Are You Selling Your Service… or Selling the Experience?
Customers have more choices than ever. Sometimes the difference isn’t just the service you provide, but how you make people feel from the first interaction to the final follow-up. What are some ways your business creates an experience that keeps customers coming back?Should you pause ads when you’re short-staffed?
I don’t think the answer is always to shut everything off. But running ads like normal when your team is already stretched can create a mess fast. More leads don’t help much if response times slow down, quality slips, routes get overloaded, or the owner has to jump back into the field to save the schedule. When we’re tight on capacity, I’d rather adjust the ads than pretend nothing changed. That could mean lowering the budget, keeping branded search on, focusing only on dense route areas, pushing new jobs further out, or temporarily stopping low-margin one-time work. Marketing should match capacity. If the ads are bringing in work the team can’t serve well, the campaign might look good on paper while the customer experience gets worse. But the other side is maybe this is the perfect time to hire and be over capacity instead of scrambling. When you’re short-staffed, do you pause ads, reduce spend, or keep leads flowing?Are reviews more useful than a marketing agency?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. A good marketing agency can absolutely help a business. They can help with creative, targeting, campaigns, landing pages, reporting, and getting ads in front of the right people. But before you pay someone to write your message, it’s probably worth asking: Have you actually studied what your customers already said about you? Because your reviews may be one of the most useful marketing assets in your business. A lot of owners look at reviews as proof. 5 stars. Good testimonial. Nice thing to put on the website. That’s useful, but it’s only the surface. The better part is the language. Customers will tell you exactly why they hired you, what they were afraid of, what they noticed, what made them trust you, what almost stopped them from buying, and what made them stay. For us, reading through our reviews changed how I thought about our marketing. Customers kept repeating things like: “worth every penny” “one less thing to worry about” “like clockwork” “they text before they come” “they send a picture of the closed gate” “they take the waste with them” “I was embarrassed” “my last company left the gate open” “there aren’t enough hours in the day” That language is better than anything I could have guessed from sitting at my desk. It showed me the real buying triggers. Some people hired us because the yard got away from them over winter or they're busy families who didn’t have time. Others had health issues, pregnancy, injuries, or physical limitations. A small handful switched from cheaper competitors because they were tired of missed visits, poor communication, or gates being left open. Those details matter. If I only market the task, I sound like every other company. “We scoop dog poop.” That’s true, but it doesn’t explain why someone is willing to pay a premium. The reviews showed us what people actually valued: Communication. Reliability. Thoroughness. Gate safety. Waste hauled away. Professional scheduling. No judgment when the yard is bad. A clean yard without having to think about it. That becomes ad copy, website copy, quote follow-up language, sales training, social proof and also helps with pricing objections. When customers repeatedly say “worth every penny,” “more than fair,” or “I’d pay twice as much,” that tells me price is not the full story for the right buyer. It tells me I need to explain the value better, not panic and discount the service every time someone asks about price. A marketing agency can miss that if they don’t understand the business deeply enough. They may write clean copy, but clean copy doesn’t always match the customer’s internal conversation. Your reviews give you that conversation. They tell you what people were already thinking before they bought or what made them feel safe enough to hire you. They show you which parts of the experience matter more than you realized. For us, gate photos became a bigger marketing point because customers kept mentioning them. Hauling waste away became a bigger marketing point because customers kept comparing that to companies that leave it in their trash can. Communication became one of our strongest selling points because people brought it up over and over again. That’s the kind of information every business owner should be paying attention to. Before you rewrite your ads, rebuild your website or hire someone to "fix your marketing", read your reviews. Print them out. Tag the repeated phrases. Look for patterns. Group them by pain point, objection, trust factor, and reason they stayed. Then use the customer’s language in your marketing. Your best customers are often telling you exactly how to sell to more people like them. Have you ever gone through your reviews and pulled out the exact phrases customers keep repeating?Is your follow-up helping you close, or annoying your leads?
This is one I had to learn the hard way. Speed-to-lead matters. If someone fills out a form, asks for a quote, or reaches out with interest, the business that responds fast usually has the advantage. A fast response can be the difference between closing the job and losing the customer to the next company they call. Quote reminders matter too. People get busy. They forget. They compare options. They need a little nudge. A good follow-up system can recover a lot of sales that would have gone cold. But there’s a point where follow-up stops feeling helpful and starts feeling pushy. That line matters. I learned this lesson from my only 1-star Google review. It wasn’t because of the service or because we did a bad job scooping. It came from a lead who didn’t want to receive any more messages, and because of technology issues with our automations, messages kept going out after they should have stopped. That one stung because it was preventable. It also taught me that automation can make you look organized when it works, and careless when it doesn’t. A follow-up system should never make someone feel trapped in your sales process. If a lead says they’re not interested, asks you to stop, or opts out, that needs to be respected immediately. No excuses. No “just one more reminder.” No system glitch that keeps poking them after they already said no. For us, that means paying closer attention to: how many quote reminders go out how close together they are what the wording sounds like whether the lead has a clean way to opt out whether the automation actually stops when it should whether a real person needs to step in before another message goes out The goal of follow-up is to reduce friction, not create resentment. A good reminder should feel like: “Hey, just checking in in case life got busy.” A bad reminder feels like: “Why won’t you answer me?” That difference affects your brand. Especially in local home services, where trust matters. People may not remember every detail of your quote, but they will remember if you made them feel pressured, ignored, or annoyed before they even became a customer. I still use automation. I still believe in follow-up. I still think most businesses lose money because they don’t follow up enough. But now I also think your follow-up system needs brakes. It needs opt-outs. It needs timing rules. It needs limits. It needs someone checking that the customer experience still feels human. Because closing more jobs doesn’t matter if the process damages your reputation with the people who don’t buy. How many times do you follow up on a quote before you stop? And do you have a clear opt-out process for people who don’t want more messages?What Marketing Actually Works for Outdoor Service Businesses During Slow Seasons?
I run a small land clearing/brush clearing business in Ohio, and with how wet it’s been in our area lately, things are starting to slow down a bit. I’m trying to be proactive and focus on marketing so I can keep work coming in and continue growing the business. For those of you who’ve been in a similar spot, what marketing has actually worked best for you to bring in more customers and keep jobs lined up? Facebook ads, Google ads, yard signs, referrals, local networking, something else? I’d especially love to hear what’s worked well for seasonal or outdoor service businesses when weather starts affecting the schedule. Appreciate any advice or ideas you’re willing to share.Are cheap competitors actually your fault?
This is probably going to rub some people the wrong way, but I think it’s worth talking about. A lot of service business owners complain about cheap competitors. I get it. There is always someone willing to do the work for less. In my industry, I’ve seen people charge prices that make no sense once you factor in drive time, labor, supplies, fuel, insurance, taxes, and the actual time it takes to do the job right. But I also think we have to be honest as business owners. If the only thing a customer understands about your service is the task itself, they are going to compare you against the cheapest version of that task. For us, that would be: “They scoop dog poop.” So the customer starts comparing: price frequency who can come sooner who seems cheaper That’s a weak position to be in. The customer has no reason to value the difference because we haven’t explained the difference well enough. That’s where positioning matters. For us, we had to get much better at explaining what the customer is actually paying for: proactive communication reminders before service on-the-way messages gate photos after every visit waste hauled away thorough multi-pass yard checks professional invoicing and scheduling reliable weekly service trained and background checked technicians a company that shows up consistently Those things matter to our best customers. And when we looked through our reviews, customers were already telling us that. They were saying things like: “worth every penny” “like clockwork” “one less thing to worry about” “they text before they come” “they send a picture of the closed gate” “they take the waste with them” “our last company left the gate open” That changed how I thought about cheap competitors. Some customers will always choose the cheapest option. That’s fine. But if too many good-fit customers are comparing you only on price, your message may not be doing enough work. Your marketing should make it clear why your service costs what it costs before the customer ever asks. That means talking about: risk trust reliability communication safety convenience consistency the cost of hiring the wrong company The cheaper competitor may still win some customers. But I don’t want to lose the right customers because I failed to explain why we’re different. Are cheap competitors hurting your business, or is your positioning making it too easy for customers to compare you on price?
