Home improvement and service businesses rarely understand the power of owning traffic and the stability that comes from it..

In this newsletter, I want to break down the 3 main traffic types and how you should aim to use them to slowly decrease your cost to acquire a client.

The 3 types are

• Traffic you buy

• Traffic you control

• Traffic you own

Many businesses, especially new ones are very dependent on the first one as they haven’t yet established themselves and rightly need to get opportunities fast.

If they are not careful they will find themselves in a never ending hamster wheel of increased competition and increased prices.

Let's break down the 3 traffic types quickly.

Traffic you buy - Paid ads, sponsored posts or anything that requires you to pay for clicks.

Pros - Fast, limitless and well targeted

Cons - Expensive, competitive, risky

Traffic you control - Social channels, youtube or anywhere that you have built an audience on a platform you do not own.

Pros - Free, limitless posting, targeted

Cons - Slow to build, minor risk if bans or changes to algorithms that affect reach

Traffic you own - Email, SMS, WhatsApp. This traffic is owned by you and no third party can take it from you. Its data you own.

Pros - Free (relatively), limitless, targeted, opted in and cannot be taken from you ever.

Cons - Slow to build, needs to be nurtured.

What's the goal here.

The first two have risk and/or a constant expense. The goal of all and any lead generation marketing should be to capture data and de platform the traffic into a source that you own.

Why is that important?

• Advertising is expensive, and costs only ever go up. That's not good.

• Buying leads can be unstable and quality/volume varies massively. That's not good.

• SEO work can be undone overnight by a Google algo change. That's not good.

By capturing and owning the contact data of your marketing efforts, you are then free to nurture, build relationships and promote offers to forever, at next to zero cost.

• Now you have a source of leads.

• Now you can factor out the cost of marketing

• Now you can be more profitable OR more competitive to win work

I hope this is sinking in...

How can you start to implement this?

• Either collate all your old leads/customers onto a spreadsheet (Minimum - Name, Email, Phone) or start to do so. This includes leads you generate, referrals and leads you purchase.

• Add these to a CRM or a marketing platform. There are many choices, ours being one.

• Commit to sending out a combination of useful, relevant information that helps solves your ideal prospects problems. Sprinkle it with subtle reminders of your products/services.

• Schedule alerts of promotions or offers you may have on via email and SMS.

This may potentially sound like a bit of work, but believe us, the rewards are huge.

Good luck and get in touch if you need any help.

Hi business owner

Whenever you are ready, there are two ways I can help you:

1. If you are looking for a way to manage leads, open conversation faster and close more deals i’d recommend asking us about our marketing automation suite, LeadCentre.

2. If you need to generate leads or improve your lead generation systems, yu cn speak to us about our marketing packages. All these packages include our LeadCentre software.

Here to help