When it comes to advertising anything will work for you… if you understand how each type works.
What does this mean?
Well, Google ads (formerly Adwords) is intent based. This means they are actively looking for fence companies.
So when you’re advertising on this platform its pretty straight forward. Use tke words the customer is searching for. Put up a halfway decent ad and BAM! Your ad will do pretty well.*
*Note: With more and more companies using Google Ads the price keeps rising. 3 years ago I was getting calls and emails for $12. If I used those same ads now I would be spending closer to $50! OUCH!!
If you have no idea what you’re doing it wouldn’t be uncommon to spend $200+ before you even got your first call or email. Its just really easy to waste a ton of money pretty quickly if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Don’t want to waste a ton of time and money? Sign up for our free email series. It’s completely free and will save you countless hours and stacks of cash!
Facebook is an entirely different animal!
If you apply the same logic to Facebook you would spend $500+ and see absolutely no results.
The reason for this is that people don’t go on Facebook to buy stuff. They go on there to see what their friends and family are up to. They also go on there for cute pictures of dogs and bunnies.
For this you never want to say with your posts “buy me”. These should be more of:
- Before and after pictures
- How to posts
- Answer to common questions
In the last few months I really started diving into Facebook and now I’m getting leads for an average of $3! That’s 8-10x cheaper than what I get with Google Ads!
However, it doesn’t matter how many leads you get, but rather the number of jobs you land from those leads. Currently I’m tracking which jobs I receive to measure how well this is working. As I get more and more data I will be able to determine how well this is working.
Remember, Facebook is not based on people actively looking to buy stuff. Most of the leads are probably just seeing how much a fence costs when it comes time.
Paper Ads
This includes newspaper, flyers, post cards, discount mailers.
I do not suggest these at all for a few reasons.
- They are expensive:
- In my area the Clipper magazine runs $2300 per month! Now this does go to 330k homes. They tell you its less than a penny per house so you think its a great deal. But it’s not. You might get 100 calls and 97 want the absolutely cheapest price. This may be OK when just starting out but it doesn’t work for the long term.
- I used this method before I spend 60+ hours learning Google Ads with some level of success. But that was also because I was charge $1000 less for an average size job than I do now. Would you rather make $400 per day or $1400?
- Mostly bargain shoppers.
- I had to bring this up again. When you don’t have any employees you can afford to charge $1000 less per job but do you really want to be digging holes the rest of your life?
- You’re locked in for a minimum of 3 months.
- That’s fine if its working, but what if it wasn’t. I don’t know about you but I don’t want to put out $6900 for something that doesn’t work.
