03 Feb Is Your Marketing Agency Ripping You Off?

If your home remodeling marketing agency is worth its salt, you’ll see a boost in leads and jobs coming your way. If you’re not, it’s a clear sign that you’re paying too much. If you’re spending money on marketing but the numbers aren’t moving in the right direction, the first step is to ensure that you’re measuring sales appropriately. Identify your marketing spend, and then work backward to track revenue generated. This will help you identify any problems in your sales funnel so that you can correct them. If you’re still unable to see any growth, it’s a sign that your marketing funds are being wasted, and it’s time to look for a new marketing agency.

Effective marketing = more leads

Marketing is about generating more leads for your home remodeling business. It’s about reaching more local customers and enabling them to take action. If your marketing agency isn’t increasing the number of leads generated, this might be a red flag. Although it doesn’t happen overnight, the needle should be moving in the right direction. Effective marketing is the gradual process of generating leads through various channels. You might have to be patient, but at the same time, the needle should be moving. You should be able to see a small but noticeable increase in your lead numbers.

The focus of a bad agency will be on activity over results

Some agencies are in the business of pushing customers through the sales funnel as quickly as possible. These are the types of agencies notorious for using spammy marketing tactics like sending out emails, writing blog after blog without local intent, and pushing content that isn’t relevant to the geographic area. They will be so focused on activity, that they forget about delivering results. You and your marketing agency’s focus should be on growing the number of qualified home remodeling leads, with the right offer and the right marketing strategy. The goal is to have people in your local service area interested in your product or service turn into paying customers.

A good marketing agency will have a proven strategy to provide results for home remodeling companies like yours

An effective marketing strategy considers your buying cycle, ideal customer personas, competition, and other factors. It also considers how you can convert these prospective leads into paying clients. A good marketing agency will tell you what they will be doing and how they plan to do it. The best agencies will also be able to prove that their past clients have seen similar results. At Craftsmanship Marketing, we provide case studies with proven success stories of our home remodeling clients. If you are not seeing results after a certain period, ask your marketing agency what adjustments they have made to their strategy. If they don’t have a proven strategy to deliver results, they’re not worth your money.

If you are not seeing tangible results, you should question your agency’s expertise

If you do not see results from your marketing campaign, you should hold your marketing agency accountable for those results. If you find that your marketing campaign has flaws or problems with how the campaign is being implemented, work with your marketing agency to correct them. If you find that your marketing campaign is flawless but still not seeing results, it’s a sign that your marketing agency could be making optimizations in many areas to generate new leads for your home remodeling business. The second thing you need to do is to create a timeline for results. If you’ve hired a marketing agency and don’t see any results, create a timeline for when you would like to start seeing those results. Let your marketing agency know where you want to be in 90 days or 180 days. This will help to hold your marketing agency accountable to produce results for you in a given timeframe. A good marketing agency will be able to benchmark a reasonable timeline that their marketing will start delivering you more jobs and more leads. If you’re early in a relationship with an agency, request case studies. A good agency will showcase results they’re provided for companies just like yours and how they did it.

Any good home remodeling marketing agency will know that Google is the gold mine for home remodeling leads. If your business is nowhere to be seen on the first page of Google for relevant searches, your marketing agency isn’t performing as well as it could be. Someone searching for “home remodeling company near me” or “home remodeling company in Austin” is the most qualified lead you’re going to find. People searching terms such as these are looking for your services, and a lot of times they’re ready to convert, and your business needs to be coming up on the first page. If you aren’t in front of them, your competitors are and you’re missing out on leads by not ranking. Google is the leading search engine, with an estimated 80% of internet users using it to find businesses. If you rank on the first page, you can gain new customers. When a company decides to spend money with its marketing team, it hopes that the company will deliver a return on investment (ROI). The hope is that these marketing dollars will result in a steady flow of new customers. 

Good, but not great marketing

We often see generalist agencies make the fatal mistake of focusing on the tactics for home remodelers: blogging, email, social media, and retargeting.

This is not advanced marketing, this is essentially marketing basics for home remodelers. Many home remodeling companies work with agencies for years and the agency hasn’t even gotten them ranked on the first page for the search term “home remodeling company near me” on Google. Very often, the marketing agency is focused on tactics like blogging, email, social media, and retargeting, all of which are good things, but only provide marginal increases in leads generated. 

If your marketing agency is not focused on increasing your visibility on Google, they don’t understand how to market for a home remodeler. 

While there’s nothing wrong with blogging, email, social media, or retargeting, a good marketing agency will first and foremost focus on high impact marketing strategies.

We’ve encountered numerous home remodeling companies working with an agency who don’t have any visibility into which keywords their business is ranking for on Google, how many local monthly visitors they’re getting, or what their conversion rate looks like. This is almost always a tell tale sign that the marketing agency is ripping the client off. Underperforming agencies hide behind activity and ambiguity and they tend to de-emphasize analytics. They highlight all the work and activity they’ve been doing, but when it comes to results, they’re never actually sharing analytics or they make it confusing for you. If your marketing campaign is underperforming, your marketing agency should be honest. If they hide behind activity and ambiguity, it can be a red flag that they aren’t being honest about their performance. 

A high-performing agency will focus on the results of its marketing campaigns reflected through clear analytics. They understand that analytics help determine their marketing campaign’s future by allowing them to make better decisions. When an agency is focused on the success of its campaign and the analytics behind it, it shows that they are transparent in its approach to marketing and honest with its clients. When you hire a marketing agency, you need to be sure you are investing in marketing that will bring you clients. Investing in ineffective marketing will waste your money and time. It can be difficult to know if an agency is being honest or scamming you if they’re not being transparent.

Key analytics your agency should be regularly reporting on:

Keeping track of your marketing agency’s progress and results can be challenging as a business owner. Knowing which metrics to track and how to interpret them can take a lot of time and effort. Fortunately, there are a few key analytics that your marketing agency should be regularly reporting on, which can give you an overall picture of the health and effectiveness of your campaigns. By monitoring these metrics, you can gain valuable insights into the performance of your marketing efforts and make informed decisions about how to improve them. As a home remodeler, if your marketing agency is not reporting on these three key data points regularly, there’s a good chance they’re underperforming:

• Keyword rankings:

Customers are searching for your services everyday. A good marketing company will make sure that your business comes up in those searches. You want to be sure that your keywords aren’t ranking for keywords that don’t fit your business’s niche. This wastes your money and doesn’t bring any leads.

• Website visitors:

If your brand visibility is increasing, your website visitors should be increasing month over month. You should be focused on local users. How many people are visiting your website that are in your service area? It does not help you to get website visitors in areas that you don’t serve. 

• Leads generated:

Your marketing agency should be reporting on calls, form submissions, meetings booked, and where they’re coming from.