person you're talking to. in the marketing world, everyone has heard about this. It's if you try to speak to everybody, you end up speaking to no one. And if you speak to one person, you'll end up attracting more people than that person. But you'll also end up attracting that person. So the messaging is going to be very, very important. Messaging is going to be around the avatar you're targeting. could be busy moms. It could be professionals. Right. It could be the retired are some really big avatars in the painting space.

who specifically have pain points around painting, those pain points are different between them all, right? Retired people, they physically cannot move furniture, they don't want to get on ladders, they physically can't do the work. How you talk to them is very different than how you talk to a busy professional who, you know, wants to keep the house maintained but doesn't have the time but they do have the money to do it. You're to talk to this person very different.

First thing is getting really clear about who you're talking to. Marketing is all about communication. From there, it's the packaging. How are you actually communicating that message? For instance, a lot of contractors make the mistake of physically, literally telling people that they're expensive. I tell people I'm expensive, and that means they're literally on the phone and they say, just to let you know, I'm expensive. I'm not gonna be the cheapest guy around.

It's like, that's not how you actually are supposed to communicate that if you want to communicate to we know this through a lot of testing, things like that. Wealthy luxury individuals who don't, they don't, they don't look at the price. You know what I mean? They don't look at the price when they're pumping gas. They, they go to restaurants. They don't even look at the thing. They just signed the check. You know what mean? Those types of people are your target. The way you communicate to them is very, very different. Don't tell them you're expensive.

Jacob Ransom (04:50.846)
How you do it is you tell them you're expensive without ever mentioning money. At all. In the details. How can I tell this person I'm expensive as often and as much as possible without physically saying I'm expensive? That means the way you look, the way your content looks, the way you're presenting yourself, the small details of what you're doing. Do you have confirmation calls before you show up for the estimate? Like there's all sorts of different things in the process. Bring those into your marketing.

Right? How can I showcase my work in a way that tells someone I'm expensive without actually physically saying I'm expensive? So is that going to answer your question on what separates them?

Branden Sewell (05:30.903)
Yeah no no it definitely does that's a very clear on what you can do. Now a question a follow up question that I would have for this is so would you say that you can run an ad for one company that you know it's you know you have like this you know some of the same messaging and some of the same components and then do it for another company and it not work.

because the company isn't doing the things to make the ad work. Does that make sense? you could run this ad, then if you have a terrible reputation in your community, it doesn't matter what that ad says. People are going to know who you really are or how you show up to jobs, how your sales team shows up, and all of that. That reputation might

You know go beyond whatever you put out on social media so would you say that the company could really make a difference on how and add performs does that make sense the question that i'm asking.

Jacob Ransom (06:41.598)
1 billion percent. There's actually two facets to that. The first is most agencies just pretty much run the same ads between all of their companies. That doesn't really do much to separate you if you're looking to get separated. lot of contracts, going a little bit of a rabbit hole here, a lot of contractors don't understand the difference between marketing and lead generation. Marketing is attracting or building an idea, communicating an expectation to an audience.

Branden Sewell (06:43.286)
Okay. Okay.

Jacob Ransom (07:08.622)
Legion is a sales activity you deploy against your marketing. Right. So for instance, one of the biggest campaign launches we've ever done is $250,000 sold in three weeks. We marketed for two months without a single call to action and then launched a single ad call to action against that audience. And it, it was like, they're completely prepared for it. Worked like crazy. Right. We've seen that sort of thing work really, really well. that's kind of an aside to that, but

There's actually a story around a client we had. They're not the largest, but they're one of the biggest ones. We actually ended up having to cut ways with them because of this. Their reputation was so bad in the marketplace that they were the only client we've ever had that we had to police the comments on their ads because we would post an ad and they would get 10, 20 comments of people saying that they had sued the company. They were...

They paid a deposit and it had heard anything for nine months. all in this is a larger company probably on $3 million ish. And it was just like crazy to me. It was absolutely mind boggling. I remember having a conversation with the owner and he just acted like he had no idea what we were talking about. You know what I mean? His team had a lot of turnover, all the stuff. was like, if that also told me if you can run your business like that and still do 3 million and get an award and things like that.

Branden Sewell (08:23.64)
Yeah.

Jacob Ransom (08:36.542)
none of us have any excuse. You know what mean? You can just show up and do the job, you shouldn't have an excuse. But the big thing is, is they're focused on sales and marketing, which ended up being the levers. That just kind of proves that point. But yeah, it definitely does impact that stuff because comments are actually another part of your ad. They're another piece of content there. People will check out the comments. And so if all the comments are negative, or you're hiding all the stuff and then they start commenting, I don't know why he's hiding all my stuff, something like that.

Branden Sewell (08:39.031)
Right, right, yeah.

Branden Sewell (09:00.686)
Mm-hmm.

Jacob Ransom (09:05.574)
or deleting my comments, things like that, it's just not gonna work out well. You have to have a good reputation.

Branden Sewell (09:07.788)
Yeah.

Yeah, that's really good. You know, I think about this all the time as a small business owner. And it's something that I say a lot on the show is like, I don't want to grow at the expense of, you know, X and that could be like my reputation or at the expense of my marriage or at the expense of spending time with my kids. you know, so I think there's a trade off like you could.

You could run ads and bring in a ton of business, but if you don't have a great reputation, if you're just not a well-rounded individual, it doesn't really matter how much you try to do to grow your business. You have to just... So I think of that as a holistic approach. That leads me to another question is, obviously, if somebody is going to implement something like this into their business and there's going to be this influx,

of leads and generation of business, what are some tips that you would give to small business owners to be prepared for that influx of growth that could potentially come? Because I mean, that's a really interesting thing to try and balance is you bring in this growth, but now that growth can cause problems. Do you have the staff to handle the growth? Do you have the team?

And I think that's important is like if, you know, in my opinion, I would say like you have to be ready to hire people. You have to learn how to manage teams because if you have all this growth, but you're not ready to handle it, that can be problematic.

Jacob Ransom (10:56.946)
Yes, I'm writing down here my notes, because I have three core points here. I make sure I don't forget any of them. Three core points here. you are, let's say, under 500k, you really want to grow your company. And you're like, OK, I want to do this. I think I can do 1 to 1.5 in 12 months. It's really aggressive growth. I've seen Brad Ellison do it. I've seen all these other guys do it. That's what I want to do. This is for that person. Is that who we're talking about? Like what they should kind of gear up for?

Branden Sewell (11:01.038)
Sure,

Branden Sewell (11:23.502)
Yeah, yeah. So we're talking about like that person who's, you know, they know they want to grow, but maybe they haven't experienced yet what that growth, like the problems that that growth can bring on. Like they've never hired anybody or, you know, now it's like, oh my goodness, have, you know, six estimates I have to do today, but I'm still in the field. So.

Like what advice would you give? Like how do you make the decision on how to implement this? Do you start small and then scale it? Do you go all in? Like just give some advice around that because I think that's something that people have to consider.

Jacob Ransom (12:02.6)
Yeah, the first thing you need to make sure is in place is the correct approach and mindset. I repeat this over and over and over to our community. In order to achieve that, you can no longer be a contractor or a painter. You have to be a business owner who owns a sales and marketing company that happens to sell paint and labor. At the end of the day, that's all we do is we sell labor. That's it. I own a business that sells labor. It just so happens to be that it's painting.

You have to approach it in that mindset first, because if you approach it as a contractor or a painter, you're always going to be thinking through the lens of product and through production and things like that. And you're going to run into problems like team that you're not going to solve because you're not approaching it the right way. A business owner looks at solving problems through other people. A contractor will usually look at solving problems themselves, but with a helper.

Does that make sense? So really you have to kind of like first is fully kind of move into that mindset. The next thing if you're moving into this is focus on not, and this may be a little controversial. I'm gonna say systems is a large buzzword, but specifically don't focus on tailoring the leads to your current sales process. Tailor your sales process to the leads. Big businesses have to learn to sell to online leads.

So as you're saying, what I would do is I would start off super small with online leads. You're to get these in a couple of things you have to call within five minutes. Speed delete is incredibly important. You have to call multiple times. Well, if they're serious, they would pick up. No, they won't. I know this because I call you. You don't pick up, right? That's not the way it works. Actually, people get upset if you don't follow up because they feel like you're just telling them you don't need their business.

Branden Sewell (13:32.706)
Mm-hmm.

Branden Sewell (13:48.398)
Right, right.

Jacob Ransom (14:00.754)
Their mindset is if they needed my business, they would continue to call. I once quick story with this is I just moved to Johnson City and I was going to set up a dentist appointment and I did all of this research to find the best dentist I thought I wanted to go with. And I filled out a form on their website and submitted it. And I was like, that's it. I'm done. I can just wait for them. All that stuff. A call never came in. If it did, they maybe only called once, didn't leave voicemail, nothing.

Branden Sewell (14:04.664)
Mm-hmm.

Jacob Ransom (14:30.238)
I realized after two weeks, I'd never heard from them. I was like, they have, obviously they suck. You know what I mean? I like, they don't want my business. They never called. The experience is completely different than what more like normally people think. Is this kind of making sense so far? Yeah. The next part is your sales. If you're just walking in and you're throwing a paper estimate on the kitchen table after 20 minutes, you're going to have a really rough time. Social media leads, you

Branden Sewell (14:36.686)
You're right.

Branden Sewell (14:42.296)
Mm-hmm.

Branden Sewell (14:46.54)
Yes it does.

Branden Sewell (14:57.176)
Mm-hmm.

Jacob Ransom (14:59.016)
have to build a relationship. Carve out an hour to an hour and a half, rapport build in there. Rapport building needs to be 45 minutes minimum. Then you can do your estimate. You need to personalize, things like that. You have to educate and build rapport beforehand, right? So the process is different. If you're looking at growing, make sure you look at your systems and say, is this set up for online leads? Don't approach it from the context of,

I need to go get more leads that are incredibly easy to sell because I have no sales ability because I've only sold to referrals in the past. You're not going to right? You're going to spend a bunch of money, dump a bunch of money into Facebook ads, hire an agency who's going to promise you all this stuff, all this kind of stuff, and you're going to get nothing out of it. And the agency could have done their job fine, right? They could have gotten leads, all that stuff. It's just, you didn't have the system set up to handle them. And so now, number one, you're probably like, okay, all agencies suck.

Not 100 % true, but somewhat true. And number two, Facebook ads don't work for me. That's absolutely not true. Now you're gonna lose out on possibly one of the best channels that's for painters right now because you weren't ready for it and you jumped in too quickly. Does that answer your question? Do need me to go deep?

Branden Sewell (16:10.058)
Yeah, no, no, that's that's really good. I think you covered what I was asking. But it leads me to another question that I have is, you know, obviously, you might have people who listen to what you're saying, and they're like, man, I'm, I'm on the fence, I'm gonna, you know, try and do this myself, because I don't know if I'm ready for that growth. I don't know if I'm ready to do this.

And what I'd like you to kind of explain it or what are some of the main mistakes that people who try to do this on their own make and Why is hiring a professional to do it a better option? Even if it seems like a lot of money to invest what like what would you say to the person who's on the fence on it? and I think this like it you know, think of it in this way like I'm not a bookkeeper an accountant, right so

I don't have the expertise and I learned this early on in the first three years of my business. was trying to do things myself and I actually learned that I was costing myself money because I was, because of my ignorance of bookkeeping and accounting and so I was actually costing myself money when I was trying to save myself money by doing it myself. you know, so that

That really applies to a lot of different areas as an entrepreneur. know, when you're a small business owner, you're trying to wear all these hats and you think like, I'll just save money doing it myself, but really you're costing yourself money. what are those mistakes that people who are trying to do it themselves make? And, you know, why should they hire a professional instead?

Jacob Ransom (17:59.07)
Yeah, you may not like this answer. So to hit on your point, I completely understand. I was in the same boat when it especially when it came to the finance. One year, I remember it cost me about $30,000 to not be running finance myself like well, and I fired myself from the position. I was like, I could literally hire a full time bookkeeper for $30,000. You know what mean? Like, that was crazy. I ended up hiring someone, but that also didn't work.

Branden Sewell (18:03.132)
It's okay

Branden Sewell (18:11.63)
Mm-hmm.

Jacob Ransom (18:30.032)
Even though this person was highly recommended, think that they were doing their job well, all that stuff. I didn't know enough to know if they were doing a good job or not.

Branden Sewell (18:37.116)
Mm, that's good.

Jacob Ransom (18:38.406)
So what I ended up doing is I ended up hiring who I'm working with now, which is a CFO who does my work, like does the work for me, but we meet on a monthly basis and she teaches me finance. So I can read a PNL. I keep a shadow PNL actually next to my legit one. I actually look at them at the end of the month. Me and my assistant keep a shadow PNL so I can see stuff on the fly. Like I have good enough finance literature, literacy.

Branden Sewell (18:49.87)
That's good.

Jacob Ransom (19:06.128)
Now where I can do stuff myself, I don't want to do it all myself, right? So I'd still hire someone to do it. But I know enough to do it. I think that this is probably one of the biggest things that's keeping painters specifically from growing at the rate that they could. I was talking to, not going name them. I think you've actually had them on here before. A larger marketing, how do I say this, guy position.

Branden Sewell (19:09.986)
Yeah, that's good.

Jacob Ransom (19:35.422)
and one of the largest painting companies. And we were talking about how when it comes to sales and production, business owners will, will drag, you know, walk through hell basically to learn more about it, get better at it. But when it comes to marketing, they just want to shove it all, all off of the plate and just hand it to somebody and walk away. They don't want to spend any time on it. They don't want to put any effort into understanding it. Nothing. And it is

so important to everything, right? We have been spoiled because in painting there's largely more demand than there is supply, even though it feels like there's a lot of supply, there's still more demand than there is supply. That makes it very easy. That also means that we can get very spoiled and get very lazy with our understanding of it. You don't know that you need to know like marketing until you need leads. Then you realize, I wish I knew how to market, right? At that point. So I actually think the best thing that a

business owner can do is seek to understand and become a half decent marketer themself. They should understand messaging. They should understand who their target market is. Right. I should be able to ask you who is your preferred ideal homeowner. You should be able to tell me a name their demographics their psychographic why they hire you what drove them to hire you. So I'll ask you like why you know why does someone buy your painting. They just need painting.

No, they don't. What drove them to the point of needing painting? No one just wakes up one day and says, I want to get my house painted. Something drove them to that point. And they're like, I've never thought of that before. I'm like, we need to at least know a little bit about our customer, right? You should know those things. You should know a little bit about communication. You should know the importance of posting on social media, how to present, right? You should be in on branding, things like that. Branding is not necessarily logos. It's how you present, right? In those types of things.

Branden Sewell (21:10.968)
Mm-hmm.

Branden Sewell (21:17.4)
Mm-hmm.

Jacob Ransom (21:33.98)
You should have a good grasp on those things and then have a good grasp in terms of the bottom of funnel metrics. You should know what your target, like what is your maximum possible cost per lead? For instance, in one of my painting companies, we grew a million dollars in a year at a 4.8 % cost of marketing because our sales and our setting, like our lead to estimate and then our sales percentages were so high.

that we could afford a $320 cost per lead and be at 10 % marketing. Our cost per lead was like 85 bucks. So that meant that 300 some dollars down to 85 meant that we were at a sub 5%. We're less than half. Does that make sense? Significantly less. like understanding those metrics so that you can then better support your team. like that includes holding them accountable, but not just hand it off to someone say,

Branden Sewell (22:02.424)
Mm-hmm.

Branden Sewell (22:07.726)
Yeah, that's good.

Mm-hmm.

Branden Sewell (22:19.363)
Yeah, yeah.

Jacob Ransom (22:31.868)
deliver on this and then they need stuff from you. Marketing is a full business thing, right? It impacts setting, impacts sales, impacts production, it impacts everything else. Your product is marketing now. Because of that, you have to know at least a little bit about marketing in order to talk the language, understand the lingo. If a marketer says your CTR or something, you should have a rough idea of what that means and what a good number for that should be for you.

you're not gonna obsess over it, but you at least have enough to know. It's a long-winded answer for that, but I think it's a little different from what most people kind of believe on that.

Branden Sewell (23:08.534)
No that's really good and it actually reminded me I listen to Dave Ramsey you know both both on like the personal finance side of things but I also listen to his podcast called Entree Leadership and but anyway one of the things that Dave Ramsey says all the time is you want to hire somebody who's a teacher right so like if you're looking for a CPA or an accountant or a realtor or whatever you want to hire somebody who is going to be a teacher.

Jacob Ransom (23:13.01)
Mm-hmm.

Branden Sewell (23:35.951)
So that you understand why you're making the decisions that you are. It's not just blindly trusting somebody so I really respect that but also I'm actually in the process of transitioning to like a a fractional CFO So I'm in the process of that right now and this guy is gonna do what it sounds like your person does and it's you know sitting down and actually like

Jacob Ransom (23:53.533)
Mm-hmm.

Branden Sewell (24:03.788)
going over the PNL in a balance sheet and you know making strategic strategic decisions and you know things like that so that I can actually really fully understand the depth of the numbers and how that should influence my decision making so I really like what you said there. Now the other thing that I wanted to say is I think that it's important for

You home service business owners business owners in general to have a diverse approach to their marketing right so like not putting all your eggs in one basket you know not saying like the only thing that i'm going to do for my business is you know facebook ads but you know and i had to learn that the hard way in two thousand twenty two i had all of my investment into like one way of getting leads.

But I didn't have a diverse approach. Like I wasn't doing a lot of in-person networking and going in my community and meeting with people. wasn't doing some of those foundational things as a business. So I relied so heavily on one form. And then that actually ended up going south. Like it was really good for a season. just so everybody who's listening can know what it is, I was paying for leads.

You know, so was using a paper lead service and that company like restructured their entire, you know, I don't know what you would call it, like, you know, their process of like selling the leads. And so now it wasn't just paper lead, like set a budget and then you get X amount of leads from that. They now had like a pay to play thing. It was like how they would have you go in.

and select like how much are you willing to pay for this lead. So then that's how they determine who got like the best leads or like the people who were willing to pay more for the leads. Does that make sense? And so I was like, you know, they had this, they had like options and you could choose like I'm willing to pay, you know, $75, $100, 150, 275, 350.

Branden Sewell (26:23.406)
you know, 400, $500 for these biggest, you know, leads with like the biggest jobs. And I was like, I am not, you know, maybe I'm wrong for thinking this way, but I was like, there's no way I'm paying like, you know, 300, 400, $500 for that lead. I just like, I'll figure out how to go get on myself or so. But not only that, that that just went like downhill.

fast for me. then I was like, my goodness, I'm like, you know, my numbers went from, you know, basically got cut in 75 % and like within a matter of like a month or two. And then I'm like scrambling trying to figure out, okay, how do I figure out how to get leads a different way? So anyway, I think that's why it's, I had somebody on here the other day and he worked in corporate America and in marketing. And that's one of the things he brought up too, is definitely

Jacob Ransom (27:10.546)
Yep.

Branden Sewell (27:22.188)
diversifying your approach and making sure that you're doing marketing in a lot of different ways. So if now let's dive into this. If if somebody wants to try to take on doing their own digital marketing you know what would be some of the like key things that you would recommend.

them doing to just get started. Like I know I've done some myself and I'm not going to try to say like I'm at the same level you are. But I think one of the things that you mentioned before is like you had to run multiple ads to find out was working. So like doing A B testing on your ads. Like so in the past what I've done is like, you know, come up with two or three different ads, have a budget, run all of them for like, let's say a week and see

how they're performing and then if one's like really showing that it's outperforming, I'll take money out of the lower performing one and allocate it to a better performing one and run two and see how those do and just kind of narrow it down to what's working and then run that. Is that like what your approach would be or I'm just curious, what would you recommend?

Jacob Ransom (28:35.292)
Yeah, and then if it's not too late, have a few thoughts on the diversification as well, but I'll hit on this.

Branden Sewell (28:39.34)
Okay, yeah, sure. Let's jump back to the diversification and then we can go to like how you would run ads.

Jacob Ransom (28:44.99)
Okay, yeah, I think both are interesting, we actually have a recommended diversification we do for newer clients who are coming on. This comes from years of running this stuff, including in my own painting companies. We recommend one online source, one offline source.

Branden Sewell (28:52.184)
Mm-hmm.

Branden Sewell (28:56.866)
Mm-hmm.

Jacob Ransom (29:02.854)
So you have to manage it well. If you try out too many guys, try out too many things, and then they get so spread thin that nothing works well. marketing, like here's the idea, all advertising works. We believe full, all advertising works. It purely just comes down to how well you do it. So if you only do it well enough to get a couple of leads in, then you immediately start a whole nother source. You're actually losing out on that once.

Branden Sewell (29:18.274)
Mm-hmm.

Branden Sewell (29:24.728)
Mm-hmm.

Jacob Ransom (29:32.542)
excuse me, that one source producing as well as it can, right? So if you just get to the point where you're pulling in a couple leads a month from Facebook and then you go start direct mail and then you start door to door or something like that, you're not doing any of them particularly well. You're getting the lowest return on all of them. We recommend instead, like putting effort into one to get it to a certain point, what we consider like level two or level three, and then going to another channel and getting that to level two or level three.

Right. order to take that, you really have to have a person who's in charge of it. But to get to true like mastery, like getting a vendor and something like that, that's actually when we recommend to get a vendor is when you've got to level one or level two, you need to go start on other channels, but you want to continue to improve it, get a vendor who can take it to level three or level four, right? Much, much better being run. But we actually recommend two, two core things. And I'll hit on a quick story about why this was really important to us. It actually cost me probably $70,000 a month making this mistake.

Branden Sewell (30:02.968)
Mm-hmm.

Branden Sewell (30:12.227)
Mm-hmm.

Jacob Ransom (30:32.446)
Run online, this is going to be for a smaller painting business. I would run social media ads. This is also if you're a want-based business. This means you have a sales process, you know how to sell to people who want things, not need things, right? We've worked with both, they both work, but you have to have a sales process for it. Facebook ads is amazing for an online channel.

But the strength of Facebook actually is not the lead gen, it's the marketing aspect. It's what it can do for the other channels. That's the actual strength of Facebook ads. Your Facebook ads will make your SEO do five or 10 times better. Your Facebook ads will make your door-to-door do two or three times better. Your Facebook ads will make your yard signs do 10 to 15 times better. This is what we found. So mixing the two, online and offline, is really important. Do not mix two online.

Branden Sewell (31:22.638)
Right.

Jacob Ransom (31:28.912)
So this is what I did in my second painting company. I did two channels. I picked SEO, and I picked Facebook ads. We had something happen. I've never had an account disabled or a restrict or anything like that. But something happened with our bank where they blocked it just randomly, and they disabled our account due to a payment, like a billing thing. It took us three weeks to get it resolved.

Branden Sewell (31:51.502)
Mm-hmm.

Jacob Ransom (31:53.918)
In that time, we were looking at our SEO, we were getting about 30 to 40 leads a month through SEO. I was like, okay, we'll be fine. We'll be fine. We did 90,000 the month before. That month, we did $18,000. I was like, where did all of our SEO go? Where did it all go? It went from like 40 to like three. You know what I mean? And I was like, this did not work at all, right? I thought I was diversified. In reality, I wasn't.

Branden Sewell (32:00.577)
Mm-hmm.

Branden Sewell (32:06.455)
Mm-hmm.

Branden Sewell (32:10.355)
Alright

Branden Sewell (32:15.128)
Yeah.

Branden Sewell (32:18.88)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. That's good.

Jacob Ransom (32:22.396)
because Facebook is so strong that it was feeding all of our SEO. We lost Facebook, we lost all of our SEO. Right? So in actuality, what we wanted to do was we recommend having an online and then have an offline. Neighborhood marketing. I don't care if you're putting all of your effort into online, you still need to do offline stuff. Yard signs, knocking doors are at least around the estimate and around the project, at least. Flyers, door hangers on the floors, on the doors, at least are in the neighborhood. Right?

Branden Sewell (32:37.07)
Mm-hmm.

Branden Sewell (32:47.17)
Yeah.

Branden Sewell (32:51.81)
Yeah.

Jacob Ransom (32:52.316)
Like there's just some bare minimum stuff you have to do in the neighborhood marketing side that we recommend you still like tremendously do. That's what I had about the diversification. Was that, was that okay?

Branden Sewell (33:01.6)
Yeah, that's really good. I love the point that you made there and I just want to share a strategy that we've had and used in the past is when we would run an ad. We would run it tailored to where a particular job was going on at that time. So if we were working in a particular neighborhood in Melbourne, Florida, we would run a ad and we would target that area.

And then what we would do is we would put yard signs out in that area. We would put door hangers out in that area. Our guys would be driving around and, you know, with the trailer that has our logo and everything in that area. And so it was kind of like concentrating all of our efforts into that one location while we were working there because we were like, OK, well, we can hit this for the next, you know, like, let's say week or two.

while we're there working and it's the presence of our guys in shirts are gonna be eating at different places or in different stores. And so now we're kind of trying to be seen as much as we could while we were there. So I don't know if that's kind of what you're saying along the lines of making sure you're doing the neighborhood marketing, but that was our approach was trying to really concentrated efforts in that one area.

With that thought I'm gonna pause for a second I'll be able to edit this out, but my dogs keep barking So I'm gonna go get them to be quiet and I'm gonna use the restroom and then I'll be right back. Okay? All right. All right. Thanks, man

Jacob Ransom (34:36.51)
Okay. Yeah, I'll be here.

Branden Sewell (36:30.723)
All right, Sorry about that. All right. So jumping back into the conversation. So we talked about, you know, the diversification and I love a lot of the points that you made there because it's stuff that I wouldn't have even thought about. But it makes a really good point on how to approach that. The other thing that I think we were going to talk about. So it was diversification and

Jacob Ransom (36:32.862)
worries.

Jacob Ransom (36:59.666)
in the test.

Branden Sewell (37:01.386)
Yeah, yeah. So yeah, share some feedback on that.

Jacob Ransom (37:02.322)
Yeah.

Cool, so A-B testing is something that's necessary for scaling campaigns. When you're just trying to get a couple of leads in, like let's say less than, if you're just trying to get maybe up to like 10 leads a week in or something like that, leads, let's say you're gonna set about half of them, it's about five appointments or so, then you really don't have to worry too much about it. You can pretty much just let it run because your spend is so little.

A B testing is not really in the local side at least. I do run some ads for like e-commerce and coaching and things like that for a couple of friends of mine and it's completely different in terms of how we approach campaigns. So if you go online and see a lot of advice online, it may be advice that's not relevant for local because it's not really done the same way in local. It's not really about A B testing to find a winner. Then you're going to put the the tech like the spend into the winter winter the winner.

Instead, what it is is to find an ad that works so you can run it for as long as possible and then your objective is to find as many ads that work as possible and have those all running on the side. So ads in local, you can really only put behind a single ad, maybe $30 to $75 a day behind. If you're in a position where you need to spend more than $30 to $75 a day behind a winning ad, you need four or five winning ads. How do you go about finding those? You have to test.

Right? We have found it's about one of every seven ads. We're going to find a clear winner that's going to be able to run for months without touching. Right? And also what we're not doing is we're not necessarily increasing the budgets a bunch. So we found when you increase budgets, you may run the risk of resetting learning. Right now it's a 19 % increase. You will reset the algorithm in learning, which could ruin your results. So we recommend just letting it sit and instead

Jacob Ransom (39:00.306)
duplicating it one time. So you find an ad that's working, duplicate one time, same spend. Then what you're gonna do is duplicate it again and make a single adjustment, right? So now you're running the winning ad again and now you're running a winning ad with one adjustment. This is the big thing, only one. You can only change one thing. You can only change the headline, the copy, specifically the lead on the copy is a good place to do it.

Branden Sewell (39:21.304)
Mm-hmm.

Jacob Ransom (39:29.758)
or the creative, right? Only change one thing. If you change more than one thing, you're no longer A-B testing, you're throwing things at the wall. Because if it works, you have no idea why it works. Is it because you changed the headline or is it because you changed the copy or is it because you changed the creative? You have no idea, which means you can't duplicate it again, right? That's what we recommend doing. You'll find actually that I can take a winning ad and just simply duplicate it and it'll continue to work.

Now it may fatigue a little bit faster because more people are seeing that one ad. And so I wouldn't do that if you only have one. I would be out there making more ads, things like that. But what I'm looking for is I'm looking at this one ad that worked, and I'm going to go make more ads like it. So this ad worked really well. This was an ad where I was walking through a house. I did this particular style of walkthrough on it. I'm going go do five more walkthroughs on different houses using the same format. And I'm to see if those work. And I'm going to use the same copy.

the same headline, the same everything, I'm just gonna change that creative, but now I know that that format works, I'm gonna keep trying more things in that format. Does that make sense?

Branden Sewell (40:35.99)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, no, it definitely does.

Jacob Ransom (40:38.61)
Yep. So in e-commerce, you can scale a campaign to $10,000 a day and literally dump all your spend into those because you have millions of people in your audience. And here, like the smallest company we work with has 97,000 people in their audience. And it's like, we have to run six, seven ads at pretty small budgets between them all. Or else we just burn through them too fast. Too many people see it too much and then people get ad blindness to it.

Branden Sewell (40:43.95)
Mm-hmm.

Branden Sewell (41:04.386)
Yeah, gotcha. So I have a few follow up questions based on what you were talking about. So one question I would have is, have you seen that? Excuse me, hold on.

Have you seen a weather like video or like photo ads perform better and is there one that you would recommend over one or is there like a place for both and it just depends on what type of Azure running.

Jacob Ransom (41:37.852)
Yeah, be careful about saying one thing works over another thing because we always test everything. We always run images and video. Video, based on our data, pretty much always outperforms. However, that doesn't mean you cut images and only do video. Why? The algorithm is going to show the content to the person in the best way that it knows that they respond. So the algorithm, I could jam on this for an hour.

Branden Sewell (41:42.923)
huh.

Jacob Ransom (42:06.002)
The algorithm knows you so well that it knows. Brandon tends to buy things past 7 p.m. at night and he tends to respond to image-based ads that look like this. Right? It's going to, it knows at 7 p.m. you're gonna start to see more ads that look like that. It's gonna try to show that in the right way. If you are like, okay, my videos are outperforming my images so I'm only gonna run video.

Branden Sewell (42:19.042)
Mm.

Jacob Ransom (42:31.57)
What's happening is you're giving Facebook only a very limited selection and limited library. So it's going to look at Brandon and say, Brandon has been researching a painting. He's a perfect, we think your ads are going to do really well against him. He performs best with images. Do you have an image? And you're going to be over here saying, no, images don't work for me. And so now they're going have to take an image or a video and show it to you instead. You have a less likelihood of converting off of it. So when you cut things,

Branden Sewell (42:56.334)
Mm-hmm.

Jacob Ransom (42:59.006)
like that, you may be cutting out entire sections. So like maybe the images only got three or four leads when the videos got 10. That doesn't mean that the videos are going to do a better job with those three or four. You may have just cut those three or four entirely out. Does that make sense? So that's you have to be kind of careful. We're always testing everything all the time. So I'm never like absolute videos be image 100 % of the time. We're never touching images again. That's not really how we operate.

Branden Sewell (43:13.442)
Got it. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, for sure.

Branden Sewell (43:20.11)
Mm-hmm.

Jacob Ransom (43:28.254)
We pretty much always have stuff going.

Branden Sewell (43:31.407)
Awesome. Now this is another question that I have is, and I know this kind of contradicts what you just said, you said not to do this, is what do you think is more important? The video and the photos, like content itself, or is your copy important too? like, you think people...

have a tendency to just like ignore the copy and just go straight to like whatever the video says or whatever the photo says or is your copy still really important and why.

Jacob Ransom (44:11.154)
Yeah, what a question. I've never been asked this before. This is awesome. You're definitely gonna get into the nerdy side. They are both extremely important in their own ways. Okay. You are marketing, not just for a person, you're also marketing for an algorithm. And what's happening is when you launch an ad, especially if a smaller budget, by the way, smaller budgets in the Facebook world is like anything under a thousand dollars a day. Okay.

Branden Sewell (44:39.597)
Mm-hmm.

Jacob Ransom (44:40.594)
That's just how Facebook works, you know what mean? So when you're working on small budgets like most local businesses will be, there's so much stuff that happens that the algorithm does. So the algorithm looks at your ad and it tries to gather who you're targeting based on your copy and your creative. I can't find the video anywhere, but there's a video online over 10 years ago.

Branden Sewell (44:43.278)
Sure, sure.

Jacob Ransom (45:10.478)
of Zuckerberg showcasing their new content AI thing. This was over 10 years ago where they had a video playing and it showed different things in like a four or five second rotation. within a fraction of a second, the AI was able to identify what was happening in the video specifically, like very niche, nuanced things. had a video of two in Africa of two like African.

Branden Sewell (45:10.712)
Mm-hmm.

Branden Sewell (45:16.896)
Mm-hmm, right.

Jacob Ransom (45:37.662)
people wrestling and it was able to identify Africa to people wrestling, but then the specific type of wrestling that they were doing. I can't even pronounce it. You know what mean? As an African style, like ceremonial, like wrestling that they were doing. And it was able to identify it immediately. The algorithm knows exactly what you are, what you're doing. It knows house painting, person painting a house, right? Things like that. And so it's taking all those things into account, but then, okay, it knows what's in your video, but it's also looking at your copy.

Branden Sewell (45:46.412)
Mmm. Yeah.

Branden Sewell (45:58.905)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Jacob Ransom (46:07.144)
to identify what it is you're trying to accomplish that mixed with your objectives you choose when you're building the ad, because you're going to tell the algorithm, I want to go get leads. I want them to come to a lead form, things like that. But it's also going to be looking at these things to identify. So we target our audience based on our copy. So if you tell me, Jake, I want to target retired people, we're going to run totally different copy than if you're targeting busy moms. Completely different copy.

Branden Sewell (46:34.392)
Yeah, that's

Jacob Ransom (46:36.41)
maybe the same video, right? The creative is a little more geared towards the person. So if they don't stop the scroll, which means they don't find the creative interesting because people stop to read, reading is like the second or the third step. The first step is to see the creative and they stop the scroll. So you could have, you could target the perfect person, retired person over 55,

Branden Sewell (46:40.238)
Mm-hmm.

Jacob Ransom (47:05.394)
You know what mean? They've got money, all this kind of stuff. They want to hire someone to do it. You're targeting the exact perfect person, but you run a really lame before and after image of a house. And it doesn't catch their attention. Doesn't matter. Showed it to the right person, but your creative wasn't good enough. It just kept on going. Right? So we have to keep testing within the audience what kind of creative is catching their attention so that they can actually stop to then consume the ad that we put all this effort into doing. This is where it takes.

Branden Sewell (47:20.438)
That's

Jacob Ransom (47:33.17)
This is where we go from level one, level two, we get into level three and four is like really being not just like in not just haphazard, but being very intentional about the things that we do. I'll have clients who will try to edit their own videos and the first five seconds is just I know is not going to catch their attention. So we always make you can edit your own videos, but you have to send me the raw stuff as well because my team knows how to edit for social. We know how to address the the hook.

Branden Sewell (47:59.449)
Yeah.

Jacob Ransom (48:01.65)
the story, the CTA at the end. know how to do all that stuff in relation to each other. Does that answer your question? Cool.

Branden Sewell (48:07.136)
yeah, that's really good. I love that. That leads me to two follow up questions. So the first part is going to be how important is it that, you know, we live in a world right now where you can like, you know, create something AI generated and you know, like you could put that out there. You know, you can pull like buy stock images. How important is it that the content

is authentic to like, you know, you know, let's say like, instead of me using a stock image using a image that we actually, you know, did like where our actual work or a video that's like AI generated if somebody painted versus work that we actually did ourselves. Is that is that important in today's world of digital marketing? Or does it really not matter? It's just really having the content.

dialed in the messaging and you all those they call to action dialed in so that's the first part of my question. And then the second part of my question is how do you decide what your call to action is because I know like one digital when you're like creating the add it'll say like hey do you want to get more calls do you want to get more form submissions do you want to get more messages how you determine which one of those to do and.

Jacob Ransom (49:30.974)
Yeah. So the first one is AI and the second one was the forms and stuff onto the forms and stuff first, because that first because that's a little bit of a shorter one forms of stuff through testing. So I've done this for six years. We started off with landing pages. This was pre iOS 14.5, which is when Apple created a big veil or barrier between Facebook and the outside internet world, right? The World Wide Web. They made it so that if they left Facebook, Facebook could no longer see what they were doing.

which completely decimated landing pages. And Facebook was scrambling. Forms, back then, used to be notorious for being trash, utter trash, just worst thing ever. We then went to messages. So this was back when ManyChat was working great. We would have message bots. This was years ago, right?

In that time, Facebook started to improve forums because they realized that no one's landing pages were working and Facebook's entire billions of dollars is completely off of advertising. So they had to make it work. So they started to put a lot of R &D into forums. Forums quickly outpaced messages. So then we switched to forums and that's been for the last three or so years that forums have been the best. However, we are now back to testing.

landing pages, because now stuff has gone far enough to have what's called CAPI, like conversion API, server-based stuff that's a little more advanced, to where we can get pretty good information back. just we have to actually manually set up a backend thing in order to feed that information back on a daily basis. I wouldn't recommend that for anybody that is not spending like $600 or more a day on ads. It's just not worth it. Forms are working perfectly fine right now. They work.

phenomenal. You can add in a bunch of questions into there if you're getting trash leads from it. We add usually about two custom questions, and then we'll have first name, last name, email, phone, in like a city or zip code, something like that. But then we'll ask like, what is it you're looking to get done, things like that. And those are required to be in there. So that creates a pretty high quality lead for us. But that has perfect attribution. So that answers the second thing. The first one was AI.

Jacob Ransom (51:51.078)
I think, so I am naturally pessimistic on AI. As in, I think it is being shilled by a lot of gurus and as this like magical thing is going to solve all your problems. I'm very wary of anything that is being sold as an easy button or a magic pill that's going to solve all of your problems. Right? There's a lot of like AI voice messaging, stuff like that right now. I've seen some horror stories with that.

where people, once they figure out that they're talking to an AI and the AI was trying to be a human, it just completely ruined your reputation. Something goes wrong with it, you have no idea, because you're not calling your phone every day, right? Things like, so there's just a lot of, like, I personally wouldn't implement any of that stuff into my thing. And also what I recognize is the couple clients we've had who've bought into a lot of the AI stuff, they waste so much time on it, it's insane.

Branden Sewell (52:27.874)
Yeah, that's good.

Branden Sewell (52:32.908)
Yeah, yeah.

Branden Sewell (52:38.68)
Mm-hmm.

Jacob Ransom (52:49.51)
They will spend two months trying to get some sort of stupid AI to work. And by the end, they'll just throw it out because it didn't work and just wasted two months. Of all they focused on for two months, it was crazy. For AI, I think that painting is like I say we luck out because AI is really bad at painting stuff. Like if you try to do an AI image of a roller half the time, it's not it's not going to look anything like a roller. You know what mean?

Branden Sewell (52:56.814)
Yeah, yeah, that's

Branden Sewell (53:08.259)
Mm-hmm.

Branden Sewell (53:15.115)
No.

Sure, sure.

Jacob Ransom (53:18.046)
Like you can't do painting stuff. Pretty much the only thing you can really do is like a contractor standing in front of a house or something like that. And that's not really going to work very well. So I think as of this moment, until AI gets to that point in the next maybe half decade or something like that, I would just triple down on content because content is significantly easier to do anyway. Content takes me five minutes a day. AI takes me three hours to do. It's like it didn't even save you any time. What was the point? You what mean?

Branden Sewell (53:38.37)
Yeah.

Branden Sewell (53:43.245)
Yeah. Yeah. So one of the ways that I felt about it for a long time is I think people like for me, AI and stock images or stock videos are like obvious. Right. So as soon as I see it, I'm like, that's stock. That's not authentic. And so I actually

Jacob Ransom (54:00.894)
Very.

Branden Sewell (54:08.462)
I associate those three things, know, AI, stock images or stock videos with being unauthentic. It's like, why could you not produce your own content based on something that you did yourself? So I was just curious, like if you guys, you know, would encourage, you know.

someone to use stock or AI produced stuff or to generate their own. So that answers that question. Go ahead.

Jacob Ransom (54:37.618)
Yeah. I think authenticity this year is actually the name of the game. We just spoke to all of our clients earlier in like a state of the union address and we basically were like, authenticity is the name of the game this year. 100%. You have to show your face. You have to show your team's face. All of your photos on your website need to be your own photos. We know the target audience and they are researching. They're looking at stuff. They're looking at your social medias. If they see your ads.

Branden Sewell (54:47.779)
Mm-hmm.

Jacob Ransom (55:07.613)
and then they click on your profile and they go on there and the last time you posted was 12 months ago and it was like a crappy Canva graphic that you hired some person to do for 200 bucks a month is not, it's not speaking to that audience. That audience is looking at your photos. There's so much, like there's such a big gap here that if your photos are just too dark, too dark, right? I've been in the room with my wife.

who's been looking at getting stuff done in the house and just the image being too dark. She was like, why is the image so dark? She's like, know, like that sort of thing. Does that make sense? Like all of that, we have to get, do a good job of showcasing what we have and what we do. And our audience are, they will catch on the older your audience, the less they'll catch onto it quickly. But if you work with busy professionals, throw the AI stuff out. They'll sniff it in a half a second. Their BS meter is through the roof, right?

Branden Sewell (55:42.967)
Yeah, no, does for sure.

Branden Sewell (56:02.392)
Yeah.

Jacob Ransom (56:02.59)
The second I get the idea that I'm on with a robot that's been trying to be a human, I'm out of there, right? You try to do a video that's acting like it's real, it's not gonna work. You know what I mean? I think you wanna go against the grain. If everybody's going AI, go manual. And you're actually gonna start to separate yourself in that way.

Branden Sewell (56:22.99)
That's good. So all of that kind of leads me to a next topic that I want to get into is and I'll try to like create this as like a conclusion and have two things that we talk about. But in my mind, two of the most important places for your business to be would be Google and like social media, Facebook, Instagram, things like that.

So I don't know if you have any thoughts on this, but do you have an opinion on what is more effective for home service businesses running Google ads versus Facebook? And if you do have an opinion on that, why? And I'll share my personal opinion, and you can correct me if I'm wrong on this. I feel like...

I don't know that I would spend too much money on Google. I think Google is really powerful, but I like my organic Google is more powerful than paid. So like what I mean by that is like my Google business page or on Maps or whatever you want to say is more powerful reviews. Keeping that updated is is key.

I'm opposed to like Google ads or PPC. That's my take on it. think Facebook is more community driven. think it's, you know, it could potentially be more effective. But what are your thoughts on?

Jacob Ransom (58:01.886)
100 % agree. The way we teach it is that Google is what's called demand capture. Google, you can't scale because if there's only 100 people searching for interior painting in a month, there's nothing you can do to increase that. You will only ever be able to get 100 people onto your website and a portion of those will become a lead, right? That's called demand capture. For a business like a painting business where our entire model is purchasing new customers,

You need to have a lever in place where you can actually do what's called demand generation. There are two key channels that are amazing at demand generation, where you can take a person who was not looking at getting painting done and turn them into a person who is upon meeting this channel. The first is Facebook. The second is door to door. Door to door, you can walk up, knock on a door. Did you know that this was peeling? No, I had no idea. There was no demand.

Come look at this. Oh my gosh, it is peeling. If you don't take care of that, it's gonna cost you tens of thousands of dollars in siding repair. Free estimates right now, yeah, of course I'll get one done. You took a person who had zero idea anything was happening to a person who is now in demand, right? You controlled that. That's demand generation. Demand capture is basically saying someone else, like this is why I also don't like demand capture. Demand capture, it's important to have.

but it's saying someone else is going to help this person realize that they need this done, is going to create the demand, and then I'm going to hope that they're gonna Google for it, and I'm gonna show up, hopefully show up when they Google for it. There's so many ifs and hopeflies right there that it creates a not great option, right? It quickly kind of caps out. Now, this is very dependent on your location, very dependent on your competition, like,

Dude, if you're in Dallas, give up on SEO. Don't even try it. Get a GMB up and focus on reviews. That's all you can do. Because in the world of SEO, it simply comes down to who spends the most. Contractors are always looking for this like little secret, you know, thing like that. I got a guy who can like do super good. Like, dude, if they're doing that, it's black hat and you're gonna get taken down sooner than later, right? When it comes to SEO, it's literally who can spend the most.

Branden Sewell (01:00:01.304)
Mm-hmm.

Branden Sewell (01:00:12.462)
Mm-hmm.

Jacob Ransom (01:00:28.222)
painting companies in Dallas who are spending five to $10,000 a month on SEO to make sure that they're in the number one, number two, or number three space. If you squeak up there with your $1,000 a month dude, he's doing something shady. You know what I mean? I'm talking about one of the real top three spots. By the way, you're going against Angie's List, Thumbtack, all the aggregators. You're going against everybody else as well, right? That's going be very, very hard to do. Instead, focus on GMB.

Branden Sewell (01:00:46.146)
Yeah, yeah.

Branden Sewell (01:00:52.045)
Yeah.

Jacob Ransom (01:00:57.754)
and reviews. Angie's List can't start a GMB. We all know this. There's the thing in the painting industry of like Angie's is starting trying to get into the GMB by setting up fake companies. Do you see this? They're up fake companies, collecting leads through that. So they're still trying to get in there that way. But the best thing you can do is get a GMB up, post on it whenever you post on your socials, which should be every single day, post on it and get reviews from every single person you do a project for.

Branden Sewell (01:01:08.928)
Mm-hmm. Yes, I've heard it,

Branden Sewell (01:01:21.208)
Mm-hmm.

Jacob Ransom (01:01:26.718)
reviews are still phenomenal for business and they will help everything else you do. So Facebook can actually feed your entire Google. Your Google will start to do better when you do Facebook really well. You want to have those reviews there because someone who is looking at your Facebook, they're becoming exposed to you. Then they go look you up on Google. They're very high intent. They're just unsure. They see you have 250 reviews and they're

They're real, they're posting before and after images, they're posting images of the stuff, they're calling out team members by name, et cetera. It builds that trust factor and that certainty factor. You're gonna have a very high conversion rate. This is why people like Google's because people who go through that funnel tend to be the hottest people you can get. That doesn't mean people who skip that aren't hot. It just means you have to make up for that in the sales process. That's why in our sales process, we bring reviews in a binder and we leave it with them.

Branden Sewell (01:02:20.824)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jacob Ransom (01:02:23.218)
Like, know I'm talking about? We just make up for that at that point. Did I answer that question?

Branden Sewell (01:02:27.0)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's that was really good. I appreciate the perspective there on that. It's like I know it's like I kind of like intrinsically know some of these answers, but I don't know the technical of why. So I love that you're bringing kind of like that technical, you know, explanation of why where for me, it's just been sort of like a to me, some of this stuff is almost like just

Jacob Ransom (01:02:41.5)
Yes.

Branden Sewell (01:02:55.502)
common sense. But I know there's got to be some type of psychological or technical explanation, but it's just what's made sense to me. So I love that you're bringing like the technical part of it out for me. So the last thing that I want to talk about is budget, expectations, contracts. You know, and I'll just openly say like I've I've looked at using

digital marketing companies in the past. I had this one that I was talking to for a little while. They were trying to sell me. And one thing that I didn't like is that they didn't have like a niche, right? So they kind of just like were very broad. They would do like do digital marketing for like any business. And I was I didn't really like that because I felt like, you don't really understand my industry.

So that was one like turn off for me. The other thing I didn't like was the there wasn't really a teacher attitude. There was more of like an attitude of you don't know what you're doing. So let me do it for you. Like you don't know what you're talking about. I remember sitting down in a conference room and I was talking to one of their representatives and he was like, well, you don't know and you don't understand. That's why you need to hire us. And I was like,

What do you know about the painting industry? What do you know about my clients? What do you know? And I literally like got up and left because I was so offended. And then the other thing is I didn't know how to feel about being locked into a contract. So, you know, like they would have like a six month minimum contract. And like, I understand it to an extent, but I've heard so many bad experiences from like.

people who get locked in to like let's say a six month or a year contract with you know a digital marketer and then it's not performing and then they're like dishing out all of this money and not getting anything in return so that's obviously like I'm like I don't I don't know what to do so I want to get your feedback on one what should somebody expect to pay and is there like a difference in like hey if you spend this much expect these results versus this much this result

Branden Sewell (01:05:15.215)
So if you could break that down and then secondly, could you share on like how if you if you require a contract, why and what the expectations should be as far as like time and commitment?

Jacob Ransom (01:05:28.158)
Absolutely, so how are we on time? Okay. Yeah, because I definitely have a few thoughts on this that I think are very, very interesting. First thing I want to do is help people understand why the agencies do what they do, right? Why there's contracts in place, what some of the red flags should be, but the first thing is like how the approach should be to hire an agency. The worst thing you can do as a...

Branden Sewell (01:05:32.022)
We're good. Yeah. Yeah, I'm fine.

Jacob Ransom (01:05:58.376)
contractors trying to grow their business is jump from agency to agency. And I see them all over the place, all over the place, right? They'll go from agency to agency to agency to agency, usually in four or six month increments, or if the agency has locked them into a year long, it'll be in a year long increment, right? And the problem with that is that I believe when it comes to leadership in your position, there's a few positions that are gonna be high turnover positions.

Branden Sewell (01:06:02.606)
Right.

Jacob Ransom (01:06:23.976)
But then there are other positions that you should not have high turnover in and you should really take the time to make sure you actually get that. For instance, by the way, this is a pro tip for anybody. I learned this this year, do not get a new bookkeeper every year. You will get audited by the IOS. I didn't get audited, but a friend of mine did. Purely because they had a different bookkeeper every year. That was the only reason. Find, like take the time to really interview and understand the person.

Branden Sewell (01:06:37.72)
Yeah.

Jacob Ransom (01:06:51.934)
Before you make that hire in a couple of key positions any of your overhead positions Your your bookkeeper your CFO fractional CFO, whatever you're do there Your project management your office person HR representatives anything like that You should have very little turnover. It should be off cases and why turnover happens something happened, right? Fraud something should be something large that happened that made that turnover happen if you're having a lot of turnover even in two years

In those positions, there's something wrong. Your business will suffer for it. Sales is high turnover. Don't try to keep your salesperson forever. If they're not working in four weeks, cut them, right? Appointment setters is a sales position. We cut those within three days. If they can't memorize the script and have basic rapport building skills in three days, they're gone, right? Sales guys, they have to like...

Branden Sewell (01:07:34.328)
Mm-hmm.

Jacob Ransom (01:07:48.622)
get through the training stuff, things like that in two weeks or else they're gone. And then they have to bring in some stuff within four weeks or else they're gone. Those are high turnover positions. Don't lump those in together. Marketing should be in with your low turnover position, right? Going from agency to agency to agency doesn't help anything because your business is not actually growing. You're not taking anything from that. You're not understanding your person better. You're not getting any valuable tests in. You're not getting anything from it. You don't really know what's working or not working, right? You're just

Lee Jen, basically it's like a casino. You're just throwing money at a thing. You think it's gonna work. Cha-ching doesn't work. Or cha-ching, did work, I lucked out. Use my gut, right? We treat it like a casino instead of finding someone who understands your business, right? And is like their methodologies align with what you're trying to do in your business.

For instance, there are agencies out there who specialize in the tiny guys getting adding on an extra 10, 20, $30,000 a month, because that's all they really know how to do. Usually they come from YouTube University, something like that. And there's nothing wrong with that, right? It's just they don't understand business. They don't understand anything like that. If they're charging over $2,000 a month for that or even $1,500, they're overcharging you for that, right? Because that's not going to be adding on that much, right?

Branden Sewell (01:08:55.842)
Mm-hmm.

Jacob Ransom (01:09:15.706)
If you are looking to add on an extra 500 to a million dollars a year in your business from this relationship, you need to be very sure and clear on exactly what's going to be happening, what they're going to be doing, what you're going to be getting out of it. And you need to be leading it, not just listening to what they say and being like, OK, that sounds good. You need to be kind of leading it like I'm looking to attract my ideal audience. But also, if you're trying to add on a million dollars, you're not going to get only busy moms.

You're not going to get a million dollars with a busy mom. So you're going to get a lot of other people too, right? But they should be aware of what you're trying to accomplish and be very clear and transparent and open about what they're going to do to make that happen, right? The other thing is that you cannot expect custom prices, this goes with how contractors work too, for McDonald's work and vice versa, right? You can't have easy button.

Branden Sewell (01:09:47.692)
Right.

Branden Sewell (01:10:07.768)
Mm-hmm.

Jacob Ransom (01:10:11.208)
quick push, very simple ad takes nothing from me. And also I want to make a million dollars from it. That doesn't exist. If you want to make a million dollars from it, I'll tell you what it looks like with us. You're going to be making minimum 30 to 40 ads. If you don't want to do that, don't call me. If that doesn't excite you, you know I mean? I have a course, I'll show you how we do what we do. And you can do just five of them if you want. But at that point, you should really only hire, either hire someone who's only going to run.

Branden Sewell (01:10:17.282)
bright. Yeah.

Branden Sewell (01:10:24.707)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Branden Sewell (01:10:34.658)
Mm-hmm.

Jacob Ransom (01:10:39.422)
two, three, four ads that they're running for everybody else. And that's fine, you may get some leads from it. But honestly, I don't know why you don't just do that yourself. You know what I mean? If you just need to know how to click the buttons, I can show that to you, right? There's enough stuff online where you can learn that yourself. That's not hard. Is this kind of answering your question in that sense? So like, when it comes to hiring the person, okay, contracts.

Branden Sewell (01:10:48.163)
Right.

Branden Sewell (01:10:52.62)
Right.

Branden Sewell (01:10:59.692)
Yeah, yeah, yeah absolutely.

Jacob Ransom (01:11:07.825)
you have to look at it also from the agency's perspective. I have a unique perspective on this because I have been the contractor before I was the agency. I've hired agencies before I started one, right? And it's always scary to sign it. You don't understand why, all that kind of stuff. But really a contract is there to protect both parties. So the worst experiences I've had with clients is when I have a client promise me up and down that they're gonna do everything I asked them to do, right? And then,

Branden Sewell (01:11:16.066)
Mm-hmm. Right.

Branden Sewell (01:11:35.352)
Mm-hmm.

Jacob Ransom (01:11:37.01)
They do nothing for two months and then they jump. And now I have a bad reputation, right? They didn't show up for any meetings. They didn't give me a single thing I asked for. Like they were a terrible partner. And because there's no contract in place or anything like that, in terms of like saying, you're going to give me this, I'm going to give you this, right? It's just, they just had a bad experience. Does that make sense? And now that's out there. How do I protect against that? I can protect against that by being upfront with you and saying,

Branden Sewell (01:11:40.238)
Mm.

Branden Sewell (01:11:44.227)
Yeah.

Branden Sewell (01:12:00.427)
Yeah, yeah.

Jacob Ransom (01:12:06.034)
Look, this is a six month trial. You have to be in this for six months with me or else I'm not willing to bring you on. Right? Now here's the thing about our contracts. We have a six month contract, but our contract, unlike other agencies, we don't have a break clause. And we also have a clause in there that says, if you want to leave and I agree, we can break at any point. I just need to know that you want this to work as bad as I do.

Branden Sewell (01:12:14.285)
Right.

Branden Sewell (01:12:30.318)
That's

Branden Sewell (01:12:36.515)
Right.

Jacob Ransom (01:12:36.88)
I cannot want to grow your business more than you do.

Branden Sewell (01:12:39.874)
Yeah, that's Yeah, yeah absolutely.

Jacob Ransom (01:12:41.15)
Does that make sense? That's just not gonna work for me. So like, I always say this, if you really wanna just dip your toe and try an agency for a month and see if it works before committing, that's not how marriages work, right? Now we're not getting married, but you understand. Like, I'm like, go try out, go waste money on these other guys, get burned a couple of times, and then come try me out when you're ready. Right? Does that make sense? Now I will say there are agencies. I've only ever, I'm not gonna name any names or anything like that, but.

Branden Sewell (01:12:50.784)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah.

Branden Sewell (01:13:00.93)
Yeah, that's good. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Jacob Ransom (01:13:09.66)
I've only ever blocked one marketer in our space and I've only ever called out one agency in our space and it was due to a contractual thing. There was a company who hit me up because their Facebook ads weren't performing. They had spent $1,200 that month and gotten two leads and that had been what it was like for last three months. They were blowing cash on this. They signed a contract. It was a year long contract. They had signed a contract for a different service like SEO, something like that. And they had just simply added on Facebook for cost.

Branden Sewell (01:13:23.64)
Mm-hmm.

Branden Sewell (01:13:36.654)
Mm-hmm.

Jacob Ransom (01:13:38.654)
So they were going to drop them for Facebook and come to us for Facebook, because we were able to show them how we're going to be able to do a better job, all that kind of stuff. And they could see why that was going to work, because they weren't being asked to make content. They were just running a couple of random ads, and they really wanted to do the content stuff with us. The agency told them that if they left, they were going to raise the price of their SEO contract to the same price it was with the Facebook. So Facebook was an extra $600.

And it was 2000 for SEO, they're paying 26. They're like, we're just going to raise your price to 2,600. And we also have to renew our contract for another 12 months. They're going to force them to do this. I was like, that's some of the worst practices I've ever seen before. Does that make sense? Like they completely screwed this guy over and he had no idea. So in the same breath of saying, this is why agencies do this, you got to be really careful because I wouldn't sign a 12 month.

Branden Sewell (01:14:19.712)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah.

Branden Sewell (01:14:32.174)
Mm-hmm.

Jacob Ransom (01:14:34.482)
Personally, I wouldn't sign a 12 month and I also wouldn't sign something that was going to charge me to get out of it if things weren't delivered, but also you need to have deliveries based on what they should be delivering as well. Does that make sense? And then you have to actually make sure you meet your end of the bargain. Too many times, like half the time it's the agency's fault, but the other half of the time it's because the person was just a terrible partner and they...

Branden Sewell (01:14:35.756)
Right.

Branden Sewell (01:14:48.876)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Jacob Ransom (01:15:02.29)
they sabotage the agency the whole way. And that's not a great relationship for either. Do you have any questions? Does that make sense?

Branden Sewell (01:15:08.034)
No, no, no, I really like that approach. mean, the way that I think about it is if, if I, if I was like in your position as an agency owner, if I genuinely genuinely knew that what I was doing my best, the customer was doing the best that they could and it wasn't producing results, I wouldn't want to keep that customer because I wouldn't want to screw somebody over. Right. I don't like, I don't care.

You know how much money it would make me i would be i would have to go to sleep at night knowing like i'm doing everything that i can. This customer is doing everything that they can they're doing everything i'm asking them to and it's not working and it's bleeding cash for them. I personally am not going to be able to put my head on my pillow at night no one i'm screwing that person over so i would be like hey i don't care what the contract says you're good you're off like.

You know, or if you want to do this month to month, let's do that until we figure out what's working or, you know, I just that's me as a person. So I would just it's not necessarily that I have a problem with a contract. I just I just want to know that the person that I'm working with has my best interest in mind, that if they genuinely know like, hey, this is really going to screw this person over, you know, just let them go, you know, like. But if you get

Jacob Ransom (01:16:33.502)
Can tell you what we do? Yeah, so this has actually happened multiple times. And this is how I do things. By the way, I sleep phenomenally at night. Because of this. We really take care of our people. This is what it looks like to be taken care of by an agency. At this is what we do. This is my own opinion. I think we take care of people better than anybody else. So within two months, if...

Branden Sewell (01:16:34.988)
Yeah, yeah, sure. Let's hear it.

Branden Sewell (01:16:43.074)
Sure

Jacob Ransom (01:16:59.292)
You start with me within two months if I agree that the results are not what I thought that they were going to be, right? Because we created expectations around there. And I agree that they have done everything that they can. The first thing we do is we take our meeting from a monthly meeting down to a weekly meeting until that the thing is rectified. So now we're meeting on a much more often basis, right? Sometimes multiple times a week kind of thing. We increase our communication cadence.

Tremendously if they're doing that and they're still doing the things that we're doing to test because that's how we crack Hard markets is we just overwhelm it with activity. We test way more ads We don't have to spend way more money, but we test way more ads We just we just throw a bunch of activity at it and that's how we crack really hard markets and we've cracked the hardest markets in the US like Denver LA New York things like that Very very tough markets to crack. Excuse me to crack If it's still not working and I agree. I'm just like dude

Branden Sewell (01:17:49.23)
Mm-hmm.

Jacob Ransom (01:17:56.476)
We're just struggling. I don't care if we're mid contract. I stop charging and I work for free until we get back on track.

Branden Sewell (01:18:03.415)
Mm, that's good.

Jacob Ransom (01:18:04.53)
They can leave at any time that they want, right? Because usually, like if I work for free for two or three months, their six month is over, they can just choose not to come back on, but I don't charge them. I work for free until we do that, because that's how confident I am that sometimes it's just a matter of time that we're going to be till it cracks, right? And so we'll start trying all sorts of different things. But that's what marketing is, is that trial and error, but educated, knowing what's worked in the past, things like that, making sure that that happens.

Branden Sewell (01:18:07.406)
Mm-hmm.

Branden Sewell (01:18:22.861)
Yeah, that's good.

Jacob Ransom (01:18:34.418)
and then meeting with them saying, look, we've got everything back on track. You happy? I'm super happy. This was amazing, right? Awesome. We're going to start our payments back up and we'll keep going, right? We just do month to month after our six month. We don't resign for six. We just do month to month thereafter.

Branden Sewell (01:18:43.586)
Yeah, that's good.

Branden Sewell (01:18:48.974)
That's good. Well, yeah, I definitely can respect and appreciate that approach. That's really good. Yeah, I'm going to start to bring this to a close, but, you know, I really appreciate all the value that you've brought. And I think there's really a lot of incredible takeaways for the audience. So just really appreciate your time and all the value that you've brought. You know, I was going to say in the beginning of this, you mentioned you're in Johnson City. I actually have some family.

In the piney flats area and Johnson City Yeah, so I was actually just there not too long ago and We I know you mentioned that you're you know, go to church and stuff as well. But I went to a church I think it was I Might be wrong in this but is it Kingsport?

Jacob Ransom (01:19:21.222)
Okay, we're looking for land out there, yeah.

Jacob Ransom (01:19:42.942)
Are you talking about the altar?

Branden Sewell (01:19:44.943)
I don't know. It's so like you come, I'm gonna probably describe this really terrible, but you like come from Piney Flats and I think you go like down into Johnson City and then you get on some highway and I don't know which direction you're heading, but you can literally see the church off on like a hill and then you like take the exit and it's right off the exit. You drive up a hill and it's a.

Jacob Ransom (01:20:01.928)
Mm-hmm.

Jacob Ransom (01:20:07.718)
Is it in a big brick, like stone building? Like old? Yeah.

Branden Sewell (01:20:10.882)
I think so, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know, gosh, I wish I could remember what the name of that place was, but it's where my family goes to. I just wasn't sure if you would be familiar with it or.

Jacob Ransom (01:20:25.724)
I mean, depending, might be my church, yeah, depending. Possibly. But Johnson City has like more churches per capita than like any other city. So like it could be anything. And there's several brick ones. But yeah, there's so many churches out here. It's possible, but yeah.

Branden Sewell (01:20:29.138)
really?

Branden Sewell (01:20:39.949)
Yeah.

Branden Sewell (01:20:44.236)
Yeah, this one's like right off the highway. I mean, literally, like you see it like up on the hill. So, I mean, I feel like unless there's a ton of churches like that. I guess so. I guess it's actually it's been almost a year. It would have been back in, I think, April of last year we were there. My mom actually lives like right off. I think there's a river like it.

Jacob Ransom (01:20:53.33)
When was this? When was this?

Jacob Ransom (01:21:08.179)
Yeah.

Jacob Ransom (01:21:12.606)
There's a couple. Well, the nulla checky. The nulla checky. OK. Yeah.

Branden Sewell (01:21:13.89)
There's a river like either in Piney flats or Huh? I have no idea. I haven't been there a lot. They moved there like a couple of years ago from Shelbyville out by Murfreesboro and they moved there and I haven't really visited that much yet. But yeah, I just know that her house like is right on the river and I don't know. Anyway, I was

Jacob Ransom (01:21:25.222)
of it.

Jacob Ransom (01:21:35.186)
Yeah. Hopefully she's okay. That river blew up over the hurricane.

Branden Sewell (01:21:41.492)
Yeah, she is. She was fine. She was like really high up. Like I when I went to her property, it was like looking down at the river. was like looking down over a cliff.

Jacob Ransom (01:21:53.15)
Yeah, there's a lot of like mountain top houses out here. So yeah, definitely makes sense. Yeah. Cool.

Branden Sewell (01:21:58.403)
Yeah, I'll find out what that church is and I'll message it to you and who knows, maybe it's your church. That would be crazy because we went there.

Jacob Ransom (01:22:07.934)
Our old building was, if you walk in the building, is it just like a big steep old building and you walk in, there's just two rows of pews.

Branden Sewell (01:22:17.71)
So the way that I remember this is you like walk in through the the front and then there's like a I don't know what you would call it like a reception desk or whatever like where greeters would stand or whatever. The sanctuary was off to the left and there was like balcony seating over you.

Jacob Ransom (01:22:43.326)
Okay, it's not ours. I think I know which one it is though, but I think it's the one one of my best friends goes to. Yeah, that's super cool though. Yeah, let me know what it's called because I probably know someone from there.

Branden Sewell (01:22:45.165)
Okay.

Okay.

Branden Sewell (01:22:51.488)
Okay, gotcha. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, I'll ask my mom and my sister where it is. They go there. Well, anyway, man, yeah, again, I really appreciate your time and jumping on here. After this, we'll have to have a little bit more conversation about your services and stuff. But anyway, I'm gonna bring this to a close. So thank you so much to my listeners. If you're watching this on YouTube, please like this video, comment, share your feedback.

Jacob Ransom (01:23:00.552)
Very cool.

Branden Sewell (01:23:25.934)
Please share it with somebody so they can learn from all this incredible information that Jacob shared today. You can also subscribe to the channel and turn on the notifications so you don't miss the next episode. Also, if you're watching this on any major podcast platform, Apple or Spotify, please rate and review the show. That'll really help us to reach more people. And as always, check the show notes. I have some resources down there for you if you're a home service business owner.

Those resources will help you to run your business better and implement some systems and processes so that you can get off the ladder. And as always, thank you so much for watching this episode and I'll see you next time on the next episode of the Off the Ladder Podcast.

Jacob Ransom (01:24:11.038)
Thanks, Brandon.