EP 151: Stephan Foos on Building a Strong Digital Presence for Contractors

Yeah, so I'm the owner of Impact Digital. We specialize in some specific marketing services for small to medium-sized residential contractors. So that's website design, ad management, and SEO services. Ad management primarily on Facebook or Instagram, so the Meta platform, and SEO primarily around content creation. Previous to Impact, I've done a number of things. Started in the construction industry in about 2014. Grew a home remodeling company to $5 million in revenue in about five years. And then led marketing and sales at Progel Construction Management Software. So marketing, sales, growth, especially as it relates to the construction industry, has been my bread and butter for many, many years now.

I think at the root of everything is a strong website. It's a strong presence. It's a strong brand image, messaging, positioning, et cetera. The website itself is that foundation that's going to equate to success for everything else. Outside of that, I'd have to go paid ads because it's faster. It's predictable. And usually that's what we're seeing. people usually need some return on their investment rather quickly. So something like SEO, which is a longer term play, it may take a while to get there. Whereas paid ads, dial it in, start drawing in leads, closing some of those leads. It's going to drive a more significant impact in the beginning stages to then fund other avenues, essentially.

Yeah,100%.

take in most cases. Yeah, yeah. And there's the outliers to where you create something. It's a niche service in a niche area and you go live and indexes with Google very, very quickly. And you have a call, you know, next day or something like that. But yeah, typically that's that's not what we're going to see. More and more people are online. There's more competition out there. So it takes a while to basically. be able to be in the higher search position rankings as your competitors that have been there for a while.

Definitely varies. I'd say a couple of months is fair. You have to allow time for indexing, which is basically Google's recognizing your site and it wants to include it in its search results. You have to allow time for the journey between a prospect learning and converting. So how long does it typically take somebody to be exposed to your brand before they reach out? I don't know. If you don't have a website or any sort of like CRM or something like that, you may not know the answer to that too. So that's a very imperative metric to be aware of when it comes to expectations for, hey, I've invested in this website. When am I going to see my return? Well, when you're driving down the road and somebody sees your sign, how quickly are they going to be picking up the phone to call you? I don't know.

Yeah, you definitely can. You can submit a sitemap, which is generally step number one. And that's basically real explicit to Google. Here's all your links. Here's the organization of that. On a one-off, you can submit individual pages for indexing. And that can definitely streamline that process a lot faster. Usually with newer sites, though, even if you go those routes, it can still take some time for that initial indexing. There's different scenarios in which pages, individual pages may be indexed or crawled, but not indexed or discovered or not indexed, which may be a quality factor, maybe a time factor if the site is brand new. Fortunately, with Google, there's a lot of negotiating you can do with Google, but at the end of the day, Google is going to do what it's going to do. But you can shortcut it. Um, typically. Yeah.

Nothing comes to mind immediately. I try and stay away from black hat tactics and forums and everything. Um, there's definitely some gray areas, but, uh, yeah, I, I try not even to venture down those paths. So, um, I'm sure there's probably some things you can do, but, uh, yeah, I couldn't tell you what that is.

So it's unfortunate because. The claims are usually accurate, but the devil's in the details. So can you rank for a keyword within a couple of days? Yeah. But what is that keyword? Is it bathroom remodeler near me, which is highly competitive, which requires topical authority? It demands a high domain ranking to be able to be in the top results of something like that. That's going to take time. That's going to take an investment in content and strategy, et cetera. But are you going to rank for? you know, a long tail, irrelevant keyword, like dog chains, construction companies, or just something weird like that. Yeah, you could rank for that next day. It's something that's not searched for, no problem. But is it going to move the needle for you? No. So that's kind of a big problem with a lot of these crazy claims out there of we're going to do this in no time at all, or that in no time at all. It's technically truthful, but the devil's in the details there. Is it something that's actually going to move the needle for you? And usually not. It's Google's responsibility to curate everything that's on the internet and deliver it to relevant search results in under one second. So it's really, really hard to trick Google, which is where like some of these things like, yeah, it's legit. It's just, it's in the details. It's not actually going to help you. You know, usually that's what those things boil down to.

I mean, it really comes down to I'm a big believer in topical authority. So that's establishing yourself as a subject expert in a specific topic or maybe multiple topics that may be a bathroom remodels. We want to be the, the authority on bathroom remodels. It's our job to demonstrate that we have to lead through. Google's ranking EAT, basically experience, authority, trustworthiness. All these things play into whether or not we're actually going to rank for something and we have to demonstrate it. So if you have like bathroom remodels near me, for example, how you're going to rank for that, which is an extremely competitive keyword because it's a transactional keyword, is by writing just as much as you can think of, you know, use some keyword research, use Use topics that come up in sales calls, et cetera. Write helpful, genuine content about the bathroom remodel process. Potentially hundreds of pages if you're in a very competitive area. But that's going to help people understand that you're an authority on the subject. And it's going to signal to Google, most importantly, that you're an authority on the subject as well. So, yeah, ultimately, a bigger budget can plow through that a lot faster. But it is one of those things where slow and steady kind of wins the race on that.

It's so it's it used to just be E-T-E-A-T. It's it's an acronym that's basically for Google's quality guidelines. It stands for now it stands for expertise, experience, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. Whereas before it just used to be expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. So what Google is looking for, I think this rolled out in late 2022. What Google is looking for is basically you expressing the fact that you have experience, you have expertise in whatever subject you're writing about. So, you know, little things that you can do in a blog article, for example, could be, you know, we're writing about a topic and maybe we have like a little did you know it's a note from the owner. And it's something that's relevant that only you would know through experience, right? Like maybe you're doing a. an article on demolition or something like that. And you're talking about how customer can save some money if they do the demo themselves. And then you might have like a little, did you know, you know, Hey, most customers think of demo as sledgehammers on a, on a vanity and pulling it out and all the fun stuff. They don't really consider pulling out every single staple and what a grind all of that's going to be. These, these little bits of information that you can intertwine into your articles is exactly what, what Google's looking for. That's going to lead to. higher rankings ultimately, which, you know, leads eventually down the road to more leads and eventually revenue.

Yeah. Yeah. About the, uh, the designer and the bathroom remodeling process.

A hundred percent. I mean, most of your pages on a website, they're more transactional. transactional focused pages, right? Bathroom remodel page, kitchen remodel page, et cetera. Those are again, keywords and topics that are highly competitive. So how you start outranking your competition is by building a sound blogging strategy. And a lot of people I talk with too, like, ah, blogs, I don't want to blog. I'm not a blogger. You know, I, I work with my hands. I'm not a blogger, you know, and it's, it's not. I mean, it should be obvious, but based off of some of the conversations I have, I mean, it's not sitting there and blogging about what you had for breakfast or anything like that. It is bringing genuine value to people that we consider top of funnel. So people that are in the very beginning buyer stages, more of the awareness stages, the investigational stages. Being able to provide helpful content to those individuals earns you not just their following. the brand recognition from those individuals. But that's where, again, it signals to Google that you're an expert in this matter. And then we do that 10-fold,15-fold with 10 or 15 different blogs. And it becomes more and more indisputable that we know exactly what we're talking about, which translates to our more competitive pages starting to rank higher.

Yeah. I mean, going back to the point of utilizing AI, it, yeah, it's a, it's a hotly debated topic, right? Is, is AI something that can be recognized by Google or is it not? At the end of the day, Google has, has declared that AI content can still be indexed. It's indexable content. What Google is looking for is helpful content. And that's the biggest differentiator between having content that's actually indexed and showing up in the search results and not? Is it quality? Is it helpful? Is it going to move the needle for anybody that's in any part of the relevant buying stages, I guess? So generally what I like to do is utilize ChatGPT to come up with ideas. If we want to be the industry leader on bathroom remodels in our area, let's plan that out. What's it going to take to become the industry leader in bathroom remodels? Well, we're going to have to write content around it. Okay. We could plug in something into chat, give me 10 topics to write about for bathroom remodels in my area. That's a start. You could take it next step with other tools where you're analyzing keywords or you're talking with sales and understanding buyer questions that are coming up all the time. And you can intertwine that into your content creation. But at the end of the day, you don't have to necessarily be incredibly creative in. figuring out what to even write about when you can rely on AI tools to help you form the skeleton, if you will, what that outline is going to look like. And from there, take your own experience and just have fun with it too. I mean, marketing doesn't have to be a chore and you can look at it as, shoot, I have to do this now and I have to do that now or whatever. But the reality is the construction industry is the second least digitized industry across the board. So there is tremendous opportunity in almost every industry, in almost every market to become a leader in whatever it is that you do. I like to, this is kind of an extreme example, but I like to kind of compare it to like buying Bitcoin early. You know, you could be one of the first in your area to establish something rock solid between your reviews, between a quality website, between blogs that are are focused on that topical relevancy that I talked about. There's tremendous opportunity to just establish yourself as number one. You pair that with wraps that are driving down this, wrap vehicles that are driving down the street, maybe occasional billboard, a brand awareness campaign on Facebook or Instagram or whatever. And it's never been easier to just get in front of the masses before.

Agriculture. I think it's agriculture.

Yeah. Yeah.

Who knows? Some of those things are, why are they even included? But construction is one of those ones too. I think some people might look at and say, well, why does that even matter? I keep myself busy with my own work and my own referrals or whatever. And yeah, that goes great until it doesn't. Right.

Right, right. It's kind of interesting when you go, there's a theme that I'm seeing where construction companies that are on the smaller end, maybe owner operator, maybe one or two guys in the field. Really, they're small enough where they can stay busy with. referrals or maybe they've made a couple of relationships at like tile stores or something like that, where they're getting the occasional referral passed over to them. And it definitely works for some time, but putting all your, all of your eggs in one basket like that, first of all, is dangerous. And second of all, that's not anything that you can scale. How do you scale that? You can go to more stores, you can make more relationships. Sure. But that's only going to get you so far and you're completely dependent on that relationship. What happens when that store gets their own in-house guy that's going to start doing it because the store recognized that they could be making some money off of that or whatever. Referrals are going to be your highest, potentially highest quality leads that you can get. That the most qualified lead on Facebook, on Google or whatever is going to pale in comparison to somebody that was specifically told to call you where they got a little ranting and raving about how awesome you are. But it's not scalable. And that's where like, if you want to start crushing the million dollar, $2 million, $10 million years, you have to identify what are all the possible growth channels that we can tap into. And most importantly, which of these is going to be scalable?

Go

Yeah,100%. And what happens too when that one source, something got back to them that may not have ever occurred, but it soured that relationship and you don't even know. You're just noticing that the leads are rolling in less and less frequently. When you look at growth and you look at growth channels, referrals are... A huge channel for growth. The more referrals that we can get, the better, for sure. Partnerships is another one. Establishing partnerships with your local real estate agents, for example. People that are not quite past customers or direct referrals, but there's some sort of partnership that's established there. They're going to pass you customers. You're going to take care of them. Everybody wins. SEO, paid ads, lead purchasing to some extent. Every single one of these things has their own blue ocean, this right combination that's going to usually work for you. And it's a matter of setting all of that up to insulate yourself from the risk of this one channel has soured on me. Now, what do I do? I've been trying to grow. I've brought on four workers. I don't have work for them. Even going beyond your own like, hey, I'm not staying busy. I have a cash flow problem. Now, how do I communicate this to the guys? You know, these are these are very real problems that happen every day and the risk can be mitigated. If you're establishing more of these growth channels and opportunities that are out there.

Digital marketing is a phenomenal lever because it's a little bit of work on like the paid ad side of things. There's some qualifying. There's some A-B testing. There's getting an ad to work, getting a landing page to work. refining what our definition of quality is, but it's something that's scalable. You get to a point where you know for every $150 you spend, there's going to be a quality lead that you can pick up the phone, sell them on an on-site consultation and get out there and have a high likelihood of sale. It's a no-brainer. I need 10 leads this month because I have an 80% closing ratio and I actually need eight customers. Great. That's how much money we're going to throw in. It becomes something that can be dependable. But guess what? Something happens. We have Zuckerberg, you know, answering to Congress and something happens with the ad channel. It gets shut down temporarily. You have Google backed up. You have your SEO. You have your referrals. You have your partnerships that are going to help you weather that storm. It's imperative to growth and insulating yourself from that risk ultimately.

No,100%. I mean, when we were growing our construction company, we had lettered vehicles out there. And this was maybe 2015,2016. We had magnets. The vehicles just had the most minimalist logo and phone number. I mean, it was way too small. Like realistically, the only people that are going to see it is when you're parked in traffic and they're right next to you, you know, but we still got several calls per month and we still had people saying, Hey, I see you guys all over town. We don't do work in your area, but you've probably seen us drive through. You've seen one vehicle drive through, but we were on a job site that month. So you saw us drive through multiple times. It gives you, it gives you the, the brand awareness that you're looking for. And it does, it helps, it helps you pull in leads and over time, like you said, it gets better because pretty soon you've got a professionally wrapped vehicle where people can spot you from a mile away. And they're not just dependent on being parked next to you in traffic, they can actually recognize and see you as you're driving down the road. That natural progression is great. And it kind of goes back to like, you know. perfect being the enemy of good enough, you know, in some of these cases, let's get something out there and let's iterate on it over time. Let's, let's allow it to get better and better and go through the natural evolution there. But let's start with something.

It's more important for me to not be responsible for my actions.

Yeah, I mean, let me start with the story real quick. My very first experience in construction. I was hired as an office manager at a tile company in 2013. And I started, whoever was in that position before me quit, walked out, no notice. So I'm just there day one trying to figure out what's even going on. Phone rings. I have a lady and she sounds scared on the phone. And she's explaining to me very politely so as not to incite what's happening behind her. But we have a tile setter out there, apparently, that was brand new. We had thrown out onto a job and he had a real... He was real hotheaded. So he's in the bathroom throwing tiles, putting holes in the wall, just a disaster. And those kinds of conversations that are experiences that somebody has, that's an experience that they have when they're looking for the next contractor. They want to make sure they're not getting hothead in their bathroom again. Not only that, but they're going to share that conversation with their friends, their family, because it's something interesting to talk about. So suddenly, not only did she... have a bad experience. But by extension, everybody she knows has also had that experience because that's just how it goes. So now you have everybody that's hyper aware of this absolute horror story that's very, very infrequently is something like that going to happen, but it's still top of people's mind. There's a lot of concern. Letting somebody into your castle to work on your home, you have to be able to trust them. And it's never been easier to go online and check reviews for a company, find somebody's social profile. And then from there, dive in and see like even political views, even anything that could incite somebody needs to be considered before you post it because you are representing your company while you're out there. It's one thing to read reviews. Okay, great. They have a five-star reputation, but I go on to somebody's social profile and I find something I don't agree with gone, or I find something that I find offensive gone. It could be the profile for the company. It could be profile for somebody personable. And maybe we're overflowed with leads and we don't care. We only want certain people doing certain things or whatever. But at the end of the day, the company's growth is the primary concern, more revenue that's coming in. And we are going to jeopardize that if we're not careful with our online image. And it's just as important, like you're saying, to have that on the company level as much as it is the personable level.

Yeah, that's the reality. I mean, that's the horror of social media is anybody can say anything that they want. And to the unsuspecting person that is reading that has no bias whatsoever, has no idea what happened or hasn't happened. I mean, they're left to interpret that how they're going to interpret it.

absolutely. That's probably the worst way you could go about responding to a negative review is getting hyper defensive or aggressive. I mean, ultimately that review, yes, it's a reflection on you, but that review is going to translate to whether or not somebody that's on the fence about contacting your company is going to contact you or not. So you are writing a response, not for the person that left the review. You are writing a response for potential prospects that are investigating your company. owning up to it, not making excuses and stressing that you want to make it right. So sorry, this happened. We completely let X, Y, and Z slip. I'm the owner. I want to take care of you. Give me a call. We'll get this straightened out. That's going to be a hundred, a hundred out of a hundred times a better response. It's going to still translate to people wanting to contact you compared to something that's overly aggressive or making excuses. I mean, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. Sometimes you have to take a knee. And you have to consider how this is going to translate to outside parties.

Exactly. Yep. Seen that. Heard those. Read those. Yeah. Let me get back to something you were talking about with the vehicle wrap. Something I want to touch on there. So the vehicle wraps as we see them driving down the street now, where it's like the whole vehicle is wrapped. You have an image in there. It's easy to remember. All of these positive things about the. brand that's happening there is relatively new. Go back five years previous. It's more like your truck you're talking about where it's a lot more conservative, if you will, in that it's maybe a logo and a phone number and it's not demanding your attention, right? That is a perfect example as to where websites are at and where contractors are at with their digital marketing. So basically, When I'm talking to people about building a website, there's two different types of websites. There's an online brochure and then there's a website that's designed to actually generate leads and convert them to prospects, right? So what does that look like? An online brochure is where you go out and you quickly list your services. Maybe it's one page long. You scroll down, you can see a little bit of everything. You have a quick introduction to the team or something like that. But maybe it's a single page. We threw it up on, you know. Wix or something overnight, and it's good enough. Anybody that is going to contact us, we can send them this website and show them that we have an online presence. That is a completely different thing than building a website. And this goes for paid ads too, but building a website that's designed to rank, designed where each individual service page is focusing on a transactional keyword and hot competition. And the blogs are focused on informational keywords that lead. to those transactional keywords, right? In the software realm, which I am just now stepping out of, I've been in there for five years. I came from a bootstrap company where in the software world, that's where all the VCs are right now. They are just slinging tens of millions of dollars at each other, just trying to take each other's market cap, right? And there are so many techniques that have been thought out and refined. to the last possible consideration. You know this, we talked about contact form speed the other day. What I see right now for the construction industry is a huge opportunity to be one of the first contractors that are leveraging what's been learned in other industries, establishing it as part of your foundation, because it will be just like the RAPS five years from now. People are going to have a lot more advanced websites. They're going to have websites that are designed to rank and not necessarily just be online brochures. If we can be one of the first, then we can maintain that dominance a lot longer. If we're one of the people that are tuning in and realizing that five years from now, that is a very tough uphill battle. And it's an expensive battle too, because it goes into not just your investment in terms of like monetary, but your investment in time too, in content creation and all of that. And that goes for paid ads too. I mean, I talk with a lot of people that I've used an agency, I've run ads before, it didn't do anything for me. Well, yeah, I took a look here and what you're doing is you're boosting posts or you're pushing for the absolute worst quality so that your agency can say, well, you gave me $100 and I turned that into 15 leads from you. If all 15 leads are garbage, who does that help? Nobody. It's more of a time suck for you to be contacting and following up with all 15 of those. Now, there is a strategy in place where you start quantity and you narrow into quality. But my point is, is there are more advanced ways of going about digital marketing, borrowing from other industries to allow you to establish a strong foundation to become number one and to stay number one. And I think those that are willing to take that on now are going to find significantly more longevity and reduced risk ultimately over time and being able to grow their business.

And it's the same with websites.

And we're talking a lot about lead acquisition because that's where a lot of people are right now. I mean, we're in the contracting world. One job starts, then it ends and we're on to the next, right? So usually we're only a couple of months out, a couple of weeks out. Sometimes we're fortunate enough to be a couple of years out with work or whatever. But more than that, establishing a strong brand presence, especially through reviews, allows you to break into a different tier customer. When we first started, we started as a tile service company doing regrouts, basic tile installation work, et cetera. We didn't know what to price. So what do we do? We went to HomeWise. HomeWise. com, what should we charge for installing a floor? $6 a square foot. Got it. And that just about ran us out of business because we were looking at the lowest possible denominator. How can we be competitive against Chuck in the truck? Well, guess what? Chuck in the truck doesn't have overhead. He's not going to pay for somebody to answer the phones. Sometimes you got to play a little bit. You have to establish your reviews. But once you have solid reviews, you have a solid presence, you've worked a solid name for yourself. It's so much easier to start justifying three, four or five times what you were originally charging. It's so much easier because people recognize that that quality is there. And this higher tier customer that you start to break into recognizes that you get what you pay for ultimately.

Yeah, website is impactdigitalco. com. On there is a contact form. There's an email. There's a phone number. Whatever method of communication you prefer, feel free to reach out.

I think we're up to 11 or 12 now.

Yeah, a book I'm currently reading is Subtle Art of Not Giving an F.I don't know how censored we have to be here.

Yeah. Subtle art of

Giving a fluff. Yeah.

Brad. Thanks for having me. Yeah.