SUMMARY
In this episode, Louis Massaro shares how to build trust and capture leads in your moving company.
- “Building a brand is expensive and takes a lot of time. Just focus on building trust and capturing leads. With all your marketing, that’s all you need to do.”
- “Explain in detail all of your services and the areas that you service. A lot of times we take for granted that the customer just knows because we’re a moving company, we do this, this, this, and this. Or that because we have this area code that we service all these areas. Make it clear in your marketing.”
- “I’m not saying you have to be on social media, posting, but there’s people out there that, one Thanksgiving, maybe you had a nephew over and it’s like, “Hey, you got to be on Facebook. I’ll set you up with a page. Don’t worry about it. I’ll do it for you. I’ll set it up.” They set it up with some old picture that they found with your old address. And if someone goes there, it just looks like a ghost town, like you’re out of business.”
- “Going from Neighbors Moving and Storage, it has that very down-home feel. It doesn’t sound corporate at all. If you see the trucks, it looks like the circus is coming to town. Right? So I could tell you, for local moves especially, the down-home feel wins all the time.”
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TRANSCRIPTION
Louis Massaro:
Two things to focus on, building trust and capturing leads. With all your marketing, that’s all you need to do. Okay? Building a brand is expensive and takes a lot of time. Just focus on building trust and capturing leads, building trust and capturing leads. So how do we do that?
Building trust, use real pictures of your mover staff and trucks. Even if you had to go take it on your iPhone and upload it, that’s fine. It’s better than stock photography. The stock photography worked 10 years ago when websites were new, right, and people didn’t really know how easy it was to just go find a fake image. But everybody’s onto that shit now. You’re not fooling anybody. They don’t think that that’s your, whatever it is, on the picture.
Explain in detail all of your services and the areas that you service. A lot of times we take for granted that the customer just knows because we’re a moving company, we do this, this, this, and this. Or that because we have this area code that we service all these areas. For example, if you’re in, let’s say, you service LA, Orange County and San Diego, you would want to make sure that that’s on there. Right? If you do local, long distance, storage, you want to make sure all that’s on there. When I say on there, that’s any marketing material you have, website, postcards, brochures, emails, whatever it might be.
Show off your awards and affiliations. People love logos. Any logo you could get, get it. Legitimate logos, don’t make shit up. Right? We had a company come in and they’re like, “Hey, we want to award you mover of the year,” this and that. I’m like, “Yeah?” They’re like, “Yeah, we got a logo. We’ll give you a plaque, but it’s X amount to do it.” Yeah, sign me. Right?Legitimately, that consumer business review named us mover the year. Guess what? I resign that every year and it was on every piece of marketing that we had. Real logo, real company that named us in their newspaper, mover the year. Wherever you could get logos from, get them, put them on there. People love them.
Display all of your license numbers everywhere. By the way, when it comes back to affiliations and awards, if you’ve got an A rating or an A-plus rating with the BBB, put that on there. BBB is real. Okay? Everybody thinks that, no, that’s old school. Listen, it’s not old school. If you Google the name of your company and they show up on the first page with a listing for you, it’s not old school. Right? Customer puts your name in and they have a listing, they’re going to go look at it. And even if they don’t go look at it, if you’ve got a good rating, put it on the side of your trucks, put it on your website. All right? It builds trust.
Use social proof like testimonials with real pictures and videos. I’ll show you my postcards. We had a testimonial on there, on the website, pictures, videos. Provide free valuable content, such as packing guides. You can have this that you just sent to your customers. We’ll talk about a value building sequence at some point this weekend. I had the curriculum down after the last four seminars, but now I’ve changed everything, so I don’t know when stuff’s coming, but it’s common this weekend. You give them a packing guide. That’s something they could download off your website or you send it out once you get their email. Just something super simple that provides value to them. It helps to build trust and establish you as an authority.
Have good reviews and show them off. Show them off, put them right on your website where they could see them, right? You don’t want to link over to Yelp, where you could put that this review is from Yelp. All right? We had all the reviews on there, actually created a whole other site, which I want to recommend called Neighbors Moving Reviews. And we linked to that site and I had somebody that every review that went out there, we put it on that site and actually did link to it at the time. It was some SEO strategy that really didn’t end up working anyways, so you don’t need to do that. Just put them all on your site.
Show off your years of experience in the business. You don’t have to say, listen, we’ve been in business since 1982 if you haven’t been in business since 1982. But, if the last 10 years, you worked for another moving company and now you own your own moving company, you could say, 12 years of experience. It’s a real statement. And if you’ve been in business for 10 years, 20 years, put that on everything. Right? Put that on everything.
Keep all your social platforms updated. I’m not saying you have to be on social media, posting, but there’s people out there that, one Thanksgiving, maybe you had a nephew over and it’s like, “Hey, you got to be on Facebook. I’ll set you up with a page. Don’t worry about it. I’ll do it for you. I’ll set it up.” They set it up with some old picture that they found with your old address. And if someone goes there, it just looks like a ghost town, like you’re out of business. Right? At least just get it updated. Make sure that the phone number is correct. Make sure the address is correct. All the data, all the link to the website, make sure that’s correct. Get some decent pictures on there. You don’t have to keep up with it. But again, anything that shows up on that page of Google, you want to be aware of all those listings and know that if customers are looking at it, are we putting our best foot forward to help build trust?
And then, have a consistent message in your marketing and sales. We talked about this for resolving customer complaints. I mean, you’ll start to see how all this stuff ties together. And it seems like so much stuff, but it’s like if you dial in just a few things, it all comes together. But if what’s in your marketing material is also what gets said by the salesperson, that builds trust. When your marketing material says one thing, they call in, your salesperson says something else, you lose trust, right?
Then, capture leads. Have calls to action leading the customer to call you or request a quote. So on your website, you want to have your phone number there at the top on a landing page, on a postcard, on your truck. Our trucks had the phone number and it said, call for a free, friendly estimate. On the website, it said, call now for free, friendly estimate and advice. Right? Calls to action. Just because the number’s there doesn’t mean anything. These are all just little cues that are going to help generate more calls. Remember, we got to capture leads. Having a beautiful website doesn’t mean anything. People landing on it doesn’t mean anything. Hey, we pay this much per click. I don’t care how much you pay per click. When the people landed on your site, how many of them turned into a lead?
Place your phone numbers in easy to spot areas in all your marketing, right? Don’t let them search for that. All these new modern looking websites with a phone number really small, forget that. Make the number big, not extremely big, but big enough that no one’s going to miss it, right? Big enough that if your grandma goes on there, she’s not going to miss the phone number. Right?
Have click to call set up on mobile version of your website. Okay? So either you should have a mobile version of your website, which we’ll go over, or responsive website. When they go to it, the phone number, when they see it, if they click on it, the little thing pops up. On an iPhone, at least, it says, call this number? Yes. If that feature doesn’t work, don’t think someone’s going to pull up their phone, find a pen, write down your number, go close the Google search, go to the phone number, type it in. No, they’re not. They’re just going to move on. The attention span is not there.
Easy to use quote forms to capture leads with a two-part web form. We’ll go over that. I won’t get into it now. I’ll show you an example. Offer coupons. Always offer coupons, even if you don’t want to have them in plain view on your website. It’s a closing tactic for your salesperson, instead of giving a discount, sounding like you’re wheeling. And you’re like, well, you know what? If you actually, here, let me send you a link to the website, you could actually get 10 boxes for free. Or you could actually get X amount of dollars off your move.
On my postcards, I always had, I used to do percentage off a move. I did 10% off a move for postcards. Free boxes. One month free storage. When long distance was with the 400N tariff years ago, before 2008, we had 70% off long distance moves on there, because that was how you did the tariff back then. I mean, everybody was offering 70, 75%. That’s just how it was. But then later on, we did $125 off long distance moves, 35 maybe off of local moves. I’ve found that people like the dollar amount more than the percentage. So you just figure out what you’re comfortable with, but offer coupons.
Put an explainer video on your home page. I’ll show you an example what that is. Use landing pages instead of your website for Paper Click marketing. We’ll get to that as well. Offer free downloads in exchange for email addresses. So we were talking about that packing guide. You could have that on your website. Maybe they don’t want to request a quote right away, but they’re like, you know what? I need to start thinking about packing. If you ever go to my website, you can get the ebook, but you put your email address in. You could do the same thing with moving checklists, packing guides. And now you have them in your database to email them.
Use a live chat popup. A lot of people will have live chat, but if they’re on the page for a certain amount of time and they’re scrolling, you could set it to pop up and say, is there anything we could help you with? Right? Just make sure if you have live chat, there’s somebody on the other end to have the chat. There’s nothing worse than, we’re not available right now, but we’ll get back to you. Right? If there’s no one available, just disable it during that time. If you’re going to do live chat, commit to it and set it up correctly, or just don’t put it on your website.
And use local phone numbers instead of 800 numbers. People want to do business with a local company. They don’t want to call a call center. An 800 number makes them feel like they’re calling a call center. So unless you have some kind of nationwide operation and you’ve got one website and you’re not going to list all these different phone numbers on there, have local numbers. It does not make you look bigger. Everybody wants to say, I want to look bigger for the customer. The customer doesn’t care how big you are. They care about the quality of your service.
And I can tell you, going from Neighbors Moving and Storage, it has that very down home feel. It doesn’t sound corporate at all. If you see the trucks, it looks like the circus is coming to town. Right? So I could tell you, people, for local moves especially, the down home feel wins all the time.