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Why Marketing Should Run Your Hiring Process With Jason Piasecki And Richard Witham

Ryan Englin · June 8, 2022 ·

BCC 74 | Hiring Process

 

When talking about a company’s hiring process, the HR department comes to mind. If you face some challenges when acquiring and retaining people, perhaps you need to try a refreshing strategy. Featured in this episode is Jason Piasecki, a Partner and the CEO of Revel. He discusses the benefits of letting marketers run your recruitment process. Joining him is Richard Witham of Motion Dynamics Corporation, who shares how Jason and his team helped them set up this unique hiring process. Together, the two talk about the fruits of their partnership and how they stay on top of the rapid workflow.

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Why Marketing Should Run Your Hiring Process With Jason Piasecki And Richard Witham

It’s no secret that I believe that when it comes to recruiting, it is best left in the hands of your marketing team and not your HR team. We’re excited to talk to our guests. We’ve got two guests in this episode. This is something we’ve never done before. We’re going to be talking to a marketing expert who shares that same belief when it comes to recruiting, and we have one of his clients who has been on the receiving end of the incredible results that they’ve been able to generate.

Our first guest is Jason Piasecki. He is a Partner and the CEO of Revel. They are a marketing company that does some great things when it comes to helping companies better recruit talent. Joining us is Richard Witham. He’s with Motion Dynamics Corporation. He has been on the receiving end of some of the work that Jason and his team have done to help them recruit better people. We’re going to have a great conversation about the idea that marketing can help transform your recruiting results.

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Jason, Richard, welcome to the show.

We’re happy to be here.

Thanks, Ryan. I’m happy to be here too.

I’m excited about this conversation. As we get started here, tell me what the biggest myth in your mind is when it comes to hiring.

The biggest thing that we see as a marketing agency is that manufacturers and B2B companies don’t need a creative campaign to attract employees and differentiate themselves. A lot of times, we find it’s just business as usual. It’s understanding that there’s a seat at the table for marketing when it comes to their recruitment.

You’re saying the biggest myth is that they think that they don’t need to market. They just need to go get people. Let’s dive into that a little bit more. I love that because we have our book coming out, Hire Better People Faster, and that’s one of its tenets. We often think that hiring needs to be in the HR function, but you’re saying that you’ve had great success in its marketing function.

We typically find that we have the best success with our clients when it’s a collaborative effort, and HR is at the table with leadership, and they’re talking to their employees. There’s an opportunity for a marketing partner to get involved either in an in-house team or an outsource agency.

We get to have both of you for this interview. We get to have the marketing seat and the client’s seat on this. We’ll bounce back and forth as we go through this. Why marketing? Why have that as an important part of this? I’ll let the marketing guy go with this one.

That’s an easy one for me. Everyone has a unique story and employer brand that is theirs alone. Often, people think that they have to attract employees at the expense of other companies out there when the truth is, by telling your story and speaking about why you exist, you can attract the right type of employees and get more qualified candidates through the door. The paradigm has shifted where the power is in the employee’s hands now, so as employers, we need to appeal to them on their own terms and highlight why we’re an attractive choice for them.

 

By telling your story and speaking about why you exist, you can attract the right type of employees and get more qualified candidates. Click To Tweet

 

Richard, you’ve brought in Jason. You’ve brought in the marketing seat and made sure that you’ve looked at this from that proactively. Tell us a little bit of your why. Why would employees want to work for you? Then, let’s dig into how that translates into the marketing realm of it.

It’s an easy question to answer. For me and from our perspective, we understand our product. It’s a technical product, and that’s what makes it unique. We’re manufacturing, but most people, even locally, who aren’t familiar with our company don’t understand the uniqueness and importance of the products that we manufacture. They contribute to life-saving efforts. That’s easy for us to understand.

We’re engineers. We’re technical people. We don’t know how to market that, and that’s where Revel comes in. It has been a unique relationship as we’ve grown up together in the same community. We’ve worked together for years. They understand us, and they know how to get that word out differently than we would have thought.

Help me understand this, then. You’re an engineer. You ought to be able to get engineer buddies.

We’re not the most social people.

I wasn’t going to say that. You’re on here. I figured you were at least so. How is marketing going to attract engineers?

It’s presenting our product from a different perspective than we would’ve thought. We’ve always tried to fly under the radar. We were a small company. Our marketing was truthfully at $0 for a long time. We didn’t do social media campaigns, billboards, or anything like that. We were an under-the-radar company. Our target market is R&D engineers.

Over the course of time, mostly through word of mouth, we built a reputation in the industry that positions us where we want to be. This is thinking in a different way than we’ve ever had to attract people to the team. It’s a language that I don’t speak. Jason and the team at Revel understand us better than we understand ourselves in a lot of ways.

If I could add one thing to that, Richard is being very humble. One thing that is true of a lot of manufacturing companies that are looking to recruit and retain employees is they’re not a smaller company by any means. They’re 150 employees looking to grow and add to their team. They’re humble guys and gals. They don’t want to pound on their chest and talk about how great they are, so it’s our job as their marketing partner to talk to their leadership team, survey their employees, and find out what those things are that make Motion Dynamics a unique place for people to work. We were able to do that in a genuine way and share that with the outside world.

 

BCC 74 | Hiring Process
Hiring Process: Marketers take a candidate and hand them off to HR as marketing does with sales. That type of alignment is critical to success.

 

I’ve got two questions, one for Jason and one for Richard. Jason, I’m going to ask you to go first. I’ve heard you talk about being able to pull out their messaging because you know them well. I don’t know if you have the biggest thing that you’ve ever done or got the best results, but what is one thing you can share with our audience where you’re like, “We did this for them, and it got some great results. It helped move the thing forward?”

Richard, I’m going to give you the question so you can start thinking about it. With what Jason’s team has done, how did that help you with retaining employees? That’s more than half the battle a lot of times. You hire them, but how do you keep them? I truly believe that with the right marketing message and understanding of who you are and communicating, you keep the right people when you attract the right people. I’d love to know from you about some of the real-world things you’ve seen happen. Jason, I’ll let you go first.

The biggest thing that we did was we got everyone in the same room. We had leadership, HR, employees operations, and our team there. We asked questions and then listened. The emotional culture that sets them apart is when we made that front and center with their employer branding campaign.

Their company leadership keeps their employees updated with weekly team meetings. They have a workout facility on site. Not many companies have that, so that’s a differentiator. They also do fun things like cookouts and catered lunches. Another differentiator is their modern manufacturing facility. These are all things that we played up in their campaign through photos and videos and brought out there to their potential employees.

We ran an integrated campaign across traditional media. There were billboards and social media ads. We beefed up their careers page and did a company video where we had not only the company leadership talking about all this, but then we had their employees saying it in their own words. We also tagged on some internal communication where we were able to highlight a great referral program that they have. All those things help with retention.

We’ve had over 50 job applications and 4,500 visits to their careers page in the first three months of the campaign. The message is getting seen, and it’s driving the right type of people to interview. The last thing I’ll add is Motion Dynamics has an unusually high conversion rate when they get someone, and they make it to the point where they apply and convert them to employees. Our job as marketers is to take a candidate and hand them off to HR as marketing does with sales. That type of alignment is critical to success.

Richard, I know we got your question sitting there, but Jason said some stuff that we want to dig into a little bit. There’s one thing you said there that I could think the audience say, “That’s probably not so real.” You said you got the employees talking about it. Tell us a little bit more about that.

One of the things that are evident with the social media that has been out is employees are going on their liking, commenting, and sharing the post. That’s organic interaction with the campaign as they’re seeing it. From an employee’s point of view, it shows that their company is investing in growth, and they’re proud to see the ads out there. The fact that they’re interacting with the comments is proof that it’s ringing a chord with the employees.

I love that because I know if you can get the employees talking and chatting about it, we’ve turned the corner. We’re off. I’ve seen it happen several times. Sometimes I know that when I say something like, “We get the employees engaged in building the brand and attracting the right people,” they’re like, “I can’t get them to hardly show up for work.” When you touched in on that, I was like, “We got to know a little bit more.” You got them posting and commenting. You got them engaged in it because they knew that they had a great brand and a great company. I love it. Richard, let’s turn to your question now. How has this helped with the retention of your employees?

 

Every company's purpose is different. That's why employees dedicate their careers to fulfilling the company's missions. They want to work with a company with a higher purpose. Click To Tweet

 

What has helped the most and is spawned from Revel’s homework was a period of time during the introductory phase where Revel did a lot of surveying of our employees. We got to interpret that feedback. It was so beneficial to us because, as Jason said, we’re now a 180-person team here at Motion Dynamics. That’s quite large.

Our number one priority has always been maintaining culture. For many years, we were a company of fewer than 50 people. Many of our team members are comfortable walking up to our president’s office and sharing direct feedback on anything, whether production-related or about their role at the company. That has become more difficult to maintain when you get to the size we are now.

It prompted us to start asking questions about vacation policies or compensation or the different benefits we offer here. We surveyed our team, listened to their feedback, and made significant changes that are tailored towards not the group of 50 people that have been here for 10 to 20 to some upwards of 25 years but listen to the people that have been here for less than 5 years or maybe even 1 year. It has allowed us to tap into our team like never before, and that’s been extremely valuable for us.

Maybe I missed it, but did you say you used to be 50 employees, and now you’re 180 employees?

For many years, we were less than 50 up until the early 2000s. Jason mentioned a number of 150. We were 150 employees towards the end of the summer of 2021. We have 40 open requisitions that, if 40 people lined up at our door that fit well within our team, we could take them on. That’s why we’re such good friends with Jason.

That’s significant growth. That’s amazing. Jason’s not only doing a good job on the customer side, but he’s also helping you on the recruiting side too. It leads me to a question here for you, Richard. As a company grows, especially at that scale as fast as you’re growing, I imagine there are a lot of changes that are happening. Working with Revel, how do you keep on top of all those changes and make sure that your messaging is right and you’re getting in front of the right people? 40 open reqs is a lot of people you need to hire. How do you make sure that you guys are keeping on top of all the changes happening both inside your company and in the marketplace?

As with our relationship with Revel, they know us in a lot of ways better than we know ourselves. They have account executives like Kayla, whom I work with weekly at least. We have such frequent interaction that they get it. This is from a manufacturing perspective separate from the marketing. For a long time, we were a research and development company. We had R&D engineers that would approach us with either an idea or a sketch of something simple, and we would help them bring it to production.

us with either an idea or a sketch of something simple, and we would help them bring it to production.Over the course of the years that we’ve been in business, there are a lot of things that have been developed and reached production. Here we are now at the point where a customer of ours will know Motion Dynamics Corporation on their drawing. Sometimes in the medical device industry, you’ll have components move from supplier to supplier. We are so large now because we are responsible for producing these large production level quantities. That’s what has been attributed to our rapid growth.

You’re giving credit to Revel a lot of the time. I want Jason to finish this. How do you stay on top of all of this? It sounds like your team has dug in and knows them well. I imagine you do with all your clients. I’m thinking specifically for you because I’m sure a lot of our audience is like, “That would be great, but I don’t have a Revel on my side.” What are some things they can do to stay on top of this?

 

BCC 74 | Hiring Process
Hiring Process: Finding your why and doing some regular research are two great ways for companies to remain relevant and invest in their own growth.

 

You say doing employee surveys and bringing everybody together. Is that something that you frequently do? Give us some tips and advice on how you stay on top of all this.

The number one thing is having a clear understanding of the reason the company exists. We have an exercise that we go through that was created by Simon Sinek, which is his Start with Why process. That’s how we kick off all our client engagements. The great thing about working with someone like Motion Dynamics, who we’ve had a long relationship with, is the one that we did years ago was different from the one we did when we launched its employer branding initiative.

Companies are always changing and evolving. Engage in that exercise. It’s great if you have an agency partner to walk through it with, but you can do that yourself. It’s a TED Talk. You can go on YouTube and watch it. Simon Sinek has tons of material out there that you can walk through yourselves. That’s the first key. Every company’s purpose is different, and that’s why employees dedicate their careers to fulfilling the company’s missions. They want to work with a company with a higher purpose. In someone like Motion’s case, they’re making life-saving products. That’s maybe a little higher purpose than the average company across the street, but every company has something unique.

Regardless if it was the products they make, it’s their leadership, their people, and the fact that they care and take the time to do those weekly updates to the team and let the company know how it’s going. They invest in a clean, modern manufacturing facility and do fun activities. All those things play together in the employer brand. You can do that regardless of whether you work with an outside firm.

The other thing is asking questions. Surveys are a great way to do to get feedback either from customers or from employees. We’re a little biased, but we always feel like you get a better answer if a third party asks the questions. Those two things, finding your why and doing some regular research, are two great ways that companies can remain relevant and invest in their own growth.

I liked the way you broke that down into those two things. Survey the employees and get them involved. One of the best resources employers have is their existing team, and they forget to tap them for that and then get clear on why they do what they do. I love the TED Talk and the Simon Sinek stuff. I want to take it down another level here, Jason. I’m going to start with you on this. If you were to get enough applications for Richard and his team to fill 40 reqs, maybe at one time, there was a little bit of fear like, “Are they even going to call these people? Are they going to follow through? I’m putting all these applications in front of them.”

I see a lot of employers struggle with the process side of it, and I’m big on the process. Are some things that you’ve been able to do between the two companies to make sure that when you’re generating these results for them, the team over there is dialing in the process and connecting and engaging with the people? What kind of coaching or thoughts do you have on that?

It’s a lot like marketing and sales alignment and making sure that there’s a service level agreement that there’s going to be a handoff. If you’re thinking about sales and marketing, what do sales do when a lead comes in? It’s no different with HR. Motion has an experienced HR professional heading up the effort, so our job was easy. It was to bring the leads in, make sure they’re logged on the website, and then communicate regularly and do regular check-ins. It’s having constant communication.

Accountability is not me telling you to do something. It’s me asking you if you did something, and you’re giving an account of that. When you have good accountability partners, the process works seamlessly. It’s got to be a team effort because we can do everything in our power, but if there’s not a great transition from when an applicant fills out a form, calls a phone number, or responds to an ad, the process will fall apart.

 

Everyone's saying that you must go to college and get a four-year degree. In reality, you can make an amazing living working for a great company doing manufacturing work. Click To Tweet

 

Richard, what have you seen on your side being in the team that receives that? Being on the other side of those service level agreements, what are some things you’ve implemented or been successful at over at Motion Dynamics?

Firstly, we were overwhelmed with how successful this campaign has been right off the bat. The amount of applications that we see coming in through our website far exceeds anything that we’ve been able to generate on our own before. We have an HR professional who has been responsible, whether it be on Indeed or relationships with multiple technical schools. There are several different relationships that she works with, but the process with Revel has forced us to look at ourselves from a different perspective.

We’ve got different people involved. We’ll do a pre-screening or a general interview, and then we’ll do a second interview, maybe with an operations member, engineering member, or even a production level member. We’ve started to involve other members of our team in the interview process. It has been interesting to see how much more detailed these interviews get. We place people better into areas because we have their potential peers working with them and understanding what they like to do. Before, we had an HR professional, but one that did not necessarily have a manufacturing background. It has restructured our process for interviewing a candidate and the people that we involve in the interview process.

What I’m learning from you is, and I’ve seen this happen quite a few times, how we communicate to the world, the opportunity restructures the way we interview them. You were in the interviews in between marketing their worlds where the sales pipeline was headed towards getting them to the end of the door. I’d love to learn some of the findings if we could go a little bit deeper into that. As you looked at five-year employees versus the long-term, what were some of the attractive benefits at this point in the world?

It’s about establishing a connection. Once we meet somebody and get a better idea of who they are, where their interests lie, what their experience has been, and the role that they may be a good fit for when we bring in the existing team or their peers that they could be working with, it establishes a connection. That connection, especially with some younger employees, has allowed us to communicate or demonstrate our culture.

Jason mentioned that it is so important to us that we try to maintain that as best as we can as we grow. There have been instances where we have not done a good job of that, and we have put somebody in an area that isn’t a good fit for them and what they want to do. For example, we make these small micro parts with a wire that is smaller than the diameter of your hair. We pack these into gel packs. We do it under a microscope. It’s very precise. It can be tedious, so you can’t put a high-energy person into a role like that. It’s almost torture for them. It doesn’t work. This process of working with our existing team out on the floor has allowed us to tailor candidates into a more well-suited position.

Jason, are there any reflections you have from any of the survey work you did? Were there any a-ha moments where you were like, “That’s a way we could pitch the benefits?” It could be outside of the culture. I know we’ve touched base on that one, or maybe it is in their culture, and you say, “It was all right there.”

The biggest thing with them is looking at it as more than a job. Manufacturing, many times, is viewed as a career that may be less than ideal. The reality is we’ve had a generation of everyone saying, “Go to college and get a four-year degree.” In reality, you can make an amazing living working for a great company doing manufacturing work. It’s not your dad’s manufacturing dirty or grimy on a shop floor. There is some of that, and that is rewarding work for the right type of person. It’s telling the story that this isn’t just a job. It’s a career.

We changed that paradigm rather than an hourly rate, which we see a lot of times on hiring billboards and campaigns. Anyone who’s running a recruitment campaign and is reading this, do not put your hourly rate on your billboards because there will always be somebody who has one better. It’s not the reason that very few people put it on the top of their list when they go to work at a company.

 

BCC 74 | Hiring Process
Hiring Process: Establish a connection with another person by getting a better idea of who they are. Find out about their interests, experiences, and the job that could best fit them.

 

For the campaign that we did for Richard, it was about folks putting their careers in motion and showing all the things they could do while at the job, but also as a result of having this rewarding career where there was an opportunity for advancement, good salary, great benefits, and other perks that you don’t always see. Everything we did was centered around the word career.

I enjoyed the conversation. Clearly, you two have an amazing partnership for being able to do this. It takes a team effort here. Thank you for some of the insight. Jason, I know that you have an offer for our audience and anybody interested in learning more about how Revel may be able to help them get similar results. Can you share a little bit about that with us?

We want you to think about your employer brand, and one of the central points of any employer brand is a careers page. What I’d like to offer to anyone reading is a free careers page audit. Email me at [email protected] with a link to your careers page along with at least two competitors and what your hiring goals are, like you’re looking to add a certain number of employees. We will take a look at your page and give you some suggestions to improve it so you’re presenting yourself in the best light possible.

Thank you so much for being on the show. I’ve enjoyed it and learned a lot of great things. I do love the partnership that you two have in making this work. If you’re reading this and you’re thinking, “Maybe I don’t have what I need to make this happen on my own. Maybe I need to find an agency partner,” know that Revel is out there, and I’m sure there are other agency partners out there too that can help with this.

Recruiting is the number one issue that employers are facing, so make sure that when you are looking at your recruiting process, remember that it’s not an HR function. It is something that if your marketing team is not handling it exclusively, they are in an extremely close partnership with HR to make sure that you are attracting the right people to apply for your jobs. Thanks again. I enjoyed it.

Thank you.

Thanks, Ryan and Jeremy.

Thanks so much for being on.

 

Important Links

  • Revel
  • Motion Dynamics Corporation
  • [email protected]

 

About Jason Piasecki

BCC 74 | Hiring ProcessJason’s our CEO and resident baseball expert. He is a graduate of Central Michigan University (Fire Up Chips!) with degrees in Marketing and Graphic Design. In 1998, he started ImageQuest Design, then in 2006, paired up with Andy to form Qonverge.

In 2011, they took things up a notch again and Revel was born!

About Richard Witham

BCC 74 | Hiring ProcessMotion Dynamics Corporation is a specialized spring and wire form company committed to building long term relationships with customers desiring excellence in all aspects of relationships! Each of us is committed to understanding our customers and their needs.

We will accomplish this by providing unequaled quality and delivery, by dedicating resources to innovative processes and equipment and by hiring and developing people with exceptional skills that uphold our high ethical standards.

Digital Sorcery Doesn’t Work With Ryan Redding

Ryan Englin · February 10, 2021 ·

BCC 49 | Online Marketing Strategies

 

Any marketing strategy cannot beat excellent and reliable customer service. If you cannot satisfy your target market’s demands and expectations, there is no form of digital sorcery that can save you. Ryan Redding explains to Ryan Englin and Jeremy Macliver how well-targeted online marketing strategies focused on customer satisfaction will always spell out success for any business and leave a lasting impact on everyone. Have you ever wondered how some companies thrived even in the middle of the pandemic? Stay tuned as Ryan reveals the answer and discusses the importance of learning continuously and closing the bottom of the demand funnel for blue-collar trades to flourish.

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Digital Sorcery Doesn’t Work With Ryan Redding

We’re going to dig into a little bit of marketing. I know for a lot of home service companies out there, marketing is one of those things that everybody knows they need to do. They know they need to do it better. They need to get better results, but sometimes they’re not quite sure how. Our guest has been a marketer for nearly fifteen years. He works a lot with HVAC and plumbing companies. He’s been a frequent speaker at colleges, universities, industry groups, and is even a consultant for Oklahoma State University. I want to introduce Ryan Redding to the show. Ryan, thanks for being here.

Thanks for having me.

Everybody’s got an opinion about marketing. They need to do more and they need a better ROI, or whatever that may be. Help me understand, what is one of the biggest myths from your perspective about your industry?

That’s tough because I feel like, starting off cold, most people think that most marketers are just selling snake oil, but they’re full of crap. They’re saying promising the moon or whatever to close the deal. I’ve got to tell you, there are those guys. They exist, but there are some good people and smart groups out there who are doing solid work to help guys grow. One of the biggest myths is that it’s all scam because that sucks for everybody.

That’s going to lead me to my next question. I know a lot of people that have been burned. How do you separate the guys that are selling snake oil or the scammers from the ones that aren’t? What are some warning signs people can look for?

When uncertainty hits the fan, the best of the best steps up. Click To Tweet

This is going to sound awful because I don’t know about you guys, but for us, we don’t find our clients. Our clients come to us. We work with plumbing shops, HVAC shops, and have a handful of electrical contractors. They’re all blue-collar trades guys and they get bombarded by emails promising page one listings, sales calls, or everything under the sun. There’s a whole lot of people selling a whole lot of things. We do the opposite. We do good work for the clients we work with, which in turn gets us happy people, gets them to refer other people to us. We take the approach of the best marketers don’t do a whole lot of harassing you on the phone to get you to call. They do the good work. That’s their focus and that’s how we think about it at DP.

They let the results speak for themselves. I love that. I know that you work with guys in this space that are all levels of business. Maybe they’re still in the truck. Maybe sometimes they’re in the truck and sometimes they’re out of the truck, or even maybe they got a leadership team that’s helping them. You work from small companies all the way up to some of the larger ones. In your experience, what’s the one thing that you’ve seen holding most businesses back?

I’m going to come out and say this is going to sound cheesy and cliché. I’m going to say leadership. Especially in this era of COVID, it was fascinating. Let’s start here. COVID was tough for everybody across the board. It hasn’t been fun. There are levels of uncertainty that I’ve never seen. The companies who were able to not just survive but thrive through all that uncertainty weren’t necessarily doing better marketing or tactics or whatever. They had better leadership in place and they were flexing the muscles that they’ve been building on for years. I would say the difference between a good company and a great company is hands down leadership, and that might sound corny and cliché, but whatever. That’s where I’m going to hang my hat.

Can you paint a little bit of a picture of a situation you saw that was great leadership through this and maybe one that you saw that was a little bit stronger and have gotten more out of this?

There are tons of examples. Chances are, the guys and gals reading this probably know of examples in their own market space. Right when the lockdowns started happening, to rewind the wheel because everyone knows their own unique experience as it relates to COVID. There was no uniform federalized response. It was left up to local governments to make these decisions. We saw this piecemeal response from a marketing standpoint. Whereas certain states, counties, and cities would go on various types of lockdown. We would say market demand change.

BCC 49 | Online Marketing Strategies
Online Marketing Strategies: Most people think that most marketers are just selling snake oil, but they’re full of crap.

 

Consequently, the businesses within those markets would respond differently. The companies who did well didn’t hide from it. They enhance their marketing. They use this as a chance to increase their market share. They doubled down on deploying technology, so they had tools that would allow them to virtual service calls. Everyone’s afraid for their life, but yet, stuck at home. These companies are able to run calls with their tech in the driveway or at their shop and keep the customers completely safe. They were investing in things like how to provide customer experience virtually when there’s no direct contact and your sales process would have to change.

These companies thrived. In the midst of all the chaos, they did fantastic. Other companies did the exact opposite. They scaled back their marketing, started letting guys go quickly. They maybe started getting paranoid about how they were running certain calls. We saw some guys who wanted to pretend like none of the chaos existed and their customers pushed them aside because of it. This was a time where companies who had exceptional Google reviews forever leverage that momentum. The guys who didn’t have a good reputation online struggled. It was this night and day change. We saw a lot of guys that we worked with had record revenue months all through COVID. We have other guys who we’ve worked with who struggled to get their mindset above surviving in the chaos. The mindset of growth versus survival did paint that two different outcomes.

It has been interesting watching all of that because we definitely saw some of our clients have their best years ever, while we watch some of their competitors drowned. In fact, one of my clients’ huge wins was their large competitors fell out of the marketplace due to COVID and somehow, they were picking up momentum and picking up steam. The two things that you say there was one was leadership teams that were strong and healthy. They were aggressive and they knew how to push forward in the market, but they also had adaptability. They’re aggressive and adaptable versus real stoic and they got cinched down and fearful. Some got bold and some went backward.

It’s the old expression that smooth waters never made a skilled sailor. When the economy is going well, it’s easy to make money. When things are stable and customers are good, it’s easy to make money. When uncertainty hits the fan, customers are anxious, and everything is confusing, that’s when the best of the best step up. That’s where guys who want to become the best start putting their heads above the rest of the crowd. It was fascinating to watch from a marketing standpoint.

One thing I want to push into right here is you said that you get most of your clients to come to you versus you reaching out to them, which is an interesting thing to know from a marketing person who most of us are looking to hire somebody to go proactively out in the world, too. How do you explain that to someone that says, “I’m doing great work as a plumber. I got a good reputation. I’m not getting the leads?” How do you help with that versus going to the SEO and all the other stuff and doing whatever marketers do?

There is no replacing good old-fashioned customer experience at its core. Click To Tweet

It’s funny, one of the pillars that we build on is reputation. There’s a joke in marketing that great marketing makes a bad product fail faster. If a company has poor service and they don’t know how to take care of people, there is no amount of digital sorcery that will make them succeed. All we’re going to do is drive them to the scene of the crash faster. A huge focus for us is excellent customer experience because of the influence that has both on customers being able to refer to other potential customers, but also things like Google Maps rankings, Google Local Services, and SEO rankings organically. The influence of reputation is hard to exaggerate in this day and age. Even though yes, we do recommend traditional SEO, local SEO, pay-per-click, and things like that, there is no replacing good old fashioned customer experience at its core. That never changes no matter what the medium is.

I love that conversation about experience because I’ve seen it happen where you do a great job for somebody and you hope they go tell the world. You might have to do that for 10, 12, 15 people before one person hears about it, but on the bad customer experience, that one person is going to tell 10, 15, or 20 people. I see that a lot where guys are struggling to get good reviews online. They’re like, “People that have no problem leave me the bad reviews.” Getting good ones is such a challenge.

It’s funny, I disagree with that point. Not to knock on this certain fast-food restaurant, but it seems like every time I go to a certain restaurant in our neighborhood of their kids, they always come up and say, “If you go to the bottom of your seat, you’ll get a $20 off your next meal,” or whatever. I’ve never done it. I don’t know one person who’s ever done this like, “Go online and fill out that survey and you’ll get something in return.” People don’t care. However, I would say that people want to generally help people. If you took care of the customer, wowed them with your experience, and you honestly said, “It would mean the world to me if you would take ten seconds and leave a review for us on Google. You have no idea how important those reviews are for us in this day and age. It would go a long way. Would you do that?”

Those customers have no problem wanting to help, but once you get in your truck and you’re going on to the next job, that customer is going to get distracted. They’re going to get dance recital or football practice or whatever else is going on in their life. It doesn’t mean that they don’t care about you and they weren’t impressed. Life happens. The way you ask goes a long way, but you have to make it seem like it’s meaningful and personally important to you. Not just going through your script that you’re supposed to do when you’re closing out a deal.

I can see some of our readers are thinking, “I love that, Ryan. How do I get my text to do that before they got back in the truck?” Diving into that would probably be a whole episode in itself.

BCC 49 | Online Marketing Strategies
Online Marketing Strategies: The companies who were able to survive and thrive during the pandemic weren’t necessarily doing better marketing or tactics, but had great leadership all along.

 

That’s a fun topic, too.

I want to get back to something you said about COVID and what you saw with the different companies. You saw some that said, “I need to pull back. I need to feel safe.” That’s what I heard. I don’t know that you use that word. “I need to feel safer about my business. I’m going to let some people go. I’m going to protect the revenue that I had.” You saw other guys that were like, “Floor it. Let’s go.” The ones that floored it when COVID hit, they’re all of a sudden taking market share and are doing great. I know Jeremy mentioned this. I’ve had some clients who had their best year ever in 2020 because they didn’t get scared and they pushed through it. As a business owner, even a business leader, if you’re in that mindset of comfort like, “I need to protect the business,” how would someone break out of that? What are some of the things that you’ve seen work for breaking out of that comfort, be willing to take that risk, and push your business forward?

I would probably make an argument that most leaders only respond to fires and chaos. If something goes wrong, it jumps to their attention and they will do whatever they need to do to put out the fire, but sometimes, there are no fires. Sometimes, things are smooth. There’s not a problem. There’s not a squeaky wheel. In that case, I would make the argument that good leaders set fires. They create a problem that needs to be extinguished. Sometimes, that can be a little like, “The way that we’re deploying our technologies is worthless. We need to do better. We need to do better about the customer experience. We need to do better about how we answer the phones. What we’re doing is insufficient. It was good two years ago but it’s no longer sufficient.” The best leaders even in little things, when things are smooth, are going to create a fire. This also creates unity with their teams because now all the team can unite around putting out this one fire because the leader drew attention to it. It’s interesting. There’s always a case for a fire, to exist in a fire, and be extinguished as a team. Sometimes, it’s completely good if those fires are self-created.

I’m thinking of a couple of clients I know. When things get too simple or things are working too well, the owner will come in and he’ll be like, “What can we break? I need something to fix.” He’ll start his own fire. I love the way you explain that. For those people that don’t have that natural inclination to start fires, I know that you’re a big fan of learning, fluency, topics, and those kinds of things to enhance their skills. What are some tips or recommendations you have for our readers who don’t naturally go, “Everything’s looking good. Let’s start a fire so we can get better?” How do they overcome that?

Most leaders only respond to fires and chaos, especially those they create themselves. Click To Tweet

To the larger point there, I do encourage and recommend any continuing education, formal or not. If your background, for instance, is in plumbing. You’re a good plumber and you built up this business. Now you’re the owner of a plumbing business and you’re not turning wrenches anymore. Learn other skills that are complementary to help your business grow or at least the concepts. Take night classes at a community college to understand financial accounting. Push yourself to that so that you understand how to hold other people accountable. It doesn’t mean that you’re expected to be an accountant. That’s nonsense. Get yourself to the point of learning to find opportunities through hardship. That means flexing muscles that maybe you’ve never flex before you didn’t even know you had.

Sometimes, it means cross-training like going from plumbing to HVAC or some plumbing to accounting. Sometimes, that means getting an entirely different exposure. If you’ve been out of a truck for a while, get back in a truck for a week or two. Get an idea of what that’s like. It’s almost like the Undercover Boss. Get in the actual shoes and face your customers again head-on. That experience can go a long way. Eventually, you’re going to get yourself either the courage or the insight to either see a fire that you didn’t know was one or to create a fire where you didn’t know needed to be one. One of those two will happen if you push yourself to new boundaries.

Do you have a couple of real practical things that they can do to start that journey? It’s not that big part and not go back to continue education or anything, but 1 or 2 things that you’ve seen some of your clients use to break through and start that journey.

Generally speaking, one is to get involved with these trade groups online on Facebook. There are dozens of them. It doesn’t matter if you’re a roofer or if you do window sightings or if you do plumbing or HVAC. There are tons of groups online of guys like you who are always sharing best practices, things that work in their market, and things that they’re struggling with. It’s a great way to get peers around you. Two, get a part of a trade association that more formally does that training. There are tons of groups. In our space with plumbing and HVAC guys, one of the giants has a group called Nexstar. They do fantastic coaching from CSR training to sales training to inventory management.

They help make you become not a plumber, but a business owner and they help you transition to that road. I know that’s a lot of the work that you guys do with helping these guys build your business acumen and take the business up a notch so that the business isn’t running them, but they can run the business. Find people who’ve been there, who’ve been in your shoes, and have gone down that road before you and let them feed into you. Ask them the questions. Running a business of any type is lonely and exhausting. You don’t feel like you have anyone to talk to about the struggles you’re having or the fears that you’re facing.

BCC 49 | Online Marketing Strategies
Online Marketing Strategies: The way you connect with customers has to be meaningful and personally important to you, not just as if going through your script.

 

There are other guys who feel just like you and they’re willing to help and engage. Use common sense. My recommendation is don’t try to talk with people in your same market space. That could be awkward. Find people in a larger group who don’t live in your area and let them help you. Those are easy things. That will require flexing muscles that you probably don’t know you have. There are other things are maybe more formal. For me personally, I took the route a few years ago of getting my MBA. That is not for everyone. It’s not at all. It was a way to formalize some training and some exposure and skillsets with various sorts of skills and expertise. Otherwise, I wouldn’t use it on a day-to-day, but it makes me a better business owner and it makes me help have more grounded business decisions.

Those are some great tips. A big thing in all of that was peer support. People that have been there already. You own a marketing company, so you probably know a thing or two about marketing. Isn’t that fair?

Sure.

One of the things that you’ve mentioned is these guys that pushed into marketing and how marketing can move the needle on the business. There’s this belief, “If I invest more in marketing, it’ll generate more leads, it’ll give me more sales, the business will be awesome, and everything will be great,” but then you have this line here, “Great marketing makes a bad product fail faster.” Contrary there, marketing isn’t always good. I know you believe that digital marketing can move the needle on your business, especially if you’re in that place where you’re looking to get out of the truck or you’re looking to get more trucks on the road. Help us with that a little bit. What are some ways our readers can use digital marketing to move the needle on their business?

I don’t want to get into the whole concept of it, but there’s an idea called a conversion funnel. Every person goes through this. Whether or not you’re buying a pair of shoes or a bike or a house or a toaster, it doesn’t matter. The idea is that people at the bottom of the funnel are ready to make a decision. For much of the trades in the blue-collar space, people aren’t sitting around their couch on a Thursday afternoon going, “I wonder what electrician is around me because I’m curious.” They don’t do that way. They only look for an electrician because something’s wrong. They need a solution now. There are some exceptions like in remodels, they’re going to take their time making a decision.

For the most part, a lot of the blue-collar trades are bottom of the funnel. Your customers are making a decision. That’s why you’re engaged. First off, tighten up the bottom of the funnel. If the bottom of the funnel has holes, your website doesn’t rank, your website doesn’t convert, and people can’t find you on Google My Business, if they do find you in Google My Business and your review suck, there is no step two without addressing those things. Those things have got to be dealt with. Otherwise, you’re going to pour good money after bad and it’s going to be wasting it. Tighten up the bottom of the funnel.

Find people who can help you navigate through your blind spots and become better. Click To Tweet

Once the bottom of the funnel is right and you know when people are looking for you, they’re finding you and once they hit your website, they’re converting. Once they find your GMB and they’re impressed with your reputation, then you move up the funnel. Start flushing out things like social media and start doing things like email, both cold email strategies and repeat nurture strategies. Try to find ways to stay in front of customer’s eyeballs. If you have a product or service, it’s a long acquisition process. I mentioned remodeling. Nobody is making a decision on a bathroom remodel tonight. Nobody’s going to do it. They’re going to take their time and look at different examples.

Hit them with the display retargeting ad. Keep these things in front of them. The whole bottom line is when you’re at the bottom of the funnel, which tends to be the problem, and it’s broken, it doesn’t matter how many billboards, TV, direct mail you run, or times you canvass a neighborhood with flyers. When people are trying to make the decision and they look for you, the tools and mechanisms in place will fail, hands down. If they fail, you wasted all that money. Make sure to focus on the bottom of the funnel. When you do that, it’s much easier to move up the funnel and that is when you start seeing those massive ROI impacts year over year.

What you said was to understand the way that your customers are making a buying decision. Nobody decides to remodel a bathroom tonight. If you’re running ads to get them to convert tonight, that’s probably not going to happen. I know if my toilet gets clogged and starts spilling out everywhere, I’m going to make that decision quickly. I’m not going to be shopping too much. Know your client and then focus on the thing that is going to convert them the quickest, which would be the bottom of the funnel. I love that. I want to go back to the two takeaways here that I got. I want to sum them up. The first one is to break out of discomfort. If you’re in a discomfort cycle or if you’re a little nervous about what’s going on in the economy today with COVID and other things, get involved in trade associations, peer support, and education. Improving yourself is what it is. Work on yourself, and then get the support you need. Is that accurate?

Yeah. The idea is that we all have blind spots, but you don’t know what they are, so you need other people around you who are better than you, smarter than you, and further down the road from you to help make you better. They help you see your blind spots in a way you can’t.

I love that description. The second one is if I want to use marketing to improve my business, don’t go into it thinking, “There are all these things and I’m going to do all of them.” It’s figuring out the way that your customers making the buying decision and focus on results there. Once you’ve got that good, then you can move up the funnel and start working on more of the longer-term staying in front of them and those kinds of things. We’ve talked about a lot here and I know there are some people going, “This sounds awesome, Ryan. I love your ideas. I love your thoughts, but how do I do this?” If they want to get ahold of you, how do they do that?

BCC 49 | Online Marketing Strategies
The Book On Digital Marketing: For Plumbing & HVAC Contractors

It’s easy. You can go visit our website at DPMarketing.Services and there’s a giant green button. Hit Schedule A Call and that will take you right to our calendar. We can get you on there and make an introduction and see what’s up in your world.

We’ve talked a lot about plumbing and HVAC, but you also work with home service companies in general, correct?

Yeah. Plumbing and HVAC is definitely our sweet spot, but for any crisis-oriented low trust business, we’re right up the alley. Nobody looks forward to having to call a plumber. Nobody looks forward to having to call a pest control guy. Any of those businesses that meet that low of the funnel, crisis mode, and don’t trust you from the get-go is our sweet spot.

For those readers that are willing to take you up on that learning recommendation that you gave and getting a little bit more knowledge about the business or marketing, you’ve got a free giveaway for them. Can you tell us about that?

We are giving away only ten copies. Here’s the deal. I wrote The Book On Digital Marketing: For Plumbing & HVAC Contractors. You’re welcome to pick it up on Amazon. For the readers of this podcast, we have a giveaway. If you go to our website, DPMarketing.Services/bcc, you’ll be able to sign up. The first ten people who sign up will be able to get this in the mail. There’s no pressure. It does walk you through check marking of how to set up your website, how to set up your ads, and how to go through social media planning. It is a tactical book to guide you through how you make decisions. If nothing else, I know a lot of our guys use it that we work with to fact check these marketers who talked to them because there’s no BS, crap, or snake oil. It’s process, science, and methodology. Use it as a guide to making sure you’re not being sold a bunch of crap. Use it to grow your business or whatever you do. For the first ten people who sign up, we got that on the house and we even cover shipping.

Thanks, Ryan. If you’re reading this and you want to know more about this marketing and being able to fact check the guys that are already calling on you or if you even want to get ahold of Ryan, go check out his website. Ryan, I want to thank you for being here with us. I’ve learned a lot and had a great conversation. I know that our readers are going to think that this information is relevant and valuable. Thank you.

It was my pleasure. Thanks for the invite.

Thanks, Ryan.

 

Important Links

  • Ryan Redding
  • Nexstar
  • The Book On Digital Marketing: For Plumbing & HVAC Contractors
  • DPMarketing.Services/bcc

 

About Ryan Redding

BCC 49 | Online Marketing StrategiesThere’s nothing more deflating than sitting around waiting for the phone to ring. You know that to get more customers you need more leads- and to get more leads you need better marketing. The problem is you’re not a marketing expert; you’re an HVAC or plumbing pro.

Sure, you’ve heard people talk about things like SEO and PPC, but you don’t really know what any of that means, so you feel a bit insecure and inadequate. You may have tried some things or hired someone to help, but you’re just not seeing the results you want.

I get it. That’s why I’ve developed a proven process that helps dozens of HVAC and plumbing contractors 8x their revenue. Let’s get you more leads so you can make more money.

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