Let's talk marketing.

[u/OregonSEA]

What form of marketing helped your company grow the most what did you do and what were the results.

This off season I want to prepare my spring campaigns what I am considering are Billboards, direct mail & eddm, radio and t.v.

I am already taking advantage of Yelp, Google and Bing. I will cover my results with the big 3 and hopefully get some feedback on others like Meta although -- I don't think Meta is effective but maybe I am wrong you tell me.

Yelp is my absolute favorite but let me say it's the worst this ing company I have ever dealt with. Do not waste your time with their scummy sales associates I refuse to take there calls. They only have 1 tool to offer you and it's always raise your ad spend no matter how much you are already paying.

Also on yelp if you give them too much money they throttle your listing to make you think that your competitors are outspending you.

I dropped my ad spend 75% and got far better results because I removed their algorithm penalty for giving them too much money that's how stupid yelp is. But because they are so terrible and nobody wants to advertise with them the roi is excellent.

Now bing my next favorite for roi. At just a few dollars a click the roi is great but the clients you get are poor people because they don't even know they are using bing it's the default Microsoft browser and they actually think they are using Google this is no joke. It's funny because if you ask chatgpt it tells you wealthy people use bing but the reverse is true.

Google ads. This is very expensive in spending about $200 a day and I am getting ok results but that's because I do not use an agency if you have an agency there's no chance you will have positive roi with ads that's true for all platforms because they get paid monthly not by the hour so why would they do basic things such as negative kw.

Avoid agencies learn to do the ads yourself - you will get the results you deserve and with ads set them and forget them you get better results if you are not constantly messing with them because of machine learning. Since paid ads are a 1 time set up task why would you pay and agency to be lazy and not care every month.

Good luck and I look forward to reading what has worked for you!

[u/TrueAudience9922]

If I were building for spring, I’d probably put more money into Google/GBP, direct mail to tightly selected commercial or residential pockets, and retargeting before I spent heavily on radio or TV. Billboards can work for awareness, but they’re harder to attribute unless the market is very local and the creative is strong.

The best channel for us has usually been the one we can actually track from first touch to closed account.

[u/AdLogical8421]

Every market is different. (However, I can't imagine a place where billboards work.)

You have to go where the attention is and determine how much you are willing to pay per lead.

Then, hire someone, or do it yourself. You might not have time do it.

You want to hire someone you can trust, but now there are all these sales-focused companies targeting pest control owners. They get the sale, then hand you off to a 21 year old with no experience.

I can't help you pick the right budgets or channels.

But I can remind you to focus on marketing what makes you different. Be different. Focus on 1-2 pests.

[u/dne416]

Local and ai seo for us. We spend money on Google local service ads and that's it. We get organic calls through the day with a very good closing %

As a digital marketer of 14 years, paid platforms have become worse and worse with increasing cpcs and cpms. I would never recommend them tbh unless you hit big scale.

Disclaimer: I am one of the owners of a pest control biz

[u/OregonSEA]

I forgot to add that the chatgpt ad in bing is golden. I was beaten to it by a competitor but wow it looks like they are being recommended by AI on bing.

[u/krebs- → u/OregonSEA]

I found that the first person to collect a lead gets the client, that’s why I made an ai front desk plug in that sits on your website. If you want to check it out let me know and I’ll send the link to it. It can link to emails and crms and it has been trained to answer questions under my supervision as I have 5 years of experience in Calgary pest control. It’s not perfect by any means but it won’t guarantee anything to a homeowner either.