 Are you on? Are you on? Yeah, there we go. All right. Hey, y'all. Everybody, welcome to smart business knows. I'm Liz Trotter, and I've got a co-host with me today. I've got a guest with me today. It's so fun. I've got Maria Dorian. She is co hosting with me. Thank you so much for helping me out today, Maria. And then we've got Dan Hurts. Dan, do you go by Daniel or Dan? A lot of my wife calls me Daniel. My parents call me Dan and Danny. My friends call me all different types of names. So honestly, it doesn't really matter to me. You're easy. All right. We're going to go with Dan. We don't want to infringe on your wife's kind of nickname there. My Starbucks name used to be Bruno or and now it's now it's Felix. No, that's cute. I kind of like both of those actually. Well, Felix is my newborn son. So, so yeah, yeah. Well, I'm glad I said I like that name. I wouldn't have told you I had a son name feel like. Yeah, all that is cute. All right. Well, um, we're running late today. But as y'all know, Tom only believes in running late. Only he never starts on time. Even if we're here 10 minutes early, I'm like, don't get me going live. So he will love that we're starting late today. He's not here today. He's traveling and I don't know what he's out there doing. But hey, Tom, if you're watching this, I know you're all at some point time. Just for you. We're late. All right. So this before we get into the topic of lead digression and how to combat it Q&A before we have you explain what that is. I just want to do a real quick is a kiss. And for everybody, just as a reminder, ISSA convention is coming up here. Gosh, a month. Less than a month now at this point. Woof. Start on November 13. If you aren't going if you've been on the fence. Hey, Don. Let me see. She's talking to you. I think there she is. Did you get her email? I've been on calls for the last five hours. That's a big no. Funny. I love that she's going to hit you up on a podcast if she can't get my email. If I've gone the whole way to take advantage of technology. That's amazing. All right, but if you're not going to ISSA at the convention, you've been on the fence. Let me let me just give you a couple of reasons why you might want to go. First reason is you're going to get a new perspective. This is one of my very, very favorite reasons to go. We kind of get in our own little bubble, right? And I'm guessing this is the same with y'all too, right Maria, right, Dan? We get into our own little bubble about what we think, what we know, and we just sort of get into these rhythms and these routines and we just keep going along. Ah, but the convention really pulls you out of that and forces you to see things from other perspectives and see something just a little bit different than you may have looked at it before. Or at least it's always happened for me. I've been going ever since ever since I think I wasn't at the very first AR CSI convention. I hadn't heard of it yet. But I've been at everyone since that very first one. And the reason for that is perspective. I love to get fresh perspective. I come home really energized. Do y'all go tend to go to the convention or any convention or anything like this? Dan, I don't know, do they have? Yes, second year going man. Yes. Dan, do they have anything like this in your in your space, your field? Yeah, you know, there's tons of marketing, air conferences or SEO things or places where people can be groups and things like that. There's endless amounts of them. Honestly, a lot of them are a lot of look at me whoopie hollery. I am the best. I know everything. It's it's marketing and honestly, I've been doing this so long, I'm just like, I can't stand those events to a certain extent to be honest with you. Yeah, and yeah, there's a lot of a lot of arrogance to a certain degree. If it was more industry focused, like in like for cleaners or for remodellers or for things like that, there's a lot more to it because you're meeting other people in the industry there in the same positions you are in. So, you know, for marketers, you know, marketers tend to be a little bit more fabricated. So so honestly, I'm kind of past that in my world, I probably was a little bit like that in the beginning. But you know, I think it's much more valuable for like industry people like yours, like yourself that is like actually with a cleaning company, and there's all cleaners here, and they're talking about all things about cleaning and what they're doing and how they're achieving it. So we all have problems. And we don't have the constraint marketing. I like what you said, it's kind of fabricated. Marketing, that's part of the job, right, is you have to make something sometimes out of less, you have to totally, you know, and a lot, a lot of things with marketing in general, which I'll get into in this topic when we when you ask about it, but a lot of things in marketing in general is unfortunately, you have to give bad news, you know, and a lot of times marketers that are getting paid by clients don't like to give bad news because because they think though that company or that individual is not doing a good job for me. But in essence, when there's certain things that happen, like for instance, economy changes, there's nothing that there's forces of nature that you can't really control. And but you can combat it in certain ways to make things better than what they perceive. So yeah, Agreed. I love that. Okay, I'm kind of getting excited. That's what we're going to be talking a little bit about. All right, looking forward to it. How about you, Marie? I know that you're in Spain now. So obviously much harder for you to go to these types of events. But did you did you have the perspective shift when you used to be here and used to go and you did with quality driven every year to Oh, yeah, I mean, okay, so when I go to the events, I usually have like a small list of problems that I'm coming to the event with like, okay, by the time I leave the event, I want to have an answer to these things. So that's always helpful. And my thing with events, so you know, because people from the industry, right, they always go with the same intensity, the same people, and you see your friends that you develop friendships with, I always go with the thought mentality of I'm going to meet somebody new that I've never met before, which is actually how I met Martha, you happen to be sitting alone in a table, and I'm like, there's a woman over there, I'm just going to go sit next to her and introduce myself and say hi. And you know, you know the rest is kind of history. I didn't know that about you meeting Martha. Okay. Well, then my second point, you brought up my exact second point for a great reason to go to the convention. You meet people that you would not meet otherwise. And you are afforded opportunities that you wouldn't have. Otherwise, if you hadn't gone, you you met Martha, y'all started a business together. You did a lot of things simply because of your your experience at at the convention. Alright, same. Yeah, I'm sure. You know, I, I think Tom and I have been in together on, I don't know, maybe seven, eight different businesses at this point in time. Is that right? Somewhere around there. And I met him at the convention, right? So I wouldn't have had those businesses if it hadn't been for meeting him. Yeah. So the other the other big thing. So just two reasons today. One is new perspective and meet people and meet different people and gain new opportunities that you never even want to dream of. All right. That's it for the kiss. And I want to like kind of dig into this topic. First, though, seriously, Dan, I was kind of sound alive as joking. Hey, Shirley, good to see you. I work with Shirley's daughter right now and love her. Alrighty, so let's see. You're gonna have to explain what this is. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty straightforward. If you think about it, you know, you know, we deal with many mostly like house service verticals, right? So we obviously have cleaning companies, we work a lot with like 4050 of them at this point in time throughout the country. And then we also our other verticals are for instance, like solar remodellers, general contractors, you know, that kind of vertical plumbers HVAC. And all these home service businesses, I have just like Maria, like five, 10 meetings a day, it seems like these days, I can't even get to my emails to the end of the day or the next day. And I see Maria messaging. And now I know you're in Spain, I saw you email me like last night at like midnight. I'm like, yeah, Maria must be in Spain. But anyway, you know, I'm seeing kind of across the board, people, I want to say the word complaining, I don't want to make it in the negative, but they're concerned about their lead generation, right? As of late. And like right now, ever since pretty much August through now, as I've been hearing it a lot. And it's tough. And it's, and it's difficult to kind of talk about with clients, because, you know, I take a look at things, things look okay. And then I have to kind of use my other skill sets away from what we do as an agency to kind of support their roles. Hold on. Let me let me interrupt here again. I just realized that of course, I know who you are. You are everybody knows that is live knows who you are. A lot of people here later that aren't going to have a clue. So do me a favor. I'm going to have you introduce yourself and also actually, Maria, how do you introduce yourself first real quick, and then introduce yourself, then we can jump back in again. All right. I thrown off my game here by being all yeah, Maria. Sure, I'll start. Okay, so my name is Maria Dorian. And I'm probably most well known at this point for starting task away virtual assistants. I'm on the Zen Mei team and listening cells co partner on listening cells with Liz and Dan Smith. And I live in Spain. I got a few kids over there. So you got kind of a fun little life going on there. All right. And Dan, go ahead and tell us a little bit about you. Yeah, I'm Daniel Hertha, you know, I'm one of the owners of a company called one click marketing. We used to be called SEO one click until we expanded into pretty much doing an all in one service for digital. I don't know that I gotta write that down. Yeah, yeah, well, if you go to our domain, it's actually SEO one click calm. But you know, as we organically grew, clients started to ask us, you guys do websites, you guys do AdWords, you guys do this that this and you know, when you're growing, you never say no. So you just say yes to them all and then you figure it out as you go. So now yeah, so now we're a full service digital marketing firm. The only thing we don't really really do is social media. I was actually a VP of a social media marketing firm, two jobs before starting this business. I'm not a huge fan of doing social media marketing, in all honesty, just mentally for myself. And just in general, it could definitely be good for some industries and some businesses. But obviously, it's a whole nother topic in itself. And then I was a marketing director for a top 50 remodeling firm where I met my business partner, Jordan. And now 15 years later, we have was company called one click marketing, we have 40 in house salaried staff employees. And I say I say it like that just simply because the majority of marketing agencies outsource the work that they do whether and you know, we keep it all under one roof. I know every single one of my staff members personally, I've been out for drinks with them and everything else. So so you know, in honestly, in the marketing world nowadays, when it comes to, let's just say SEO in general is like, you have website tasks, you have content tasks, you have back linking tasks, you have Google local tasks, and all of those kind of are connected to really create an authority for your company to rank better and get more visible in search. So you can't really have separate departments working separately away from each other. If you want the best results from basically from what I see. Now, obviously, there's a lot of agencies out there in the world that grow really fast, and they get thousands and thousands of clients, and they have to kind of outsource a lot of their work. And I understand that model, but we're more of a like a boutique model, we only take on about 110 clients at a time. So that's, that's kind of my background. There's probably a lot more than my background. I was also a class APGA golf professional, but that's a whole different topic. That's cool to know. We should make all of our guests give us some obscure fact about them that nobody knew. I love that. That's interesting. That's what I'm doing that from now on. Poor Tom, you walk away for one week. What happens? Liz, change it to show. So what is it? Give us just PGA what? Class APGA golf professional. So basically what that means is I used to be my first job out of college. I for seven years I worked at a place called the Phoenician in Scottsdale, Arizona, which is a two five diamond resort. And I was the membership director there. I grew into becoming the membership director there. And I was also a class APGA golf professional. And that's a fancy, dancy resort when people come to Phoenix, all the politicians, presidents and celebrities usually stay at that reason. I've played golf with three presidents. I have a lot of stats. I have a lot of stats and fun things of name dropping that I could do. But a lot of a lot of secrets went down and those types of resorts especially. So that's super cool. We're definitely doing this Tom. Hey, when you come back, sorry for the new shift, but that's awesome. I'm gonna love finding out this cool job. Yeah, lots of background, right? Yeah, right. No kidding. So Dan, Donna is asking, did he say was part of one SEO? It's here. I'll share your website. Yeah, okay, it's SEO one click.com. But we're rebranded to be called one click marketing and one is spelled out. So you won't find our website by looking at one click marketing because there's honestly I've looked at it and there's 21 click marketing types of company names. But that's okay. We actually don't really utilize our website to market our brand, believe it or not, which is kind of counterintuitive because that's what we do for all of our clients. So where we see the most amount of business for a company like ours is actually through email marketing, through referral marketing, and also through cold calling, believe it or not, it actually works really, really well. Yeah, been using a new platform. I don't know if you guys have all heard of and this is all great information for everybody out there, even though it's not exactly about the topic. Have you ever heard of a platform called zoom info? So zoom info, if you haven't heard about it is one of the bigger they're actually publicly traded on the NASDAQ and they have they're really basically they're compile tons of data and information about people out there. Why we use it is it creates intense signals. So I actually, they give us categories that we pay for. So I can actually see everybody in the remodeling industry that has been searching for SEO marketing in the past day, week or month. And I actually can see the person's name that has actually been doing it. And I get their phone number and their email. So we can actually call them and then you cold call them. So you can actually call ask for John Smith at XYZ, get your no contract team and be like, Hey, we heard that you have been digital marketing or internet, whatever the topic is. Yeah. And you can kind of cold call them based on that. So it's not just as cold calling with intent. I know that everybody dislikes getting spam and telemarketing. I know, I know, we're we assistant to that issue, but it actually works quite well to be honest with you. Yeah, when it comes to doing like SEO or PPC or website marketing for marketing agency, can you imagine the amount of competition nationally for competing for things like that? Yeah, it's absolutely. It's a waste of time. Even the ad words clicks are the cost per click is extremely high. It's just not worth it. There's other ways. So you just have to get creative sometimes with your marketing and we'll talk about that with this topic. But yeah, this is you just definitely have to just get more creative with how you approach your marketing, especially when times get a little bit more difficult, like everybody's experiencing right now. One of my circles today, we were talking about this exact topic, of course, right? Everybody's looking for how to get more leads, etc. And a question came up today, Dan, I was like, Oh, I'm so excited, Dan's gonna be on smart. The question was, so this gentleman, his company, he lives East Coast, Pennsylvania, and his cost per click has just skyrocketed. It's somewhere around in the last, like, I think six to eight weeks, cost per click is like $15 click. Do you have any ideas what could potentially be happening or what you might look at or there could be a lot of reasons for that list. So first, I would have asked him, like, have you done any changes since, you know, you noticed this? Because I'll give you one example, I've been doing, I actually have been AdWords certified for almost 15 years. And we do a lot of AdWords for cleaning companies ourselves. So I can say actually pretty eloquently, like in the last three weeks, I've been trying to I've been testing new models like moving away from the bidding strategy of maximize conversions for the people that understand out there to Google's trying to push you into what's called maximize conversion value. And they've even been recommending that they like are pushing you towards it in their recommendations tab and things like that. So I did a test. I did a test with a couple of our companies that are out there, you might you might know them like I did with pH clean and maids and more. And I noticed within a week, that their average cost per click went up 40 to 60% on their campaigns by switching over to that bidding system. I didn't I didn't see much of a difference with conversions, because obviously, if you get that many more conversions, then who cares if you're bidding higher? But but so I changed it right away after testing it, but that's kind of what you have to do as marketers, you have to test new avenues to try to increase the lead generation. So that could be a reason why there's one of them. Another reason why is you can also if you go from broad match targeting to phrase or exact mass targeting to your keywords. I don't think he made any changes. So like he hadn't. So if he's made zero changes at all, there's only one reason for that. Okay. And usually in down economies. And this is a good example of a digression is is in down economies, Google smart, they obviously notice it's based on an auction system. Typically, the smartest businesses actually invest more into their marketing in a down economy. That's a very common. It's very psychologically difficult for people to do. Yeah, very, very psychedelic. But most people do they'll cut their own salaries, they'll cut their own revenues just for the purpose of doing that to gain more market share of their business. You know, so the ones that do that, you know, they'll notice that a lot of other companies do that. And the cost per click bidding, they know that there's less Google knows there's less leads out there. Therefore, there's more demand. So therefore, there's less supply, more demand. And therefore, the cost goes up just in general, you know, normal economics of the world with any products or services when there's less supply, usually the cost goes up, right? Yeah, that's that's that's good. And what we're looking at, there's less supply of volume for people looking for your services right now. Therefore, Google is charging more from an auction standpoint. So that would be the reason if there's been zero changes done. Okay. All right. The bad news for him is that this means there's just fewer leads out there period. So you're paying a premium for them because there's just fewer of them. There is. And the volume overall, and you know, you see it, you see it, you just see it in website traffic, you see it in AdWords clicks, you see it in people searching in AdWords numbers, you see it in SEO, you just see it across the board. There's less people searching for your services. And it's kind of common sense, right? This is lead digression, right? If I mean, for me, I'm even spending less money, I don't necessarily need to. But just because the economy is struggling like I mean, today, 8% mortgage rates, right? 30 years hit the first time since 2000. Financing is miserable. Cost of products and gas and inflation and everything and food is at all time hot, right? Every people are cutting back on things that aren't as necessary. And unfortunately, the cleaning world is part of that cutting back. So there's has to you have to figure out ways to combat those issues or just to understand where you're at today and set realistic expectations of your business. But understand that listen, I'm sure you guys have been through these before. Yeah. Right. There's always a light at the end of the tunnel. You know, this isn't going to be the last time we go through something where the lead digresses, you just have to understand that what do you do to combat it? In my opinion, you do more to get more market share in your current industry. So when the economy does start to turn around, people do psychologically start to spend want to spend more money on your services. You are out there in more spots and more visible in more areas for you to take up more market share away from all your competitors that got nervous and cut back. And that's pretty straightforward, right? See this comment here? Yeah, went to exact match and creating new ads also the same phrase match 125 versus 14 is different campaigns. I'm not exactly sure what they cost $125 a dollar 25 versus $14 and but they were in different campaigns, it sounds like. Yeah, it sounds like they're in different campaigns. Usually if you're a cost per click is in the $1 to $2 or less range, you're probably doing some kind of display marketing. And display marketing is great for a cost per click when it's cheaper, but it really doesn't convert that well at all. My suggestion is you always want to focus on your search clicks. Just you know, the general ones when people look for cleaning service near me and your ads pop up on top, right? Those those ones are always want to go for search. You can do remarketing ads. So if people have already been to your website or have intent for searching cleaning services because you can target people with intent of cleaning services with display ads, those might be a little bit more useful. But to me, depending on the budget you have, you want to make the budget work for you the best you can. And instead of going focusing on things that won't convert as much, even though it creates less traffic, like as you can get a ton of clicks from display traffic. But that's not a big deal. Those are a lot of times agencies actually put display marketing on your ads themselves, just to increase the volume to showcase how great they're doing as a job. Right? And that's why it's that's why it's smart to be realistic, is that this is the fabricated marketers that talk about that. You know, just got to be real with your clients, you got to be like, Listen, there's less volume out there. You know, so if we're talking about certain buckets of topics, like with AdWords, you want to make sure that you make do smart with your budget, like what I've been telling clients is, like, let's take a look at your, how your cost per click is from a day to day basis, and see how much volume is from a day to day basis. Let's say Saturdays and Sundays are a little bit slower from a volume standpoint. So let's take the budget away from your Saturdays and Sundays and throw that into your Mondays through Fridays. So you have your budget work more for you on days that may convert better for you. Right? I think it's smart. And same thing with hours of operation, you can actually see in the Google area, like on at four to five o'clock, the amount of impressions or clicks or conversions you get versus, you know, 10 to 11. Usually what I see in the cleaning industry, the most conversions and the amount of people searching happens between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. So a lot of times we'll out, we'll compress, we'll compress the budget to a five hours of the day instead of eight to 10 hours of the day. Right? Okay. And a lot of times on the weekends, you know, it's a good topic for you, Maria for VAs, right? A lot of topics like that people don't have the phone, they don't answer the phone on the weekend. So why are you running ads on the weekend? If nobody is answering the phone on the weekend, you're just doing yourself this service. And a lot of times people don't have it in their operations to have some kind of follow up process on Monday morning for all your missed calls, just because nobody left the voicemail. Lots of times, I don't leave voicemails. I don't. I don't leave voicemails. Yeah. But a lot of times it's only in the systems or the training of the person to call back the people that left the voicemail Monday morning instead of going through. Which is difficult. Totally. It's difficult because Monday morning, like organically, your everything's happening on Monday. So by the time you get to return those lead calls, it's like 11, 12, and people really have moved on by that point. But wait, what did I hear you say though, Dan? I think I heard you start to say that you need to pull the list of calls and call back the people who didn't leave messages at the very least, right? Just just call all the missed calls that you have on your caller ID. I love that. But the pro, I mean, nobody does that. And I don't know why. I mean, but not only that, it's unfortunately, even if you do do that, which is you can probably scrounge a few leads every month by calling all the missed calls. Yeah. But even if you still do that, everybody knows when you don't contact the person back within five minutes of them, five minutes of them reaching out, your conversions drop over 70 percent. And I don't think everybody knows 70 percent. It's a it's a lot. Right. People have a big number. If I haven't heard from a company that I tried reaching out to that when I need my house cleaned in a matter of a few minutes or an hour even, I'm calling somebody else, right? Or you lose interest too. There's no proficient to see just because you have the most reviews in Google. I'm not going to go with you because you're not answering your phone for me, right? It's not even that. I'm not even thinking about whether I want that you or not. I'm like, I'm still in a mission. I still need house cleaning. I'm still in here. I'm still till I get to. So yeah. And and and and because there's more volume out there, a lot of times you need to refocus not on necessarily spending more money, right? A lot of times when I say you shouldn't cut back on your marketing doesn't mean you spend more money. It means you spend more time, which time is money. And a big thing that I can see people do when I talked about this on the last show, so I'm not going to cover it too much was, you know, how your follow up processes are really getting into that a little bit more. How your customer services, other things you can do is like how your content is on your website and down times of the economy, everybody's thinking the same thing. Everybody's a little bit more nervous. If you've noticed that all the psychological psychiatrists out there talk about the psychology with getting used to a big change in your life. And like COVID was a good example of this. They say it takes 45 days for people to start getting used to the new change in their life. And you noticed when if you take a look at things during COVID, people were freaking out in the first week or two, you know, rightfully so in a way. But then after 45 days, what started to happen? The stock market started to go like this, started the boost way up. People started to get more comfortable with the idea of having to wear a mask in public. They started to get more comfortable with the idea of walking outside again. You know, and you just saw the behavioral changes. And this is the same thing for recessions as well. So, you know, you want to speak to your clients, not only with your ad copy, but with your website copy and a more empathetic tone, right? A little bit more understanding of the current situation. You want them to make them feel that you understand what they're dealing with with the money is tight right now. And you want to be able to spend your money with a service that's going to be quite quality like your own. And you got to really speak a little bit differently. Obviously, when you're working with SEO people, SEO agencies, you have to speak with the keywords as well. So you have to kind of understand that a little bit even like, you know, mentioning to your agency speaking more blogs about these topics and those types of things. So changing your tone to what the economy is telling you can actually have a fairly large impact, especially like things with social media too. You know, a lot of times people just want to be hoop and holler about how amazing their company is on their website. Like look at all my reviews. I'm the best in the area. You know, this and that and this is fine and a more upbeat economy. But you know, people don't a lot of times misery likes company is the old fashioned state statement. So if you're really empathetic with them on being like we understand we're going through tough times too, they're probably more willing to work with you because they understand you. So there's other ways to really psychologically combat the situation too, with the content that you throw out there. Interesting. And that's just a really easy way to kind of understand reviews. Obviously that's another really big topic. Right. A lot of people understand we're getting more it's easy. It's easy to understand if you get you've probably experienced this with your own businesses. When you have more reviews and everybody else, you notice an increase in lead generation. It doesn't matter if it's a down economy or an upbeat economy, right. And I know that getting reviews is an obvious thing. But it's it's it's people beat you up about get more reviews, get more reviews, get more reviews. And a lot of times people get very stagnant on getting more reviews. But it is that important not only for your brand and showcasing how good you are to everybody else, but people don't really realize that when it comes to ranking in local search in the map pack, which is one of the best areas for lead generation on the Internet is review Google looks at what's called review velocity. So the amount of reviews you get and how quickly you get them and has as the velocity increases, because if you really think about it as your business grows, you get more customers. Yeah. So therefore, your velocity of your reviews should get intensified as well. So Google looks for that natural progression with your brand over the years. So so you have to understand just because you got 2030 reviews that last month, it doesn't mean you can take a break this month, right? It's only going to have a negative impact on your lead generation and your rankings, which is also a part of your lead generation. So you know, I really love this because it makes such perfect sense. This is something that I'm always preaching to all all businesses, right? Watch your numbers, your numbers tell the story. And so all you're saying right now is Google watches their numbers because the numbers tell the story. So that's what they're looking for is they don't care that you got how many reviews you have. What they care is, is your business growing? Are you getting more and more reviews? So they want to see those reviews going up. That's perfect sense. Yeah, if you just think about it, it just makes sense, right? Yeah. Yeah. And right now, it's a really good time to focus on it because if revenue is down because you're not getting as many calls, everything's kind of slower, that is a great place to kind of refocus your your office staff's efforts into getting more reviews and just asking. It's literally an ask, right? Yeah. And I say this to all my clients, like you can't you can't force people like you can rank much better. You can send out more ads out there. You can get Google guaranteed. You can throw out budgets everywhere you want. But you can't force somebody to click to when they land on your website. No marketer in this world can force them to call. No marketer in this world can force them to fill out that form or book an appointment through whatever booking platform you have online, right? You can't force people to do that. So so when volume is low, so a sentiment in the economy. So even if they do come to your website, like I said, with your content speaking more empathetic to them is the sentiment, even if they do come to their website, you're going to get a lot more window shopping. Just like people do when they go through malls, when people have a lot more money, they're spending a lot more money. People still go to malls in a down economy, but they're just not spending as much money. They're window shopping. Everybody likes to window shop probably in this room and on this thing. It's fun to just go to these fancy stores and places and just see what dream about what you could have at some point in time. Yeah. And a lot of yeah. And so you got to really understand it's it's it's it's not about, you know, you got to get more market share. Another thing that I've been seeing honestly to Maria's point is business owners have to start doing more. I noticed a lot of business owners once that they have been more established companies. They really are hands off and they just delegate, delegate, delegate, delegate, delegate. They don't really take responsibility for themselves. They don't do it. It's OK to delegate to the right sources, but you also have to step in when it's time to step in. Take responsibility for your company. You can't just point the finger at other people. You know, you're your own worst enemy at the end of the day. People love pointing the finger. It's like when we when we when leads are down and I can easily attest to this when leads are down. Honestly, the marketing is the first thing that people throw their finger at, right? Yeah. But then when you really assess the business, it's like, oh, they're not getting any reviews because nobody's trained to get reviews. Oh, they're not answering the phones on the weekends because nobody's trained to do that. Oh, they're not, you know, there's all these things that you can pick at. But every single one of these little things adds up and people. It's OK. You earned it. You established a great company. You're making good money. You earn more time off. There's no doubt about it. But when things start getting, you're responsible for a lot of employees out there and their salaries and their families. So when times get more tough, it is your responsibility to step back into your business and figure out other ways to market your brand, right? I'm surprised that you have to. You have to unless you're OK with, you know, going down for a little bit because that's what's going to happen. You know, again, you can't force people to call you just by pointing the finger at whoever you're delegating it to. But you can improve your current brand. I mean, everybody knows when you hire employees, they're all gun-ho. They can't wait to get working. They're doing a great job in the beginning. And then that then talk about digression. They digress. Unless they get continual support and training. Yeah. And if you haven't talked about, if you haven't trained one of your staff members, especially people answering the phone in over a year, you're doing a bad service and a bad job, right? You have to really assess those situations, you know, and those types of things. So there's leads are digressing and there's many different ways that you can get better. You can rank for more keywords, right? Maybe you're already ranking really great. So what other long tail keywords can you rank for? Or let's take a look at your website content. Are you speaking to your current client base with the current sentiment that's in the economy? You know, let's take a look at your ads. Are you getting high quality clicks? Are you getting the right types of clicks? Are you focusing on display marketing or search marketing? You know, we can really nitpick this and nitpick it with your agency, right? It's not it's not about getting angry that your leads are going down. It's trying to figure out a way to get it better because everybody is in the same bucket right now. Everybody's hurt. Everybody's leads are down. It has nothing to do with anything because other than the sentiment is not that great right now. But yeah, just last night, I was on a podcast with Sean Day on gosh, what is it? Higher lead chill, I believe is his company and his Facebook page where where we went live. And we were talking about how, you know, not that long ago, we thought we were amazing because the leads are just coming to us. We're closing these right after COVID was raining leads. And we thought it was us. We are so good. And now we're starting to figure out, OK, it's not out there, y'all, it's that we're not as great as we thought. There aren't like millions of fish just fishing in a barrel. We got to do a little bit of work now. Yeah, tweak things. Yeah, yeah, the creative or just like you said, simple thing about the tone of the website. But that takes some time. It takes time because it takes, you know, you're speaking to the tone of your customers. So unfortunately, you know, you can have your marketing agency try it out if you want to ask them or your marketing person. By the end of the day, how it comes from yourself with the area that you understand and the target audiences that which nobody should understand better than you, the owner. Yeah, that content needs to come from you. Take an hour or two and write a page of content to put onto your homepage, right? And then give it to your marketing agency to add their SEO optimizations to it and post it. And make it better. Yeah, make it better and make it more robust. Maybe maybe your headline on your hero image at the top of your website, which is the prime real estate of your website. Maybe maybe you need to stop saying number one best everything in the area. Nobody again, misery likes company. And you need to understand like maybe you say something along the lines is, you know, something else that is empathizing, every, you know, times are tough right now. But let's make let's make your life a little bit easier by having a clean house because I know my wife, when our house is clean, her stress level goes from here to here. Oh my gosh, so true. So, you know, talk about it in that way rather than look at me. I'm the best. You can talk about look at me. I'm the best when the economy gets better because people like that stuff. People love jumping on the train. Oh, yeah. People love jumping on the train with who's the best, who looks the best, you know, look at social media. It's all like it's all like who's who's awesome. So everybody follows that person. When I can afford it, of course I want the best. Yeah. But if I if my pocketbook is a little thin, I want the best I can afford. Yeah. Right. So then I'm like, OK, I'm I'm a little bit more picky. I'm not just looking for the best. Now I'm looking for a lot more than that. People who understand my situation, you know, back to the whole no like and trust thing. I got to I got to feel like they're on the same page as me. Yeah. This this. Even when times are good, you know, the sentiment out there is very positive. And even if you can afford it, people finance it. People put more money on to their credit cards just just because they want to be like everybody else. Totally true. But now that the interest rates and credit card rates are sky high, people are kind of nervous about doing that anyway. Still they're doing it. Don't you saw more credit card usage in the past six months? Oh, yeah. Going back up again. Here it's going because of exactly what you say. We, especially here in the United States, right? I'm not speaking to Spain or other countries, but in our country, for sure, we are very much about our stuff. Makes us feel good. Right? I mean, oh, yeah. I mean, after today, you see, you saw after. So I don't know if people fall. I like to follow the markets and stuff, but Tesla, everybody knows what Tesla is out there. Probably the most one of the more popular brands out there in the world, one of the probably the best marketing brand out there in the world as well. Their sales were reported after the bell today for the quarter. And guess what? They were weighed down. They missed expectations. Even the most popular brand with the best marketing spends billions of dollars on marketing in the world has a super amazing CEO that has the millions and billions of followers still can't hit their numbers. Right? So what makes you think that you guys can hit your numbers? So you got to really kind of understand. You got to set the expectations for the model. A lot of times customers have like the like companies have this idea is like, I need to get 70 leads a week for every week to hit my goal numbers, but they don't adjust it when the volume and things decline. They don't see that and they don't know how to fix it. And guess what? Unfortunately, there's not really that many easy ways to fix it. You can't just throw money at a situation to fix things in these type of ways. So maybe if you tweak your website to make your conversion rates a little bit better. That's awesome. I saw a good stat here the other day. I'm going to I forgot where you're right. I'm writing down these ideas because I'm going to pass them on to everybody, right? When it's a down economy and you can, of course, you can throw more money at any problem. You always can. But here are some things that might work even better than throwing money at stuff. Tweak your website. And this is probably good advice like how often do you need to be taking your website? Dan, I would think that this is something I would. The problem I see with most websites is people use stock imagery. I had a big topic about using, you know, what makes customers feel good when they come to a website? They see, you know, let's say, you know, I'm in Seattle, so I was talking about Seattle is like, oh, if I see a picture of the Seattle Skyline, I'd be like, oh, local company. Or I see imagery of your cars or people that are like me going to work and trying to clean my houses instead of people happy on the sofa, smiling with their cup of coffee and their dog next to them in the perfect world, which is a very common stock imagery. I know, I'm like, I know that. Yeah. I mean, come on, let's get real. Let's be real with people. Like go out and take some raw photographs that you're not asking you to go spend thousands of dollars on professional photography, but go have somebody of your staff or yourself go take some real pictures more relatable, more real people smiling, right? Like I mean, things like that. I've also been talking a lot about videos, videos is becoming a hot topic, right, because videos is not only becoming good for user experience and people staying on your website longer, but it's also becoming more important for SEO rankings, meaning that if, you know, a lot of times I've been seeing companies rank well, they'll create videos about their location, like if they created a video about Olympia and they posted into their YouTube channel and they call it House Cleaning in Olympia, Washington. And then in the description, they talk about house cleaning in Olympia, Washington and all the things. And then they embed that video on their Olympia, Washington page. It kind of Google's kind of sees YouTube is owned by Google. So they see that connection and the optimization of that video and it will actually help out your SEO rankings as well. And then it also helps out your brand experience. It makes your company more real. Videos aren't easy to create, but you don't again, you don't have to be perfect. You don't have to be pretty. You don't have to be all these things that people are better if you're not. Yeah, yeah, the real video so much better. Me too. You know, and and that's what also why AI content is not that great, right? People will create videos and content based on AI, but it's very generic. It's not it's not relatable as much. Yeah, so yeah, yeah, but so that's not nearly as important either right now for creating content. It's just the easy way to do it. And usually the easy way to do it isn't the best way to do it. Again, good stat right here before this. Yeah, five percent increase in your customer retention. Oh, my God, can shoot up your company revenue. Oh, my God, 25 to 95 percent. Yes. OK, that's your huge. We push on this constantly in our circles. OK, so here's a number I would love to get from you. Dan, I'm guessing that you have something along this. So we so I'll have people right. And so we track everybody tracks their KPIs on a regular basis, either daily or weekly. And we'll have people that will say things like, oh, I need to spend more on marketing. Well, the first thing I look at if somebody says that they need to spend more on marketing is first what your close rate. Because if your close rate is four percent, why do you spend more money? Oh, that makes no sense. Yeah. Right. You're just now paying for other people to get more clients. Not yet. So do you have any numbers like, like what is a good like either where is a good close rate where now it's time to kick out some more money or when you're kicking out a certain amount of money, when is it time to say, OK, now I need to start doing something else, because you have to spend money. You're you're not suggesting at all. Just pull back on all of your AdWords marketing and just tweak your website and add some videos. Right. You know, I mean, yeah. It's it's you can always maybe increase your leads by increasing your marketing dollars. But unfortunately, you might end up spending more than what you're increasing by. So when I see close rates by the cleaning industry in general, I usually see somewhere between 40 to 60 percent. Sometimes people who've been holler saying they have 50, 60, 70 percent close rates, but they're usually full of it. It's usually there. They have 40, 50, 50, 60 percent close rates on the people they talk to on the phone. Right. They're not incorporating all the missed calls that they that they that they missed or all the calls they didn't get on the weekend or all the leads they got through their forms, which is kind of dishonest when people hoop and holler about that. I think it's dishonest. I think really and I've talked to a bunch of these people. So I I don't believe it's dishonest. I think they think that's a more real number. Like I didn't even talk to those other people. Why would I include them in my they really believe? Why would I include those in my numbers? Because I never even talked to them. I never even had a chance. I'm not open on the weekends or whatever. They're measuring in a different way. Yeah, they're thinking this is a more accurate number. This is a problem in our industry, I think. Yeah, you don't find this in other industries. Everybody tracks the numbers exactly the same way. Right? This is how you do it. In our industry, we're like, we do what we feel like. Yeah, which is unfortunate. You know, like we're talking about increasing your marketing dollars to increase your leads. But look at your closing rate first. To me, if you define a lead, it's anybody who tries to reach out to you to inquire about your services. OK, so included in that is anybody that sends you a message through what are one of those one of those companies? Yeah, I mean, you can you can pick and I'm going to say yes. Who? Like what did you say, Maria? Well, I didn't know if you were talking about like the the chat like the little chat bubbles. Is that what you're making reference to? Like a little chat bubble or if you there's a million is asking for a price. How much, you know, they're just checking the pricing on, you know, a 2,500 square foot house. So is there anything you don't count, Dan? If somebody calls you inquiring about plumbing services. High five, OK, so very clear. So there's there's quality. There's there's either a lot of times people, like you said, when the leads were raining on us after covid for a year or two. Right. People got so used to cherry picking what they wanted to talk to and the leads that came in first versus thing. But now guess what? We're in a time where you can't really cherry pick as much. You have I'm surprised. There's people that don't go back to the leads that they got a month ago and give them a call back. I think definitely people are doing more of that for sure. Good, good. And as they should, but like any any lead, whether it's a very low quality lead or an extremely high quality lead is a lead. Yeah. And and you have to put those into your numbers to be able to take, take, assess any things. Because if you're a good sales person of your brand, you should be able to turn a lower quality lead at least sometimes into a potential customer. Absolutely. So in listening cells, our sales program, we know it is one of the things that we teach is if someone is contacting you, they they're interested in your service. Period. In some way, and there may be a different buyer phrases, phrases, phases, but they're definitely interesting. Yeah, I'll get an example. Wasting that time contacting you if they're not interested at all. Yeah, I'll give you an example of a low quality lead I had today. OK, is as I have one of my staff members runs are called email marketing campaign. And I got an email from an owner of a contracting company and it says, oh, I don't have time for this today. But you can contact our marketing director for to see if this is something that we need. Right. In our in our world, that's a low quality lead. But you have the CEO saying to contact his employee to talk to him. Yeah. So if I send an email or call that person being like, hey, CEO, FYZ told me to reach out to you, you better believe that marketing director is going to listen to us because his boss told me to reach out to him. Yeah. And that actually happens quite often in our world. And I can't tell you how many times I've turned that into an actual customer. Yeah. So I guess what? I had to put a little bit more time and effort as the owner to make sure that I achieve that business. Yeah. And unfortunately, you're just going to get a lot more lower quality leads out there with people window shopping. So you either got to convince them on the phone of why you're more affordable or why you're better or, you know, you understand the situation. Therefore, here, we'll give you 30 percent off your first cleaning and you let us know how it is. I'll call you after that's over and we'll see if we can book you another one. And if it was up to your standards, right? If you really handhold people, they're going to want to spend money with you. So. So yeah, there's there's a lot of different topics to talk about with lead digression, you know, in a way. But I think there's many ways to combat it by putting a little TLC into your work. OK. Yeah, I have a quick question for you. So you mentioned adding video, which obviously keeps people on your website longer. And you mentioned you know, changing the copy a little bit to make it, you know, not not as flux my muscles. Look how great we are. Look how, you know, me, us, us, right? More. And what's in it for you? A little bit more empathetic, softer tone. As far as SEO, how impactful is making those changes in Google's eyes? Could it be that the more you're changing it on a long term basis, it's going to benefit you anyways? Is that a thing anymore? I know it used to be. Yeah, having more robust content, the more content you have, the better, essentially, right? So if you're changing your more empathetic tone on top of your SEO optimized content, you're probably adding a lot more words to it, which is always good. Plus one of Google's algorithm ticks is they want to see your website continually be updated. So they want to see you working on your website and updating, adding more pages, adding more content because to Google in their eyes, what their algorithm thinks is if there's a website that's been stagnant for two years without any updates, what kind of user experience is that? So therefore they don't want to they don't want to position that website as well. I'm not saying there are people there. Yeah. They don't want to stand there. They're sitting there. That's good. Yeah, now what you say in your empathetic tone, you might not be as keyword stuffy, so it might not benefit you as much from a ranking perspective unless you optimize that content with keywords or you make a lot more content. But the idea is especially if you are so a lot of times the people that complain the most are the people that are used to getting so many leads and just aren't getting it anymore. So what I say then is let's let's why don't you change your tone of your content? Because if you take a look, you're ranking really well across the board. Nothing's nothing has negatively impact your rankings, your ad words, or anything else for your leads to drop. So therefore, the only thing that's impacting your leads to drop is obviously the volume of the people searching for your services in a lot of ways. And we're talking just the lead specifically with SEO. And and and so therefore, what do you can do to combat that while you can rank for more keywords that you're not already ranking for? Of course, it's an easy one or you can try to work on your website conversion. Take a look at how presentable your website is. Take a look at how easily it is to navigate. Take a look at your empathetic tones. You know, take a look at how fast your website's loading. You know, all these little things that you're kind of taking a look at to assess a website to see how could I make a better experience for the customer I know so well on my website for the times that we currently are living in today. Right. And that's always surprised by sorry. I'm always surprised when I go to websites how the phone number is hard to find. You have a lot of websites. You have to scroll to the very bottom to find the contact address. I'm like, dude, I just want to call you and give you my money, man. Yeah, that's the first thing I point out when I assess a website when I'm going that over a potential leader client is I'll go over their website and the technicalities of the how fast their website's loading right away just because it's more important to me from an SEO side. And then I'll go on to the aesthetic side of things. And I look at the navigation and above the above the fold first. And if that navigation is complicated, like, for instance, they have a lot of times people like to put 20 different links on navigation. Like, look at all the things we have for you, right? But that just confuses customers, you know, they've already searched your brand. They've already went to the internet. They search for house cleaning services in your area. They looked at your reviews. They checked out your information and they chose to come to your website. So why are you distracting them with all this nonsense of all this other stuff? Right. They already have intent to get in touch with you. Just make it easy to get in touch with them. It's not rocket science. You're a cleaning company. Right. What are you afraid of? What are you afraid they're going to want? Yeah, they just want to know your pricing. They don't want they don't want to be duped. They don't want to be getting into this long sales process. Nobody likes to be go to a car lot and get sold by salespeople all day long. Right. Be transparent and straightforward to them, you know. All right. Yeah, I have to I have to cut you off, Dan. No, no, I know it's 259, but I do. I do have just one quick question for you, Dan. Let me see if I can share my screen here. I always struggle to share my screen, but I'm going to try really, really hard. So if people are enjoying what they're hearing from you, right, am I sharing my screen, y'all? Oh, yeah. Am I? Do I have one question? Yeah. OK, good. So, Dan, we have people that are doing marketing all the time on the show because it's a big deal, right? Without leads, you don't sales. Without sales, you don't have money. That's right. So we're always bringing people on. But what I'd like to ask you today is why should people call you and why should they reach out to Dan at one click marketing? Oh, gosh, it's a great question. You know, I'm very real with people, whether it's good news or bad news. But just because I'm real with people and our agency is very real with people doesn't we can always find a solution or another route to make things improve. It's not just keep going down the same route. We roll the punches, right? I've been doing this for 15 years. I've worked with 100 cleaning companies by now. You know, I would love to talk more about that. But, you know, we know what other companies are experiencing in other areas and you're not alone, right? You're you're marketing that you're experiencing right now doesn't mean that you're alone in this. So I can able to share what other people are doing for success, not just with what we do as a marketing agency. But I can talk to them about email marketing, cold calling, customer service, all these other things that they want to talk about based on the experiences I've had with other cleaning companies. Also, our communication, you know, there's not you guys both can attest to this because you were both our clients. And you can know that when when you communicate and you have a question for us, there's not a day that goes by where you're not hearing back from us. So so, you know, if you're worried about communication or as if your company got in stagnant with you, we're not that company. You know, if you have a question and you need something fixed, we're going to fix it. So, you know, at the end of the day, we're very transparent, we're very real and we're very experienced in the specific industry. Okay, I was going to give you a plug as well. My my plug for you is that we have been working with you, I don't know, for a few years now. And one of the things that I most appreciate is so especially for my cleaning company, I am checked out. I'm not there. I haven't I haven't been for over a year. You know that, Dan. No comment. It's intentional for me. I just need somebody else to be doing a better job and I got you for that. But one thing that I really appreciate is when something does come up. It's you that will like if if something isn't being addressed well enough by me by our company, you will reach out personally and say, hey, Liz, did you check this out? Have you seen this? Pay attention, Liz. Look here. This is this is something that's going on here. That to me is very valuable and in a company that I'm working with that the owner of the company is paying attention to the point of reaching out to me and making sure that we don't we don't we don't churn and burn through clients. That's why I said we keep our clients to one hundred and ten max. You know, we don't we don't we care if you were to leave us. It bothers me a lot, right? So so so I'll do anything and everything within my power to fix the situation if somebody wants to leave us, right? Yeah, whatever their personal reasons are. So, you know, it's I thank you for that, Liz. All right. Yeah. Well, that's that's a true experience. That's, you know, just a quick testimonial that is truth of my experience. I don't know if everybody. My experience. Yeah, my experience is so, yeah, obviously working with Dan one by one, one on one. But he's got a great team behind him. Like all the interactions I had with his team, they're all like, oh, gosh, they're all responsive. And it feels like you've got like your own personal collaborative team on your side. So yeah, and they're not in their own buckets. Like I said, they're they all know what the other team like somebody that's writing this content gets handed to our dev team to implement that dev team and then to optimize that content. So they're all working together. Yeah. I sent you I sent you my information, Liz. You know, if anybody wants to contact me directly, I'll be happy to talk to them personally. So. All right. You heard that all y'all. If you have any questions you're interested in speaking more to Dan, reach out and we will give you the details. All right, y'all. Thank you so much, Dan. Thanks, Maria, for helping me out here today. And I really appreciate chat with everybody. We will talk to you. Actually, I won't be here next week. It'll be Tom next week. So different experience again. All right, y'all. Thanks everybody. We talk to you. Thanks everybody. Bye.