Ian Robertson
Welcome back to Inspector Toolbelt Talk, everyone. Today, we have a solo podcast talking about how to do direct to consumer marketing, with not just the general idea of it, but actual actionable things that we can do after we listen to this podcast. This came from, not only just a lot of general comments, but also a specific listener wrote in and said, hey, what are some specific things that I can do to do direct to consumer marketing? We actually did an interview with Working RE Magazine, and we kind of laid some things out in that article and some things in a couple of previous podcasts, but I wanted this podcast to be directly here are point by point things that we can do.
So the first thing that we can do if we want to do direct to consumer marketing is understand why it’s important. And if we already know this, I’m sorry if I’m repeating myself, but it’s important to understand, there is a market shift. It’s not a huge shift, like 80% now of our work doesn’t come from agents, but there is a market shift. We’ve seen numbers go up by 25% in our own companies and companies across the US and Canada, of people not hiring a home inspector through their agent. Those are some pretty big numbers to be honest with you. So as that shift continues to happen, I don’t think it’s done yet, we want to make sure that we’re in front of those buyers and sellers and other clients who would hire us. So how do we reach them? Well, it always takes a bit more effort to do direct to consumer marketing, matter of fact, approximately 10 times the effort. I say that because every agent that we acquire, on average, brings us about 10 inspections a year. So if I have to go out and get that agent, it’s not a lot of effort. I do a presentation, all of a sudden I have 2, 3, 4, more agents that refer us, and there’s 40 inspections a year. If I have to go out and directly market to the consumer, that’s a lot more work. I have to go and get them individually in large groups, and even if I get a large group of 100 people, I have to convert 40 of them to get just the inspections I get from those four agents in just one year. So it’s a lot more manual labor, so to speak, to do direct to consumer marketing, but once we have it down, the labor intensiveness of it gets less and less, and we find that that broad net that we just cast not only gets direct to consumer marketing, but also it gets us agents as well. It works hand in hand.
So the big ones and the obvious ones we’ve talked about before, website and SEO. Listen, if we don’t have a pristine professional website, and we’re not cranking up our SEO, and not just when I type in home inspector near me, there’s going to be lots of different keywords, having it professionally done, all that stuff, we’re just behind. We’re just behind the times. Even search itself is changing. With the advent of ChatGPT search engine and some other changes, there’s going to be a lot of, a lot of things to keep up with. And if we’ve haven’t started already, we’re behind. So get started now, if we haven’t already. Fantastic website, and listen, if it’s our budget that we do a cheap website, you know, something from like Wix, or, you know, whatever, one of those website builders with GoDaddy, that’s okay, but we shouldn’t stay on that for very long. We should make sure we get something professionally done.
So let’s just blow past that, because one thing that we have, we have an upcoming podcast with Mike Ortiz, and he’s actually done extremely well, and you’ll hear some of his numbers. And one of the things he says is he’s like, listen, I have people to pay. I have a business to run. I do paid ads, and I pay for those acquiring that work direct to consumer. Paid ads are 90% direct to consumer. Somebody is searching online, and you paid for a Google Ad. Now that your Google Ad pops up, whether it be Google Local Service Ads or Google Ads, there’s a difference. And if you don’t know, go back. We did a couple podcasts on it with Jason Boeing’s, but we need to be paying for those ads if we want to do direct to consumer. Now the problem with paid ads is we get a bad taste in our mouth most of the time because we’ve done it wrong. There are people out there that have degrees, and this is all they do, are Google Ads or whatever other kind of ads we’ll talk about in just a second, and they do that full time. So when we kind of like show up and just throw an ad together, or you work with one of those Google quote, unquote specialists that call us, we’re not going to get a great experience. That’s kind of like going to the Olympics, like that Raygun lady and showing up and saying, well, you know, break dancing isn’t for me. It’s like, okay, when you can do backflips and spins on your head, listen, it’s, it’s going to be a whole different world.
So hire somebody to do Google ads. They’re complex, and they’re always changing, negative keywords, positive keywords. It’s a whole world unto itself. Put the money into it to do it properly. Because, listen, if we try beer one time and it’s some home brew by some guy, and we make it ourselves or whatever, and it’s just gross, and we spit it out, do we say forever, I hate beer. No, we just might hate the junky beer that was made there. Can we walk around and say, and I hear this a lot, Google Ads don’t work. Google Ads do work. That’s why it’s several billion dollar, hundreds of millions, I don’t know, it’s one of the biggest industries out there on the internet, for a very good reason, because it works. Problem is we do it ourselves, we lose a bunch of money, we hire somebody who doesn’t know how to do it in our particular industry, because there is a difference in our industry. So paid ads are good.
Couple of other ways to do paid ads, Facebook ads, we’ve talked about those before. Cheap and easy, run some dollar a day ads, and you’re not going to be able to say, hey, I got X amount of work off of this Facebook ad. It’s like putting out a billboard. You’re not going to be able to measure ROI on it. It’s keeping you in front of people in your local community. But again, do it right. Keep it local. Make sure you’re not in Arkansas showing ads to people down to Florida. Make sure it’s all local and shows up for people in your area. Same thing we’ll talk about Tiktok in a little bit, but Tiktok ads, cheap, relatively easy to do, and can get us some good exposure. And remember again, it’s very hard to measure ROI. Google ads, yeah, that’s a little bit easier, but almost everything else that we’re talking about here, you’re not going to be able to say, hey, I got X amount of inspections on there. Forget about measuring ROI. It’s, it’s a buzzword and a buzz term that you won’t hear a lot in the marketing industry as a whole, because we know that top of mind marketing and all this other stuff doesn’t have to do with lead generation, but it’s still important. There’s a reason why GEICO commercials are all over, but they don’t say how many, how many people did we get from the guy saying, you know, from the lizard talking, or guy talking about Liberty biberty, we all know those commercials, probably, but it’s hard to measure ROI, and it’s top of mind marketing and other types of marketing that are very distinct.
So before we get into a couple of other bits of social media, let’s talk about some stuff that we can do locally. Home shows. We’ve talked about those before. Home shows are becoming very important. I’ve known home inspectors that have done home shows forever, and I’ve done really well on them, and they’re doing even better now. Set up a booth. Hand out some tape measures with our logo on it. Talk with people, people at home shows are oftentimes people who are looking to buy homes, or people who might need our services in other ways. We might meet real estate agents there even talking about those two types of marketing going hand in hand, direct to agent, direct to consumer. Home shows, you’re not going to be walk away and say, man, I got 18 inspections from that. We might go six months and not know anything, but then all of a sudden it we see the cumulative effect of it. Keeps us in front of our community.
Even though it’s low tech, yard signs. Do we have yard signs ready to go so that when we are inspecting a house, that yard sign goes in the front yard, this house is currently being inspected by so and so. Listen, the guy who paid my driveway, put a yard sign. He says it’s his best advertising. Totally different industry, and we’re not going to get the same results as him, because we’re not paving driveways. But are we making who we are known to the agents that pull up, the father-in-law, the family, the seller, all the neighbors, other people who drive by that house who are looking at it like, oh, darn. Now it’s getting inspected. But who’s that guy? A yard sign out there for a few hours. When we’re done with the inspection, pop it out, put it in our vehicle, keep it in front of our house on our own lawn. None of that can hurt, but that’s going to get direct to consumer, again, low tech and cheap, those, those things you can get online for pennies, practically, not really, but pretty cheap.
Sponsor events. Now this one you have to be careful with. You’ll always get those scams. Sponsor our golf event. You can be on the 13th hole or, you know, folders for this agent or that agent, half of them tend to be scams. So be careful who you give your money to. But we don’t want to just sponsor events to have our logo somewhere, that I find gets us nowhere. But is there a community event where we can go and sponsor and have like, a little booth there? Listen, if you go to canva.com, C-A-N-V-A .com, and there’s a couple of other places that you can check out online. We can get event material. We can get tablecloths and banners and these expandable, vertical banners and things like that, so that we can very quickly and easily show up, have a, have a table, and then have a professional looking booth. And our local town, do they have like, there’s a fair in my area that we go to every year. Listen, it was five days of a booth, and the whole thing was $500 for five days. It’s $100 a day. Get your nephew to go sit at the fair every day. Everybody who’s in that community is going to be in that fair that day, those five days at those booths. Man, it’s, are you going to be able to measure the ROI? No, but you’re going to be in front of all of those consumers.
Before we get into a couple of other things. I do want to talk about social media, because they’re going to be related. So we cannot pay people to do the level of social media that I’m going to talk about. You have great companies like we, we do social media postings for SEO purposes. And then you have amazing companies like Inspector Media, they do amazing posts and things like that. But if you’re going to go viral, you can’t replace your own face. It’s just not going to happen. Look at Inspector AJ, look at Preston Kincaid, look at what those guys have done, because they have an amazing social media presence and the big following that they’ve built by regularly engaging with their audience. And sometimes we’ll look and we’re like, oh, I’ve been doing social media postings for a year, and I’m not getting anything out of it. Listen, we made a bad batch of beer, or maybe we just haven’t honed our skills yet. Stick with it. So Facebook, TikTok, YouTube shorts. Do not forget YouTube shorts. I actually like YouTube shorts for several reasons over TikTok sometimes, even though TikTok is the big one. Facebook is still where, I forget where it lands in the realm of things, but is one, still one of the most heavily used social media platforms out there. Instagram, not my favorite for our purposes, but it still has its place. But listen, post on there every day. Interesting stuff. Get better at it. Don’t just keep posting the same thing over and over again, like Einstein said, trying the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. Try different things, expand. Watch what other people are doing. And we may not be overly charismatic, it doesn’t matter. People want real. They want authentic. Authenticity is a product in of itself. So regularly put ourselves on social media. Again, look up Preston Kincaid and Inspector AJ. Man, those guys are killing it on social media, and the work they get from it is immeasurable.
But now, when it comes to that, a couple of things you can do. First of all, cross advertise. There’s an agent in my area that we’ve worked with for many, many years, great guy. I remember when he started. I was young. He was young. Now we’re a couple of old, old fogies, whatever, but he crossed markets all the time. I know where that guy is all the time because he posted on social media. He belongs to a local gym where they do HIIT workouts, and he’s posting himself there, and he’s like, hey, I’m here at this HIIT workout place. It’s called Metabolic and they, you know, post his progress, and they’ll post himself with the trainers. And now those trainers are drinking out of his mugs, and they’re advertising for him too, and they’re reposting his posts. That’s amazing cross advertising. Every time he goes to a diner or something, he tries a new place, he posts their menu and he says, hey, it’s so and so here, and we’re trying out their new menu, and he’ll post himself with the owner, and they’ll repost his post. He’s cross marketing like nuts. Do that. Get involved with the community, and continually post. Are we going to a new restaurant? Are we, we’re home inspectors, we’re out all the time. Are we trying a cool place for lunch? Cool say, hey, you’re the owner. Let me get a picture of you and post you on my social media, and I’ll tag you. Now he’s sharing our post with his customers too, and they see, hey, it’s Joe Home Inspector. Cross marketing is great direct to consumer marketing.
The last thing I’ll share is teaching. So we’ve talked about teaching real estate classes, and that’s really great for direct to agent marketing, but we’re talking about direct to consumer marketing. So when we say teaching, you’re gonna have to really search for this kind of stuff. But sometimes there’s some adult education classes, and there’s also, I don’t know if BOCES are everywhere, but here in my area, we have what are called BOCES, and they teach classes, and sometimes they have ancillary classes. They have guest speakers. Volunteer for these things. And I say volunteer because I see some home inspectors show up and they say, well, they weren’t going to give me anything. They were going to give me $50 to do guest speaking thing. I can make more money than that. That’s not the point. First of all, we’re doing a good thing, but are we, can we go when we teach, and now we have a class of, let’s say, 12 students, and we hand them all out a flyer, and we teach them how to inspect something as part of their shop class. All their parents get the flyer. They hear about this guy. And then you’re involved in the community. Listen, in my community, if you’re teaching a class like that, everybody knows who you are. Can we find adult education classes, those people taking those classes, they’re going to know who we are. Even, can we find real estate courses that want a home inspector as a guest speaker, that teach new agents? A lot of those new agents don’t even make it through the class, but we’re marketing directly to them. Find opportunities to teach. We know stuff. We teach stuff all the time. That’s how we inspect. Can we teach these kind of classes that might not on the surface havea lot of benefit to us from our perspective, but actually do.
So, as you can see, it’s not simple to do direct to consumer marketing, and it’s also cumulative. So we’re not going to always see an immediate benefit. Sometimes we do, but most of the time, we’re going to see a cumulative benefit over time. So direct to consumer marketing, really well worth it, because it just expands our marketing horizons like crazy, helps us keep up with a trend that’s happening now, adds longevity to our business, but ultimately it’s just best practice. So hopefully these help. Keep the questions coming in, and thank you very much, and listen in next time.
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