In the latest episode of the Pest Control Marketing podcast, Andy tackles yet another question from one of his listeners, also talks about Internet Marketing!
What is the Google Premier Partner Program?
Andy’s marketing agency, K-3 Marketing, is a part of the Google Premier Partner Program.
As of 2021, there are two partner statuses that you can achieve with Google. To become a standard Google partner you have to have at least a 70% optimization score in all of your accounts. You have to meet a 90-day ad spend requirement of $20,000 across all of your managed accounts to show that your company has a healthy amount of activity. Also, 50% of your eligible users (people on your team) have to have a certification from Google.
To be eligible for the Google Premier Partner status in 2021, companies will need to earn a new partner badge. The Google partners program will then grant premier status to the top 3% of participating companies each year. Google selects the premier partners based on a number of factors, such as their annual ad spend across managed accounts, client growth, and client retention
In essence, Google Premier Partners have a lot of history, they’ve shown proven results, great retention, and professional service. Google also provides reps for marketing agencies so that they have a lot more success and quality.
This month’s topic is internet marketing setup for success.
If you have an established business or are looking to start a pest control or a wildlife control company, you really want to make sure that 2021 is a great year.
What can you do online to be successful in internet marketing?
BRANDING
Start with creating some sort of branding document or style guide.
If you’ve just started a pest control company, you’ll have to get a logo made. This is to put on your website as well as on any other assets, e.g. your email signature, your trucks, your signage, the emails that you send out, etc.
You need to take into account some simple things like:
– what’s your logo
– is there a horizontal version of your logo or a square version
– what about the inverse of that logo
– what are the colors that you use
– which fonts do you use
– what does it look like on a white background versus a black background
– what’s the layout
– what’s the kind of overall message, theme, and pictures that you choose
Once you’ve laid this out, anything you create moving forward, anything on the web or even stationary should always follow this style guide. You need to build a brand that can kind of trigger in people’s minds and remind them of your company. So, if you haven’t done that already, then you should take the time to do it.
WEBSITE
You obviously need to have a website for your business. A lot of business owners don’t understand where to get a website, what is a domain, what is hosting, and what is email.
Your domain is your www.something.com or.net or whatever you have. You have to register your domain through a domain registrar, for example GoDaddy, and it’s typically 7 or 8 dollars a year.
Hosting is usually a monthly fee, or you can pay for a yearly, and it’s around 50 or 60 dollars a month. So hosting is literally a machine sitting somewhere on earth that hosts your files of your website. So when someone types in your domain address, the browser pings that server and the server sends it back to the screen.
You need to get a domain hosting email address. Don’t send people to, or send invoices from an AOL or Yahoo or Gmail, you need to have billing@, info@, questions@, or whatever at your domain.
Another thing you can get with your hosting provider is an SSL certificate. An SSL certificate stands for Secure Sockets Layer, and it allows for authentication encryption and decryption of data sent over the internet. This is very important because the majority of people use Google Chrome as their browser. On the address bar, the browser will notify the user if a website is secure or not, and if it’s red, it really gives the wrong impression to your visitors.
Your website should load fast, it should have a phone number, a quick quote form, and reviews above the fold. You should have a chat feature if you can. All these are most important and as long as you get the information over professionally and quickly, that’s the most important.
When it comes to websites, Andy likes building websites in WordPress because it’s pretty simple, easy to use, easy to change out, and is good for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). So get someone to do your keyword density and your meta-tags.
On-page optimization is crucial for a local pest control company. But it should not cost you hundreds of dollars a month. You should just be doing it one time and then letting it roll over organically through reviews, blogs, etc. People do read blogs or blogs really help your SEO efforts. So posting a blog, once or ideally twice a month would be ideal.
MARKETING
Get a Facebook page and an Instagram page. And if you can get the resources, get a YouTube channel as well. This is a lot but if you can get all three of those and post regularly, that’s really going to help to push content. And this all plays a role in the whole internet marketing ecosystem. Because what you post on YouTube or Facebook, you can run as ads and vice versa. As people are researching, you can follow them around through remarketing, retargeting, and having these social platforms is crucial.
You want to list your company on Google My Business (GMB). That’s easy to do, just go into Google My Business, sign up. Then put in your website, phone number, the services you offer, hours of operation, photos, etc.
Also, there are a lot of third party free listings that you can be posting on. Like – Yelp, Angie’s List, Home Advisor. You can use the services for free or pay for their paid subscription. Make sure that your phone number, address, the name of your business is identical everywhere. That does make a difference with your organic rankings.
Next, we’re going to talk about reviews. It’s hard to make sure you get reviews consistently. Andy has a program to get reviews. But you can have someone in your office call or email your clients whose job you’ve closed in the last week asking for a review. There are also third-party tools out there like BirdEye or Review buzz. They’re expensive but they’ve got an awesome tool where they can automatically connect to your CRM. And then send an email to everyone asking for reviews.
Google ads and Facebook ads work extremely well. If you do Facebook retargeting or you’re running Facebook ads, the majority of people don’t just click on the ad and call you. They go to your page so that’s why having a social media presence is important. If you’re running Google ads and you can run display, you can use YouTube again. And when people go to your channel, you want to make sure you have actual videos.
And the last tip for the internet marketing set up for success is email marketing. How many customers or potential customers call you but you don’t close the deal? It could be for reoccurring pest control, essentially someone who’s potentially interested in your services, either now or in the future. If you could capture their information, or at least their email address, name, and email address, then you can email them consistently.
A tool that Andy likes to use is called MailChimp but there are tons of email marketing systems out there. You can email potential customers, send them your latest reviews, offers, and whatever you want to do.
Hopefully, the Internet Marketing tips will help. And if you’re not doing any of these, do jump on it as it’s really a nice overall marketing ecosystem structure built for success. If you’d like to listen to the full PCIM podcast episode, you can find it here.