7d (edited) • General discussion 🧠
Slow season, market saturation
I'm ten months into running Red's Dryer Vent Cleaning.
I've spent nearly $20,000 in the Meta ads manager, reached nearly 500,000 people in Austin an average of 3 times (according to to Meta -- likely more if I count Google, website, and YouTube impressions), and personally completed ~700 jobs (plus another 100 or so from January thru April last year when I was working for someone else in the field instead of running my own business.
I've crunched some numbers and determined there's likely an average of 5,000-7,000 jobs in my market each year, and since I've personally fulfilled about 800 of them, it's starting to look like I've somewhat eaten my own lunch.
And so my strategy is shifting toward long term market presence and harvesting customers directly from competitors.
I believe I've soaked up most of the "freely available" market desire from people who had not yet chosen a vendor.
At this point, most of the residents in my market have at least heard of me; particularly if they are FB or IG users.
Now, much of what will win new customers for me is out of my hands. I've positioned myself to be top of mind, but most people have likely had their vents cleaned within the last 2-3 years and simply aren't looking for service at the moment.
So my strategy now is shifting from GETTING DISCOVERED to HOLDING MY REPUTATION and DEFENDING MY POSITION.
I'm reducing total Meta ad spend to $10 a day; the platform is genuinely less of a performance acquisition channel and now functionally a fixed-cost billboard, so that's how I'll treat it. I might slowly reduce to $5 a day. The impressions and traffic are so cheap that even low spend like that still works.
Content is still king; I'm going to keep experimenting with content ideas and formats. This will be high leverage and a key differentiator.
I want to decrease my reliance on Meta by branching out across LinkedIn ads, YouTube ads, Google ads, maybe Reddit ads. I also want to get ahead of AI discovery.
Print marketing / direct marketing is another area I'll experiment this year. I want to use mailers to hit as many homes in my territory as possible. I'm open to doorhangers. I'll be trialing church bulletins, and possibly even newspapers.
But, the big realization for me is that the season of explosive growth is likely over. I've eaten somewhere between 10% and 20% of the annual market already, and I've very likely prepositioned myself for consideration in the minds of just about everyone who matches my ICP.
The goal now, as always, is to hold that position by making myself impossible to ignore and impossible to forget.
I've done a lot of work to claim a huge section of my territory; now, I need to defend what I've built and slowly accumulate more my taking customers from my competitors.
1
3 comments
Slow season, market saturation
powered by
skool.com/empire-launch-academy-4798
The Giant Slayer Method | Helping small businesses disrupt saturated markets w/ contrarian positioning & demand generation | Hosted by Empire Launch
Suggested communities
Powered by