Franchise QB

Episode 95: Amber Gaige- Chief Marketing Advisor, Far Beyond Marketing

• Mike Halpern • Season 1 • Episode 95

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In this episode of the Franchise QB Podcast, host Mike Halpern speaks with Amber Gaige, an international bestselling author and Chief Marketing Advisor at Far Beyond Marketing. 

They discuss Amber's entrepreneurial journey, the importance of effective marketing for entrepreneurs, and the four C's of marketing: clear communication, consistent branding, customer demographics, and channel management. 

The conversation also covers common marketing mistakes entrepreneurs make and actionable steps to improve marketing strategies, especially within the franchise model.

Takeaways

Amber Gaige shares her lifelong lessons in entrepreneurship.
Franchising offers stability and consistency for business owners.
Marketing for entrepreneurs focuses heavily on return on investment.
Clear communication is essential for effective marketing.
Consistent branding helps build recognition and trust.
Understanding your ideal customer is crucial for targeted marketing.
Channel management is key for customer retention and upselling.
Many entrepreneurs fall victim to ineffective marketing strategies.
It's important to have control over your marketing assets.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction
00:48 Amber Gaige's Entrepreneurial Journey
04:10 The Importance of Marketing for Entrepreneurs
07:01 The Four C's of Effective Marketing
12:13 Common Marketing Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make
16:02 Navigating Franchise Marketing Challenges
19:00 Conclusion

https://farbeyondmarketing.com/

https://a.co/d/5TVgkh9

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Contact me and my team with any questions along the way. www.calendly.com/franchiseguy
Mike Halpern, CAFC
mike@franchiseqb.com

This is the Franchise QB Podcast, where we empower entrepreneurs to win big in franchising. We huddle up weekly to educate our audience about the most successful small business model ever created. Franchise it! Welcome to the Franchise QB podcast. I'm your host, Mike Halpern, a 20 year industry veteran and entrepreneur. My mission is for listeners to achieve their American dreams of creating wealth and independence through franchise ownership. Every week we speak with franchisees, franchisors or vendors that support the industry. Thank you for joining us and let's get started. Joining us on the huddle today is Amber Gaige, international bestselling author, speaker. and Chief Marketing Advisor at Far Beyond Marketing. Welcome to the show, Amber. Thank you so much for having me, Mike. It's a delight. Well, I'm so happy to have you here. So uh let's start off with your business background and your personal background. How has entrepreneurship impacted your career? my goodness. It has been a lifetime of lessons and blessings and hard times. Any entrepreneur will tell you, entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart. uh I think that is the beauty of franchising that comes in is that it provides a level of uh consistency and stability that you don't have otherwise. And so as a child, my parents partnered with venture capitalists out of Florida to start Benjamin Franklin Plumbing, which is now a national recognized brand. Yeah, I'm really familiar with them. It's a great brand and Authority Brands acquired them. Authority Brands acquired them. Yeah, sure. So I was very blessed from a young age, having been homeschooled, to work and see all the work that went into forming a franchise. We were actually a license before we were a franchise. This was back in 1999. And so that really formed a big part of my passion for franchising and for entrepreneurship, because I got to see behind the scenes at both a local level And then as the brand grew and my career took off, after I graduated from college, uh I got to sit on the board of the franchise, the advisory board, and helped to heavily influence the national branding and marketing for that franchise and for the other franchises that are underneath the same umbrella. And so my business background is a mix of entrepreneurship, family business, and franchising. and it was a great education. Yeah. So just walk me through that. So your parents were operating, did they start as Benjamin Franklin as licensees or did they have like an independent business that became Benjamin Franklin? They did have an independent business that then converted to become Benjamin Franklin. They were the first Benjamin Franklin Plumbing in the state of Texas. Wow. That's super interesting. And was that in the Dallas area? It was. Yeah. And then we acquired Houston and San Antonio later on. My goodness, that's a really big business. So that's really interesting. So they got the capital um from kind of a venture capitalist, and then your parents were kind of operating partners that were in the day-to-day and kind of scaled the business. Yep. Yeah, they were very blessed that my dad was a plumber since 1983. So definitely rode alongside him in the backhoe. His first company was a commercial subcontracting business. And so um that was their first plumbing company. I finished high school at 16. My mother has three business degrees. My father looked at her and said, okay, you finished homeschooling your kid. What are you going to do? And she said, nothing. I've raised a child and done. He said, no, I think that you need to go into business and let's start another company. And so that's when they decided that they wanted to get into the residential home services. And they're still in that business today. And I've been out of that business for about 10 years, maybe even closer to 15 now. wow. So what aspect of residential home services do they do? Is it a lot of things or do they focus on a certain niche? They focus on the plumbing primarily. OK, so that's got it. Cool. Yeah, it's just really interesting. mean, you come your parents are entrepreneurs. You grew up in an entrepreneurial environment and your expertise. I'm sure you are, you know, you have expertise in a lot of things because as we both know, entrepreneurs wear a lot of hats. But marketing is your thing. So. What makes marketing for entrepreneurs different than say marketing for national brands or chains? Yeah. The first marketing company that I sold to private equity in 2018 is where I got my experience on marketing on a national level. Okay. And I will tell you that marketing for an entrepreneur versus marketing on a national level comes down to the desperate need for return on investment. and for every dollar to have a purpose and an emphasis on return on investment versus branding. And there again is, if you were to ask me what's more important, branding or return on investment, I'm going to tell you that they're married because branding is the wind in the sails and return on investment is what makes your phone ring as an entrepreneur. So um I think an entrepreneur probably has more fingers and more pies than necessarily a national. marketing advisor, say, or a marketing director, and an entrepreneur also has less time to focus on their marketing as well. So unfortunately, they end up getting the short end of the stick a lot of times because they don't know what they don't know. Right. Well, it's interesting when I talk to a lot of candidates that are exploring franchise ownership for the first time and they look at Item 6 in the FDD and they say, OK, I understand the 2 % local marketing where they give me guidance on where I should spend my money. But what's this 1 % brand fund? You know, how do I You know, it just seems so like intangible for them and explain kind of the bigger picture that you also have to participate in the wind and the sales, as you say, I like how you put that. So you've actually written the book about marketing for entrepreneurs. So what was your inspiration and reason for doing so? So the inspiration for the book was that I saw my people, the home service providers of America being confused and frustrated about marketing. uh I also saw the major repercussions that happen every time Google had an algorithm shift and the challenges that occur operationally when the phone isn't ringing and you have technicians sitting in the trucks on the sideline. I wanted to be able to empower franchisees and individual entrepreneurs with a system of marketing that would grow their business while they slept and would demystify a lot of the confusion that comes with marketing. So it did become an international best seller on Amazon, which I was thrilled. It's a very simple read. It's the four C's of effective marketing to help them grow. Yeah. Well, I want to dive right into that. uh you're exactly right. A lot of entrepreneurs like the franchisors giving them guidance as to how they can do client acquisition. They're coming up with their own ideas, maybe from their previous work history. What are your four C's of the effective marketing framework? Sure. The first C is clear communication. Mostly the most overlooked aspect of marketing that I find when I'm working with people who are not a part of a franchise brand. They don't understand the confusion that exists in the market, why people are not buying from them. ah So I am part of the Story Brand family, the Donald Miller Story Brand family. I take all of my clients through the seven part framework to make sure that what they are saying on their website, on their trucks, on their business cards, and in their emails resonates and is clear so that people understand what benefit they get from doing business with that business owner in two seconds or less. So clear messaging, clear communication is the first C of effective marketing. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense because it almost seems like intuitive for an entrepreneur. They assume that like what I do every day that I'm in, I'm in the trenches, I'm working. to clients, especially in home services. But it's not always interpreted that way by the consumer. They don't exactly know what you're selling, how you're selling it, what makes you different, what makes you better. So I think having that consistency is super important. So what about the other Cs? The second C is consistent branding, making sure that, again, your brand is represented consistently in your marketplace. It's not enough just to have a sign on the back of a truck now. you need to have frequency overreach. And a lot of entrepreneurs, especially big visionaries, will play with their branding. They will alter a font and think nothing of it. They will change their color scheme and think nothing of it. They don't understand that the human brain is wired for frequency. So what we want to coach our clients on is that the messaging is clear and the imagery is what evokes emotion. to motivate customers to do business with you. So if your brand is inconsistently placed, then you're wasting your breath. So we want them to brand everywhere and keep it clean. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And then you'll find that like people that are out there kind of searching the landscape for franchise ownership, they'll start to say, wait a second, I just saw that truck on the road. I've never noticed it before, but now that I'm familiar with the logo now, I realized that there's already a presence in my market and those things start to happen. So let's talk about the third C. The third C is your customers knowing who your ideal customer is. So your customer demographic is the third C. You would not believe how frequently our clients come to us thinking that they are serving a certain demographic, male, female, geographic, psychographic, certain household. income, and then we run an analysis on their database. And we actually are able to show them that the people that are buying from them are not the people that they're marketing towards. understanding what motivates your clients to do business with you, understanding who's paying your bills, understanding not only what's influencing their buying decisions, but where they are buying is a huge part of customer demographic. is that like You know, doing a real deep dive on your data as well as like anecdotal and coming up with your customer avatar like this is exactly who they are. So you can speak to that person. Is that kind of part of that process? Absolutely. Absolutely. Mike, you need to be willing to alter your messaging to be impeccably clear to your customer avatars. It's very rare to have only one in your database. uh So understanding the offers that are appealing to your different avatars, really important. Yeah, absolutely. And then you can do some A-B testing and figure out what resonates and what kind of results you're getting based on the types of ads you're running and messaging you're putting out there. So let's talk about the final, the fourth C, channel management. Tell us a little bit about that. Channel management is what I like to call rinse and repeat. Channel management is a bit of an ambiguous term that means different things to different people, but we're not in the business as business owners to turn 'em and burn 'em. We recognize that it is a lot less expensive to upsell a current client and give them great service than it is to go fishing for a new one. So channel management in the book talks about establishing your systems so that you can put your customer service on autopilot, upsell, and make sure that you retain those customers long-term. It's vital for home services when you think about someone needing a plumber on average of every three years, an electrician every four years. How do you make sure that you are maintaining your customer database? uh So that's what channel management is all about is your upsell opportunities, the frequency of your communication, and understanding what it's going to take to maintain that consistent steady stream of income for your company. Yeah, I'm sure that a lot of people without a sophisticated marketing plan, you know, you mentioned a plumber, they'll put a magnet, you know, like where the plumbing work was performed and that doesn't cut it anymore. Maybe it did like 10, 20 years ago, but now it's like that messaging has to be consistent. You have to keep that relationship with the client. And in fact, you know, in addition to the upsell, there's probably a lot of referrals you can earn out of that. And when you get that trusted referral, that's the gold standard. Like in my business, When I have a client that invests in a franchise and I coached them for 90 days to help them kind of evaluate the landscape of what's out there. And they recommend, I just had that happen. I had a husband and wife that invested in a multi-unit personal care business happens to be in your area in Dallas. um They referred a cousin to me that's in Florida. So they're actually evaluating the same franchise model. So that is a huge win for me as it relates to like being able to get a great client that And the client A was great to work with. I'm hoping client B is also great to work with. never know. far so right. can get referral partnerships. And you know, I tell my clients all the time, how about a referral partnership from your vendors? How about you scratch my back and I scratch yours? There's nothing wrong with envelope money. So you can get referral partnerships that you're willing to share your brand name with and reputation manage with. Why not? Yeah. I think that's a really, really good insight. And I guess that can be achieved when owners like get into the community, they get to know non-competitive service people. It's like, Hey, you you can perform this service and I can promote your business and cross promote. Um, you know, in my business, I work with 800 franchisors. I don't know them all personally, but the ones that I do have good relationships with, they would love to send me a great candidate that just doesn't happen to fit their particular franchise model. And what a great way to connect with someone. There's already trust. um When someone's like, hey, I'm an expert, but if you can't fit into our model, like talk to Mike, maybe he can help you find something, which is pretty cool. So I'm sure you've seen it all. Like what are some of the common marketing mistakes that you see entrepreneurs out there making? And it kind of drives you nuts. my goodness, Mike, it's, it's heart wrenching. Some of the things that we see, a lot of our clients come to us because they have been ripped off by marketing that didn't work. They were promised the moon and fairy dust and they got nothing. uh So a lot of the times they're trusting the wrong people with their marketing. A lot of the times it's as simple as their website is not converting and they don't know why. So for example, maybe they are talking about cats, but they've got pictures of dogs and the website just doesn't make sense and they don't know why. And so we do a website audit to help them to understand, well, you're driving, you're spending thousands of dollars on online ads, but your website kind of sucks. We need to figure out what's going on there. um Another thing is not having direct control or insight over their marketing. A lot of people don't own their websites. They basically pay thousands of dollars to build a website and then they lease it back to themselves because they can't get in there. They don't own the domain. They don't own the URL. They're not in control of the hosting. And so when things go wrong, they're handcuffed and they're frustrated. um I also see people investing in paid ads too soon. When you don't have the foundations of marketing in place, such as clear messaging, such as consistent branding, and you're investing in paid ads, that's just pouring money down a drain and it doesn't work well. So we tell our clients what not to do as much as we make recommendations on what they should do because we never want to see them wasting money. Yeah, that's a really good insight about kind of getting your house in order, so to speak, before you go out there and promote it, because you're going to spend all that money for someone to get a bad impression or a confused impression. Whereas if they start with the fundamentals and get the website right and their messaging consistent, and then they go out to market, they're going to have a much better chance of converting those prospective clients and actual clients. So that's really cool. So do you, I know you work with franchises you mentioned that you work with independents. You kind of work with both and I'm sure it's a little bit different. But do you find that like half of your business is one of the other or do you tend to just work with any entrepreneur, whether they're in a franchise system or an independent business? Our business model is set up to serve entrepreneurs, whether they are independent or a multi-unit franchisee. We've also done some consulting with national brands on the franchisor level, but it is a completely different ball game. marketing a franchise versus an individual uh brand. And you have to be very cognizant of the bylaws of the franchise uh agreement. You need to understand what you can and cannot do, whether or not you can own your own website. There's a lot of different things that come into play with franchisee marketing on a local level, um as opposed to a singular business operator that is not associated with a national brand. And we love to work with both. but you have to understand the nuances in order to coach the client in the right direction. Because you said it earlier, Mike, even though they have a uh brand fund, that marketing isn't always advantageous on a local level. And yet they have many wonderful resources that they could employ if they knew what to do with them. So sometimes it's just a matter of coaching our franchisees to say, well, you have the artwork for a billboard. Have you thought about putting one up? You have the access to your website. Are you actually investing in SEO and knowing how to craft a marketing strategy that will produce the local leads? Yeah, that's really great because the franchisee, they could run their business the way they want to run it, but it has to operate within the brand standards. And there are certain things that require approvals by the franchisor. So do you basically like present the idea to the client and say, look, we got to run this by corporate first and loop them in and kind of get the green light before you go too far down the path with an idea that ultimately may not be a fit? Absolutely. Yes. Every single client that we work with gets an hour long complimentary consultation. We dig into the operations of the business first and understand. what challenges that they are experiencing as well as what the parameters are for their operations. And then we build a marketing strategy that fits within their realm. We don't do it the other way around. There's no one size fits all. Everything that we do is also month to month and fully transparent because we want our entrepreneurs to stay in that driver's seat. I love it. Super cool. And it's pretty rare. Like you have a really interesting point at differentiation, you know, being that you own the company and you are someone that came up. in entrepreneurship and then got into franchising set on the advisory board. You just have a whole perspective that I think is really valuable, especially in the franchise side of the business. So if a listener wants to kind of level up their marketing game, what are some of the specific steps they can make to take action? Number one, get a online presence audit. Find out how you're ranking online. and uh know what your reputation is in your local market, in your service area that you have paid for. uh We offer this as a complimentary service to any of our potential new clients. Your SEO and your online presence, everyone lives on their cell phone, Mike. And so understanding what you're beginning with and how you're appearing online is hugely important. The next thing to do for leveling up their marketing is understanding what calls to action are. actually moving the needle forward and continuing to push those offers that are the best revenue generating opportunities for them. And then number three is anytime you're going to test something new, give it at least 90 days. And I know that every serial entrepreneur hates it when I say that because they're going, Amber, if it doesn't work within two weeks, I'm pulling the trigger on it. OK, well. How are you really gonna know if it's effective? You have to have a process and system in place to actually track your results and understand that the end, the last call, so to speak, is not necessarily an indication of what marketing was effective in getting that client to your door. And what I mean by that is a client has to hear about you 11 times before they make a single action. So just because they call you on the phone and they say, I heard you on the radio, they probably saw your truck. heard you on the radio, Googled you, talked to a friend. That's four actions right there. But no consumer is ever going to tell you all those things. So you have to see what marketing is working and you've got to have a dashboard that shows you that. Well, great insights. Well, this has been awesome, Amber. And another thing they can do, of course, to level up their marketing is buy your book, Far Beyond Marketing on Amazon, because it's an international bestseller. And hopefully we can add to that by adding more entrepreneurs into the mix. But anything else you'd like to add today before we wrap up? Just happy hunting. think entrepreneurship is the backbone of the American economy. And I love that we have the privilege of supporting entrepreneurs. And if anyone's considering buying a franchise, I hope they'll talk with you. Well, thank you so much for the plug, Amber. I appreciate that. And if anyone listening would like to connect with Amber and her team to learn more about Far Beyond Marketing, contact me at franchiseqb.com or on X @QBFranchiseQB. and I'll get you connected. Thank you, Amber, so much for taking the time to get in the huddle with us today. It was such a pleasure. Take care, Mike. All right. Thank you for listening to the Franchise QB podcast, where you're at the helm of your future as a franchise owner. If you enjoyed the content, please rate the show and recommend it to anyone that might be interested in franchising. Make sure to visit franchiseqb.com to subscribe to my newsletter and for an actionable playbook to go from walk-on to legend in your new business. Follow us on Twitter @QBFranchiseQB and join us every week for a new episode. See you next time. Visit franchiseQB.com to take the next step of your journey towards wealth, independence, and franchise ownership. And remember, when working for the man gets old, you must do something bold. Thank you for listening.