Pressure Washing Marketing Podcast – Episode 1 What Makes A High Performing Facebook Ad For Pressure Washing Work

Hey, what’s up guys? Dave Kunstek here with Connor Zimmerman. I am the owner of Clean Marketing. We’re a Facebook marketing company for pressure washers, exterior cleaners and such. And Connor here is our sales manager, one of the best here. He’s over 250 sales. He knows what he is talking about. He works on the programs as well.

But what we’re gonna cover here today is what makes a pressure washing Facebook campaign work now people. That run them by themselves. You know, they have their own theories of what they work. And you know, a lot of times you’ll see in the forums like pressure washing friends and the other groups, they’ve spent money, things don’t work.

And again, they just, they write Facebook off every 20 bucks. But the thing is, there is kind of a science to it while the important parts are your offer, the content, and what is in the ad. There, there’s many other factors that make it work. And that’s kind of, we’re gonna go through here, we’re gonna go down step by step here through and just talk about what we’ve found that works, you know, in different areas of pressure washing, window cleaning, paver ceiling, and you know, that’s our core, core competency.

But we, we have, we do do other home services outside of that. We just don’t advertise like we do have some carpet cleaners and such. So we do have a really good Basis of what works and what doesn’t. So first thing we’re gonna tackle here is the offer. What makes an effective offer? When you’re running Facebook ads now obviously you’re talking to people and you’re coming up, you’re doing onboarding, you’re coming up with their offer.

Like what kind of offer do you have people suggest to you they want versus the ones that work?

Yeah, I mean, it really comes down to specific markets, of course are gonna be different, right? Every state is a little bit different. You know, what our clients in Pennsylvania can use as their offer is a little bit different than somebody say in Florida.

Yep. Just based on competitiveness. Now, you know, we, we have many different types of offers that we run. We do request for quote, we do starting at prices. We’ve done vouchers, you know, for a certain dollar amount off. We’ve even done percentage off before and had a little bit of success with that as well.

So there’s a lot of different options that you can do. Most of the time we try to stick to a starting app price. The main reason for that is gonna be that with Facebook, they’re scrolling. Yep. They’re not searching for you. You know, they’re, you’re trying to catch their attention with something, you know, if you put a percentage off offer in there, they don’t necessarily know what the price is gonna be.

Yeah, they don’t know what percentage is gonna be

off of what. Yes, exactly. So starting at price is a way to grab their attention, give them a general understanding of possibly what it’s gonna cost for that type of service. So that’s what we try to stick to. Now for paver sealing, because of the nature of that service, we always go request for quote.

And that kind of brings me to another point with Facebook, when you get to a certain price point, you want to switch it over to not including that price. There’s a certain price point on Facebook. Usually it’s around 300 that once you get over that it drops. Now we’re talking

about for saying, you know, this service for 300 hours.

Yes. So, and that’s, that’s relating like pressure washing? Yes.

For like for house washing. You know, if you wanted to do over 300. It’s probably not gonna work with that style of

offer and that that’s not to say that you can’t charge that much or you won’t get that much. A lot of our clients get a lot more than that.

It’s just that with the whole scrolling and people are not looking for pressure washers. You need some kind of a minimum viable offer. And again, I hate to use the word bait, but you, you needs something to catch their attention, to bring them in, which again, it could be limited by square feet, you know, if you’re doing windows, it could be limited by the number of windows and number of panes.

But those are the type of offers that you, I’ve noticed work the best. Yeah. Now that’s usually where we try to lead clients, but a lot of times when they come in, sometimes we’ll, we’ll start onboarding a client and they’re, they’ll make the statement that, Hey, I have a minimum price of 4 99 or 500 bucks and I don’t start my truck for less.

And you know, obviously we have to respond to that cuz saying that in an ad really doesn’t work out. So like how do you handle when someone comes in and they’re trying it? Force us to use an offer for their program. Yeah. Which we guar, which we’re guaranteeing and we know it’s not gonna work. Like how do you handle that?

Yeah. When someone comes in and says that, usually I just try to explain to them that, you know, it’s really choosing between two things. You can either, you know, get the volume of leads that, that we’re talking about and that we see with our clients and the averages that we give you, that I give you on the phone.

Mm-hmm. Or you know, you can kind of take that out of the equation, use the offer that you would like to run if you have a minimum or whatever the case may be. And then there’s absolutely no guarantee that you’ll get anything. You know, we, we don’t run those offers and when we have, they haven’t worked as well.

And that is a fact. They just don’t work as well. You know, it’s just the nature of this specific type of marketing. The thing about Facebook is that you gotta be ambitious, you gotta be eager, you have to be willing to work those leads. The, the revenue stream is there. It is absolutely there. We have case studies on clients who are 5, 6, 7 xing their, their investment.

But you have to be ambitious and be willing to talk to the leads in the same way that I do. You know, we have a minimum for our programs. Yep. And I would say we have more clients signed up with us on higher tiered programs than our minimum. Than we do at the minimum. Yeah.

And that, and that comes down to sharing the value.

And again we use a lot of different tools to do what we do. And obviously with those different tools, there’s more time investment, there’s more, there’s this expense to go up. And the same thing with you guys. You know, you got, you’re gonna have, you might have, might have to quote on your driving distance to get to a Pacific specifically, which again, is part of your targeting to make sure you’re finding people in your service area, the chemicals you need to use and so forth.

You know, maintenance on your truck if you’re, you have employees. But all that needs to be factored in. So yeah, when someone comes in and tell us, Hey, we do have a minimum, we do understand that. So, but again, with Facebook, you need to find a way to get them in. You know, you want to get on the property and you want to, you know, look around and upsell ’em, you know, or again, like I said, make sure when you’re quoting, they understand that the offer we, that’s put out is for a minimum viable offer, whether that’s for 1200, 1500, 2000 square feet, whatever that is for you.

That you know, that, that’s just stated. So on from there, you know, again, sometimes we run offers and they don’t work. And when I say Don’t work, you, you’re just not getting the result you want. You’re not getting number of clicks, you’re not getting the messages, you’re not getting the messages turning into leads.

So what I call that is a feedback loop. So when you’re running an offer, And people are clicking, but they’re not taking action, meaning not giving their contact information, that that’s feedback from the market. And what that’s saying is that that they’re not going to accept what you’re offering.

It’s just not gonna work on Facebook. So the only course of action is at that point, is what you gotta do is adjust it. You know, you can keep running it cuz that’s what you feel like it should be. And that’s what you want. And maybe that’s what you get from, you know, Google ads or referrals. And again, what you really can’t compare.

Cause those are two d totally different animals from Facebook, but you gotta adjust your offer. Now in your experience when you’ve, to people’s offers, like what have you, how have you seen the results turn? You mean as

far as adjusting them to an offer that we feel comfortable is gonna work? Yes. Yep,

yep, yep.

And yeah, and we did mention a couple here in the beginning, but just no, we have. We have a book of them that we found that worked over the years. Yeah,

nine times out of 10 it does the trick. Now it’s not a hundred percent. You know, there’s so many other factors that we will cover that get into and, and we will go over what makes a program actually successful.

This is just one piece of the pie. But yeah, nine times outta 10. It usually works. Now again, like I said, every area is different, so we have to kind of look at your market specifically. We, we will actually do some research and figure out what is kind of going on and. In your specific market, what other people are running to make sure that we’re putting you in a competitive position.

Yep. Yep. I

agree. So on from that part that when you, we have the offer, so the next part is the content, and again, You know, the gold standard for us is before and after. And again, that, that seems to be what works the best for pictures. Now, there are other plays as far as branding and such, but again, if we’re trying direct response to get your money back as quick as possible, we’re looking at before and after.

So you kind of just wanna go over what you have seen or best kinds of pictures and you know, again, as far as ad, you know, the ad text, the ad content. Like what do you, what goes in there again? Yeah.

As far as ad content, it, it really just comes down to, to making sure your pictures are crisp, making sure that you’re taking quality pictures of your work so that you can show off the work that you do.

And that also is gonna show off the value of your company. I did want to touch on value. You know how he said when you are on the site, then you can kind of show your value. That’s exactly what you want to do. You want to walk someone around their property. And explain to them like, Hey, you know, if you really wanted to, you could go buy a pressure washer for, I don’t know, 150, 200 bucks, not a commercial washer.

Well, yeah, that’s, but yeah, that’s what people think. They’re like, oh, I could, something you can wash your furniture with. Yeah, I could go buy a pressure washer at Home Depot and I could do this. But then when you’re walking them around and, and saying the process and all the chemicals that you’re, you’re using for your soft washer, whatever it is that you do and how you do it, they’re gonna understand the pricing then and the price point of why it’s costing what it costs.

And they’re gonna see that value. Yeah. But anyway, back to the content. Just crisp pictures now before and afters. Yeah, they’re definitely a staple, but it’s not the only thing that we use. We do videos, we’ve done TimeLapse videos, we do still images. You know, we’ve even done the personal ad, which is pretty

successful for us.

Yeah, we, that, that’s a good backup. And a personal ad is basically just a picture of you and your family, you and your equipment, you and your equipment and your dog. It doesn’t really matter. Just something that demonstrates that you’re local to that area and you’re looking to help them with the specific problem that you serve.

I mean, and that has worked really well.

Yeah. And then we, we do base your ad text around that as well, you know, instead of An ad text for a before and after style where we’re kind of talking about what you’re seeing in the picture a little bit. It’s more so based around, you know, this is a family owned and operated company.

Mm-hmm. This is Brian, you know, he’s been doing this for X amount of years. It’s more personal style, more family based, family friendly, I would say, because people like to see that, you know, they’re, they’re gonna trust. A certain amount of money into this company. They, they like to see that family aspect for sure.

That, that’s a huge thing that we like to, to play off of with that type of ad. But as far as the content and pictures, just make sure that you’re taking the same picture if you’re doing a before and after picture. Yep. A lot of the times that’s what we’ll see is that. It’s a different angle. Completely. Or it’s, it, it’s hard to tell and

sometimes the time of the day throws it off depending on light.

Sun

shadows. Yeah. Shadows and lighting. You know, I know it’s tough because it can change, but just try to make sure that the lighting is similar. But those are, those are the biggest things. Lighting the angle and just make sure it, it’s a very, very similar

picture and if you do a long job and it’s an actual dramatic finish and you have a good before it’d probably be worth your time to drive back the next day.

At the same time when you took the before, so you can get the same lighting and you can actually see the difference without people online saying, Hey, this was Photoshop. Cause we’ve seen that too. Mm-hmm. Sometimes we like with paver ceiling, sometimes, you know, you go from this white, milky, messed up looking pavers.

And they become like really deep brown, orange, like vibrant looking, and people feel like it’s Photoshop, but it’s not. It’s just that the, the person that took the picture really took some care and some time into when and how they took those pictures. Yeah. So okay, so, so far we covered the offer, the content, meaning your picture, your ad text.

The next thing we’re gonna talk about is the market. And again we have markets, we serve the entire United States. You know we’re, we’re physically right here in this office here in Pennsylvania. Most of our clients are south of here. You know, we have a lot in Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, you know we start going out west.

It’s, it’s kind of sporadic depending on the area. But the thing is, what we find is, The offers that work here in Pennsylvania don’t work in Florida. And you know, vice versa. You know, sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. But you just don’t know until you test them out and figure out what’s gonna work where.

Well,

it could also be vice versa in the fact that paver ceiling, for example, Way more opportunity and popularity in, in Florida than Pennsylvania, you know? Yeah. There’s not nearly as many paver driveways here, or paver patios, so that’s how vice versa could come into play as well. Yeah.

But mind you, when you get in areas where there’s money stuff just works great.

Like for example, you know, we have two clients in the Long Island, New York area, you know, long Island. There’s money there and stuff there That works. Okay. Other places. It wor it works great there just because the money’s there and the people with those types of properties. And you know, a little secret as far as I’m concerned is I feel like the area is underserved, you know, as far as contractors, but Yeah.

Yeah. And then, you know, that, that just kind of plays into what you have to do in your specific market, right? So you needed to understand this industry, that there’s certain states that it’s extremely competitive. You know, down south you can do it year round. So that means, yep, there’s gonna be companies popping up every week, every month.

You’re just getting more competition every single day. So you need to play with that. You need to find a way to make your company attractive, find a way to set yourself apart and understand that in a state like Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, you know, all those southern states where it is extremely competitive because of the amount of companies, you know, you may have to pay more per lead.

Than somebody in Ohio just based on competition.

And the other part of this too, while you are paying more lead per lead, generally that’s because there is more competition, but then you’re probably also gonna get the higher ticket value again, cuz you’re, you’re getting those higher end jobs. Which again, if you think about it, you know, if you’re doing window cleaning, obviously that could be a lower end job.

You’re doing paver sealing, you know it’s gonna be a higher end job as far as a ticket and your ROI could be a lot higher. So those leads cost more because there’s less of them, if that makes sense. So a lot of times when your lead cost is higher, the the average revenue per ticket also goes up at the cost per lead.

So you gotta think about it that way too. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I agree. Alright, so from there, the next thing you wanna look at, actually two, we’re gonna hit it once here is one, your social media presence. And two, your reviews now, and I’ll tell you why. The reviews and social media presence matter. We can look at the statistics of almost any ad account that we have, and obviously we’re running offers where people click and come in and they either go into a messenger sequence or some kind of a information collection apparatus that we have built.

But of the people that click on that only, it’s only about 30% of the people actually click on the offer. And the other 70% of people that click on your ad, that don’t click on the offer, what they do is they click on your the, the Facebook page name, and what happens is they go in there and they check you out.

And if you have not made a post in the last few months, if you have zero reviews, again, this is what they’re looking for. Your ad program’s not gonna work. And again, we’ve know, seen this across the board, a lot of times when we have like a, an ad campaign that we’re like, this is not working, this is a great offer for this area.

It has worked for other companies in the state. We go and look at their Facebook page and we find out that they just don’t keep it up. They’re not posting or the season started and they got busy and they didn’t post, and it just looks like they’re out of business, you know? At what? Yeah. Even, even

more so than out of business if, if you haven’t posted in a long, long time, like we, we’ve seen people not posting in years.

I’m talking two, three years. You know, people might think that the ad is a scam. They don’t want to give their information cuz they’re not really sure if they, if it’s safe to, because yep, this page hasn’t posted in three years, but yet it’s running an ad. So that’s the biggest thing, you know, you just want to try to stay active.

You know, the, the other thing too is staying active is only showing off your work more. You’re showing everyone coming to your page. Then, you know the type of work that you do. Your house washes, your roof washers, the, the driveways you sealed, the windows you cleaned. They wanna see that. Yep. You know, they’re, if they’re gonna employ you, they wanna see the work that you do.

And that ties into reviews too. They wanna see that you have good reviews. They wanna see that people were pleased with your customer service. And when you came out, you know, you were. Polite and, and did a great job and took your time on things and, and were just accommodating

really. Yep. And the other side of that is too, is that when you’re running ads and people are engaging with your ads, it drives your engagement level up.

And when your engagement level on your page goes up, people will naturally see those organic posts that you’re making. Or again, we have a service now where we actually, we’re actually doing it for people as well because man, sometimes it’s an act of God to get people to do it, and I get it, they’re busy or they don’t know what subject matter to put behind it, or they just don’t have the time.

It really doesn’t matter. But you know, one of the things we advise of when you were running an ad campaign is man, At a very, very minimum, we want you to post once a week. Ideally three times is great, five times. We can almost put a guarantee behind, you know, you’re going to get more leads, you’re gonna get a cheaper cost per lead, because what’s gonna happen is the people engaging with your ads, again, they’ll be scrolling tomorrow and while they might still see your ad here and there, now they’re gonna start seeing all these natural posts coming through their feed.

And they’re gonna click on them, go to your page and it’s just, it’s gonna drive up your conversion. And a lot of times that is just the difference between a high performing and a non-performing or a mediocre campaign is what you’re doing on social media and you know, if you’re trying to get reviews.

But you, anything else to add to that? No,

not really. The only thing I would add to that is, like he said, don’t feel like you need to post every single day if you can. That’s, you know, even better. It’s gonna be awesome. But you know, like I usually tell people on the phone two to three times a week, if you can, is really all that’s necessary to keep it consistent, keep the posts going on there.

And the other thing too is it doesn’t necessarily need to be pictures and videos all the time, either. You could do something as simple as, Hey, I’m gonna be in this town today. Beautiful town, something like that. It, it does not have to

be complicated. Yeah. Or you know, again, you go in, post your picture of, Hey, here’s the house we’re at, we’re working on this today.

If you’re in this neighborhood, you know, shoot us a message, you know, and a lot of times when, when people see local landmarks or they see neighborhoods they recognize, you know, that I’ll make them more apt to work with you. You know, on top of the ads, so. Mm-hmm. So we, so from there, the next thing we look at too is, is part of the adsd.

There’s a couple different ways we can set them up. Now, our favorite is Messenger. So is the channel you want your leads to come in through people, and we, what we find is with Messenger, you know, let’s, well, let’s back it up. Let’s say you get a lead off your website or you know, you’re using a lead form on Facebook.

And someone submits their name, email, and phone number. Now you can call those people and they don’t necessarily have to answer. You could text them, they don’t necessarily have to answer. But if you get them in Messenger you’ve much more higher probability of turning them into a lead because now you have a third way of getting in touch with ’em.

Again, we’ve just had a lot of success with that, where someone clicks in your ad, it opens up messenger. And now you got them, they, the flow starts and you can go back through your business page and message those people anytime you want now. But the other thing is too, it, it’s just always sitting there now in their messenger that, you know, if they go back through and look, you can retarget people run a Messenger ad in there.

It just, it’s just, we just find a lot more success than that. So And that’s not to say we won’t run phone channels again. We, we do have more advanced campaign where they come in through Messenger, we collect all the information, we will send them a text and email to follow up. A lot of that’s changing with the industry right now, with what you can text and what you can’t.

But but that, those kind of regulations do not affect Facebook Messenger. Again, if that’s the platform you’re running ads on. And then from there I gave, we got them in. And then is there follow up? Do you, do you want to go after that one as far as you know? Yeah,

the follow up. I feel as though follow up should be pretty self-explanatory for everyone.

You just want to be cordial, timely you know, just try to do it as quickly as you can Now, I don’t expect you to be able to follow up with everybody within seconds. That’s unrealistic. But, you know, just try to do it as quickly as you can. If you’re, if you’re following up 12 hours later, odds are, yeah, they’re moving on.

They moved on, right? They found a different offer, they lost interest. You know, you just wanna try to be as quick as possible. But, you know, within a few minutes is fine. Even in hour is fine. We, we set up in our automation follow ups as well, and you know, if they stop answering, it’ll actually respond to them for you after an hour, sending them another

message.

And we try to make it seem human versus being a bot. You know, as close as we can, but at some point the cat gets out of the bag.

But yeah. Yeah. I, I think that’s the biggest thing. And then it kind of does take us to, you know, the last piece then, which is your quoting method. So. Don’t quote in Messenger is what I would say.

Yeah, just, just try to, not to

if you can. Yeah. The only, the only time that I would agree with Messenger or quoting over the phone would be if it’s outside of your, your service area. You know, it’s just you again, you don’t wanna drive 45 minutes for a, you know, a bottom line job. Right. And you know, you wanna take a shot, you know, and let’s just say, you know this, you don’t think they’ll meet your minimum, but just quote it where it’ll be worth your time.

And if you get it good, then it’ll be worth your time. And if it’s not, it’s not. But of the people that we talk to as well as say our, our you know, say leads are not converting or they’re having issues with closing the deals, a lot of times these guys are not quoting in person. Now, I know for some businesses that is really hard to do, but it really is the most effective way to go and being, you know, that’s where you can walk the property.

You can meet them, you can start that relationship. And again, just to give you some numbers, what we’ve seen is, is sometimes we’ve had people come in and say, I’m only closing five, 10%. And we’re like, how are you quoting? And they’ll say, Hey, you know, we called them, we get the square footage from you know, a satellite view or however it is they’re doing it.

And we send ’em a quote by email. The thing is, you know, that does work sometimes, but. Quoting in that manner versus in person especially, you know, again, a lot of people we work with are, you know, they’re newer in the industry. They’re, they just need at, that’s what works better is the in person, and it’s gonna go from like a five or 10% close rate, if that’s what you’re seeing, you know, to 30 to 60% by being in person.

And again, when you’re in person too, be presentable. Don’t be smoking. Have a nice, you know, you know Have your vehicle taken care of or you don’t have to have, obviously, you know, you know, a fully wrapped truck and stuff. But be presentable, be personable, and just be in person. Walk the property, show your value.

Explain to them why, you know what, what you do, your processes again. Cause when you build the value in like that, you’re not gonna have as big of a trouble closing those bigger tickets, you know? Do you get anything to add

to that? No, I think you covered it pretty well, honestly. Yeah, I, I mean, if I know that if if David here could have me do in person Yeah.

Quoting and calls, he absolutely would. Unfortunately, because we target all over the country, it’s not really possible. So I, I gotta stick to the phone.

We’ll do Zoom if you, if you’re willing to though,

yeah, we will do Zoom, but, you know, phone calls aren’t awful either. I personally would just suggest trying to stay away from quoting in Messenger.

We’ve seen people do that. The only way I would ever quote in Messenger is if somebody is. They finish the flow. You know, you have their information, their phone number, their email, and they start asking you a ton of questions and you’re kind of going back and forth with them getting some baseline. They want some baseline pricing and some they have questions about your services specifically.

Maybe then you could shoot them just an idea of what it might cost. Yeah, that makes sense. But other than that, I would try to call them right away. Definitely. I would suggest in person quotes if it’s possible.

Cool. I mean, I don’t have anything else on this one, but. What you just witnessed is episode one of our new podcast.

Again, we decided to do it in house so that we could again, go through what makes a pressure washing Facebook ad campaign work. So future episode, again, we’re gonna be going in other things like seo. We’re gonna be going into local service ads, Google Ads, and we’re gonna start bringing some of our clients on.

And again, we can tell you this stuff till we’re blue in the face and I’m, I’m sure you’re listening to us. You’re, you’re hearing it, but I truly believe once we have your peers in here telling them how they handle these leads and what they do, that it’ll, it’ll really make the difference. So that’s what we’re gonna have in future episodes.

Thanks for tuning in and we’ll catch you in the next one. Yeah, I appreciate it. Cool. Thanks guys.