Social media hacks to expedite growth — Russ Stephens // The Association of Professional Builders

Quotes

• “For a high-ticket industry like us, our focus is on awareness and lead generation. There really is a little opportunity in terms of making sales via social media, so it’s all about the early part of the journey. For that, it’s all about content and using lead magnets.” - Russ“The first tip that I want them to focus on, we’re well aware now that clicks are quite meaningless. Five or ten years ago, all the talk was about the cost per click and now after Facebook did some research that there is no proof of a correlation between clicks and any subsequent event. Now, we’re not even focused on leads. The focus is on marketing qualified leads and the cost per marketing qualified leads and the reason is that it will help you identify the best channels.” - Russ“What we see is that 80% of leads that come in either for our business or our clients, 80% of those leads are simply not qualified. They could be SEO companies or people who don’t have land. So what we need is to find the marketing qualified leads and base our costs on that figure. It’s a really important thing that transformed our business and it made a big improvement to the builders that we work with.” - Russ“You need to focus on from the bottom of the funnel up and if you’re just focused on driving a lot of volume to the top of your funnel, you’re going to be sorely disappointed because you’re likely not going to be very targeted.” - Ben“Also, the more that you can understand what’s happening with people that are very close to converting, the more efficient your marketing efforts are going to be.” - Ben “In terms of things like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube the quality percentage is very similar. Slightly stronger on YouTube but not massively. SEO is probably twice the quality of leads as a rule.” - Russ  “But when you look at all the other specialty channels, there are a lot of up-rates that are offering lead generation for builders. We see the quality of leads for those types of service to be beyond poor and bordering on a complete waste of time and money. That’s simply because they’re guessing the consumer too late in the buyer’s journey. Another thing is when they simply pass the details on of the three or four different builders and now they’re in a race to the bottom basically where the lowest price wins. So that’s a lose-lose for everyone.” - Russ “The main challenge that builders have is when they go the traditional route of quoting jobs where a consumer has got the design done and is now looking quotes like any industry if you’re looking to build a website for instance, and you go to three website designers, with those three quotes, no two are going to be the same because these are not commodities that are being sold so you really have to understand what’s being provided and that isn’t always clearly articulated in the quote so it’s a race to the bottom.” - Russ“So you have to figure out what the channels are, understand the industry and focus as far down the funnel as you can in terms of figuring out what are marketing qualified leads.” - Ben “You’ve got to know your numbers. It’s very important to identify the key KPIs and monitor them religiously every week.” - Russ“You must understand your sales cycle because that will give you a clear indication of how much cash flow is going to be required to scale your business. But KPIs, this is something that we don’t see happening enough. This is digging into your KPIs for a Facebook campaign on a weekly basis and understanding what you’re trying to achieve with that campaign and what the most important number is now.” - Russ “I think working back from your leading indicators is an important thing to understand. You build that learning over time by continually monitoring the data that you have. I know that when someone converts and they’re consuming 95% of my videos and they’ve been doing it for six months, that’s somebody that is worth investing more from a leadership perspective.” - Ben “I would be open-minded on what a campaign can achieve. We’ve seen multiple times now where we’ve used awareness campaigns that the primary objective was to drive traffic to websites so that we could pixel those people and retarget them with warm campaigns. But what we found on a number of occasions is just the process of sending visitors to the website where they consume an article.” - Russ“When we actually measure the cost for marketing qualified leads, we’ve actually found some of those campaigns to work even better than a specific lead magnet campaign that just sends people to a landing page. It’s unusual because the primary purpose was just to build awareness but those campaigns have actually turned into fantastic, high-quality lead gen campaigns as well.” - Russ“Ride the fast horse, play the hot hand, whatever is working you need to amplify it and be open to it even if your original intent wasn’t the one that is working. If you start to notice an awareness campaign driving direct response results, don’t fight it. Instead, double down, put more budget to that campaign and be happy that you’re getting the results that you’re getting.” - Ben