Facility Management Marketing Podcast

The Art of Ad Optimization for Facility Management

• Javier Lozano, Jr. - Facility Management Marketing & Sales Expert • Episode 190

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Are you ready to navigate the digital advertising maze for your facility management business? Let us be your guiding light! We're pulling back the curtain on our struggles and triumphs with paid channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google. Our hard-learned lessons from a disastrous ad campaign will show you why strategic targeting and approval processes are not to be taken lightly. 

In the second half of our chat, we roll up our sleeves and get down to the nitty-gritty of optimizing ads for high-quality leads. With real-life examples, we explore how to squeeze every drop of value from your ad campaigns on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Google. We also highlight the game-changing potential of granular targeting, compelling copywriting, and setting up a separate ad account for your go-to-market strategy. As we wrap up, don't miss our insights on the power of webinars, digital marketing courses, and email subscription lists for staying ahead of marketing trends and training. Tune in, and let's revolutionize your facility management marketing strategies together!

Speaker 1:

What's going on everyone? Welcome to another episode. I'm your host, javier. Next thing I wanna be talking about today is the importance of targeting in your paid channels, so like on Facebook or LinkedIn or Google. So you're probably asking yourself how to successfully grow a facility management company in today's digital age while still remaining profitable. You know that marketing should probably be in the mix, but you may not know the best approach, the new strategies or which digital platform is market on. So how do you use marketing to grow your FF business today? That is a question, and this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Javier Lozano Jr, and welcome to the facility management marketing podcast.

Speaker 1:

Targeting plays such a critical role. I believe it is one of the main reasons why ad is either gonna be super duper successful or just fall flat on its face. Okay, and I say this because we've experienced this within our organization okay, if you're not familiar with what we do, we basically run a ton of Facebook ads. Okay, and I'll be straight with everybody here, we run quite a bit of ads where it is a little uneasy because we're living and dying by what Facebook does. Like Facebook could literally change their algorithms, they can just disappear and that would really, you know, it would really hurt us. Could we recoup and find another platform to run ads on? Most definitely Would it take some time. Well, yeah, would we have the same results that we're currently having right now that we have with Facebook? I don't know, because there are channels that we've not actually gone into and wholeheartedly gone, like we're gonna go into this channel or this avenue, and so, with that, what's going on here is I'm gonna kind of discuss on the importance on setting up targeting parameters and why this is really it's critical within your advertising strategy. Okay, so let me kind of tell you let me back up a little bit until you get a little story here.

Speaker 1:

When I first started at Ratmate, we were generating I don't know five 6,000 leads a month and at a very, very low, low dollar amount, like they were super duper low, which was insane. However, as we implemented new technology like HubSpot and then started getting more reporting and then splitting paths on our website a lot of these different things we started realizing that the majority of our leads were premium leads or personalization leads. These are people that was like Jack or Tom or Sally that wanna wrap their white sedan because they don't like it, to like a different color, okay, and that's fine, that's totally cool. However, those people are a tougher sell and it's a different conversation. And then we weren't getting as many commercial leads where it's like Joe the plumber that wants to promote his business while he's just doing plumbing work in the community and that sort of stuff. Those kinds of people weren't really falling on our lap. And so the challenge was that we were generating a lot of leads at a low price, but in reality we weren't paying a low price because those weren't converting.

Speaker 1:

What was happening is that we were spending a ton of money on like commercial leads, and it wasn't a good value. All right, now let me fast forward a little bit, okay. So we flipped this and I started working with our agency and I started getting them to get more strategic with their ads and how they were kind of creating it and letting it. You know how it was supposed to be done. So we went from one point generating roughly 15% commercial leads to 85% premium leads or personalization leads, and we flipped that to where, by the end of December of 22 to like the beginning of 23, we were at roughly 65% commercial leads and 35% personalization leads. So we literally went from 15% all the way to 65%. Okay, now that was good. We were generating good quality commercial leads. We were hitting some great numbers on a sales team. Like the momentum was flowing. We were doing a great job in the beginning of the year. Things were going, things were all firing like no one could complain.

Speaker 1:

Right Now comes June of 2023. Our agency at the time is like I'm going to try a new ad without getting my approval. Okay, let's just kind of I'm going to preface that. They started a new ad without my approval and that ad essentially was it was a cool rap, don't get me wrong, but it was definitely not our target audience. And so it was a Supra that was wrapped with like the I don't know, I don't know what the terminology is, but it's like the fighter jet, you know fighter jet kind of look, and it had like the teeth smiling on the side and whatever and like. And it had like the rivets, you know like on the vinyl and super cool, like our design team like had fun designing this is a beautiful rap.

Speaker 1:

Anyways, that ad goes out and it completely like just destroyed us. And so this is what happened. We were generating like two to 300 leads a day and you're like that's awesome I have here, but like 80 or 90% of them were premium leads and I'm like what the fuck? And so I try to tell them to turn it off immediately, but they kept sitting on it Like, well, we just want to see how. I'm like no, these are not the leads that we need. They finally fucking turned it off and it screwed up the that, that one campaign. And so what happened here is that that campaign got optimized to basically only go after personalization type leads, even though before that it was going after commercial. It was doing a very good job, and so what happened here is that it really hurt us big time. It took us six to eight weeks to write the ship.

Speaker 1:

This was the beginning of June, okay, beginning of June, and it took us until the middle of August. No, no, I'll take that back. The beginning of August things started turning, and then all of a sudden, the middle of August, it just flipped. Okay so, and the reason it flipped is this is is we no longer work with this ad agency? We don't have anything against them, they did a good job, but we kind of graduated from what they were doing. That's just probably the best way of putting it. Okay. So we graduated from what they were doing and you know, in the process we had hired I'm sorry we had purchased the.

Speaker 1:

In April, we acquired a company called RapidFi and this company very successful company doing awesome and they have an ad buying person. Her name is Amy and she's amazing, and so I started talking to her, kind of seeing how she does things. I'm like, okay, she knows her stuff and so I was kind of feeling her out, getting an idea of what her strategy is and her approach and what she would do. And so we did some tests and they were industry specific tests and the way she was doing the test. I was like this is exactly what I've been wanting to do, this is exactly what I've been wanting to do, and I was like my other agency would not do this. So we were doing separate tests with her stuff. Now it may have not been delivering like ginormous results, but it was giving us enough of like, hey, this is working Okay.

Speaker 1:

So in the time that the ad account basically was generating all these personalization leads, we started putting out more of these industry based leads where there are very specific targeting. So this is what I mean we're going after like trades like HVAC, plumbing, painting, yard services, like trades. That would be what like facility management companies would need. The difference is is ours is residential, yours is commercial. So I'll get to that in just a second. So just bear with me. Listen to all this stuff that you're going to understand.

Speaker 1:

So we were creating an ad for a specific trade and then we were targeting those people and then we would have a vehicle for that trade. So like, if you were a painter, you saw a wrap for a painting wrap. Okay, if you were a landscaper, you saw an ad for a landscaping wrap. You get what I'm saying. The copy was the same thing. And then, on top of that, we were targeting very specific people, people that were in that specific industry, that were decision makers, that were that's considered like in the city or like in the 30 mile radius of like the heart of that city. So like if it was Denver or Houston or Chicago, like we were picking very specific cities, very strategic and very you know, very you know approached to what we were doing.

Speaker 1:

Now this thing got massaged a little bit more till we got it dialed in, but what started happening is that these ads started getting us exactly that. We were running an ad for painters and it got us painting leads, and then we sold painting wraps. We were running ads for house cleaning, like cleaning services. It got us cleaning services leads and we sold cleaning services wraps. Like we were seeing this over and over again, like all right, and we knew it was gonna work, but it hasn't been tested, because the way we were doing our ads previously was a blanketed approach, and so what I mean by this is that we were running one ad, we were blanking the entire United States and we were just saying, okay, everyone that likes or is interested in HVAC, plumbing, home services, like all of these things. You know, what the issue is is that if you are a person that's not a business owner, that happens to be looking, you know, at hiring a handyman, you are considered a person in our now new ad network because you're interested in hiring a handyman, so you'll probably see that ad, and when you see the ad, you're like, oh, that's cool, I wanna wrap my Camaro and then you become a lead to us but like you're not the quality lead that we're looking for. So what we started doing is.

Speaker 1:

We started getting very strategic on not just the trades that we were going after in the home services space, but also the targeting of the audience. All right, so it was someone that is a decision maker for home inspection and owns a home inspection business, and a few other things. I forget what the exact targetings are, and we're using Facebook to do this. You can do this granular targeting in a lot of different ad platforms like Facebook, obviously, instagram, which is owned by Facebook. You can do it on LinkedIn, you can do it on Google, like it can be done. So just bear with me here. So we went from at one point having 15% commercial leads to another point beginning of the year at 65% commercial leads, and we were happy to. We were at like 35 or 40% commercial leads. It went it reverted to now where we are today, at 95% commercial leads, so we've literally flipped an entire ad account.

Speaker 1:

Okay, and so, as a facility management company, if you're not running ads, you're missing out on a great opportunity. This is where, like your, your verbiage, you know your copy that you use is very important. Your targeting that you select is very important. I still think IFM's property management companies should be running ads on Facebook, and I'm saying this right now because you might be saying, well, facility managers don't hang out on Facebook. I beg to differ. There are 8 billion people on the earth, okay, on the planet. Roughly 2 billion of those people are on Facebook. It's a fact. Look it up. All right, it's a fact. You cannot tell me that. You know Sally, the Fisselinee manager for I don't know, like Fisselinee manager for five below in the South region of 200 units, is it on Facebook or Instagram occasionally? You can't tell me that because I guarantee they're on there.

Speaker 1:

Now, the challenge is the targeting, and you're going to have to figure that piece out. Now, if you're like, well, I don't want to do Facebook, I want to do Instagram, or I want to do LinkedIn, even better. The difference here is that you're going to be paying more for that lead, okay, but if it's worth it to you, if you're okay, paying 50, 60, $100 for a lead, it might be totally worth it to you, okay, but it's where you get very specific in your targeting. The more granular and specific you get with your targeting, you're going to start getting higher quality leads. Not just that, your entire ad account will then essentially be optimized for those types of leads, so that when you start running more ads, it's going to be like these people that are doing these X, y and Z things that are interested in this and they're a business owner and they have this, are going to be interested in this ad, so we'll feed this ad to them. Now, is it 100% foolproof? No, there nothing is, and that's okay.

Speaker 1:

But what I'm saying now is that now this kind of changed our entire strategy now to where we no longer are going to be running and we never did before. But when we create our new go to market for personalization raps, that is going to be completely new ad account, not just like a campaign, but a separate ad account. Okay, our current one right now has been optimized for commercial and we won't fuck with it. And so we have, I think, 13 or 14 trades. I don't know what all the trades are. We have like also one that's like a test campaign, that's like small businesses over the past you know, that were created in the past two years. We have another one that's like what is it? I forget, but small businesses is a good one, because it's a great way to promote your business if you're low on money.

Speaker 1:

But what's genius about all this is that, you know, sitting down with our essentially our ad creator, amy, we started talking about this through and she's like this is how I'm thinking about, how we approach this. I'm like, okay, I'm digging this, I like it. And there was a point where it was tough because I knew it would work. But selling this to my team and trying to tell them like, guys, just trust the process, it's going to take time, we will flip, you know, we will write the ship, it will be fine, it will be okay. And then our sales team is not hitting sales, or sales isn't hitting sales goals. Our numbers are kind of down. Things are kind of like, you know, people are pissed off and like everyone is up in arms, everyone's making excuses, everyone's pointing fingers at everybody else. Okay, like there was pressure on me for for you know, small, small part of time, but I knew that this was the right approach and so I said I was very steadfast and like we're doing this and this is how we're going to do this. We're not changing the direction of this and we did it. And the beauty about that is that it changed everything and now, like for the past two months like. Well, let me rephrase that August was the biggest month we've ever had as a company in history. September will be blown away by August, or September's numbers will blow away August numbers because of what we're doing and we're seeing signs of like this new strategy giving us better quality leads. People are closing quicker. We're seeing other transactions come through that what we call is non-touch.

Speaker 1:

So you as a marketer in the facility manager in space if you're not even a true marketer and you're just kind of a sign to market like your marketing coordinator or something like that, and you and you want to start running ads on Google, facebook, first of all, listen to my previous podcast. I teach you on how to do all that stuff. Okay, I'm not going to break this down, excuse me. There are ad courses out there to do that. I'm not going to break that, that kind of stuff down, but what I'm going to tell you is that when you create your ads, you need to be very smart and diligent and strategic on your targeting, not just who your ICP is, your ideal customer profile, but you also need to be very smart about you know where, what locations, that sort of stuff. Now, the other thing, too, is to think about, is like your website and the messaging as well, too. Your website and the messaging should be very specific to the type of customers that you're looking for.

Speaker 1:

So let me give you an example when I was working at CMI Mechanical you know it's an HVC company, but the issue that they were having is that they were having a lot of residential people finding their website and calling to have their HVC unit worked on, when CMI Mechanical only works on commercial units, and they're like this is ridiculous. So what I did is I started going through all of their website copy and I started updating it, and I updated all the copy to where I would say commercial, commercial, hvc, commercial, refrigeration, commercial, you know, commercial heating in air, like everything. And we would just put commercial everywhere, and we did that on purpose. So then, all of a sudden, when someone saw our website, they're like oh you do, commercial. So then we would get the right types of people calling us, because we didn't need a ton of leads. We needed the right leads to the point where we were getting calls from Raytheon, from T-Mobile, from Verizon, from Dollar General, like from these big, big, big, big big brands and government contractors. Anheuser-busch was another one which was insane. We were getting all this and it was because of how we started doing our targeting better as far as, like, our website messaging.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so your messaging on your ads, like your ad copy, needs to really be going towards who you're going after, like those types of people, and if you can do that, that will make your ads more successful, which will make your ad account even better. You keep improving on those things and you will start seeing changes in improvements in your overall ad performance and then you'll start generating the type of leads that you want. Okay, so this takes time. It's not gonna happen in a month or two months. So my recommendation is this number one listen to some of my old podcasts. It's in there, it's. I don't know what episode it would be, but it's like some of my earliest ones, okay.

Speaker 1:

Number two if you're not familiar with running ads on ad platforms such as Facebook, linkedin, google, instagram, that sort of stuff, then just buy a course. Okay, like, should I have a course, probably I could probably sell it to you and you'd probably buy it, and that's fine. But I don't have one. I don't even have a recommendation for one, okay, so go find a course and if it's like a thousand bucks, it's probably worth it, like, spend the money on it because you get what you pay for. And if you're like, well, that's just too expensive, think of it like this If you spend a thousand dollars and you learn how to generate leads, that gets you like half a million dollar customers. Was it worth it to you? Fuck, yeah, it was okay. So understand that, like, if you really wanna do this, do it the right way. Second or sorry.

Speaker 1:

Third, when you start running these ads, understand that you're trying to target specific audiences. So get really dialed in who your ICP is so that you can go after them correctly. And then, fourth, when you generate those leads, make sure you have the right messaging on the back end as well too, like follow up emails, that sort of stuff that is also congruent with the message from the front and in the middle of the funnel. Does that make sense? So you do those things. You should not just start generating better quality leads. You should start moving people down the pipeline to where they become a customer.

Speaker 1:

Now, not everyone's going to convert, we all know that but you'll probably have the right people converting at probably the right price. Now, what's the cost of these leads going to be? It all depends. I can tell you right now you'll probably be spending more money for your leads than what we spend, because our demographic is a little different. You're looking for facility managers. Linkedin knows that that's a high sought after title, and so going after those contacts might be a little challenging. Not that you can't find them, but you're going to pay more money. But if you have everything else dialed in, it might be worth it to you because if your sales team is good, you've got great messaging, you've got great communication going through those emails and follow ups and that sort of stuff, and your sales team knows how to work the leads accordingly. It's a win-win for everybody.

Speaker 1:

So with that, I hope you understand why I'm just kind of bullish on this targeting stuff, because it makes 100% sense. I knew it was going to work. However, the thing is that it's always nice to see it work and be like boom, what? So if you got some value out of these podcasts or out of this podcast, I asked three things at the end of my podcast Number one please give us a five star review on Spotify or Apple. Podcast. Number two please take the time to share this podcast with somebody else. This is how our podcast has been growing. We're on the verge of hitting 200 episodes, which is insane. And so you sharing this podcast to one of your colleagues, your friends, whatever is the biggest thank you I could ever have. So please do that. And then, number three if you're not connected to me on LinkedIn, please send me a connection and give me some feedback. What podcasts did you like, what would you like to hear more of? And so I'm going to continue to be sharing more of these stories.

Speaker 1:

Last thing is that I know I tell stories and strategies that sometimes pertain into the space that I'm in right now, but understand and I keep saying this quite a bit you can apply these strategies in the facility management space. There is a reason why I niche down to facility management marketing because, a there is no other person that is essentially the leader to marketing and facility management. So that's the first reason. B there are outdated strategies that are being used right now that are not as effective as strategies today, and so what I'm trying to get to is that wouldn't it be great that if you can learn some really great golden nuggets from these podcast episodes and you can implement them into your facility management company, your property management company, and it actually works and I can tell you right now it will work. I know that I'm that confident. It's just a matter of implementation and execution. So, anyways, do those three things. Thanks a lot and have a great day.

Speaker 1:

All right guys, thanks for taking a listen to our facility management marketing podcast Secrets. This is your host, javier Lozano Jr. One other ask I've got for you guys is to subscribe to our email list. You can go to boldermediasolutionscom slash email and that way you can get updates on some marketing trends that I'm seeing, some strategies that I'm executing and, more importantly, I'll be actually launching some webinars and training that's going to help your company use marketing strategies to essentially grow your business. We'll be using training, offering some courses, that sort of stuff. So you can always unsubscribe to that email list. It's no big deal, it's not going to hurt my feelings. This is more for facility managers, for facility management companies that want to grow their business by using marketing. All right guys, thanks a lot, have a great one.

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Javier Lozano, Jr.

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