EP187: Unlocking Marketing Success: Insights from Ben Stimler of One Thing Marketing

discipline, integrity, and respect. Welcome to Hammer and Grind. Hey, welcome back to the show. Today, I have a guest with me today, and we're going to be talking about all things marketing-related. And I got a guest, Ben Stemmler, with One Thing Marketing. Ben, welcome to the show.

Absolutely. So there's some things that we're definitely going to get into that we want to talk about. We were talking before that we started recording, but before we get into all of that, give us a little 30,000 foot view of, of who Ben is and why marketing and how you got here.

Awesome. Well, I'm glad to have you on the show. I think we're going to have some good discussions here about marketing in regards to like marketing efforts. If I, cause here's, here's what I, when I run across a lot of people, Ben, a lot of contractors and I say, what kind of marketing are you doing? You know, like potential clients. And they're like, well, I don't really do any marketing. Like it's all word of mouth. It's all referral based. Right. Which I know you will agree that referrals are the best type of lead that you can possibly get. But. If you want to try and grow any resemblance of a business that's producing lots of money, you need to have some type of engine that's going to produce leads beyond referrals. So what are some tips or what are some techniques that we can, you know, contractors, home service-based professionals can do? Like what's the basics? Let's start with that. What are some basic things they need to have in place? Okay.

Makes sense. So we got, we got to have a Google presence. We got to collect some reviews. We got to have a website. We got to have the vehicle branding, the wraps. We got to have the uniforms. Yes.

Yeah. And so my last week's episode at dropped was on social proofing. like why it's important to have a optimized personal Facebook page, not a business page, but even like your personal page, if you have one, can you speak a little bit about just like the idea that people are going to social proof you in some capacity beyond just looking at your website? And obviously this isn't every single client, but there's a, there's a high number of people that will go and they want to know what kind of person are you. or who's going to be coming to my house and working the social proofing aspect of it. What's been your experience with that?

And I talked to not in my episode, like if you're going to be, if you're going to put dumb stuff on your profile, on your personal page, then like at least make it private. So the general public can't come and see all the foolishness that you put on there. There's one particular contractor that's, he's in my Facebook group. And I mean, people don't realize this, but I actually go and look at contractors, personal pages, their websites. If I come across a contractor and let's say they're having problems, maybe it's just we're on a random Facebook group together. like not even my stuff, I'm just in someone else's contracting group. And somebody's like, Hey, I'm having trouble in my business. You know, does anyone have any advice? I usually will click on their profile and I will go look at their profile. If they have a website listed, I will go to their website. Like I will actually go and social proof them before I even leave a comment. Because if I go to your profile and all I see is a bunch of nonsense and it doesn't look like you're a professional. I'm not going to waste my time even trying to give you advice because it's just going to go right over your head, right? Versus somebody that I go and I see like, oh, this is a professional who's really trying to do well and he's just struggling. That gives me motivation to want to invest time into that interaction. And that's just me as a business coach. Like your clients, they're going to spend $100,000. They're going to be doing a lot more. than just that. And so the social proofing aspect is important, but even like on your website, do you recommend like having all of their team on a website, like an about us section? Do you recommend that? Do you think it matters or it doesn't matter? What's your opinion on that part?

Yeah. And you mentioned something earlier about consistency, which I think is huge. Like for one, like brand colors and all that, if you have gray shirts with your, you know, your, uh, screen print logo on there, and then you drive black trucks and you go to your website and it's blue, you know, and your Facebook page has got yellow, like there's just so much confusion. Am I talking to the same company? Like, is this the guy that came out? Cause it doesn't look the same. So having that consistency, would you agree?

Well, I think I've preached about this, so I'm blue in the face. But I think with tradesmen in general, the overall arching belief is that as long as I do good work, then my work will speak for itself. And then I'll get a bunch of referrals and then everything will be great. Right. Like I don't have to advertise. I don't need a website. I get all the time. You know, people like I've been in construction for 20 years. I don't have a website. It's like, OK, but you establish yourself a different way. 20 years ago, and then you got to market penetration and then your reputation took over. And so you can't say someone starting a business today doesn't need a website. Like that's not, that doesn't equally go across the board. No.

I did a video, like a TikTok video recently about, you know, when I started my business in 2009, there was still, you still had like newspapers, like you could still run, you know, ads in your local newspaper. That was an effective marketing strategy. You know, today there are no newspapers really. They don't exist. There's the, you know, the thrifty nickel was one that you could also advertise in back in the day. And so I think a lot of times, especially guys that have been in the game long, longer than a few years, they want to like, once they find something that works in regards to like marketing, they just want to like, say, check off the box. I never have to think about it again. I just keep doing this one thing forever and it's going to keep producing the same result. I mean, what's, what's your thoughts on that? Yeah.

Yeah, I would agree. One of the things that I've seen recently, like just in the past several weeks, is people are starting to say, hey, you know, is your lead slowing down? Has your phone stopped ringing? You know, what's going on right now in the economy? And feel the temperature. in the room getting hotter, people are starting to get worried about some of their, you know, lead flow and some of their, you know, their business because they're not, you know, some of these guys are living like lead to lead. I mean, they're like, they get this one lead, they sell it. And another lead comes in right before that job's finished. And they happen to sell that. And they're just, you know, they're not living paycheck to paycheck. They're living lead to lead. And they don't know how to turn this faucet on to get more leads. But I don't think people understand is that. When you have a down economy or when things do get slow, you actually have to do more marketing than what you traditionally had to do. And I know a lot of people that started post-COVID, a lot of contractors that I talked to that started 2020 after COVID, where it was like you could just throw a magnet on your truck and your phone would ring off the hook. That's not normal. That's not a normal situation. And they got used to that. And so now I see a lot of people that are saying, hey, the phone's not ringing. And I go ask him, well, what are you doing for marketing? Well, just, you know, I post on Facebook two times a week and, you know, referrals. And I'm like, well, no wonder you don't have any leads. Right.

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Well, I mean, just looking at our website, you know, and I don't know, I have no idea what you guys charge, but. You can go online. It could be anywhere from 500 to 50,000, right? So anywhere in between there for a website. But if I spend, let's say $10,000 on a website and it makes me, you know, half a million dollars a year in return, I would say it's a pretty good return on my investment.

Yeah, it's a return of investment. And a lot of times people see this as an expense. And I tell people all the time, like coaching, websites, you know, marketing, those really aren't expenses. Those really are investments. Now you could go spend $10,000 on Facebook ads and blow all your money. That's a possibility, right? But like websites and you know, anything it's going to, if you invest money into something and then it re it brings you back a bunch of its friends. right it's it comes back with a bunch of its friends that's called an investment it's not an expense now it doesn't always make it you know more affordable if you got to spend you know again ten thousand dollars on a website or whatever it is and you don't have ten thousand dollars that doesn't make it easier but it's still not the same as like oh i'm just gonna blow ten thousand dollars just like no it's an investment you know three months six months a year a year and a half, like you're going to get a return on that investment at some point.

absolutely. I think a lot of times with contractors is they look at this stuff as a if or. So it's like if I have a business and I get my truck wrapped, right, then that's an object. And then it's like, or I can get a website. So it's like, get a truck or a website or, you know, get a website or do social media marketing. And a lot of it's like, ors. And I tell people all the time, it's not an or it's an, and it's, you get a truck and you get a website and you have Google reviews, you know, and you do social media marketing and you do networking. Like, And so when you start adding all these ends, it can definitely be overwhelming in terms of time that you would have to invest as an owner. And I've talked before about like in terms of marketing, if you're just starting out or if you don't have it, if you're not making a ton of money, if you don't have enough money to invest, the only other tool or the only other currency that you have is time. And so like you have to invest a bunch of your time doing stuff that you can't pay for. You really want to get to where you can just pay for everything and then have a bunch of free time. And there's definitely a balance there, right? Depending on where you're at in your business and growth and profitability and all that. But I mean, me personally, I'm trying to buy out as much things as I possibly can because I want more time. I want more time. And I think a lot of younger contractors, they believe or have this belief that there's unlimited time and they can work, you know, a hundred hours a week because they have the energy and they feel like it's time is, you know, unlimited. They, us older farts are like, uh, you know, pump your brakes. You're going to run out of time. You're going to run out of energy. You need to start looking at where you can really, you know, spend the money wisely to give you the most leverage. so that you can have the highest return on your investment.

know, in order to date myself, the first website I had, I built with Microsoft front page. So you, you probably know what that is. A lot of guys listening don't know what that is, but that's like an old school, you know, the web development platform. Yeah. Was it worth my effort to spend, you know, dozens and dozens and dozens of hours, first of all, learning how to use it. And then second of all, very, very poorly implementing it because I'm not a professional website designer, but I thought I was saving money, you know, to do this on my own. And so I traded. I don't know,40,50 hours of my time trying to learn and do this. That is, I mean, you can't even use it anymore. Like it's, it's stupid to even know how to use Microsoft front page. So it was a completely wasted effort in my, for me to try and learn how to do this. And I think a lot of people don't understand, like there is, there is actually good and bad websites. Like just because you have a website. I mean, that's better than nothing. Even if it's a terrible looking website, it's better than not having anything, but still a really good website is going to really make a big difference. Won't

I thought you were going to maybe make a joke about Microsoft front page.

Well, I, I mean, I do love technology. My first business, actually, I, I built computers and did networking. So I actually came from a computer background and technology. So that's one thing that I've always used to utilize in my business to really give me an advantage over everyone else. And, you know, just having a coaching call right before this and We're talking about using QR codes for, for SOPs, like, you know, having a QR code on something that your guys can just scan with their camera. And it has a, you know, it has a video that shows them how to do something. But I, you know, this is like becoming really popular. And like, just in the last year, I've seen two or three other companies pop up that like do QR codes for SOPs. And I was like, I was using QR codes seven years ago. for marketing i had a qr code on the back of my truck that if you scanned it would take them to my website and 90 of the population didn't even know what a qr code was no yeah

like yeah and so like being early in technology is going to have its advantages if you're always late so like right now If you're like, oh, I'm going to start collecting Google reviews because I know you said that's important. It is, and you should do that. But the company that's already been doing it for five years that has 250 reviews and they consistently do it, you're never going to catch up to them, right? And so, like, you always have to be, I shouldn't say always, you need to be early adopters to any new technology once it, like, right when it starts to take off. Maybe not too early. But right when it starts to take off, you really want to cash in on that trend. Would you agree with that?

Yeah, I don't know the hard numbers, but basically every decade, the way people buy changes completely. And if you're still using, implementing, you know, three decade old technologies or processes or marketing, you're going to get left behind. I mean, it's just that simple.

certain on the table.

And if you don't have the website or the Google listing or any of that stuff in place, then you're missing all of those leads. Correct. Well, I know we've covered a lot of stuff today, and I know people listening have some good... reinforcement of like things they should be doing. Uh, if somebody is interested in your services at one thing marketing, how can they, uh, you know, get ahold of you? What do you specialize in mainly?

Perfect. And we'll put the links in the show notes for anybody who's interested. Ben, one thing I always like to ask everybody is what's a book that you're reading or one that you would recommend?

So, yeah, I've read that book. It's very interesting. There's a lot of data in that book. Yeah.

Awesome. Well, thanks so much again for being on the show, Ben. I appreciate it, your time today.

Well, guys, that's the end of the episode. You know where to find me on the social media is just search for the Hammer and Grind podcast. Look out for some exciting things I got coming out here in the future. Keep it a little secret for now, a little cliffhanger, but I have some exciting news to share here really soon. But until then. Just follow along on social media. And until next time, guys, remember, profit is not a dirty word.