Full Marketing Strategy To Grow Your Business and Brand

0:00These Nikes, they didn't haul me and cold sale me. I desperately wanted that because the biggest companies in the world really do brand. Is this really happening right now? This is really happening. You're trying to educate people on how not to hire you. Doing the right thing is always the right thing. Be the roofing magazine for the town and neighborhood, not the guy or gal who sells the roof. I actually am very concerned about people that are over-reliant on search and Google. My brother and my fiance both use 100 % chat GPT. The ultimate long-term is branding. Brand is impossible to measure.

0:33Brand is like love and God. Attention is the number one asset. There he is. Benny, I have to get stitches right now. You see this? What happened? Ross Brown elbowed me directly in the fucking eye. Did you lose like at, were you playing V Friends Uno edition or something? Did you lose? No, we were playing basketball. It was going well. Why don't we get into some Q and A while we're waiting for the doctor? Let me see what I can pull off here. Are you being serious? I'm being dead serious. Here's the doctor getting ready. Actually, I have to. Only Gary Vee as the doctor. Yeah, we could just, maybe we could.

1:15Joseph Hughes, what question do you have for my main man, Gary? What's up, Gary, man? So good to see you. Thanks for your dedication and doing this from your bedside there as you're getting ready to get stitches. So appreciate you, my man. we've got a few hundred people here. So as you may know or may not, we ran a marketing agency for seven years. 2019, we transitioned over into an education company or marketing training company because we believe and what we've seen is that small businesses need to understand the DNA of marketing. They cannot just blindly outsource it. So our clients, our community are the folks that get it.

1:57Most of the roofing industry, however, still does not understand why it is so critically important to have some marketing DNA and some people and some tools inside your company to build your brand to day trade attention. So can you speak on that for just a minute? Yeah. So team, getting new customers comes in two ways, marketing and sales, right? You're either a sales organization or you're a marketing and brand organization. And so the reality is, is that in this industry, a lot of you are just in sales, which is amazing. I don't begrudge sales. I love sales. And so that's fine. And that's great.

2:37But sales is what you do when you don't know how to build a brand. Sales is what you do when you don't do marketing, right? Because what ends up happening when you build marketing is it comes to you versus sales where you go to them. So everybody does sales, except the biggest companies in the world really do brand. Like these Nikes, they didn't like tag me or call me and cold sale me. I desperately wanted them. What everybody's goal in here is, is that in your general area, your city, your county, your state, you need to be the default roofing company that everyone thinks about at all times, always, period, end of story.

3:24That is the ultimate goal. That only happens if you do branding. That happens if you are constantly top of mind. This is why car companies are constantly running TV commercials and billboards. They have no idea when you're ready to buy a fucking car, but they always want to be top of mind. So you pick that. So the reason everybody needs a sales organization is it's the better version of doing business and selling stuff, right? Marketing organizations are the key. Sales is great, but building brand is the key. And a lot of you are reliant just on Google AdWords, which is really digital selling.

4:04And the reality is, is that Google itself, with chat GPT and perplexity and all these AI things, if you're in this room right now and you get most of your leads from Google, you better wake the fuck up because the next five years, all consumer behavior is going to start shifting to AI bots. And that's a major deal. So look, I just can't push hard enough on building brand because it's the historic truth of building businesses. And brand building is now done on social. And social is free for reach if you're good at it, which is insane. Of course, you can spend more media dollars on it. But the fact that it's also free because of the way the algorithms work now.

4:50So now becoming great at content has become 10 times more important. that's awesome um let's go to jamie samide next uh vp of marketing fortune 500 company beacon roofing jamie what's up what's your question for gary gary so um spent 10 years at procter and gamble so definitely im vibing what you're stating about all these things i think the interesting thing for a lot of our contractors is to get their mind shifts that the average homeowner i think would only buy a new roof every one to two times in their life right yeah yeah How can they think differently than, say, a retail experience where I'm going to the grocery store every week or I'm buying wine every month?

5:32This is something that a homeowner only does once every 20 years. So how can they think differently about how important and magical that moment is during that marketing to sales process? Yeah, I mean, I think you know this, like whether it's mattresses, we've worked on Casper, whether it's cars, we've worked on Ford. longer lead time once in a blue moon purchases it actually requires branding in a different way and more again this is why i will continue to triple down on after now yep okay god okay what do i do do you want to take the phone away for a sec well no i think it's kind of cool okay just yeah this sucks close your eyes i will nobody pass out is this really happening right now this is this is really happening this is cool though like i mean we got inside access to the concierge doctor and uh maybe the doctor can comment on what how he feels about brand and marketing i don't know when you build a brand you get to the point where the doctor comes to you like someone in the comments mentioned so that's the ultimate level of building a brand let's do a question let's see let me ask because like we can answer some of these questions let's see here any questions I'm good, Benny.

6:44Ask a question. So anyway, the time, obviously, you know, it's longer the time when you're selling a roof once or twice. But don't forget, there's people constantly talking about it. So your customers, this is an industry where over delivering on experience is remarkably important because you all know this word of mouth and recommendation is huge to this industry. right? So this is an industry where you've got to constantly over deliver. I'm going to give you guys a tactic that I'm obsessed with. A year after you do someone's roof, a year to the day, I want you to send them something, a small gift, a couple hundred bucks, whether it's wine, whether it's flowers, whether it's golf equipment, obviously you're at their home.

7:29So you have a pretty good sense of them a little bit, right? If you send something one year to the day after you worked with them and asked them, how is it going? Right. How's, you know, how's the roof going there? It's so out of mind because it was a year ago, the surprise and delight that benefits of that are just remarkable and leads to a tremendous amount of word of mouth. So if you're doing that, especially if you go unique, like you were in the house and you saw buy a$300 comic book and you send it with a note, how's the roof treating you? That person's gonna be so overwhelmed. They're gonna tell that story 13 times.

8:13And one of those 13 times, somebody's gonna be like, oh shit, I need a new roof. I actually think the thank you economy, Benny, is potentially even more impactful to this crew than they trading attention. Actually together, they're the real, this is really funny. um so that's where we're at with that i definitely believe that the gifting strategy is really good i'm not sure if you know who john rulin is uh gary um giftology he wrote a book on giftology he's a friend of mine he's done some stuff in the media uh in the past i dropped john's link i dropped john's in the uh in the chat because he's got a really cool and he loves that whole idea of gifting like a special especially something that's nuanced from like uh finding something in the home that they might be interested in, whether it's sports.

9:04You know, you told a story one time where you sent somebody a jersey that bought a case of wine. You want me to tell that story? It's a crazy story. Oh, yeah. Tell the quick story. And then we're going to get to Q &A. So I was writing this book. Thank you. I wanted like a great example of why I believed Surprise and Delight was a driver to retention and growth. And so I told Brandon Warnicke, who still runs Wine Library, that the next time somebody orders wine on our website, and we could find them on Twitter to follow them and figure out what they love. And it took a couple of weeks, but we found a guy with a unique last name.

9:44We were able to identify and confirm that it was that same guy on Twitter. And we realized that he was a huge Chicago Bears fan. Brandon called me. I told him to go buy a Jay Cutler signed jersey on eBay, who was the quarterback at the time. Ironically, the gentleman that bought the wine bought something very inexpensive. He bought a case of cheap Pinot Grigio. We probably made$35 in profit on the wholesale. I told Brandon to buy a$300,$400 signed jersey. We sent him the jersey with a note saying, thank you for shopping Wine Library for the first time. We hope you enjoy this. I thought the guy was going to call the next day, losing his mind.

10:27weeks go by and we don't hear from him we did a bunch of little things like this trying to get examples for the book i'm all pissed like a month later i'm like i can't believe the jay color one didn't work a couple weeks later i'm boarding a plane and brandon calls me frantically and then he texts me call me call me call me i call him he goes you're not gonna believe what happened sorry it's okay i said uh the jay color guy called or bought something he goes no i go god damn it he goes better i go what he goes a guy just placed an order in texas for six thousand dollars worth of burgundy very high-end wine i'm like okay i go what does that mean he goes wait he goes now let me tell you what the note said in the gift note section he said wine library this is my first order you have a tremendous burgundy selection this is amazing i want to talk to somebody about more burgundy p.s my buddy in chicago told me about the jersey that you sent him a couple of weeks ago pss i'm a huge bruce springsteen fan that's how it works you're proud that's awesome all right let's get a q a from some of these contractors jovani ramirez unmute and ask your question to Gary V.

11:49Hey guys, how you guys doing? So my question, well, I kind of want to say something first. I just want you guys to know that I think it's pretty legendary that Gary, you didn't reschedule this, even though you're getting stitches right now. I think that's the definition of no excuses at this point. Thank you, my brother. Getting it done. But I hope all is well and my question was if you were a single family residential roofer what platform would you choose to run the proper content strategy and like what would your content strategy be i'm obsessed for this industry on meta specifically facebook believe it or not even though instagram is great too but i'm obsessed with meta you've got the right buyers there facebook's targeting is incredible the especially when you start learning media on top of just organic content it gets really crazy.

12:38So I would become as great at Facebook marketing as possible, both organic and paid. But the reality is you want to be on as many platforms as you possibly can. And you can use the same video on every platform, as long as you slightly DJ it and change the copy, maybe the hook, maybe the title, because obviously on TikTok, it's a little different vibe than it is on LinkedIn. The content I think would be about my big belief is in this industry, you're trying to educate people on how not to hire you. Like that would be my strategy. I'm the roofing guy that doesn't want you to ever need me. I'm going to teach you things that you should be doing to protect your roof.

13:18And that is building so much value that that all of a sudden builds an incredible reputation, right? Doing the right thing is always the right thing. So if you're out here making unlimited videos of what people can be doing after rainstorms, after what they could be coding it with. How do they maintenance it? How do they detect it? How do they, like, could you imagine making content driving around a street and pointing out things on roofs that they should, like, it's just become a public service, right? Character, and it will lead to unlimited business. I started a wine show in 2006 and all I was trying to do was get people to stop buying bad wine, which led to people buying wine from me.

14:02If you're out there trying to help people get two, three more years out of their roof, well, now you're a monster, right? And what if you're making content telling people how not to get tricked to pay more for a roof than they are? You guys know this. There's a lot of bad advice. There's a lot of bad, I wouldn't call it bad actors, but you know this. Some of your competition, maybe even some of you, if we're being honest, are maximizing the fee when there's ways to minimize it a little bit. What if you're the guy or gal out there making content? Like imagine making a video that's titled 16 questions you must ask before you buy a new roof.

14:42That's massive. Thank you, Nate. I do think it's good. Like be, be the roofing magazine for the, for the town and neighborhood, not the guy or gal who sells the roof. By doing that, you're the most valuable character in the game, I think all of you intuitively know this is good advice, right? Think about how people fear overpaying for a roof and all that stuff. You're building reputation that way. And don't forget, I've been saying the same thing for 15 years, a hundred different ways. So even if there's only seven to 15 different things that matter in your game, there's a million different ways to say it.

15:19There's a million different places to say it from on top of a roof, on the garage, on the driveway, looking up to the roof. Different slang, different platforms, different adjectives, using pop culture. Maybe there's a big tornado that happened and you make a piece of content that next day referencing the tornado. Let the world be your context, but stay true to the core message. Thank you for that question, Giovanni. How about Nate Schweppe? Nate Schweppe, unmute ask gary v your question buddy welcome welcome to the inside buddy yes get in here brother shweps appreciate it epic opportunity uh so my question is not really marketing or branding related um so just give you a real quick backstory i've been in business about 14 years uh kind of been a one-man show the whole time and you know fluctuated around a million dollars in revenue.

16:14And so the question is, I've kind of plateaued and I've gotten to a little bit of a comfort level. I'm not really comfortable enough that I want to stay here, but I'm not really uncomfortable enough that I want to make major changes to get to that next level. So how do I do that? How do I find that motivation to push to that next level? That's a great fucking question. I think you're going to be forced into that because of how the world's changing. So I think ultimately what's going to push you, buddy, is fear. Because there's no such thing as being in the middle. Businesses are either on the offense or on the defense.

16:50You may not see it, but based on your words, you're currently declining. You know that, right? Yeah, I agree. Yeah. That's it. So somebody's going to come along and do exactly what I'm talking about in your general area. And she or he is going to take so much market share that you're going to get caught and you're going to change in one of two ways. You're going to be on your back foot and over-invest in panic, or you're going to sell your business. Okay. Appreciate it. Yeah. And so let's keep building on this, buddy. What I think is the fact that you know that you're in this kind of complacent mode, I would rather you sell the business right now at the top of the market for you because you're still where you are and the decline will come either slowly or rapidly depending on the competitive nature of the market or use this moment with me you and the stitches uh and decide fuck it i need to go back on the offense and maybe you bring in a minority partner who has the fire in their belly maybe you hire a great executive or you know who's got it or you just say, fuck it, I've got one more at bat in me.

17:59Let me go hard, get it up to 1.6, and then I'm going to flip it. Because there is no, you're in the middle. There is no, like, you're not just chilling. You're either growing or you're declining. Yeah, appreciate it. Yep, that makes sense. Love it. That's a good one. Thanks, Nate. Charlie Anderson, my boy from DreamWorks in the middle of central Pennsylvania. You're up with Gary V. What's up, Gary? Thanks for getting on here, man. And it's a great pleasure to listen to you. I've been a long time fan. Thank you, bro. Absolutely. So my question is, I just lost it. Let me pull it back up here. So my question was, we never really viewed roofing as something that people really wanted to learn about or hear about on their social media feeds.

18:42Like my wife doesn't even watch it. She gives it a like and she swipes past because it's not a problem that she has right now. That might have more to do with what she thinks about you, brother, than roofing. That's a conversation for another time. but we feel like nobody really wants to buy a roof everybody they have to do it and they just want to get it over with and be done with it but we want to stay in front of them all the time so yeah when we make roofing content it seems like nobody gives a shit about it so we want to we want to create more like until until they do until they do until they do let's just i don't want to let that one go because everyone has to remember for sure and that's and again if the title of the video is don't get ripped off when you buy your next roof.

19:26That also might matter. Or six questions you have to ask to save yourself money before you buy your next roof. Right. So I know where you're, I sense where you're about to go, but I just wanted to put that pin there because all of you need that. Keep going, my brother. For sure. Yeah. But what, what I want to do is I just want to create content that people like to watch. I want to create entertaining content about small businesses and things in our community that are happening. so but i don't want to detract from the fact that we're a riffing company so how much content when we put out how much do you think should be you can make it about golfing you can make it about cigars golfing whiskey the new mayatorial race in town the carnival coming to town and then literally make a piece of content that you use every time that's almost like kishi and funny that at the end of the video it like changes and it says p.s we sell roofs you know like It could be a whole shtick where everything you do is awesome, to your point, it's more interesting, but that every video you have, P.S., and if you or your friend or neighbor or relative are in the market for a roof, don't forget to come to us.

20:33Literally a P.S. clip that you add to every video. Right. So it's just, that's like the afterthought. It's a subtle reminder. So maybe your 4th of July Main Street parade goes viral and everybody sees the P.S. and boom, you're the winner. I'm a very big fan of this concept of the P.S. I'm a dentist. P.S. I'm a roofer. P.S. We do landscaping. P.S. We have the best pizza in town. I think the P.S. edit at the end of content that's everything local is a monster need for local SMBs. i like that i like that p.s p.s i do stitches

21:23we're gonna get that we gotta get that doctor's simplicity today man this is gonna be a good one thanks charlie for that of course thank you long island joe joseph l shazley coming uh to speak with gary v i don't know if you're gonna remember this gary v but he's a good buddy of mine joseph and i had him be a guest on one of my Hangout hot calls. So I think he's got to do a format similar to this, but he's got a question about his roofing business and more importantly, the media company that he's trying to build for his roofing business. How are you doing, Gary? Thanks so much for doing this. This is really awesome, and I appreciate it.

21:54No worries, brother. So we're building a small media team inside our organization with like a director and editors. We create content for a handful of people in our organization, like sales reps and operations staff. And we're currently tracking leads by asking people if they've seen our videos to kind of measure success. But besides the leads, like what other metrics would you recommend looking at to evaluate if our team is doing a good job and if we're on the right track? Reach of the content. So you're looking in the platform of how much reach did the video get? So I'll just use my Instagram, for example.

22:25So yesterday, my post with my dad, two carousel, right? Image, then video. I hit view insights. I'm sure you've seen that before. And so I'm able to see that this reached 233 ,000 people, right? That is giving you a great indication if we're making content that is good for the platform. The platform is deeming the content good, right? Next, you're doing click-through, right? How many people are actually going to the site? So I may reach a million people, but only 100 come to the site, or I may have 223 ,000 people I reach and 20 ,000 come to the site. Obviously the second one, the content was more narrow, but it did the job we care about most, right?

23:11You're basically looking at reach, click through, and then conversion. You can get all, every piece of content to how many people did it maximize reaching, how many of them filled out leads, and then how many of them became customers, all three levels. Does that make sense, Jeff? Yeah, definitely. And by the way, If you're building brand, the first one matters kind of in a real way, right? The second one's a great indicator of the affinity of the brand work that was done, right? And then the third one is the business impact of what the content made. Does that make sense, everyone? Yeah, thank you.

23:46That's what you do on every single post, Joe. Love it. Thanks for the question, Joe. Jeremy Simpson's next. Jeremy Simpson, unmute and ask your question. what is up gary um i'm a i'm a jersey strong family build business here so um uh my what part of jersey uh family's from patterson but we live all the way up in vernon by the ski resorts i love it man good for you um so it's about that um i'm coming from a third generation family business that was very like head down strong just get it done mentality and as I'm gaining in this market and the brand awareness deal, it's not fitting my vision on how I wanted to move the company.

24:38I wasn't taught that. I was only taught to put the roof on, go. And in my process of becoming more aware of brand awareness and marketing, the duality of running this business in that old mindset that while trying to turn the new wheels is a bit of a struggle. Why? From managing your time and energy, or are there other humans in the family business making the second part a challenge? No, actually, the family business is down to just me. So there's nobody else in it that's influencing my time or anything like that. it's really just mindset on how the business's wheels were funded. It's money. So the old methods and old ways are still what's paying the bills.

25:29What are the old methods and old ways? Well, I'm not sure we can go into all of that, but it's just a universal conversation for everyone. Meaning like when you say old methods, old ways, you don't mean just like put on the roof. You Yes, we were 100 % referral before and we didn't need marketing. We have no letters on the chart. Do you need it now or why don't you just say 100 % referral? I believe because what you said in the two calls before, I'm dying and I recognize it, that that model is not going to work for me and I recognize it early and that process just took a long time to start to switch over.

26:09So I want to extract the things that benefit. Why did it? Why what? Did it take long to switch over? Because even though you recognized it, you hadn't felt it in the P &L yet, and that's why you didn't act on it? Yes, yes. And it was very difficult. No shit, Jeremy. This is why I'm bringing you down this path. You didn't act on it like I wanted you to when you recognized it. You only are starting to act on it now because you're starting to feel the pain. Yes or no? Tell me. I don't feel pain yet because we don't have such a big company that matters yet. It's actually the opposite. I want to actually grow the company now, and I know that that old model is not going to do it.

26:52So your business is not down. No. But because you're intuitive and it's family business, you've been in it, are you telling me you're kind of starting to smell the smoke before the fire? Like it's not down, but you've been doing this your whole fucking life, and you can kind of smell it. yes 100 then i'm really proud of you okay so what's the fucking problem because the alternative is you go out of business i don't want to go out of business so so is that a part of like just the mental part of getting over the hill of like ah fuck i have to learn a new fucking trick that fuck this shit kind of stuff so the question i add at the end is this i want to know where i would like to know a recommendation on um not misusing the the macro patience and micro speed theory I don't need the triggers to know when I'm being complacent and when patience is needed.

27:44Where are you on content on social? Not where I want to be, but I very much enjoy content. I like doing videos. I'm not afraid to get behind the camera. I'm not afraid to speak on different topics. Have you ever gotten customers from social? I'm going to say this one, and this is awesome that I'm able to say this. uh last year well maybe 16 months ago uh an old customer from a decade and a half his daughter clicked on my profile his her father looked at it and uh it triggered a dual sale of about 2.5 million dollars in two projects off of a tiktok that wasn't even about roofing so what so yeah what the fuck are we doing here i know but i i that's i wasn't able that you know that's what i wanted that's what made me start to want to go and do this and not old school no shit yeah it would make me want to do it too i know a million dollars that's an awesome story bro like that's cool i didn't know that story so jerm i i honestly like why i'm doing this because it's bringing value for everyone as you can imagine everyone hearing that number that just woke up a lot of people who have not started yet or have never seen that like I guess what I'm not, I'm not joking.

29:01What's the question here? Like, why are you not doing more? Like, are you asking me why you, why I think you might not be making three videos a day and posting them on all seven social networks? Like you should be. I think it's the fear, the fear of. That you'll get distracted and you actually like it so much. You might only do that. And that's like playing around and not running the business. oh my god 200 because i that's exactly where i go i feel like i'm doing content all day and then no one's putting a roof on kind of deal my mind makes sense so jeremy tell me your day no bullshit because what the fuck are we doing here otherwise when does your day start professionally ads cruiser leaving 6 30 7 in the morning i just i'm not actually retracting myself a lot from operations now i have a person that does all that but that's one of the moves that i changed from old school to new school.

29:53So my day actually starts taking care of the family and checking out some social media content and posts and trying my best to throw a little story out real quick. And then I go to the office and see what's going on for the day. I've been oddly removed from operations, which is allowing me to have that time to do some of this stuff. And I think I just said my own question, being removed from operations is what's making me feel so weird after having 30 years of only now i understand yeah can i give you some real peace of mind please you grew up in this business right all every second just a funny question right now you ready yep if i walked into that office and offered everybody four times more money than you pay them because i wanted to start a direct competitor to you in vernon new jersey okay and they're all gone now next day they're like, fuck you, Gary Vee, we love him.

30:44See ya. Would you know what to do to hire people and get it going? I'd like to say yes. So what, so that's funny. So explain to me what has happened in your removing from operations or doing like, I figured since you grew up in it, right? You're in it like that. There's nothing you don't know. Are you saying you don't have the stomach to do it? Like you cut, ah, ah, here's an interesting one. Do you feel like you've done such a nice job of building it out, building the ops, that you're in a really cush spot right now, because it sounds like you're on social media all day just hanging out. Do you feel like the fear of going back to that grind, like you're enjoying this chapter?