Jake Sheldon on Making Facebook Ads Work for Pest Control

00:00 Dan Leibrandt

Hey there and welcome to the first episode of Pest Control Legends. I'm your host, Dan Leibrandt, and in this episode, you're gonna learn how to do Facebook ads for Pest Control from Jake Sheldon. If you don't already know Jake, he's one of the biggest names in pest control marketing. He originally started his agency Pest Customers Fast about six years ago, doing Facebook ads for pest control companies. Over that time, he grew to 368 clients and ended up selling his agency. Now he's a partial owner in nine different home service local businesses, including a million dollar pest control company where he spent millions of dollars across Facebook ads for all of them. Jake also owns a VA staffing company as well as Pest Control Millionaires, a pest control marketing program that he runs with Jonas Olson, one of the other top guys in pest control marketing. And fun fact, I'm actually releasing an SEO course in their program soon and I've had both Jake and Jonas on my other podcast, Local Marketing Secrets. So regardless, Jake is a killer in the space and I'm so excited for this episode today. So without further ado, thanks for coming on the show, Jake.

00:59 Jake Sheldon

Yeah, thanks for the introduction. I appreciate you letting me be on here.

01:02 Dan Leibrandt

For sure, man. So we're gonna be talking all about Facebook ads for pest control. First off, what do people need to know about Facebook ads for pest control? Like, why are they so important? Why do they matter?

01:14 Jake Sheldon

So I guess the first thing that I want to say is you can get a lot of sales with Facebook if you do it properly. I've had numerous of different clients that have done well over thousand sales, even for my personal pest control company. I usually do anywhere from 500 to 750 general pest control sales just from Facebook. That's not SEO or Google or anything like that. So you can do a lot. However, there's quite a few things you need to get right when it comes to Facebook ads. So, and I can go many different directions on that.

01:48 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, yeah, let's dive in, tell me.

01:50 Jake Sheldon

So, one of the things you need to do right is get your targeting right. A lot of people will go in there and they'll run like boosted ads or an awareness ad or something like that. And a lot of the times you're gonna be just burning money. You'd have a better chance of. You know, piling up money in a cul-de-sac and light it on fire. Cause at least people would like be drawn to the fire. So, in my opinion, I think for pest control ads, would highly, highly recommend lead gen ads. They are the best in my opinion. And that's just what we've seen over the last six years of running pest control ads, even for my own company. So targeting is important and you can't really target. On the awareness ads or a boosted post is the reason why I say that. So with lead gen ads, you can target like the demographic, like the age group, if they're male or female, what zip codes, you can get very, very nitty gritty with it why we like it. And it's funny because a lot of people like, you know, Facebook ads don't work, they don't work, but yet they've bought stuff from Facebook before.

03:02 Jake Sheldon

They could talk to their spouse about, you know, like pizza. And then all of a sudden a pizza ad pops up. Like Facebook's so good at knowing what you like and what you want, but yet for some weird reason, a lot of service-based industries don't think Facebook ads work, but yet they see it on their feed all the time while they're scrolling. You know, they're like, man, I was just talking about, you know, Nike shoes yesterday and all of sudden Nike shoes popped up on my timeline. Well. The great thing is we can have that happen for pest control as well. People can be talking to their spouse about pest control. They're looking it up on Google or wherever they're looking at it. We can have, if the interest is done properly, we can have people scrolling to the feed and finding those pest control ads just has to be done properly. But targeting is definitely very, very important.

03:51 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah. Yeah. So.

03:57 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, I want to ask you, I feel like a lot of Pest Control owners that I've talked to actually have tried running Facebook ads before, but like you said, most of them aren't successful. So what are all these companies getting wrong? Is it targeting, like you said, or is it something else?

04:11 Jake Sheldon

There's a lot of different variables with Facebook ads. It definitely is not beginner friendly. There's so many different things that you can do on there. There's so many different options and buttons and it even is overwhelming if you have never ran an ad before looking at everything that you can do on there. Targeting is definitely number one that I see it gets messed up right away in the ad set level. The number two reason why I see people's ads don't work as they have, they don't have a good offer. They just have something that says like, you know, call now or 50 bucks off your next service or, you know, they'll say like, do you have ants in your house? Know, something that is not an irresistible offer. I mean, you, me and Jonas talk about this all the time is creating an irresistible offer, almost, creating an offer so good that someone would be silly not to do it.

05:07 Jake Sheldon

That's what you need to do for your service-based business. In this case, pest control. You have to make it so irresistible. Someone they're like, Oh my gosh, I need to choose this pest control company. You look like everyone else out there. Cause let's be honest, if you're a pest control owner now, right now, you've probably tried the $50 off offer. Everyone has, I'm pretty sure. So you don't want to be like everyone else. You want to come up with new offers, creative offers, things that stick out.

05:28 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, everyone has.

05:38 Jake Sheldon

And make you different from your competition. Know what's funny Dan is I've talked to quite literally thousands of pest control owners and all of them, and this is no knock to anyone, but all of them truly believe they are the best at servicing homes. Every single person, every single one. I'm like, so like what makes you different from your competition? Like what do you guys do? Do you create a valuable experience? Do you do any irresistible offers? They're like, well, I truly believe my service is the best in town. I'm like, well, I talked to five year other people that live in the same city and they all said the same thing. So...

06:15 Dan Leibrandt

Haha Dang.

06:18 Jake Sheldon

That's why marketing is so important is because everyone thinks they are the best. And you might be the one who actually is the best. You might be, but no one knows that truly because it's just an opinion basis at that point and no one knows until you do something about it.

06:42 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, definitely. I will say that I like that aspect of taking some pride in your work. Like I feel like you said, that that's kind of a recurring theme in the pest control industry, that they genuinely take pride in it. Like, hey, we are the best company. We know the most about ants and spiders and all these different bugs. So I totally respect that, but there is a missing component on the marketing end. Again, relating to Facebook ads, I feel like this is almost a little bit controversial, but you think that you should only be running.

07:09 Dan Leibrandt

Lead gen ads, no engagement or anything else.

07:12 Jake Sheldon

So that's a loaded question for guys that are looking to get leads and leads now. Cause most people are at the point in their business where they're like, if I'm going to spend money, I need to get a return. Some of the guys who are bigger seven figures plus they're not as it's not as like a dire need. Anyone who's below that seven figure mark usually is like, if I'm going to put in money, I have to get a return now. ASAP. So if that is you listening to this, I would definitely recommend lead ads. Now, if you're not in dire need of that return and you want to get your brand out there and then you could run some retargeting ads, it's a whole other story, but you can run an awareness campaign, get tons and tons of eyeballs, they call it reach on Facebook. You get tons and tons of eyeballs seeing your ad and then you can retarget people. Who either watched a video or engaged with the content, and you can do retargeting ads back to an audience. Now there's a bunch of things you can do there, more high level stuff like build custom audiences and lookalike audiences, which Facebook does really, really well on that. I guess we can dive into that a little bit too, but a lookalike audience on Facebook is when an audience looks like an audience that had been created. So you can either use a source audience, what they call a custom source audience. So let's say for example, there's an HVAC company in town and this HVAC company has the customers that you want. They're all in your demographic. You know, they all live in the zip codes you want. They all make the money that you want as customers like for your pest control company, but they're HVAC. However, those people are probably customers that you want in your database. So what you can do is you can grab that database.

09:09 Jake Sheldon

You can throw it into your custom audience on Facebook and then can tell Facebook that you want to create an audience that looks like that audience. And they call it a lookalike audience. It's incredible. However, go ahead.

09:22 Dan Leibrandt

Hmm. Yeah. So would you say that's mandatory for Facebook ads? Does everyone need to be doing lookalike audiences?

09:32 Jake Sheldon

No, it's extremely difficult to get audiences like that. You have to set up strategic partnerships on that. Have to, you have to get permission to use audiences or you can buy data, which data is very expensive for anyone who has never done it. So you can do it. It's just, it just makes your Facebook ads a whole lot more expensive on the front end to buy data.

10:02 Jake Sheldon

But if you have the money, then you, I would definitely suggest doing lookalike audiences because it makes your targeting so much more efficient. Your closing rates are going to be higher. Your data is going to be better. But you can, you can buy that data and throw into that custom audiences and then make a lookalike audience. It's not necessary to answer your question. You can build up an audience, organically from Facebook's algorithm. It just takes a little bit longer. And you do have to go through some not so great leads. And that's one of the things that I think people get wrong with Facebook is their expectations with it. People are so used to getting really good calls from Google, like from their website ranking. And those calls are usually very good. They're also used to like Google LSA ads, like the local service ads. Those are also really high intent leads.

10:59 Jake Sheldon

And so when they start running Facebook, they kind of expect the same quality, which is so far away from the truth. So even with our company, we're really, really happy if we're selling about 35 to highest 40%. Some people might think that's really, really low, but for Facebook, it's actually fantastic. Average close rates on Facebook lead ads are about 20 to 30%. So they're, pretty low because you're going to have about 40 % of the leads that will just never answer back. There people who just filled out the form just because they're like, eh, you know what? Have a couple of ants in my house. Yeah, whatever. I'll fill it out. My, may use this someday. And then you text them, text them, call them. They'll never answer. I don't know why to this day. I've been doing it for years and years and years. They'll just never answer. You could send them a hundred texts and they'll never say anything. Don't know why.

11:59 Dan Leibrandt

Hmm. Okay, so that's something to note is that you have to kind of lower your expectations. It's not gonna be the same as any other platform. But with that in mind, what does the cost per lead then look like? Does that still make sense?

12:12 Jake Sheldon

Yes. So I like to go off based off cost per acquisition and I can get to the cost per lead as well. But our cost per acquisition I'm really, really happy with. If I'm to sell a general pest service, I am very happy with anywhere from 75 to about 150 bucks to acquire that customer. When I ran the marketing agency, our average cost per acquisition was about a hundred bucks to get a reoccurring general pest customer. And for most pest control owners I talk to, they're totally happy paying that to acquire a new customer. Some people aren't, but most people are. So that's usually what we see anywhere from 75 to 150. Now our lead cost is anywhere, it gets all the way down to $10 sometimes, and then can get up to like 40 bucks per lead, depending on season, zip code, all that good stuff. Usually the...

13:09 Jake Sheldon

The more wealthy the zip code is, the higher the lead cost is.

13:13 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, okay, cool. And then I'd like to dive into what the ads actually look like themselves. So is there a picture? Is there a video? Is there a lot of text? Is there a little bit of text? What have you seen works the best for ads?

13:26 Jake Sheldon

Yeah. So that goes back to the offer to you want to have a very, very good offer and irresistible offer in your area. And I'll actually give you a perfect example that someone could use. So in the past, like before I started running Facebook ads, we used to do our initials anywhere from a hundred to about $300. Let's say the average initials about 200 bucks. And for most pest control owners in the space, I usually see that's pretty average is that initial. Now, however, I talked to a mentor, a long time ago and he's like, Jake, what's the most important thing to you in your business? I was like, generating customers. He's like, okay, that's fair. He's like, but what kind of customers? I was like, ones that bring in lots of money. And I was like, is that right? He's like, no, no, no. He's like, really think about this for a second. He's like, do you just want a one-time customer? Do you want reoccurring customers? And I was like, hey, definitely reoccurring customers. That's where all the money's made.

14:31 Jake Sheldon

Know, termites and bed bugs and all that's great for revenue, right? But it's not gonna come back the next year. So that is like, when the light bulb went off in my head, it's like, okay, like I only want reoccurring customers because you explained to me the value of not just that year, but the reoccurring value of that year and the referrals I would get from that. And not to mention this is where everything changed for me is the equitable value of the company.

14:59 Dan Leibrandt

Mmm, yeah.

15:00 Jake Sheldon

So if you can build your company large enough, say I want to sell in 20 years from now and you have a $10 million company, well, you can sell that $10 million company for 30 or $40 million because of the equitable value and the reoccurring customers. So that's what I'm looking at when it comes to the offers and everything that we're doing in our marketing, it's all revolved around our reoccurring stuff that we're doing. That's really all I care about. So going back to the Facebook is I'm looking at building reoccurring marketing. And so instead of that $200 initial that I wanted to get people on, because I like, I just want to get the revenue. He's like, Jake, you need to figure out how to get people in the door. That's all that matters.

15:52 Jake Sheldon

Gives many people the door as quickly as humanly possible. Cause then you can sell them on your reoccurring service. Cause that's the only thing that matters is like, shoot, give them service for free. And even he said like, give them a coupon or something too. I was like, well, I don't want to do that. So what I came up with was it was kind of, I don't know, maybe we were the pioneers. Maybe I'm not really sure. Cause we did it before a lot of people is instead of our $200 initial, we dropped it all the way to $67. So we did a $67 initial if they signed up for a year with us. If they chose not to sign up for the year with us, it was 200 bucks. It changed everything.

16:38 Dan Leibrandt

Pretty good deal.

16:39 Jake Sheldon

Oh, and we had leads just flowing through. Now the funny thing is I even had people messaging me in town, other pest control owners being like. You're ruining the industry. You drop price too much. Like they're all freaking out because they've been seeing my ads over and over and over. And they're like, why? Like, how can you even do it for that low? How are you making any money? Well, I wasn't, I was actually losing money on that front end because the initial takes the longest. I'm spending the most time there. I'm a tech spending the most time there. We're using the most chemical on the first initial. Like I'm actually losing money on that initial. Cause my advertising costs plus technician insurance, all that stuff, right? However, I didn't care because we did a followup 30 days later and started their quarterlies. And so that's where the money was made.

17:31 Jake Sheldon

And that's what a lot of people aren't willing to do for some reason is they're not willing to even lose money or, drop their initial cause they're so used to making a quite a bit of profit on that initial. They're not willing to do that. But I was and I have been for years and years and years. So that is an example of an irresistible offer. There's so many others that you could do. You could add in mosquitoes with that. You could do a $39 mosquito treatment and then give them their first, you know, general pest service for half off or combining the offers, bundling stuff. You just need to do something in town that no one else is doing. And that sticks out above the competition. So that of course would go into market research and see what other people are doing. Yeah, that was exactly how I got started with doing the irresistible offer for my first pest control company and why it exploded so fast.

18:35 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, for those that aren't familiar, that mainly comes from Alex Hormozi's $100 million offers book and just generally what he preaches on his YouTube channel and other socials. Anyone who hasn't read that book should totally read it. I mean, it has basically changed the game of marketing and that's why Jake's been able to do something like that and make a ton of money from it. Whereas you're willing to take, you're actually willing to lose money on the upfront to then have that lifetime value of the customer. And they take the offer because it's an irresistible offer. Mean, maybe they're paying like, I don't know, $150 per visit, and now they get to pay 67 bucks, and, oh, I just saw a spider in my house, I might as well choose them, and it looks like a nice ad and everything. So that's definitely something to consider as well. So you need an awesome offer, but what does the media itself look like? Is it a photo with the offer on the photo, or is it a video? What does that look like?

19:25 Jake Sheldon

Yeah. So we do a variation of a bunch of different things. So it used to be just images is what we mainly did. However, I recently partnered with Jonas Olson and he is a master at video. We've actually seen video is working quite well. The only downside to video is you have to make that media or that video. You have to make a lot of it, a lot of them. You have to adjust the content often. They call it creative fatigue on Facebook. Whenever you hit creative fatigue, you need to switch the video or the picture or any, or the carousel you need, you need to switch it up and video goes quickly. So that's only downside. It does work and it does work well. It's just that you have to, you have to constantly do it, which again, we both know Jonas he's creating. Tons of content anyway, so it's no big deal to him. So I actually, I prefer images still, however, like I still run video ads, I just don't run as much ad spend in my video ads, because it's a lot of work to create that content.

20:43 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, okay, cool. And then I'd kind of like to get into the infrastructure within the ad account. Again, it's gonna be kind of hard to talk over on the podcast, but I'd like to get an idea of it. So do you have multiple campaigns set up and then multiple ads within the campaigns? What does that look like? And can you do it very basic or do you have to make it super complex?

21:06 Jake Sheldon

No, it doesn't need to be super complex. The one thing that people would need to understand for sure is that you always need to do a B split testing. Facebook's algorithm is designed to test. It's not designed just to do one campaign, one ad set and one ad. And for people who have never ran ads in Facebook, all that means is the campaign is like a folder section. It's just like a Manila folder. Then your ad set is where you do all the targeting, like your your gender, your age group, your demographics, if they like Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, like anything that's all in the ad set. And then you have your ad levels where the actual image or video and ad copy and lead form and all that's created. So the most important thing is testing, testing, testing, testing, testing, testing.

21:55 Jake Sheldon

And that's with any advertising medium, Is always be testing, never be content with the result. Facebook wants you to spend more money. On Facebook of course, their business. So they always want you to be making your ads better and they'll always hit creative fatigue, no matter what.

22:15 Dan Leibrandt

Hmm. So what is, just to kind of tie off that, what does that creative fatigue look like? Is that a few weeks or a few days?

22:24 Jake Sheldon

Uh, well, depending on your area and your population, one of the best examples I actually like to give is, uh, and a lot of people know is the reason why I like to use it is there was a Little Caesars campaign that they ran on Facebook and even on commercials radio. And, uh, you might even remember it. It was a Little Caesars campaign where they were talking about, there was no rules and this guy, he's like, oh my gosh, there's no rules. And he like takes off his shirt and they're like, sir.

22:52 Dan Leibrandt

I think I do remember that.

22:53 Jake Sheldon

Like sir, you need to put your shirt back on. He's like, okay, there's one rule. Well, that campaign ran on Facebook, radio TV for a Little Caesars for a long time. And it worked very, very well. He was on a podcast talking about it. However, it's still stopped. You don't see the commercial today just cause it ran super well for a long time, longer than a normal campaign. You still have to change it up. The reason why I bring that pizza ad commercial up is. Pizza is still the same. Like the Little Caesars, Hot-N-Ready pizza is always gonna be the same, but you have to frame it in a different way, create different offers,...

23:27 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, it's always the same. Mmm.

23:33 Jake Sheldon

Create different commercials. Cause if people see the same commercial over and over again, they hit a funny part of their brain where it's like the reticular activating system is where if people see the same thing over and over, they start to brush over. It's like the opposite of.

23:49 Dan Leibrandt

Mmm.

23:51 Jake Sheldon

If you think about a red Tesla, you'll go see a red Tesla everywhere. So if you see the same ad over and over again, your mind just kind of puts in the back burner. However, if you keep coming up with new content, it's new. It's stuff that it grabs your attention. So that's all we're doing on Facebook is disruptive marketing, grabbing people's attention. Even if it's just general pest control forever until let's say 30 years from now, general pest hasn't changed any. Like it's all the same. All, we use the same chemical and everything just because it's the same. Doesn't mean you don't want to stop changing your advertising. You always want to come up with new ways to pitch that. So...

24:35 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, no, that is so good, disruptive marketing. And also because pest control is kind of boring, it's kind of the same thing over and over. So I think it's even more important to frame it as something new, like you were talking about. And a great analogy I like, I've been watching a lot of MrBeast lately, a lot of, not as videos, but podcasts that he's been on, because he's actually incredibly smart. And he keeps referring to the purple cow analogy, which is kind of the same thing. I don't know if you've heard of it. There's a whole book based on it, but. Essentially when you're marketing you want it to always be something completely new that no one's ever seen before so if you're maybe driving on the highway or driving I don't know near a farm and you see a cow it's like you know it's just a cow but when you see a purple cow you know maybe it's like bright purple maybe it's even got some horns or something like whoa you know and you're gonna remember that for the next few days maybe even the next few years so the same thing should kind of apply to your marketing it should be something completely new that no one's ever really seen before right yeah...

25:17 Jake Sheldon

Yeah, whatever.

25:32 Jake Sheldon

Yeah, I like that purple cow. I've never heard that. I'm to use that. It's really good.

25:35 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, there's a whole book on it, which MrBeast said he didn't grab it from the book, but I guess this kind of philosophy has been around for a while. So I want to read that. And it's a really, really good kind of principle as a whole, because what I've seen for pest control companies, not only are they not remaking and really making new kind of ads, but they're also doing the same as everyone else in their area. So it's like everyone's just seeing all the same pest control ads over and over. I mean, no one's thinking any different, but I think in this way, you can actually really stand out because everyone's basically doing the same stuff. It's like a super basic offer. Maybe it's just like a basic engagement ad. If you can really catch people's attention and figure out how to capitalize on that, then that'll be huge.

26:20 Jake Sheldon

Yes, no, absolutely. And one thing to say about like the purple cow cow analogy to something that sticks out. A lot of people aren't grabbing the attention from the scrollers. I guess you could call everyone. Like some of the largest companies too, are doing ads where, and I don't want to offend anyone, but it's a lot of times it's a technician with his arms folded. Leaning against his pest control truck. And it's like call today to end your pest control needs or whatever it may be, you know, something, something that's a pretty generic and they don't even have a pain point in there. That's like marketing. 101 is have the actual pain point in there. And to answer your question from earlier is like, what you want to actually even put in the image of the videos is actually have a pain point. A spider crawling across. The screen or have a giant spider in the actual advertising. So it like scares people when they're scrolling.

27:15 Dan Leibrandt

Mmm, yeah.

27:24 Jake Sheldon

You want to create that response of disruptive purple cow, which I like that. Like you want to create that.

27:28 Dan Leibrandt

Huh. Yeah, no, I've seen that's what Jonas does in a lot of his content. That's why it performs so well because it's like, you know, a crazy spider or, you know, I don't know, it's a mouse or a rodent, whatever. And it totally catches you off guard. I think that's actually what people should be focusing on in Pest Control because there's not too much to play off of other than pests are like scary and annoying and weird. Like, my, there's a, you know, why are there a thousand ants in my house? Like that is just something like most people have never seen before. Like I think I saw one of his videos, maybe he was like disrupting a hornet's nest or something and now they're all flying around everywhere. It's like that, that disrupts you. And I think that's, even though it's not a very sexy industry, that's something to definitely get people's attention is using, you know, maybe it's a spider, maybe it's some kind of scary pest that kind of catches people off guard and now they're hooked.

28:18 Jake Sheldon

Mm-hmm, exactly, exactly, because people buy pest control based off pain points. A lot of other industries, you do it off of experience or desires. Like if you're a medical spa, like you're doing off the desire to like look better, like a lip injection or Botox or whatever, people buy that stuff like crazy because it's desire, it's not a pain point. And that's why it can be harder to sell pain point businesses.

28:48 Jake Sheldon

Because that's what it is. It's not like you're not like desiring to buy pest control. You know, you're not like, I can't wait to buy pest control that, know, like, but people get excited, you know, to, get a massage or they get excited to, you know, get Botox or they get excited to go to a basketball game, like an NBA game. Like those are exciting things to buy pest control is not exciting to buy. So you have, you have to disrupt people hit their pain points. And so they're like, man, my gosh, I do need to buy pest control. My gosh, like I didn't really know I needed it this bad until I saw this ad. You know, that's like what you create.

29:29 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah. No, and honestly, you need to get a little meticulous about it. You have to figure out what's gonna strike in people's brains. Honestly, because a lot of the people buying on Facebook for pest control, it's homeowners and it's usually the wife that maybe they're worried about their family, maybe they just saw a crazy pest. So I think something that people could focus on is the danger to the children. I think that's actually a huge one that not many people do. But it's like, as a mother, that's like your number one priority is like, how are your kids doing? You wanna make sure that they're safe. So I think that's a huge pain point to kind of harp on.

30:06 Jake Sheldon

100 % we actually find in most areas, cause I get this question a lot too is like, Jake, like what's usually like your target for your ads? And I would say like 75 % plus of the time, unless you're in certain parts of the country, like Florida, there's a lot of like 65 plus people that are in Florida, but most of the parts of the country, it's typically women that buy that are between the ages of 35 and 55. That's the typical age range. I'm not saying that's all the time. Because even in like certain zip codes, like it's funny, I was running ads in Dallas a few years ago for a buddy of mine and he had a zip code that they're right next to each other. One was women between like 45 and 55 and literally across the street and the other zip code, it was men like 65 plus. And we're like, man, if we would have just went with the same, the same demographic in these two zip codes, we would have missed out on a lot of customers.

31:06 Dan Leibrandt

Really? Interesting.

31:06 Jake Sheldon

So it can change even by zip code, which is kind of crazy. So yeah, we testing and watching it.

31:11 Dan Leibrandt

Okay, weird. Yeah, okay. Yeah, so does it vary that much then? Just to follow up with that, how do you know what kind of audience you should be targeting?

31:24 Jake Sheldon

So this is another point too that a lot of people give up early. They'll run ads for a month, two months, shoot, even three months, and they'll give up. They're like, shoot, it doesn't work. Well, if you started a pest control business and only tried it for three months, you wouldn't quit. But for some reason, people, when they advertise, they'll try it for three months and they'll quit. Or for your instance, they'll try SEO. And they'll do it for three months and they'll be like, SEO is not working. It's like, that is not how this works. This takes, this takes some time, because it takes time for the algorithms to build up. They don't, they don't, they're not just going to give you tons of clients right away. And so you have to test, test, test, test, test. So the reason why is you're going to start off with a, the example I like to give is like a fishing example. You're going to start with a huge wide net.

31:56 Dan Leibrandt

Now I...

32:20 Jake Sheldon

So say it's like Dallas, Texas, for example, you're going to put a large radius around Dallas, Texas, and you're going to get people to start coming through that pipeline. And that's going to gather data for you. If you don't have a custom audience, you're going to gather data. And over time, you're going to start narrowing that, that fish net and you want to narrow it. Cause you're going to have like red fish, blue fish, green fish. Those red fish are the people that you don't want. You're going to kick them out. You're going to turn off those ad sets. Well, the blue fish are okay. You can kind of keep them around, but they're not like the exact customer you want, but at least they're, they're paying customers and you can keep those around. So you're going to keep those ad sets on. Now your green fish are exactly who you want. You're going to start putting them into a custom audience. Like telling, we use a system called GoHighLevel. We put them all on a specific pipeline being like ideal customer. So as you start building up that data, you're like ideal customer, ideal customer, ideal customer. You throw that back into Facebook, custom audience, do a look alike. And now you're only targeting people who look like your ideal customer. That of course can't happen immediately. This takes a long time.

33:35 Jake Sheldon

However, during that entire time, you are still getting customers, which is fantastic. It's not like you're just wasting money for a year. You're, you're still getting really good. Customers throughout that entire process and building data at the same time. But I've like, some people have heard me say this stuff like six years ago, they tried it for two months and quit, but if they would have started and kept going with it, you know, five, six years ago, they would now have thousands of accounts if they would just started then.

34:07 Dan Leibrandt

Dang, okay, so part of it is building the data. I've heard this before, so I'm glad to have it validated. You need to be putting enough money and be putting enough time into Facebook so that there's enough data for them to then give you the better audience and the really better targeted segment that you wanna then target in the future. But you need to be putting enough time and money into it before you can start really seeing Facebook ads do well. Is that what you're saying?

34:34 Jake Sheldon

Yeah, yeah. And a lot of people don't know this, but even when you start building out the ad, it will say it's on an auction. So Facebook actually works on an auction level. Not exactly like how you'd see it, like a car auction or anything, right? But it does kind of work like that. So you have to meet certain criteria to rank higher on the auction. One of the criteria for Facebook to rank high on the auction is just going to be relevancy on the platform. Like if people are watching your video, or if people are liking your stuff, you impressions is what they call it, sharing it, liking it, commenting, that's the higher you're gonna rank on the auction. The more impressions you get, the more eyeballs that interact with the videos or the pictures, the higher your rank on the auction. Now there's something that Facebook calls a threshold. You have to spend, in my opinion, this is not Facebook confirmed. In my opinion, you just spend at least 600 bucks a month on a campaign in order to rank high on the auction. Cause I've tested it so many times and every time I spend below 600 bucks in a campaign in a month, I rank super low on the auction. It like Facebook will quite literally tell you if you rank low on the auction, it will say below average. And if you're average or above average, it will tell you all those all those signals to see if you're ranking on the auction or not. And so.

35:54 Dan Leibrandt

Dang.

36:05 Dan Leibrandt

Dude, that is such a good little tidbit. Because you've done it for over 300 companies and now with the program, over 400. So I mean, you know basically better than anyone else. I think you actually do know better than anyone else when it's in pest control.

36:17 Jake Sheldon

Thank you.

36:17 Dan Leibrandt

So that's a good threshold that, I don't know, maybe if you're just putting a few hundred bucks a month towards it, you probably wanna be doing over 600 a month then.

36:24 Jake Sheldon

Yeah, because at that point you could be literally wasting money because Facebook's not going to put you up high on the auction. So the thing a lot of people don't know is I didn't know this actually until a couple of years into it. Luckily, I just had such a good offer and everything was going well that it still was working. But a lot of people don't know is reach doesn't necessarily mean they're going to see it. Reach just...

36:52 Dan Leibrandt

Really?

36:52 Jake Sheldon

Yeah, reach just means that it's on their feed. So say, think of it as like a giant, like a piece of paper and your ads way, way down here, but they're up here and they have to scroll to get to that. And let's say they stop right here. They still, you, they, technically got reached, but they didn't see it. Yeah. So they put, they put ads on people's. On people's feeds or Instagram or whatever it may be, but it may never actually reach their eyeballs, but it reached them. Yeah.

37:17 Dan Leibrandt

No! That is crazy!

37:31 Dan Leibrandt

Dang, okay, that's another thing I'd say most people never know. So that's another good little hack there. As we start to wrap up here, I'd also like to talk about the funnel. I know, and you actually just mentioned GoHighLevel. How are you guys using GoHighLevel? Do you think every company should be using it? And what does that funnel process look like? So people fill out the lead form, then are they getting followed up immediately? Are you calling them? What does that process look like to close that lead?

38:01 Jake Sheldon

Yeah, I'm glad you asked that, because that's super important into making Facebook ads work. Because again, it's way different than like an organic call or a Google ads call. So we use a lead ad. Our lead ad is going to ask for usually zip code, name, phone number, email. And then we usually ask them like a question about their pest issue. Like if it's ants, cockroaches, spiders, whatever it may be. So you want to gather that information upfront. Once that lead form is submitted, it goes to that GoHighLevel system. Now what happens when it hits the GoHighLevel system, it's going to text the owner or the sales rep and it's going to let them know that they have a lead and they need to call them instantly. We call it speed to lead. Jonas says it all time.

38:44 Jake Sheldon

Speed to lead, speed to lead, speed to lead. It's the most important thing by far when it comes to Facebook leads. These people are just on Facebook. They're scrolling. They see your stuff. They click on it. They felt their information. If you don't call them right away, they could forget about you in an hour from now. Like they're gonna be like, and someone's gonna call, it's a number that they don't recognize. This is a crazy stat. Do you know who Grant Cardone is?

39:13 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, of course.

39:15 Jake Sheldon

So Grant Cardone said that 86 % of the people that they call don't answer the phone on the first call.

39:23 Dan Leibrandt

Really?

39:23 Jake Sheldon

And they say like 80 plus Americans, we'd have to Google it here. I'm sure people can Google it while they're watching this, but it's like 80 plus percent of people don't answer a phone call from a number that's not saved in their phone. I don't know if you do that, but if I see a number that's not saved in my phone, I don't, I don't answer it. I just let it ring.

39:40 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, I usually don't, yeah.

39:42 Jake Sheldon

I'm like, eh, they'll leave a voicemail or they'll text me if they want to get a hold of me. That's the way most people are in the U.S. So that's why it's so important to call them and then call them back again immediately. Call it a back to back call. You will get so many more answers on a back-to-back call. If you've ever dealt with a Meta rep, a Facebook rep, they'll call you three times if you have a scheduled appointment with them. Boom, boom, boom, they'll call you. So when they realize that if you don't have the number saved in their phone, you're just not gonna answer it. But if they're calling you three times in a row, you're gonna be like, who the heck is calling me?

40:09 Dan Leibrandt

Dang.

40:22 Jake Sheldon

So that's what really, really helps with Facebook and your conversions. Cause they're not going to have, you know, ABC pest or whatever your company's name is. They're not going to have it saved in their phone. That's really important to it too. Another thing is say they're at work. They can't answer the phone. You want some sort of text to go out to them. So instead of there sitting in text and all the leads that are coming through, say you have a hundred that come through a month. Well, you don't want to send all those texts out. GoHighLevel. You can set up a system to actually send out those text messages for you. Autopilot, it's a little AI does it for you. And if they text back, you can even have the AI text them back again. So you don't have to. And so has a little conversation with them. It's amazing. So we recommend that. And then of course you can track everything on there. Who knew, who are new leads, who responded to the text messages, who needs to be followed up with who says they need to talk to their spouse, you know, who we've sold. And then you can move them into your like CRM. You know, it's not gonna, it's not gonna replace like a CRM, like a GorillaDesk or PestRoutes or FieldRoutes, or it's not gonna replace those, but it's fantastic for lead nurturing. So.

41:39 Dan Leibrandt

Awesome. Okay, so you have to call leads right away and you have to call them at least twice, maybe even several times they don't pick up on regarding Facebook ads.

41:46 Jake Sheldon

Yes. Yes. We're, we're pretty crazy about it. So we call them three times a day for the first five days. So we call them lot. Now that gets us to that 75 to $150 acquisition costs. Some people think that's nuts. They're like, I would never call that many people, but I'm like, that's fine. But we've closed literally thousands of accounts and built a seven figure company off of Facebook.

41:54 Dan Leibrandt

Wow, that is a lot. Yeah.

42:15 Jake Sheldon

Ads because we do that. And so it's really up to you. We found out another way to do that is by hiring virtual assistants. They're like six to 12 bucks an hour, depending on where you get them from. But you can have a virtual assistant call those leads to that has been a game changer too.

42:32 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, awesome. One of the last things I'd like to cover here is retargeting. So you mentioned it earlier and I'm sure retargeting is more advanced. People probably don't know too much about it, but can you talk about what retargeting is and why it's so important?

42:47 Jake Sheldon

Yeah. So there's a few different things. So everyone watching this should definitely have a website, right? So Facebook, one of their retargeting things that you can do is they call it a pixel. Actually the way my Facebook rep explained it one time is like, it's like a little leech and that little leech you hook to your website, just the header of your website. And it tells you where people went through the website. You know, let's say if they went to the thank you page or the gallery or whatever it may be. Right. It tracks all that. Now you can also run Facebook ads to people who have gone to the website. So you can like retarget them be like, Hey, I saw you into my website. Like you can literally say that there's a, there's a very famous marketer. You obviously know who he is. He's his name is Russell Brunson.

43:35 Jake Sheldon

He is so good at retargeting ads. You've ever gone to his sites. And if anyone's watching this, go to one of Russell Brunson sites. I promise you'll get retargeted with one of his ads and you can have a very specific message for those people too. Like, Hey, I you into my website. For some reason you didn't call us. We'd love to take care of your pest control for you. So you can retarget that way or you can retarget from Facebook. So if anyone watched your video, so say they made it, you know, 70 % of the way through your video, you can retarget those people who watched a certain percentage of the video. Or you can even do another retargeting tactic where if they go to your lead form and don't fill it out for some reason, let's say they got like, they typed in their name and they typed in their email and then all of a sudden like their kids spilled a glass of milk and they're like, Oh shoot.

44:28 Jake Sheldon

And they put it down and they forget about it. You can send all those people a retargeting ad. So yeah, it's Facebook is it's gotten so good at finding. Really anyone and everyone. It's quite impressive how vast the back end of Facebook is.

44:36 Dan Leibrandt

Crazy.

44:53 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, so what would you say is the best use case for retargeting for pest control then? Should they be doing what you said or something else?

45:00 Jake Sheldon

You definitely have a pixel on your site, um, but definitely be retargeting people who went to the lead form that didn't fill it out. Cause that does actually happen more often than people think. Uh, cause you can go, you can retarget people 90 days in the past. So if they, if they went to the lead form for some reason, didn't fill out that lead form and, um, within 90 days, you can retarget all those people. That's where we see. We get really, really cheap leads. Uh, because those are the people who are thinking about it. But then either something happened and they had to, you know, they're at work and they're like, my boss is coming in. They put their phone down. Those people are usually interested, but they might not see the ad again, unless you do a retargeting ad.

45:43 Dan Leibrandt

Mm, okay, awesome. So that's a super easy one that everyone should do.

45:46 Jake Sheldon

Yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely.

45:48 Dan Leibrandt

Cool, awesome. And then the last thing I'd like to cover is this Pest Control Millionaires program that you've got. So you run it with Jonas and I'm gonna be releasing a course in there. Can you tell people, you know, maybe they've never even heard of the program. What is it and who's it for?

46:02 Jake Sheldon

Yeah. So the Pest Control Millionaires course is a Jonas and I, and you are now a part of it too. It's going to be awesome. Jonas and I are quite literally showing, what we're doing for our pest control companies, on like a daily basis with advertising, like what we're doing for our reactivation campaigns, what we're doing for our upsell campaigns, our Facebook ads, our Google ads, now SEO.

46:31 Jake Sheldon

We're covering everything. Door knocking, delegation, systems, SOPs. We cover everything that you would need for your pest control company to scale. And this is not like theory based. We quite literally show you our screens, like what we're doing for ours. Like right now, this isn't stuff we did six years ago or whatever. Like the videos are now like, and then we do a live Q and A every Thursday. We share our screens with people. We show you what kind of ads we're running, what we're doing at this very moment. To grow our pest control companies. It's not theory based, that's why people are loving it, because they're like, my gosh, this is so great, this is like tangible stuff that you guys are doing that's working right now. And that's why it's, I believe it's been so popular because of that.

47:15 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, no, it's so awesome. I think I mean you and Jonas are Undebatably like some of the top guys in the pest control marketing industry, you know You've had over 300 pest control clients for your agency. Jonas has a 40 million dollar pest control company, which most people don't even know And he also has some of the biggest socials. I think it has like the number two or number three YouTube channel for pest control...

47:29 Jake Sheldon

Giant company.

47:36 Jake Sheldon

He's number four, number four in the world right now. He'll definitely be number two or one by the end of this year of largest YouTube channel, in America for pest control.

47:43 Dan Leibrandt

Cheers. Yeah, no, that's insane. He also has the podcast and everything. So awesome. And just to be more clear on it, like who exactly is this for? It for, like, let's say a pest control owner has never done anything before. Can they get started with this, like brand new or, you know, can companies that are even at a million dollars a year plus get into this?

48:07 Jake Sheldon

Yeah, absolutely. Mean, so one thing, Jonas is an eight figure earner, has an eight figure company. So we even have guys in the class right now that are at eight figures in going to be at nine figures in the next few years. There's tons of seven figures, six figures, and we actually have some brand spanking new people who joined. So it's pretty cool. Cause you see anyone and everyone has joined the class and everyone is benefiting from it. So there's really no like size of company to be at. You don't need any technical skills whatsoever. That's one of the big things people always ask is do any technical skills. And that's not the truth. All everything is in a membership area where people can watch at their own pace. And then if you do have any questions, we always do a Q and a every Thursday and they can ask. But that answer your question. No, there's no size of company. No, you don't need any special background in advertising or anything like that. You can be at any point. And get value out of it.

49:07 Dan Leibrandt

Awesome. Yeah. So for anyone in pest control and also potentially lawn care, I think that might be available now or in the future. I mean, again, really all the same principles apply. Like I told you off this call, you know, I'll be completely transparent. Know, SEO is basically the same across all home services. But, you know, I still do have that pest control expertise just like you and just like Jonas. So I'm a big believer in the program and I'm also going to be releasing my course in the program, which is super exciting. And Jake, for people that maybe want to learn more, obviously they don't have to like buy it right now, but how can they learn more about it and then potentially buy the program?

49:32 Jake Sheldon

Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's gonna be awesome.

49:40 Jake Sheldon

Yeah, so go to pestcontrolmillionaires.com, book a call with either Jonas or I, and we'd be happy to show you the info and what the class entails, see if it makes sense for you. That'd be the fastest way to get ahold of us.

49:58 Dan Leibrandt

Awesome. Cool, man. It's been so great having you on the show and I genuinely learned a lot from this one. I know I had you on the Local Marketing Secrets one. We kind of went all over where you're talking about like virtual assistants and Facebook ads, but we went, I mean, this was like a Facebook ads masterclass. I think this was awesome.

50:02 Jake Sheldon

Yeah, thank you.

50:11 Jake Sheldon

Yeah, no thank you, I appreciate that.

50:14 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, definitely, man. So thanks for coming on the show and also where can people find you on social media? Are you on LinkedIn, Facebook?

50:20 Jake Sheldon

Yeah. So, obviously they can find, find me at the Pest Control Millionaires.com. So, where I'm going to be at going to be starting a YouTube channel here this year as well. But I am on Facebook, as you know, I'm a Facebook guy, so I'm on Facebook all the time. So you just look, look me up, Jake Sheldon. We're also created a pest control group. It's called, pest control professionals. We have a few hundred people in there already, so you can find us there as well. And then we have another Facebook group. It's going to be private for this. So.

50:32 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah. Let's go.

50:50 Jake Sheldon

We have, I think about a hundred people in that one. It's the Pest Control Millionaires Group. So that was a private one. You have to of course be a part of the program to enter that one. But yeah, I'm always available on my personal Facebook for sure.

51:06 Dan Leibrandt

Cool, man. All right, cool. So everyone should follow him on Facebook and also go to pestcontrolmillionaires.com. Just check out the program, learn more about it. I hate that everyone sees, I don't know, doing a discovery call, discovery call, whatever you wanna call it, that like, they're just gonna try to sell me the whole time. Part of it is just learning about the program and like, is this right for you? Mean, like me and you have talked, some people just genuinely aren't that ambitious and they don't wanna grow. To where and also maybe digest all the information in the course. So it might not be right for you, but if you are a pest control owner looking to grow, then you should definitely check it out. So, all right, cool. That's the podcast. Again, thank you so much, Jake, for coming on. And this is the first show. I think this is awesome. And yeah, thanks for coming on.

51:46 Jake Sheldon

That's it for me. Yeah, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

51:52 Dan Leibrandt

Cool man, awesome.