- What's up everybody?
Welcome back to the Sharpest Tool. My name is Josh Smith.
I am your host. And for those of who don't know,
I we're bringing this back.
It's been, we've been on a quite a bit
of a sabbatical here from the Sharpest tool.
There's been a lot of things going on at Scorpion,
so I wanted to bring us back, kick the podcast off.
We got a action packed season
for you here at the Sharpest tool, but a few changes.
I wanna make sure everybody who's been a long time listener
to the Sharpest tool is aware.
First off, those who know me, I've been hosting the show
for, gosh, almost three, four years.
I'm also, I also wear a couple hats here at Scorpion.
I'm the, the VP of marketing
for the Home Services division here at Scorpion.
So I help assist the team
that ultimately drives the customer success over here.
And I'm gonna be joined this entire season
by another fantastic individual
who I've grown to love over the years.
His name's Nicholas Bosco. We call him Bosco.
So if you hear me call him
by his last name, it's intentional.
Bosco. That's right, that's right.
Why don't you go ahead, why don't you introduce yourself
to everybody listening.
'cause you're a new face to some, some you've talked
with probably some of
our customers who are listening to this Yep.
Are familiar with Bosco.
So tell me, what's your, what's your deal?
What do you do from, well, first of all, you You're welcome.
Okay. No, you're giving me someone to talk to. Yeah.
I'm trying to heighten up the show a little bit here now.
Bringing myself in. Really? Yes.
- So, - Bo, I go by Bosco for those that I know personally,
those I've spoken to before,
you've heard Nicholas, Nicholas Bosco.
I think we need to give you JRPI think we should actually
stick with JRP to let it flow.
Stick with JRP. So there's a funny story behind that.
If you keep listening at some point this season,
I will explain where JRP came from
and that's, that's a real conversation.
Alright. Just, there we go. We're starting it soon.
We're starting. Okay. We're, yes.
So for, for those that dunno me, I'm the senior director
of account management for the home services division.
I oversee several account managers.
We work to grow our account for home services. Specifically.
We, yeah. Honestly, I actually enjoy talking to clients.
It's very interesting to get a lot of their backstories.
Yeah. But truth be told,
I wouldn't be here today if it actually wasn't for
JRP over here, Josh.
You know, he definitely drives in a new breed
into the home services area.
So I'm excited for this podcast.
I'm excited to kick things off. We're about
to just dial it up over here.
Think there's one thing you know about Bosco.
He brings energy. So if you're a listen to this,
you're on the road, wherever you're at, expect him
and hold him to it too.
If he's not bringing the energy, I want you
to like, flag it to us.
Be like, you know what Josh, the last episode, good content,
but Bosco isn't bringing the energy.
So, alright. I, I wanna do something different.
New, new season. All right. So here's what we're gonna do.
We're gonna rapid fire. I got a few riddles for you.
Are you ready? I quick comes pop. Ready. Alright.
I, I have legs, but I can't walk. Who am I?
The table you got. Okay. Okay. Alright.
Alright. Okay. Hold on, hold on.
I have teeth, but I can't eat. What am I? Oh, piano.
No, I dunno.
I didn't know why that came to mind.
I have teeth but can't eat. What am I, my, my grandpa.
Is that, is that not a thing? That one, that
- One deserves a, a - Little, oh no, he doesn't have teeth.
That was right. That he doesn't have teeth.
That was the one. Okay. If teeth
but can't eat, what am I, last chance?
1, 2, 3 teeth. I don't, I don't really use them anymore.
Well, maybe you would use them.
You have locks of luscious locks on your, on your dome.
It's a comb. A comb has teeth. Pecha. Of course, of course.
I got one more. I got one more. All right.
It starts with P and ends with E
and carries every letter within.
What is it? Starts with P and ends with E.
It starts with e Ends with e carries every letter within.
Oh, I, for whatever I'm thinking. Like parcel envelope.
I'm getting too granular on this.
No, no, I, yeah, you're getting too granular. Back out.
Okay. I got nothing.
You have post office. Post office carries
every letter with, come on.
That was a good one. Okay. That was a good one.
Sometimes it's that. There we go. Alright.
One last one there. Redeem yourself on this one. Okay.
Right. I'm yours. Still everyone can see me, but you can't.
Who am I? I'm yours. Still. I I'm yours. Still.
Everyone can see. Everyone can see me,
but you can't, what am I, my reflection?
No, nose, face, something. Shadow.
I, ah, shadow drum roll please. And it's a, is it really?
Yeah, it's a shadow. Which I don't know if I agree with
that one though, because you can see your shadow.
So anyways, here's another one for you.
Topic of discussion today.
It starts with social and ends with media.
Oh, that, that was a good way to hear. That's tough.
A little bit longer winded on this intro,
but I wanna make sure everybody gets
to feel the vibe of what we're gonna put down here.
But today I wanted to talk about social media.
Social media is a big thing, especially
for home services contractors, right.
We're moving into what many dub kind of the shoulder season.
Yep. Yep. For some people think, start to slow down
for some people think, start to pick up.
For some people they don't really see a change.
I think there's been this historical idea
that things always slow down.
And I've just seen that to not be the case.
I've seen so many businesses thrive in the silver season.
But one of the things we constantly talk about
and preach here at Scorpion is this idea
that this is the time when you really wanna build value
with your customer base.
And one of the best ways to, not even social media,
but not even in the slow season.
It's year round. Year round. Consistency. Consistency.
We talk about that all the
time. I think people forget about that.
Yeah. Yeah. Why? But so here's like step back, right?
I mean, you're so bosco, for
what it's worth, people look him up.
He's like, he's way more social media
savvy, I think, than even I am.
And what he drives is this idea of consistency.
The importance of consistency.
So if we're gonna maximize maximizing social media
engagement, it takes consistency.
Tell me a bit about that. Bosco.
What, what does that entail?
Being consistent on social media. What does that entail?
Okay. I, I think what people tend to forget is social media.
We think of just kind of generalizing Facebook
or Instagram, right?
And those are kind of your two core foundational,
but if you look at what you're trying to accomplish, first
of all, social media has created awareness.
Like, and yeah, I don't the word awareness, right?
Awareness. Awareness, yeah.
So we're trying to create this awareness not only
for your brand, right, for for your business, right?
We talk about influencers, we talk about, you know, again,
influencers can be your celebrities, building brands such
as like Coca-Cola, apple, right?
It's, it's all about how you build your awareness.
Well, it's through platforms that people are using, right?
People love consistency
because it's something that they can rely on
and go back to time and time again.
So when we talk about consistency,
it's about getting it out there.
And what people tend to do is they go, alright,
I'm gonna start posting.
Three months later they're done.
And it's like, yeah, that's not how this works.
Let's drum that up.
Let's actually dial it up to the consistency.
Your audience wants to hear from you.
They wanna know what you're doing, what you are wearing,
what you're eating, what you're talking about, what happened
to your ex, whatever the case may be.
They wanna hear about it, right?
But they love that consistency. Yeah.
Well, maybe not, maybe not.
What's happening with your ex, not in a business context.
No. Know what's interesting, I wanna jump into this though.
'cause you, you know, you're talking about being consistent.
People are often flashing the pan, right?
They throw three posts up there
and then all of a sudden it wanes.
It Is it, it can be exhausting as a business owner,
especially a small business where you haven't
yet figured out that you wanna hire somebody
or you wanna pay somebody to do this.
Yeah. This is one of those things that falls into category
for what it's worth, where it's from where I'm sitting.
If I think like a business owner here, in terms
of running my business and my operation,
if there's something that I can get somebody to do 80%
as well as I can, and it removes a time burden on my
plate, I, and, and I can afford to do it.
I can afford to pay 'em. I need to pay them to do it. Yeah.
I just need to trust that they're gonna handle it.
And I think that's one of the things, like I, even myself,
I am so bad at this consistency thing, posting consistently
week over week, day over day, month over month,
year over year to build the relationship
on these social channels.
Yep. The way that you need to, if you're gonna do it right,
if you're gonna maximize social media engagement, you have
to be consistent with being present with your people, right?
Yep. There's, okay, but there's a way to accomplish this
and it's a lot of leg work in the beginning,
but it pays off dividends in the end, right?
Because you're building that awareness. Yeah.
You wanna schedule, you gotta build a schedule
to actually accomplish a lot of these things.
Right? And what I mean by schedule is,
if you're looking at one month, two months,
three months ahead, you're actually gonna start building out
a schedule of what you're going to talk about.
Business owners, everybody out there,
you know your business, you know
what your season looks like.
You know when it gets hot, when it gets cold, right? Yeah.
You know what, people are DIYing, you know
what people are talking about, what they need.
You schedule out those posts to reflect
what people are gonna be talking about.
Even wrap it around, around the
holidays, talk about what's going on.
Like building out the scheduling
of your posts helps create this consistency
and all of a sudden you're doing it within
two days, three months work.
Yeah. Simple as it's, it's,
it's sometimes easier said than done.
I get that. Yeah. But you get the consistency.
You're building out the scheduling of your post.
And I agree. I think that a lot
of the times the business owners try
to take a lot on themselves.
Yeah. If you can afford it, hire somebody out to do it.
It really makes a big difference.
One, it takes a lift off of you.
You're actually having someone who knows
that area is the expert on it, can give guidance
and suggestions of what you wanna
accomplish a hundred percent of the time.
Yeah. And I think it's, so, especially in the home services
field especially, it is so important
to drive your content visually.
I think for every, anybody driving content visually,
we're seeing it in the TikTok generation
with videos become the primary medium, the primary motif
to getting content out to users, right?
Instagram with images, right.
Pictures in terms of reels, even slideshows Yeah.
Become super valuable and important.
And we're seeing these social channels prioritize
those mediums.
So like, I think there's a, a case to be made about
s if you're gonna do it right, a yes.
Get somebody to help you with it. Right? Schedule it out.
You want schedule consistently somebody
who can know your business
and nobody's gonna know your business
as well as you do, right.
As business owner. But the way you partner with
that person too can have a huge impact.
I think about the clients that we have, Moscow, where
we're running social media with them, but,
and it's good, right?
We're getting them in front of their clients.
We're seeing a lot of really good progression in increasing
followers, increasing post engagement,
really powerful visuals.
But the ones who dominate the market,
they have these custom visuals that are driven
by the people at the business.
It could be about technicians we're
sponsoring and highlighting.
It could be about reviews
that we just gathered from our customers.
It could be a video of a technician walking
through a simple diag diagnosis of a problem.
So customers are getting value out of it, right? Oh yeah.
What have you seen on that?
Because visuals seem to be such an important piece here.
Yes. For maximizing engagement. Yeah.
I, and I think what, what the issue
that you run into is people aren't digesting content
like they used to, right?
I mean, you can look at the most successful businesses
and it's all about the visual aspect of it.
A lot of reading is kinda like, yeah,
I don't wanna read all this, right?
Yeah. But you present more of a visual aspect.
A hundred percent. And at the same time, I think what a lot
of business owners just need to break away from is
their comfortable state, right?
Yeah. A lot of the success you see with other companies,
they do something that is outside of the norm, right?
That makes 'em different and stand
out above ev everybody else.
I, it's, it's crazy to me
because a lot of people I've seen,
like some business owners create these unique,
comical videos when it comes to plumbing
as an example or hvac, right?
But they do something different that relates
to their audience, right?
And it's just like, yeah, I wouldn't normally do that,
but guess what, I'm gonna do it anyway.
And now all of a sudden they're building this influence in a
market that they've tapped into
to help gain their awareness.
They're influencing out to their core followers,
and then their followers are gonna go,
check this out, this is great.
Now they're top of mind. It's just, yeah, you,
you gotta go this route.
I I, in the long run, it's gonna pay off you. You know?
What makes you think of, you remember that?
I think he did boilers the New York, the New York dude
who did boilers and he made a rap video.
Yes. That was good. That was good.
It was getting, it was getting some, it was circulating.
I mean, what's interesting though is like, I mean, not
to say go do a rap video, right?
No, I wouldn't be opposed to it.
I wouldn't Autistic you think that's your audience, right?
Yeah. It's in terms of building relationships
with your followers, that's
where like really knowing your audience.
Oh yeah. If you have an audience that's super, like urban,
if you know your audience and you know,
they're urban in nature and they, they,
they love hip hop music, right.
Doing something like, that's phenomenal.
I've seen ones where they go back harken back
to like a seventies song
and they apply it to, they do a little music video
with people around the office and it's corny,
but it gets people like kind of interested in laughing
and being like, Hey, check this out.
The more people are sharing and engaging with it. Yeah.
Right. But they did this like people around the office
and they each had a line, they took the, the verses
of this melody from the seventies
and they applied it to like plumbing.
And so, not to say for what it's worth, step back.
You don't have to go do a music video.
You, you can if you want to,
but you don't have to like, stay within something
that's authentic to you in your brand.
Right. For, for the boiler guy
that was authentic to his brand.
I mean, you look at the website and it feeds that style.
So there's something about it
that was authentic to their brand.
Oh my gosh. Yeah. And that is the type of people
that they're trying to attract.
That's the type of people they're trying
to build relationships with.
And it's so important
to make sure you're keeping it authentic,
because relationships are built on
authenticity more than anything else.
Yeah. We're not talking about like the relationships
where you check in with your in-laws once a year.
We're talking about the relationships that you actually have
mute, like the puppy love stage.
Like you really want get with your followers
and build up this base where people understand you, right?
Yeah. They, they want to, people want to connect with you.
Like, I, I can't say that enough.
People want to connect with you, they want to engage
with you, but they do it through these platforms
and that's how they absorb this information.
And I promise you, come time when they need you,
they're going to remember that rap
video and going, this was funny.
I'm gonna give 'em a call and check this out.
Because they're entertained. They love it.
They, they connected
with you on a different level than they would before.
So, you know, it's, you, you bring up a good point.
I I, I saw this one time in the past.
I'm gonna give this person a call
'cause I'm thinking about them now.
And you made the comment top of mind, right?
That's how you stay top of mind.
I think it's important to step back
and recognize, we're gonna talk about this in a few episodes
though, about how do you measure success
with social media marketing.
So stay tuned for that. But maximizing social media
engagement is the first step
to actually driving the success.
And the success isn't always to get the call at the end
of somebody watching that rap video, right?
It's about building the brand.
It's about making sure that that name is top of mind
for boilers or somebody's got a plumbing issue
and bringing awareness about how we help solve that problem.
We're in the generation of helpful insights
and everybody goes to Google to search for something
or seeking something out that they need help with.
And the more helpful you can be through the content
that you're driving, and the more you can share about the
exciting things that are happening at the business
that generates excitement, generates a buzz, shows people
that you're engaged in.
You're, you're engaged, invested in solving their problems,
and you have the expertise to do it,
and you marry that together now
with a powerful experience when your technician goes
to the door or when somebody places a phone call,
how your CSRs are responding.
That's, that's a, that's a dynamic duo that you can't,
that's tough to fight against.
From a com competition standpoint, we,
and this is just one piece of it
as we know the customer journey, I mean, what used to be
somewhat of a flat line started to have a curve to it.
Yeah. Now it's operating like my mind does when
I'm trying to figure out a chemistry problem.
Like it's all over the place, right?
I'm telling you the customer journey is just wild.
But what stays the same are different ways of reaching them.
We know what they're using, right?
So what type of social media apps, we know
that they're searching on Google, right?
We know what they're doing
and it's about being in front of them with the right tools.
And so that's what we try to do. We try
to guide people in talking about that.
Right? And if it fits your business at the right moment
and right time, let's do it.
Let's talk about it. What's we do all the time.
You know what's interesting is a, a lot of social media,
when you go step back, just broadly
speaking, businesses engage.
I do love broadly. That's good.
Broadly, no, not broadly, scorpion.
Well, I'm, I'm talking about broad, broad strokes over here.
Broad strokes. The, this idea
of influencer marketing, right?
Leveraging, we think oftentimes I think
with home service business owners,
there's influencers within the industry, right?
We go to business coaches, we go to marketing experts, we go
to per online personalities there,
and they help us, you know, we're, we're likely to, to
investigate buy things from the people
just as business owners, right?
Yep, yep. But now there's a step further that a lot
of product companies typically take, right?
They go to celebrities, well-known people on social media
and they get them to push their products
to a specific client base.
Yeah. And the way they do this is they find people
who typically are of the client base
that they would sell the product to, who also happen
to be an influencer online.
I'm, I've convinced me otherwise, Bosco,
and maybe the answer's no,
but I'm not convinced that that's necessarily a path
that you typically will go down from a home services
perspective is finding somebody who's gonna go push ream
to their client base, who's some social media influencer.
You know, like, is there, is there a case to be made
for influencer marketing to
maximize social media engagement?
Or are there other channel avenues
that probably resonate better?
I definitely think there would be
other avenues in terms of that.
The biggest piece that when influencer marketing, a lot
of the base that you're going after are for people
and especially in the home
services industry, are homeowners.
Yeah. Now a lot of homeowners do have some sort
of engagement with influencers out there,
but that's not to say that this is the right type of mind.
What a lot of homeowners are doing is either DIY projects,
looking at how they can actually impact their home at
a cost savings perspective.
So it's not about getting an influencer
to talk about that and pushing a product.
It's about getting out there
and connected with the audience on
that level in terms of that.
So backing up when you look at this,
when if you're actually seeing, do we have
to go into the influence type marketing?
Do we actually have to get a celebrity engagement?
No, you don't need to really do that, right? Yeah.
Again, a lot of these people are doing the DIY, like Josh,
I know you've done a bunch of DIY
and you're doing your research,
you're starting to look this stuff up.
I Exactly. But when you start to get that person that,
that actual tech that's out there that talks about
what you're doing come time when you actually run into an
issue, like that's what you're
doing is you're gonna be contacting them.
Hit on that. Oh, trust me. Make no mistake,
I'm not doing any more tiling jobs.
I think I'm all tiled out
after this last one that I, I tried grout,
I tried doing grout
and I will tell you right now,
so's funny is grout is actually like doing a grout
job is actually not bad.
I don't mind that you put it in the
lines and then you swipe it.
That's fine. That's the tiling stuff, man.
That's exhausting. So I will absolutely hire a hire a
tile person for my next job.
But the people who are like witness to me, if they're local,
like those are the ones I wanna,
I wanna like give the business
to, 'cause they're in front of it.
I think, you know, here's the case. I,
I will see this on influencer now I'm thinking about it
influencer marketing, where it becomes really impactful
for home service business is,
let's say you give a really powerful experience to
somebody in your local market who just so happens
to also have an influence online
or an influence or a following.
You know, you, you end up doing work at the house
of a celebrity or you do, you know,
and then you're able to build a connection
and relationship with them to the point where it's like,
hey, you know, would you mind, you know,
just sharing your experience, you know, something like that,
that potentially could be a path that you go down
to engage in influencer marketing, but yeah.
You know? And how does this integrate with other channels?
You mentioned the zigzag, the chemistry problem.
I kinda, I'm just kind curious to your thoughts.
How do you see it when it comes to how this integrates
with other marketing channels?
Well, okay, so we talk about the customer journey.
Let's use your, your tiling as an example.
And I promise you any tiling I
would do would look like Picasso.
Let's do it. It's just all over the place.
So if we're gonna do some tiling, first of all,
typically homeowners gonna wanna do that.
DIY. They're gonna be like, all right, I can do this.
You know, wife goes to you
and says, Hey honey, I wanna do this for our bathroom.
You're like, I got this.
In reality, we know in
our minds we're like, we don't got this.
But we start looking it up.
We DIY, the project, we think about,
all right, what tools do I need?
We start looking at the tools. There's some recommendations.
First of all, I'm on Google, it's not social media.
I'm on Google. I'm getting hit up by different ads. Yeah.
Different videos, right? Sure.
Whether it's through YouTube,
sometimes social media pops up, what have you.
Yeah. All of a sudden getting hit up.
We start looking at those products. Great.
Next step, we start getting
all the tools, start going through it.
Then we find the video that tells us
how we actually accomplished this project over time.
We're gonna come across, say, a plumbing issue.
Because as we did tying work, guess what?
I accidentally hit too far and I broken a pipe.
I don't think I can actually do that work.
I'm not speaking from experience on this,
but I probably have broken a pipe.
But, so we look at this, now all
of a sudden we're doing some research,
but maybe I did some research via, from the tools I hit up.
Now all of a sudden that social media marketing
that was hitting some of that similarity of
what I was looking for is actually targeting me.
So now the customer journeys on social media
through Google as well.
So it's going, kinda going back and forth. Yeah.
So what's happening is I've done my research,
I've done my walkthrough, different things.
I've now said, all right, I need a
plumber near me as an example.
So as I'm looking through this, I now, I'm getting hit up
with different advertisements on Google, through
retargeting, through social media, retargeting,
through Instagram, what have you.
Now all of a sudden I'm gonna start calling
some of these prospects.
'cause I need some help and guidance. So again,
maybe I don't call 'em right now.
Maybe I figured out another DIY on how to fix it myself,
but I got them in my back pocket.
So it'll probably take me several different click-throughs
just before I actually call a business.
Right? Yeah. So again,
I'm hitting on all these different
areas and different platforms.
So the customer journey's all over the place.
That's just me. As you can tell, I'm all over the place.
So by the time I'm actually like, alright,
I need to call somebody.
Yeah. It took me through five different areas Yeah.
To finally go, all right, I need this guy to come out here
and fix my, my broken pipe to totally.
And I, it it's kinda like it's courting, right?
You gotta be present with somebody
that you wanna ultimately have a commitment with.
Oh yeah. And so this is,
this is kind of part of that, right?
You can't expect a random commitment if you're not
continuously present with them in a powerful way.
So, oh, maximizing social media engagement.
Super interesting, super powerful.
Next four episodes, stay tuned
because we're gonna be jumping into
how do we leverage it for lead generation?
What's the role of video? Video is a rising discussion right
now in terms of social media marketing actually is,
I think it's been a rising discussion.
I think we're seeing, seeing the need
for it now more than ever.
So, and then we're gonna talk about measuring success.
That's all to come. Just wrapping up this
episode, I hope you guys enjoyed it.
If you enjoyed it, definitely share it around, slap
that like button and give that
subscribe button a little nudge so you can get more
of this awesome content from Bosco
and JRP over at the sharpest tool by Scorpion.
Yes sir. Until next time, Bosco, I'm pumped for this season.
I hope you are too. I'm excited for this.
It's gonna be great. Alright, until next time, friends,
we'll talk then.