YouTube Ad Domination in a Niche Market with Rich Feola

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. Brought to you by the HubSpot. Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Business Made Simple. Today, we'll be breaking down YouTube ad domination in a niche market. To drop these value bombs, I have brought Rich Fiola into EO Fire Studios. Rich has helped over 3 ,500 home service pros generate over 3 billion in home upgrades using simple YouTube ads. His exclusive brands have been a leading force in lead generation since 2017. In today's foundation, we'll talk about the strategy.

0:37We'll talk about the best way to run YouTube ads today. We'll talk about getting quality leads over quantity and so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Rich and our sponsors. The Next Wave, your chief AI officer, hosted by Matt Wolf and Nathan Lance, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Matt and Nathan are leading AI creators in your guiding light in the AI and technology frontier. AI technology is transforming the way we do business and the media landscape is fragmented. The Next Wave strives to be the leading podcast on AI technology and how you can apply it to growing your business.

1:16Listen to The Next Wave wherever you get your podcasts. The internet's best converting checkout is here. Did you know that Shopify is up to 36 % better compared to other leading commerce platforms? Sign up for a$1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash onfire. all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash onfire now to take your business to new heights. Rich, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. A lot of people think you have to have a lot of business knowledge or background in business administration or something to run a successful business.

2:03And, you know, for me, I think that one of the key things of being successful is having the best ideas. Now I studied jazz music in college, so I didn't, you know, get an MBA or, you know, be a business minded person at all before I started my business. And, you know, studying jazz music, you know, you have to create ideas kind of out of thin air, you know, musical ideas. It's based on a lot of improvisation and a lot of creativity. And I think having creativity and having a lot of great ideas is really where business really the rubber beats the road. Because it doesn't matter how much you know the numbers or how good you are in business necessarily or sales skills.

2:46All those things are important. But I think creativity and having the best ideas and being able to come up with those out of thin air is really what drives businesses going forward. It's how to be the best CEO you can be. Fire Nation, we're talking about YouTube ad domination in a niche market. And Rich, one thing I wanted to focus on was the fact that you figured out how to effectively use YouTube to grow a business within a niche market, and that being home service businesses. So talk to us about how you uncovered this strategy and how you utilize it. Yeah. So I started going door to door in marketing 15 years ago, selling windows and roofing and all different types of home service products.

3:29And then I realized that if I wanted to really scale, I needed to figure out a different way to get leads. So later I joined the financial services industry and they had all these archaic marketing tactics. So I realized I had to learn online ads. And that's when I started that journey about 10 years ago and then started my ad agency, which focuses mostly on Google and YouTube ads. and we've helped over 3 ,500 home service companies, solar companies, roofing companies, HVAC companies, all different types of home services, window remodelers, kitchen bath remodelers to grow their business. We've helped 3 ,500 of them sell over 3 billion in home upgrades all through simple YouTube ads that you can record on your phone.

4:12I really want to get detailed here. I mean, there's strategies, there's tactics. I mean, what are people doing wrong? What are you doing right? A lot of home service businesses or just businesses in general, they try to figure out the marketing on their own rather than finding a partner that can really assist them reaching to their ideal customer base and know how to hit the pain points that they want to hit in their market and do it quickly. Because the online attention span of most people on YouTube or on Facebook or anywhere is really short. So, you know, trying to do it all yourself is probably a fool's errand.

4:44You're going to spend way too much time, way too much money trying to test it all out. But with our data to our advantage, we've generated almost 5 million leads over the last seven years. We know exactly how to generate that interest, sell the sizzle, and get people on your calendar that want to buy a home upgrade or want to buy your product or service. Okay. I want to take a step back here because I love specific examples. So what's the very best way to run YouTube ads today? Let's get detailed. Let's give examples. A lot of people, when they run YouTube ads, they run these really long ads. Some of the best gurus in the YouTube ad space say like, hey, you should record a three to four minute video, really go deep in kind of like a video sales letter format.

5:27But for lead generation, I've found that 30 second to 40 second videos really shorten to the point that really sell the sizzle and get someone initially interested are a lot more effective than these long drawn out ads that most people don't watch. So I think short and to the point, and then having a lot more education after they click on the ad, you know, to educate them further, pre-sell the prospect, and then get them to ultimately book an appointment on your calendar is the most effective way of generating a lot of interest. And then a lot of that additional marketing happens in the back end, following up with them via text or via phone calls and all those things.

6:02You know, we're kind of old school. We have a call center that calls all the leads and sets the appointments for our professionals that hire us. And, you know, it still works. It still works the old school way of just calling people and texting people. And yeah, AI is great. And we use it to a certain degree. But, you know, when it comes to marketing and making sure that you get exceptional results for your, like for your businesses that are, you know, generating these leads, you have to make sure that you really stay within the confines of simplicity. I think simplicity gets the job done a lot better than additional complexity and saying too much.

6:41Now, getting leads is one thing, but let's be frank, it's the quality of those leads that really matters. So let's talk about some other ways you make sure online leads are quality, not just numbers. After they click on the ad, really educating them and having them become knowledgeable of the product or service in a way that really helps them become pre-sold. You know, you could do that through video content. You can do that through just long form copy. But there's a way to generate a lot of that interest so that by the time they get to the end of the funnel, they are motivated to want to book an appointment right on your calendar.

7:18You know, when we used to run ads on Facebook, primarily, we would find that three to five percent of people would book an appointment after filling out the form. But on YouTube and Google, we've seen it as high as 15, 20, 25, 30 percent. So it just shows you that the quality of the leads is significantly higher based on the platform that you target because YouTube is a search engine. Google obviously is a search engine. And when people are actually searching for your product or service, they already have some level of interest to the point where they're motivated to buy. And now it's just a matter of taking them through that process so that they really understand that this is the best option for me.

7:55And we show them how your company is the premier choice for whatever product or service you're offering. So it's really a matter of education. We want to initially get people in the door with a short format that's going to really grab their attention and be cutting edge and different and quirky and with some humor attached. but then also bring them in and educate them as much as we can so that when they have that purchase intent originally coming from the platform that they're coming from, like YouTube or Google, it's a very streamlined process to getting them to book right on your calendar. Fire Nation, I really hope you're understanding how Rich is doing this in his markets and how it may apply to yours.

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11:49and most home service professionals, they're used to selling in-home. How do these professionals transition into selling virtually instead? Yeah, so we actually have a sales training that we offer to our clients through Jeremy Miner's NEPQ training. If anyone's not familiar with Jeremy Miner, he has a real cutting edge way to sell over the phone or virtually. And we use a lot of technology so that you can actually give a proposal to someone over the phone or over Zoom, for instance, and still be in control of the proposal so that the homeowner's not, you know, skipping over things or reading things that you don't want them to be reading.

12:30You can actually control it from your screen so that they're going, you know, through your sales process with you. And there's a lot of creative ways to, you know, generate sales just simply over the phone. Ever since COVID, this has been something that people have been trying to figure out. And a lot of home service companies are transitioning this way, solar companies, roofing companies, even other type of remodeling companies that are so used to selling in the home but now want to expand. If they can install their products or services beyond just their local vicinity, then selling virtually is a huge advantage because now you can target a larger area.

13:13A lot of our clients, they can install statewide or throughout multiple states. And that just gives us a larger population to target and gets your overall cost per lead, cost per appointment, cost per acquisition down so that you can get a higher ROI. And that's to say that there are some challenges with virtual selling. Obviously, getting people to show up to the virtual meeting, getting them to pick up the phone, getting them to show up on the Zoom, that's the hardest part. But if you could really dial in the sales process and learn that, which we teach a lot of our clients to do, you could actually build a much larger organization based on volume because you can get a lot more leads coming in to fill your calendar.

13:52So if you're used to knocking doors or using archaic marketing tactics like direct mail and hoping the phone rings, this is a way to fill your sales calendar, fill the calendar for your sales team, train them adequately to sell virtually over the phone, and see a much larger increase in sales. Let's call a spade a spade. Most entrepreneurs simply fail when it comes to generating leads online. And again, we're going back to those quality leads that actually matter, that could convert into actual business, actual ROI, return on investment, actual revenue. Why, Rich? Why do most fail? Well, from our own experience, we've tested so many different iterations of different ads and different landing pages and different strategies to generate leads.

14:39And we've been doing this for over seven years now. And there have been times in our history as a company where we had to figure these things out. By getting a lot of feedback from a lot of clients, we could figure out what isn't working and what is working. And it's always a continual process of improving the process over time. And we found that over the last three years or so, we've dialed in the process so much that even when we try to expand upon it or change certain things, we notice that, hey, the way we've been doing it the last three years is kind of like the best we've ever done it. And we're just kind of doing that continually going forward now.

15:16So what I'm saying is that we're testing things all the time to see if we can improve the numbers, improve the quality of leads, improve the volume of leads and getting more leads. But we found that every time we test something new, it doesn't always work as well as what we've discovered over the last three years. So our control is so strong now that we have the system dialed in that really, as long as you have a product or service that you want to sell and you know that you have a target market that's online that's looking for this, we can pretty much plug and play all these things. It's very cookie cutter almost to the point where, you know, it's very streamlined and the quality that and the feedback we get is is very high, you know, where we have like an 85 percent success rate with people generating a return on investment within the first 30 to 60 days.

16:07So it took time to get there. It took a lot of testing. It took a lot of iterations. It took a lot of challenges that we have to face through or go through. and now we know that we have a real system that works and I think that a lot of entrepreneurs they fail because they haven't gone through that process they haven't you know they dip their toe in they try it out then they give up really easily rather than you know figuring it out now we have the benefit of having thousands of clients over the last seven years so we've been able to test a lot spending over 140 million dollars on ads you know we had to figure it out because this is our business.

16:45So I think finding an expert who can help you generate quality leads is important and not every so-called expert is created equal, right? I think that there's a lot of digital marketers out there who are just kind of like using your money to test to see if they can figure something out. But we've had to go through that ourselves. But since we've done so much volume in advertising spend, we've been able to figure those things out much faster because of the volume of spend that we have and all the data that we have to our disposal. Now, we don't have to go into super detail, but I want to maybe just get one favorite example of yours of an actual client.

17:25You don't have to use names or numbers, but just tell us a story about a client utilizing your services and how they found success. We've had clients start at a very minimal budget, saying like our lowest tier, where they're spending a few thousand dollars a month. And that's low compared to when you're talking about major advertisers and what they're spending to grow their business. And then we've had them gradually scale over time to the point where they went from a couple grand a month to five grand a month to 10 grand a month to 20 grand a month, all the way up to like hundreds of grand per month.

17:55And we've seen all of these different companies, like specifically solar companies or roofing companies, you know, I'm thinking of that have grown exponentially over time because they took our advice, they scaled slowly and gradually, and we just built their business kind of, we were the fuel behind their business. You know, I think of one client who, you know, started at a pretty healthy budget of like 20 grand a month. He was already a medium sized organization. But then over the course of the next year, we scaled all the way up to about half a million dollars a month in spend and, you know, drastically grew his business to the point where he fired all of his other lead vendors like, Hey, like, I know this is a risk just going with you only, but I believe what you guys are doing, like the quality is so much better that, you know, they scaled to a half a million dollars a month and have been at that level for years now.

18:45And so, you know, it's a matter of finding an expert, finding someone who, you know, can help you in that scaling process. Obviously you don't want to throw a ton of money at something that you don't know it's going to work. So start small, start small, see a proof of concept. And then over time, take the advice of an expert to grow that so that you can build your sales team, hire hundreds of sales reps, you know, get to the point where, you know, you're really, really scaling it and building your business to the point where it's a machine. And that's something that we're experts at. Let's talk artificial intelligence, because you do utilize AI technology while you're remaining compliant, which is a key thing to keep in mind that a lot of people don't think about.

19:26So tell us more about this. With AI technology, the FCC just recently banned cold calling people with AI. A lot of voice AI technology was being used for the wrong reasons. And so the FCC just banned it completely. So you can't just upload a bunch of homeowner phone numbers and just blast it with AI anymore. That's become illegal. And now the FCC is saying that starting in January 2025, you have to have exclusive one-to-one express written consent from every lead you generate. And this is how we set up our business seven years ago. I had really two options to set up my lead generation ad agency.

20:05I could have either sent all the leads to one centralized landing page and then aggregated all the leads afterwards and sold them multiple times like many other companies do. Or I could set up exclusive campaigns. So our company is called Solar Exclusive. We also have other brands called Roofing Exclusive, Turf Exclusive, Water Exclusive for Water Treatment, for instance, all these different exclusive brands. And we set it up so that every single client has an individual campaign. And so we're already compliant with this. It's kind of the future of lead generation going forward. And when you're utilizing AI going forward after January 2025, you need to express one-to-one consent.

20:40So you need some type of written proof. And we get a video recording of every opt-in showing that we have this written proof to be able to contact them with AI technology. Now, how we do that is that we use AI voice technology in addition to our actual human beings in our call center. And we also use AI technology via text and SMS to be able to really nurture those leads and have them become excited about booking an appointment and really see the value in doing so and talking to an actual expert, whether the person's going to come to their house or whether they're going to talk to them virtually.

21:14We leave that up to our clients. Some clients just prefer, I want to do it in home. Okay, we'll do it in home. so we'll just customize the campaign that way some people want to do it virtually but it's by nurturing these leads on the back end through sms or through voice ai technology but the key thing is having that one-to-one consent because if you don't have that starting in january 2025 you know you're going to be non-compliant and the fcc has actually given um carte blanche authority to verizon at &t t-mobile to like shut down businesses at the business level from being able to buy new phone numbers, being able to cold call, being able to use auto dialers, being able to text people with automated voice or AI technology, unless you have that written consent.

21:58So the idea of buying a bunch of age leads or buying homeowner data or just gathering a bunch of leads from some source and then contacting them with AI is like a thing of the past. It's not going to be a thing anymore. So you need to generate these leads in real time from an expert that's actually going to run these ads for you and get you this one-to-one consent so you can protect yourself. Fire Nation, the nurturing of the leads, I mean, that's something that's so underrated. People just don't do that right. And I love how Rich is giving you the advice about how to get ahead of the curve, not be caught with your pants down like a lot of people are.

22:37And those people that are ahead of the curve and doing things right before these changes are in place, you're going to win at an exponential level because the other individuals, your competitors will get shut down. They will not know what to do. So Rich, with every value bomb you dropped today, what's the one thing you really want to make sure our listeners get from our conversation today? If you tried to generate leads online before and it didn't pan out, there's always someone out there who knows things better than you, Ray. I think we all have to humble ourselves and realize that, hey, just because I've tried three, four, five, six different agencies and it didn't pan out.

23:13Maybe I was working with someone who wasn't a specialist. Maybe I was working with someone who was a generalist, kind of a jack of all trades, but a master of none. And maybe it's time for me to look into finding someone who actually works in my industry, who has actual results and data and hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars worth of spend in my industry, who've already done this before and already become experts at it because, you know, I think we can all admit in business, when you found success, there was some key thing that, that happened. It was some connection you had. Maybe you met your partner in some, some other way.

23:48And the two of you together are amazing at what you do, but you could never have done the level of success that you had in your business without the two of you together. And I think that's how I view what we do with our clients. Like we're kind of like a CMO for them, like an actual partner in their business where we're actually growing their business exponentially. And, you know, obviously not every client has great results with us. Some people don't have, you know, clear cut processes. We try as best we can to educate people on the best practices that our clients have used in the past to see amazing success.

24:22And so not everyone's going to succeed, right? There's a risk in anything in business, But, you know, the large majority of people that have worked with us over the years, you know, they've been able to grow their business and been able to implement things that they didn't really think about before, but were able to actually get these high quality leads and appointments filling their calendars so that they could sell more of what they do and impact more people. And that's really what it's all about is making that impact that you make with your business and the people you serve, also the people on your team, and ultimately what you decide to do with your wealth to make this world a better place.

24:55And that's why what we do and what we believe in and why we care so much about what we do. Rich, if Fire Nation is fired up by all this, they want to connect with you, they want to learn more, what is your call to action for our listeners today? Our main company is called Solar Exclusive. we built really our business in that niche specifically in the beginning. But we've expanded over the last three years into multiple home service spaces. So you could actually go to solarexclusive.com and book a call at solarexclusive.com. And all of our advisors are experts in all the different industries that we've served.

25:32You know, every single one of my account managers has clients in all these different industries if you're a home service business, or really just, you know, even we work with insurance companies, we work with financial advisors, we work with all these different groups, because any industry that's really heavily reliant on leads, we've probably run ads for them. And, you know, you can go to solaredexclusive.com, book a call, even though it's really strictly solar, that website, that doesn't mean that we're only, you know, doing solar. So you can check out our website, book a call, talk with one of my advisors, and we'll give you a clear-cut plan on how to grow your business.