When we started our business, we depended 100% on Thumbtack. Our goal was to conquor one platform at a time. I still remember the first day when we opened with zero jobs booked for the day. We remained very active that day on Thumbtack and managed to book 3 same day jobs and were off to the races. Fast forward 90 days and we're now a Top Pro (that was a big moment for us) and ready to invest in other means of getting the word out. Now that we've grown we've started experimenting on how to optimize our marketing spend. Here's a few things we've learned.
Practice Your Story
In our industry (Hauling/Demo/Moving) customers see our services as a last resort (vs. doing it themselves) particularly for small jobs. We work very hard to educate each of our customers on how we're trying to improve the industry, but we only meet these customers after they've already hired us. We use this time to perfect our own story so that when we go on social media we have a strong narrative to follow.
Set Up a Brand
Social Media is a good way to grab customers, but without more behind the curtain it is very challenging to convert customers using just a few social media posts. Make sure you have a website (SquareSpace, Wix, Weebly) that conveys your story in a longer more detailed format so users have somewhere else to go to read more. A lot of our customers do their research once they start a conversation with us. They read about us on our website and they go through our Thumbtack profile and our reviews and responses. When we arrive we always ask why they picked us. More often than not it's because of how we engaged them during the booking process. As we've started building a brand we're noticing the deciding factor has switched to our reviews or our mission which they learn about by reading up on us.
"Social Media" Where You Least Expect It
When people think of social media they immediately think of Facebook or Instagram. These are great platforms, but they don't always have direct funnels back to getting hired. There are however several platforms (including Thumbtack) that leverage social media features to allow you to engage customers with your story on the same platform they're already using to hire pros.
Free Platforms
- Google My Business is a great portal to cohesivley showcase your company and brand across all of Google's products (which grow and change quite quickly). You can post photos, events, special discount offers, and more. While customers won't necesarily be able to scroll through all these as they would other social media platforms, the content is used by Google across Maps and Search to add more media to your search result which increases the amount of direct traffic you get. Since we started cross posting our Thumbtack photos and projects to Google (using the Google My Business app) we've seen a massive jump (+60%) in organic leads.
- Yelp is not my favorite platform by any means (detest many of their business practices), but as a business in the service industry we see at as a necessary evil. Many customers will cross check our Thumbtack on Google as well as Yelp so being consistent helps them feel comfortable that we're a real business.
Paid Platforms
- Thumbtack allows you to tell quite an intricate story with projects, photo uploads, a bio, and survey answers. Utilize all of these as you would IG or FB to start telling your story where customers are already looking.
- Facebook allows companies to set up business pages in a very similar fashion to Thumbtack, however if you don't spend additional advertising money, your posts wont reach your audience outside of people who follow your page. The cost of promoting posts is low, but it will be a reoccuring expense to constantly reach new users.
- Instagram is similar to Facebook and the lines seperating these platforms are blurring together quite quickly. The mechanisim for growth on Instagram is again very similar to that of Facebook. If you pay to promote/advertise your posts you'll see a decent return on increased engagement in your posts, but you'll have to maintain this spending to keep reaching customers.
- Yelp also works as a paid platform. They have quite an assortment of products, but those generally fall into two categories: Advertising and Subscription. The advertising products they offer are very simple and work like Facebook and Instagram. You can create several ads that drive traffic to your Yelp page so customers can hire you. Their second product category is a recurring payment that allows you to block other companies from advertising on your page, as well as dressing up your Yelp page (and how it appears in the search results) as a way to grab a customers attention. We've found Yelp to be wildly ineffective compared to spending the same amount of money on any other platform, we saw $2 dollars of increased revenue for each $1 we spent on Yelp. By comparision see about to $12 of revenue for every $1 we spend on Thumtack, and roughly $7 to $1 when we used Google Ads.
Depending on industry these platforms may provide varying results, but we've seen the biggest rate of return by sticking to platforms that funnel users back to our phone number or website so that they can make a buying descision after having read our story and learned about our business.
