Welcome to this first (of many, hopefully) chapter of the “Reddit Asks” series.
Simply put, it’s good ol’ Cél (me) recycling repurposing my replies to people’s queries from reddit to reuse them as content. Don’t call it lazy. It’s sustainability!
The discussion continued privately and I got permission from the business owner to publish the content. Thank you again, Manuel from Canada — wishing you every success!
Without further ado: enjoy the read.
Question
I am looking for advice as to how I should approach and implement a marketing strategy for our small family business. We work mostly on automobile paint protection and window tint installation, with some residential and commercial window tint projects.
I would like to scale up the business, as currently, we only have work for 2 full time employees, but have a total of 4 employees working.
This presents an issue initally, as the amount of salaries eats up most of our profit.
Ideally we’d want a strategy that starts generating leads as soon as possible and use the additional income towards a longer term organic growth. I am thinking this may mean the priorty may be PPC > Social Media > Local SEO.
Answer (+ follow-ups)
That’s not necessarily the case.
I’d even argue basic local SEO is the first thing you need to look at if you haven’t done so: GMB optimisation, directories, quickly optimising your website for local search — these are steps that shouldn’t cost too much money to go through.
Depending on the type of work you do (I’m not knowledgeable about automobile paint protection or tint installation, sorry!), social might be a better way to go first than PPC.
On the other hand, some business spend $0 on SEO and go all-in with social media too… so it’s never a one size fits all approach.
I do not have experience at all in these fields and although I would like to learn all this myself, I fear I do not have the time to do so.
My idea was to try and hire a freelancer to handle this work, but having no experience in these fields I do not know how to interview for a good freelancer. I’ve heard the stories of people paying for SEO only to find out months down the line the strategy did not work and all the funds were lost.
I would like to avoid this, especially at the beginning of our growth:
- Would anyone be able to give me any pointers as to what to look for in a freelancer?
- I’ve seen Upwork has many great options within our initial budget, and many of them have really high ratings but I am skeptical on the ratings as some offer their services at very low cost.
- Can I guide myself by years of experience on Upwork and rating alone or is there something else I need to take a look at?
- Would using a site such as clutch.co be better and more secure?
- I don’t have a budget in mind, but if costs are too high I may have to reduce my salary temporarily until I start generating sales.
Here’s a shameless plug on how to avoid the bad kind of agencies/freelancers.
TL;DR: You get what you pay for when it’s low cost, but that doesn’t mean high cost is necessarily a badge of quality.
TL;DR2: Avoid at all cost those who promise you the moon, especially those who will start DM’ing you now on reddit for no reason.
The best thing you can do is to ask someone who knows someone: referral. Surely you have friends/fellow entrepreneurs who already work with someone, and it’s working for them. Perhaps they can refer you to that someone!
As well, would anyone give me some guidance as to the areas I would need to focus on and if there is anything important I am missing?
Right now, I have identified the following areas that need work but I am not sure if this is all I should focus on or eliminate anything from this list:
- Local SEO (30% of the budget to start with, then slowly increase to 70% as organic growth starts to increase)
- PPC Google Ads (70% of the budget to start with, then slowly decrease to 30% to focus on Local SEO organic growth)
- Social Media Marketing (Do this myself?)
- Back End/Front End Web Optimization for SEO and proper landing page for PPC.
- Conversion Tracking (needed?)
- Independent Audit of Ad Campaign (every 3 months?)
Don’t reason in percentage of budget attribution.
Everything is potentially important, but you only have that much money so you can’t possibly do everything… some stuff virtually cost nothing, and some others are simply not worth your money.
See the 1st point to reason your way out of your dilemma.
I am not sure if anyone can also guide me as to the costs I would expect to pay on the above services. Or would these costs be heavily dependent on the market I am trying to target?
If you specified your location, it’d be easier to give you an idea of costs. For example, US and EU have wildly different expectations.
As a general rule of thumb, PPC management services cost anywhere between 5% to 25% of your monthly ad spend. That means if you have $1000/month to spend on Google Ads, an agency will ask anywhere from $50 to $250.
The lower the figure, the higher the %… so if you spend $1M/mo, you’re probably not going to get 25% but closer to 2-5%. This also means you get less bang for your buck if you hire someone with a low budget.
Some agencies and freelancers charge a flat fee, but it’s around that much.
Note that it tends to be pricier to ask for a setup and no management. We tend to be in for the long run so there’s little incentive for us to work on one-off missions, so prices go up for shorter durations.
Thanks in advance for any guidance as I try to learn the best way to approach all this marketing world. It is a lot to learn initially.
You need to sit down with someone to walk you through the priorities, otherwise you’re in for a bad time spending money here and there and not understanding what works and what doesn’t!
And as it happened, Manuel sat down with me (virtually) and had a longer chat by mail below. It’s edited for the sake of privacy (and readability).
Hi Cél!
First of all, I would like to thank you for all the valuable information you have given me on reddit. I am trying to help our small business grow in hopes I can in the next few years open a shop with workers. Local SEO/PPC is the first thing I’ve decided to look into expanding the business.
My main worry is attempting to hire someone who is not qualified and losing months/years and money early on trying to find the right candidate.
If you’re not in a hurry to do so, I’d advise you to learn as much as you possibly want to before hiring anyone – that way you can eliminate some of the noise yourself when considering your hire.
It’ll really save you a lot of money, effort, and time – if you don’t know someone you can trust straight away, it’s the best thing you can do.
Again, I really appreciate you going out of your way and taking your time to provide this advice. Time is important and nowadays you don’t encounter many people with the time or willingness to help. I hope some day your generosity is repaid.
Thank you! If I can’t work with some people for many reasons (budget or common interests, I suppose!), I hope I can at least help them NOT waste their money. My job is helping people make more money, not making myself rich!
Did you enjoy it? Feel free to connect with me if you want to continue the discussion!