Mat Rogers on AI, E-E-A-T and Why Smaller Pest Control Companies Can Win Now

00:00 Dan Leibrandt

Hey there and welcome back to Pest Control Legends. Today I am with Mat Rogers, who is the CEO of Lizard Marketing, a very successful agency serving pest control companies and other home services. And we are actually together in person in Charlotte. We actually just filmed a series all on AI stuff, which is going to be great. That should be coming out maybe in the next few months or so. And we are going to expand upon our initial podcast. So if you're not familiar, we filmed a podcast a few weeks ago or so. And it was actually my most popular one on my Pest Control Legends channel. I told you that like immediately a day or two after it dropped, it was already my most viewed video. So obviously Mat is a huge guest and we're going to continue to talk about AI, how it relates to digital marketing, what you need to know and all of that. So it should be a great show. So thanks for coming on, Mat.

00:46 Mat Rogers

Bro, I'm so excited to talk about this stuff with you. It is humbling to be considered a big guest. I feel like I fumble forward with stuff. And so I'm happy to share anything I've learned with the people that are listening to you to give them a leg up because you need a leg up because this market is competitive.

01:05 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah. So if you haven't seen that first show, go make sure to watch that one first, because this is kind of going to be a sequel that you need to have that kind of foundational knowledge that we talked about in that episode. Now we're going to go deeper into all the topics we discussed. But I thought it would make sense to cover some of Mat's experience real quick before we really jump into things. I believe we didn't discuss this on the first show, but I really want to exemplify the difference between where digital marketing was at before and where it's at now. And your original start in pest control is a pretty unique one. Your family ran Killingsworth Pest Control [The company is Killingsworth Environmental], and it ended up growing to a very big pest control company with the help of you. And I want you to talk about that experience. Talk to me about growing Killingsworth, what was working back then, and how you grew it to such a big company. Yeah.

01:55 Mat Rogers

So when I started, the company was around $8 million, and this was around 2012. And I had pushed back on joining the family business. I'm the black sheep of the family. I'm the college graduate of the family. I was not going to jump in the pest control game. But I had been going... My father had been doing so well in this market, in the Charlotte market, that I would go home from a college or visit places, and he'd be living in a different house with more cars in his garage, and all kinds of crazy stuff like that. I'm like, what exactly is going on? Anyway, he ended up asking me at the right time, and his tenth try, he said, and I told him I would do it. And at the time when I jumped in, what I didn't realize I was jumping in to was what I now consider a renaissance in digital marketing, or from traditional marketing to digital marketing. So at the time, there was a heavy impetus on traditional marketing channels. Things like door hangers, leave behinds, mailers, right? Things like cloverleafing with technicians. Things like radio commercials. We had huge budgets set aside for WBT and WFNZ here in Charlotte on AM radio stations, because Dad didn't play on the FM radio stations, because Spotify and...

03:10 Mat Rogers

What was the other one? Started with a P. I can't remember it now. Anyway, people started streaming music back then. He's like, I want to be on talk radio. And then we were experimenting with broadcast television commercials, which got pretty expensive, actually. But his biggest investment, which blew my mind when I started working there, was the Yellow Pages. He started his career in Yellow Page advertising. He sold it to companies, right? And so he was investing $323,000 a year in Yellow Page advertising. Like, big spreads. And this is like really old school, is way too old for you, okay? This is when you like cut and you pasted things down and you gave layouts to marketing directors. I want my ad to look like this and make this font bigger and all this stuff is very like hands-on, old school graphic design, right? And Yellow.

04:04 Mat Rogers

But I knew as a consumer at the time that this was leaving. Why are you putting so much money here? People don't use these things anymore. We don't use these things anymore. And it took this big effort to help them understand that the consumer is changing their behaviors. And so it's important for us, if we're going to make it, to change our behaviors too. And so I took a lot of work to kind of prove that out to him, to make it make sense because he only knew what he knew and it had gotten him to an $8 million company and that's awesome. But at the time, things were rising up and the market things like Google Guaranteed, which is now LSA, which is now a tertiary feature on Google right now, right? Things like Facebook, I'm sorry, Google Business Profiles, right? Collecting reviews to put it out there. Things like social proofing were starting to become a thing. And I was having a hard time with these like rejoining marketing channels trying to convince my dad that we need to put some effort into this.

05:00 Mat Rogers

I believe this is where things are going. As a consumer, this is how I buy things. And I think that we need to make sure that our voice is present in these spaces. And so ultimately, we did start to make the... It was a fight like a knockdown drag out. So PCOs that are listening to us. If it feels contentious in your office, when you're making big changes like this, just know it's normal and change is hard and you need to change. It's really important. But after several fights and sleepless nights and all this kind of stuff, we took it from $8 million in 2012 to $28 million in 2018 before we sold to Anticimex. And at the time, the game is a little different now, but at the time we'd made it to position number 36 on the PCT Top 100. Yeah, I made my dad a coffee mug after we made it that far. There are some PCOs that don't like to share their rank on the PCT Top 100 because they like to keep their cards close to my chest.

05:52 Mat Rogers

But not my dad, man. He loved his showboat. He loved it. So I made him a coffee mug that he drank from every day and it said 36 bitches on the coffee mug. That's what we did. And then it kind of ramped up to another level. We sold the family's company with Paul Giannamore's help to Anticimex and I stayed on with Anticimex for a couple of years. And it was like drinking from the fire hydrant of digital marketing because Anticimex gave you access to digital marketers and some relationships that I still have from 75 countries across the world. So many states in the United States. You're just gathering information from people that are trying to make things work everywhere. What works in Italy? What works in France? What works in Australia? What works in South Carolina? You're just learning all this stuff and I just felt like I really kind of pushed the pedal down in what my experience was in digital marketing. And fast forward to now, we're in this new space together. We're in another, I'm calling it the second renaissance of marketing. Not just for PCOs for everybody. And we are a slow moving industry.

06:56 Mat Rogers

It's not hard to innovate this industry. It's hard, I love you PCOs. Sometimes it's hard to get a PCO on board. And so what's the different now though is I had the luxury of fighting with my dad for those six years to comb away big budget cuts away from traditional marketing and put it in places that were going to work better. This new renaissance because of how fast AI is evolving is happening at such a more compressed rate. I was telling you before the episode started that I feel like more has changed now in the last six months maybe in digital marketing than my last 12 years of experience in digital marketing in a short amount of time. And so just as aggressively as AI is moving forward, Lizard is aggressively trying to learn what's working so that we can give that to our clients and help them.

07:45 Mat Rogers

Because if we don't help them, they're not going to know how to navigate these things. They're trusting us with their digital marketing. So of everything that has transpired from 2012 till now, the same transition is happening. It's just happening faster, more aggressively, and it's actually giving the small guy and the medium guy a seat at the table, a real seat at the table if they take this shit seriously.

08:07 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, no, it's wild. We were talking about earlier today at breakfast is that so many companies are moving so fast. And really the trend and a lot of people are using this number that AI is exponentially increasing. It's growing at about 10x a year. So even guys like me and you are super digital marketing savvy. We know all about AI. We're listening to all the top people. It's even hard for us to keep up. So at least I wanted to ask a follow up question regarding what you were just saying is this is actually an interesting take, which I don't think everyone would agree with. That's the smaller and medium guys actually can compete now. Why do you think that?

08:45 Mat Rogers

Listen, if you're in Bug Bux and you're watching, I don't remember your name, but you commented yesterday and I put you in check and what I said was true. The misconception that some PCOs have right now is that AI is just going to run over them more. The big four dominate the digital marketing space because they have big budget, big margin, big voice, big presence, big brand. And it's often given the little guys as that form of digital marketing has gotten smaller by virtue of these big Terminix, Anticimex, Orkin, their big budgets have kind of soaked up all the room, sucked all the air out of the room. It's really left these little guys struggling to have to spend more. But the truth is and what I love right now, because I'm always rooting for the little guy. Our company came from like a double wide. I grew up in a double wide. And so I love it when a little guy can make it because I watched my dad make it and nothing filled me with more pride than it did later in life to realize that he had made it and how he came literally came from nothing. Right. And so to give these little guys a shot by virtue of AI is like next level crazy.

09:48 Mat Rogers

It is absolutely fascinating to see AI take what the big guy used to dominate and give these guys like level up their armor, level up their voice, level up their trust, level up their authority and give them an opportunity to step in the ring and start swinging. I love when the odds are stacked against me, especially when you got a tool like AI in your back pocket because all of a sudden it's not about being a rank one on Google anymore. All of a sudden you can be on page 10, but your voice starts showing up because you're doing the right things. And so if you're listening, PCOs, please pay attention to Dan. Please pay attention to what I'm saying. You've got a real shot of getting heard in this new digital marketing landscape if you will capitalize on these changes instead of being afraid of them.

10:29 Dan Leibrandt

Awesome. Yeah. 100%. So can you talk about the specific things like some of the initial things that you can start doing to compete with these big companies like you're talking about?

10:37 Mat Rogers

Yeah. So the thing that AI cares about is not page one of Google anymore. Okay. And if you are working in digital marketing right now, you need to know first and foremost that the old school line between SEO, which used to be a slow game, and paid search, which used to be the fast game, is real blurry right now. It's blurry for me. And so if it's blurry for me, it is blurry for you. I promise. Okay. It's hard to distinguish which comes first now, the chicken or the egg. Okay. So first thing is SEO and paid search. You have to be doing both of them. You have to, right? And the thing that the acronym, there's going to be lots of new acronyms, everybody. So pace yourself and take good notes, right? Ask ChatGPT. But the, and Ask ChatGPT this. What AI cares about to make your voice heard is E-E-A-T. Expertise, experience, authority, and trust. And if you are doing digital marketing activities that focus on those four components, AI is going to take your teeny tiny little voice and blow it up.

11:34 Mat Rogers

It's going to blow it up on the overview. It's going to blow up your business, your Google Business Profile. And it's going to blow up your LSA ads. They're going to drop in conversion costs. It's going to improve the quality of leads that you get on your paid search. The thing that you'll be scared of, that I believe PCOs will see is, footprint on their website is going to slow down. But if they're doing good digital marketing, that's actually because they're getting better visibility at the very tip top of the funnel. Because AI is taking information and presenting it to the user before they ever have to click on anything else. They're calling it the new zero-click, I don't know. Zero-click search. Zero-click search. That's where we are, right? And so if they're doing those activities, if they're paying attention to their paid search and their SEO, particularly hyper-local SEO, particularly hyper-local SEO that's linked into their Google Business Profile, and they're focusing on that E-E-A-T, expertise, experience, authority, and trust, they can start swinging up at Anticimex.

12:31 Mat Rogers

They can start swinging up at Terminix and making those boys pay attention to them as an opportunity for people to stick some rocket fuel in this engine and take off, just like we did in 2012 to 2018, except in a much more condensed span of time.

12:43 Dan Leibrandt

Absolutely. No, I totally agree. I'm a big proponent of E-E-A-T. I learned it from my mentor, Dennis, and the E at the end, which is, that would be experience, was just added about two and a half years ago. So it used to be E-A-T. Now they've added the E for experience. And why have they done that? I'll just kind of take some thunder. They've done that because of AI rising. That's AI can't truly have experience. I mean, it can have experience, I guess, like that this is me prompting, and it can, like you said, regurgitate from other experiences. But ultimately, what we have as humans that's unique is our experience, that we can talk, and like I actually purposely asked you at the beginning of this interview of what was it like to grow Killingsworth? What did you guys do there? Because that is your unique experience. No one can take that from you. So you could ask ChatGPT about pest control marketing advice, but I mean, what is it pulling from?

13:37 Dan Leibrandt

But it should pull from actual experts. And that's why we should be bullish on still listening to humans and not getting totally replaced, as long as we're an expert in our field.

13:45 Mat Rogers

Exactly. Trusting people that know how to engage these AI tools, a thing that we spent a lot of time talking about today. Trusting digital marketing companies that are embracing these things and helping you guys embrace these things as well is going to be what changes the game. To know how to get your voice in the right place and structured in the right way so that AI can grab it and give it to the consumer, because that's where the consumer is. That's where the shift that I was making in 2012, hey, dad, please. This is not how consumer shops anymore. Please. Nobody owns a phone book anymore. People just throw these things away or hold the door with it, right? We've got to rethink about how the consumer is buying. And so if the PCOs are thinking that way too, if they're using ChatGPT to get their answers, they will understand. How do I make sure my digital marketing is getting my information here so that I can get in front of the consumer and take my piece of the pie? This is their time to shine.

14:34 Dan Leibrandt

So let's go a little bit deeper on E-E-A-T. I'm sure a lot of people listening to this show, this might be the first time you've ever heard of that term. So you even have to get a little bit acclimated to that and just get a little bit of an intro here, which it's good you're listening. Talk to me about then, how can you demonstrate E-E-A-T? I mean, it sounds like some foreign concept, but like, are there any quick things you can do or any principles you follow?

14:56 Mat Rogers

What I think, especially, one of the biggest changes that we've had to make is internally as a company is the first thing that we had to do is we were using third party or not third party, we were using a CRM HighLevel to track and monitor the pipeline activities for all of our clients. A lot of our clients, you know how it is, you open up the hood of some of these pest control companies, no offense, I love you, but you open up the hood of some of these PCOs and you're like, you guys don't have a system in place to track any of this stuff. I'm going to build a system, I'll give it to you. So we're building this for our systems for our clients inside of HighLevel and we were having the landing pages as inside of HighLevel to start their funnel, to get the leads in front of their sales team. And one of the biggest things that we've had to do probably in the last like three months is to make sure that these landing pages were anchored down crawlable onto their domains. Because one of the things that's going to build authority and trust if they're linked up to the Google Business Profile, for example, is to make sure that these landing pages have access to this deep reservoir of content that should have been created, alt tags that should have been created, Google Business Profiles that should be linked, schema, FAQs that should be located on, it's going to crawl all this stuff together, not separate.

16:06 Mat Rogers

So at the beginning, there's a learning experience for Lizard. We were treating these things separately. We had, we called them satellites. These landing pages for Lizard were satellites to our clients websites. But now they are practically a part of our clients websites because that's one of the ways that you build a sense of authority for AI, particularly for paid search. When my paid search team did that specific task, we saw the, oh, maybe I shouldn't even say this because I know my competitors are watching, but screw you guys.

16:32 Dan Leibrandt

I'm a competitor.

16:33 Mat Rogers

I mean, you're kind of, but you're also my friend. When we did this activity, we saw the conversion costs of our, on top of some other stuff, we saw the conversion costs of our clients, like plummet and their quality scores increase because we're getting better information to Google and to the AI Overview. And therefore, it's qualifying the leads better. Right? So that's one way that a company can start to swing up. Just make sure that your landing pages are tied into your domain. That's pretty big.

17:01 Dan Leibrandt

Absolutely. Now, this is what me and Ben, we're just talking about Ben behind the camera, is that we should ideally structure Google Ads around the website. So we should send our Google Ads to different pages on the website and they should be very relevant and targeted. So a lot of companies will just set up separate landing pages like you were talking about. That might be through ClickFunnels or GoHighLevel, but Google wants to see as much data and activity on the site as possible. So when we give it that data, even when the page doesn't perform well on SEO for whatever reason, but we're sending paid traffic to it, then Google sees, oh, people really like this page, even though it's paid, but still people are converting at a high level. It seems like they're engaging with the page. They're not clicking off right away. They're not bouncing.

17:45 Dan Leibrandt

Then that makes Google want to boost your SEO, your organic pages as well. Right?

17:50 Mat Rogers

Yeah, absolutely. And so that's the other kind of thing that we do for our clients that I won't give away the secret sauce too much. We talked about a little bit of breakfast. So you got some secret sauce. One of the things that's going to give these PCOs a really big leg up is relevance, right? And by virtue of getting into the habit of working with your digital marketing company, whoever it is that are building these E-E-A-T specific types of campaigns, types of content, types of blogs, types of landing pages for you, particularly and getting them to your site and getting them to your Google Business Profile, you are going to take over spaces where your voices weren't heard before. I did a video. I posted up on our Instagram page and it's true. Semrush just released a report stating that 90% of the AI Overview isn't pulling information from page one of Google anymore. So your website, Dan's website may, Dan's pest control website may rank on page one of Google. But that's not what AI Overview used to grab information. 90% of the pages that AI Overview pulled from was not even in the top 10.

18:59 Mat Rogers

Think about how crazy that is. Think about the mindset of some of the PCOs that are still listening to us. And when they hear SEO and they're not even thinking about AIO and I'm even thinking about AEO, when they're thinking SEO, they're thinking about, SEO is about getting on page one of Google. It is not about getting on page one of Google anymore. It's not. It's about relevance, the activity of relevance. And the more habitual you are at getting this content in place, your digital marketing company is, sequentially every day, we do the same thing like clockwork. The more you are making sure that you've got fresh, relevant content that is formatted to E-E-A-T that is able for the AI Overview, your Google Business Profile, and your LSA ads to grab and offer up to the consumer. You, that is how you can start to swing up. Consistency is how you can start to swing up. So making sure your domains are connected is one. Making sure that you are consistent. You're not just like thinking about this casually from time to time. You're taking this shit seriously because your marketing is the first part of a productive business.

19:54 Mat Rogers

It's marketing, sales, ops, money lady at the back of the house. If your marketing is firing in that way and you're not treating it like something you can just plug and play and walk away from, please don't be doing that to your sales or your ops. But if you're focused on marketing in that way, that first component, the introduction of you to the new consumer, and you are habitual, making sure that content is going out every day, you're going to be seen in ways that your competitors that get to brag about being on page one of Google are not going to be seen. They're going to get shoved to the side. You can tell Terminix and Anticimex, don't be mad at me, call me. But you can tell Terminix and Anticimex to eat it. Get out of my way. I'm putting my stuff up and you need to take it back to you. It's my turn.

20:33 Dan Leibrandt

Definitely. Now, I had Neil Patel on my podcast almost a year ago. And this is when things are still kind of new. I feel like everyone's kind of acclimated at this point. But the term he came up with, which is everyone's kind of, like you were saying, has different terms. But my favorite is actually still the SEO acronym. But instead of search engine optimization, it's search everywhere optimization. Because it's not just on the search engines, but it's also the large language models. ChatGPT is a large language model. Gemini is a large language model.

21:02 Mat Rogers

I wish we could have talked about that first. I just launched mine and that one's better.

21:06 Dan Leibrandt

Perplexity is a large language model. Then you could also think of social platforms. I talked about this in the videos we were doing. That 40% of Gen Z is doing their searches on TikTok. And then there's a lot of searches. You may be familiar that YouTube is the second biggest search engine. I mean, that's also a social platform. It's kind of the middle of that. So it's not just like you were saying about showing up number one on Google. Because that's also not even really a thing anymore. I mean, there's AI Overviews, there's AI Mode, then there's local service ads, then there's Google Business Profile. So you could, like, this is actually crazy. You could be ranking number one on a really good keyword for your website and still barely get any traffic. Because Google Ads, local service ads, and Google Business Profile are taking a lot of it.

21:46 Mat Rogers

It's so true. It's so true. And I've got a client right now. I've not thrown this client on the bus. I'm begging you on a podcast now to pay attention to what I'm saying. He's hedged all his bets on PPC, all of them. He's not doing any SEO. He's not doing any AIO. He's not doing any AEO. He's not doing any LSA. He's not doing any updates on his business profile. He's not doing any of those activities. And PPC, which just like my dad with the Yellow Pages, is now on the bottom of page one of Google, if it's there and the quality sucks, right? And so I'm begging this person to start taking some of these other activities to heart. Because when they do, it's going to improve the performance of their PPC. They've had shit luck with LSA. It's going to improve the performance of their LSA. It's going to improve the performance of their business profile. They need to have coded numbers on their business profile so they can track these things. Because that's a key KPI for knowing if your SEO and AIO activities are working, right?

22:42 Mat Rogers

And so, yeah, if you do all of it, not just some of it, right now in particular, and you are focused on E-E-A-T, you're going to see a return. Some of my clients have... I won't give the... I won't say which companies. One of my favorite... You know who you are. My favorite client right now has $74 cost per qualified lead. Qualified.

23:02 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, that's pretty good.

23:03 Mat Rogers

$74, right? Another one has $113. Another one is $94. The thing that these... And they're in contentious markets, okay? One of them is in Florida. One of them is in California, Orange County. Another one is in Portland, right? One of the things that these three companies, have in common is they're doing all of the things and they're doing them right. They're not doing one of the things and doing it well, or one of the things and doing it poorly. They're doing all aspects of digital marketing that are informed by AI and it is driving down the cost of their conversion and it's driving up the quality score of everything that we're producing for them. And he said, my favorite client, you know who you are, he who shall not be named, he said he had a 3.64 return on investment in digital marketing in the first and second quarter of this year.

23:50 Mat Rogers

And that's insane. You've got a PCO who will get $74 for a qualified phone call and has a solid sales team to receive the phone call. He will spend money like that all day long. And we have... I mean, think about it. You've done this, okay? I know that you've done it. You've done the same thing for multiple clients in different markets, okay? And for some of your clients, it takes off. Maybe it's because they're doing all the things well. Some of the clients you work with and they've got real intense feelings about how digital marketing should be done and things you should do and should not do and blah, blah, blah. They don't trust you. And you've got to kind of work around them to keep that retainer coming in. Do you know what I'm saying? And their stats suck. And you're like, listen, if you'll just trust me, I'll tweak a couple of things. We'll get you up there. We're doing the same activity for all of our clients, but those three in particular are taking it and run with it. And that's because they're focused on AI and they're focused on all aspects of digital marketing, not some aspects of digital marketing.

24:40 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah. I want to get a little bit more detailed there. I feel like especially for early pest control owners, it might feel a little bit complex or overwhelming. So you mentioned some of your top clients, they do all things in digital marketing. Could you just like cover some of those things? Is there any like anything high level everyone needs to do? But what exactly do you mean?

24:59 Mat Rogers

You need to be participating in AI-informed SEO, however you want to name it. If you want to do it in search everywhere optimization, if it's search engine optimization, if it's artificial intelligence optimization, you need to be creating content that is structured for AI habitually. You need to be putting that content structured well and organized on your website. You need to be creating clusters of service type and treatment types and pest types on your website to kind of network these things together on your website. Okay. You need to be doing those activities. You need to be treating your Google Business Profile like it's your effing Instagram account. Okay. Constantly on there, constantly responding to reviews, constantly dropping new content, constantly linking to these keyword rich, hyper local schema informed pieces of content that are on your website, linking them up to your business profile. And you're going to watch that thing take off, it's going to take off. Merry Christmas, right? And you need to be doing paid search activity that supports these things because I would say probably a year ago, the biggest part of my company was paid search.

26:01 Mat Rogers

All PCOs thought if I just give money to Google, it's going to yield a result. And it's not. Please listen. If you're not doing SEO right now, you're going to see your conversion costs rise on your paid search activities and your quality score fall on your paid search activities. Take it to the bank, right? PCO, you know who you are. This is hedging all your bets on PPC. This is why, okay? You're not listening to me, okay? You need to be participating in these activities that we just talked about because what it's going to do is it's going to tell Google that this company has expertise, has experience, has authority, has trust. Let me get their stuff to the top. Let me drive down the score. Those three companies, Portland, Florida, and California, that's a blended average, right? It's not just their PPC. Their PPC, the CPLs are low, right? But they're also getting so much traffic from organic and their business profile that they blend all this together and they've got this beautiful digital marketing number that they can be proud of that we are real proud of, right? And we've even had some competition. You know who you are. It's not you.

27:01 Mat Rogers

I try to come in and take some of my slice of the pie, bro. Get out. You can't beat that number. You can't. And so that's it. When I say all, I mean, if you're doing paid search, you need to be doing AI-informed SEO and you need to treat your business profile like it's your Instagram, period.

27:19 Dan Leibrandt

Absolutely. I agree. I'm glad you keep bringing it back to E-E-A-T because, again, I'm a big advocate for this. Something most people don't know when you look at Google's guidelines and when they're talking about E-E-A-T is that it all ends up falling under trust. So the expertise, the experience, and the authority all comes under the trust category. It's almost like the trust umbrella with those below it. So how specifically can pest control owners build trust with their customers and with search engines?

27:48 Mat Rogers

So we talked about it a little bit today when we were doing our pieces. And this is a concept that I'm really trying to wrestle with because on the tail end of that 2018 experience, you had review companies like Applause, love you, Applause, and Podium rise up and give guys real small businesses a real shot at building reviews if they hadn't had those before. And that builds into this social proofing component for the consumer. These guys are up at the top of the list. They have a thousand reviews. They have 4.9 stars. That must mean consumers love them. Let me give them a shot. But with AI, trust velocity, you actually have to play a little bit of a slower game. You have to build consistently and slower to let Google know that you are trustworthy. You're keeping reviews coming in. So whether you're using native applications inside of your CRM like FieldRoutes, if you're eliciting reviews in your FieldRoutes, if you're using Applause or Podium, I love them, use them, right?

28:44 Mat Rogers

If you're doing these things, keep consistent and build slowly. Have a consistent velocity of reviews that are coming in so you can remind AI and Google over and over again that you have trust. You are building trust in your local area in your geographic region of your business profile. If you built up to a thousand, and these days, if you bumped a thousand reviews on in a short amount of time, that's actually a negative flag these days with AI. And if you park it because you did a thousand and think, I can be done now, you're not building velocity anymore. And so you're further penalized by AI and Google because they think, oh, well, they cheated to get these reviews and they're not getting these reviews consistently. So it becomes less relevant, right? You need a slow, relevant intake of reviews. You need a subscription to Applause. You need a subscription to Podium, or you need a consistent SOP inside of your FieldRoutes system to elicit these reviews from customers that you know that love you.

29:41 Mat Rogers

And that's going to build trust with AI and with Google.

29:44 Dan Leibrandt

Absolutely. No, I agree. Reviews is a huge way to build trust. I would say that is the main one. There's other ways, but we want to make sure that we're building as many reviews as possible. And like you said, it's not just about the total volume or about the star rating, but also the recency and consistency, which you could also consider velocity or any other term. Really, if you haven't gotten a review in the past few months, you cannot expect a rank and you will not be trusted by the search engines.

30:08 Mat Rogers

So it's going to be like that. The new answer is if you're not taking digital marketing seriously, buy, you're not just going to get left in the dust. You're going to get left in the dust so bad. It's not going to be like my dad where I had six years to convince him that we needed to change our game. You've got like a month, a couple of months before people that are taking this seriously are going to dog you in a street fight. But that should encourage you because if you take this stuff seriously right now, if you call us, if you work with digital marketing companies that know what they're doing, you will see your shit take off fast. It's not a slow game anymore.

30:38 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, I will play the other side of that that I think pest control is a slower industry like we discussed before. So things like e-commerce or software companies, I mean, those guys are moving fast. Those guys are moving really fast. So pest control is a smaller industry. It's home services. It's older guys. So you do have some time, but really this is the fastest marketing has ever moved. You said you haven't seen anything like this in your history.

31:04 Mat Rogers

I have not, but I also say by virtue of the profit margins for pest control specifically, I have experienced because I left the game for a while and then came back to it after we sold, right? It's a short while, but it was a while. And I've never worked with this many PCOs. Killingsworth was very insular. We lived in a bubble. We didn't do things like NPMA. Dad always thought, why am I going to sit around and tell other people their stuff's awesome? My stuff's awesome. You know what I mean? He didn't like to share, didn't like to talk to people. We went. He was a big fish and he liked the attention, all that kind of stuff. We didn't rub elbows with people. I didn't know anybody, right? And so now I'm working with PCOs all across the country. And what I'm seeing, and that's actually encouraging to me is people like your agent just above are starting companies and making ground really quick. You can make a name for yourself in this industry so fast just by virtue of being different. Because this industry is so slow, you can be a little different.

31:55 Mat Rogers

Like my boy's nice. Love you. Love you, Tommy. You can be different and make a name for yourself so much faster. And I love that there's also this like spring of young voices and young muscle and young entrepreneurs that are stepping into the game. Like me, like you, that are like, I'm getting my piece of the pie. I'm here. You're going to know who I am. Everybody's going to know who I am. And they're taking it seriously. And because they will play the game a little bit differently than it's played before, they're sprinting out in front of these old hats that are not taking this crap seriously and still trying to use the old play I've got this guy. You know who you are. You actually, there's a lot of people that know who they are. This guy in particular,...

32:33 Dan Leibrandt

A lot of call out.

32:34 Mat Rogers

He came from Killingsworth. I won't say his name. I came from Killingsworth and he is still using such an old playbook. He's still using radio advertising. I reached out to him. He's a young guy. He's my age. I mean, I'm not, I'm older than you, but young ish, man. He's still using radio advertising and I called him. I tried to convince him. He said he hadn't grown more than his company size. I won't give that away. In two years, he's still the same size after two years. These are his words. Money comes in. It just goes right out the door. I'm like, bro, let me help you. Let me help you. We can turn this thing on. He is even on the young side, but he's still using that old playbook and it's not working. It's not doing anything. And so these young guys that are stepping into the ring and are willing to take a risk, are willing to be different and are willing to take advantage of AI as opposed to being afraid of AI or there's something else.

33:25 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah. No, at the end of the day, no one cares about your opinion of AI or social media. Some people just not do social media because I don't like social media and it's for dancing. I don't like AI because it's going to replace jobs. And like, no one cares your opinion. Let's get objective. Let's look at the data and the KPIs. If we implement something like AI or new age digital marketing using social media, whatever, and it gets results, I mean, then why not do it? Like you have to be open to new solutions, especially because things are changing so fast.

34:00 Mat Rogers

Put your voice out there. Building that social network builds brand relevance in your communities. And so if you know, as the PCO, the AI is focused on hyper local activity and cares that you have a brand relevance inside of your market that you're working in, man, you're going to go nuts. Though the two of the companies that I mentioned have great brand presence and have so much fun on social media. They're just having a good time. They have no, they're not getting on there and being like salesy. Have pest control with me. Let's learn about this bug together. Bullshit like that, right? There are plenty of PCOs out there who still use their social media like a library of pest control catalogs that nobody cares about, right? And wondering, why don't anybody engage my social media? I'll tell you why. Call me. But if you get on there and you have a good time, all of a sudden, like you are getting noticed and all of a sudden, Google, especially if all of your shits linked together and you're sharing that shit on your business profile, particularly, all of a sudden, your business is getting noticed and it's got that rocket fuel underneath it and your business is going to change fast.

35:02 Dan Leibrandt

Now, I'm so glad you brought up brand. That was actually a part of the notes here I was writing. Yeah, no, exactly. So talk to me about brand in 2025 and beyond. First off, like, how has it changed? What was branding different back in the day? Like you're kind of hinting at it now of at least a good portion of it is social media and that we're kind of just being ourselves. Talk to me about like where branding is at right now and why it's so important or how important really is it.

35:27 Mat Rogers

Branding is the there's an old Harvard study that I refer back to a lot that says that a person has to witness something. 27? 27?

35:38 Dan Leibrandt

There's tons of different studies all around that range.

35:40 Mat Rogers

27 times for about 73% retention. Okay, when you're building a brand presence in particularly when you do it in conjunction with SEO and paid search activities and a door team, which we haven't touched on. Okay. If you're building brand recognition in your community, you are increasing the likelihood that a consumer is going to choose you because they feel like they know you, right? And so PCOs that are having fun, particularly in the TikTok space, particularly in the Instagram space and they are letting the consumers get to know them. They're dropping the veil of professionalism that used to guard the consumer from the business owner. They're putting that veil down and they're allowing people to get to know them by virtue of their social media. What they're doing is they're increasing the odds when that consumer has a problem in their market, that they're going to choose that person by virtue of social proofing because they feel like they know them. I will let Travis and Tyler with Nice Pest Control come over to my house. I will let Rian and Noelle come over to my house because I feel like I know them.

36:39 Mat Rogers

And this is when... PCOs understand this intuitively. When you welcome a stranger into your house, when your wife is at home and the kids are at home, that is an intimate space and there has to be some type of trust quality there that is better than your uniform. You can't have some scuzzy guy pulling up to the side of the street to Grace's house, open the car to when a bunch of shit fall out. Do you know what I'm saying? And then he walks up buttons his pants up and stands like, I'm here to fix your blah blah blah, right? If you have done the work of good branding now and it's so much easier, Killingsworth only went viral one time, right? I couldn't make lightning strike twice. Yeah. But so many people are going viral all the time now. If you do a good job at branding, getting somebody on your team that will help you or working with a digital marketing company that will help you with your branding messages, you will find that what happens with your inside sales with your outside sales is a higher closing ratio, higher click through rate, higher conversion rate for the leads that are already getting produced.

37:37 Mat Rogers

Why? Because the consumer feels like they know you. It's huge. But back in the day, back in the day at Killingsworth, you had to spend lots of money on expensive ways to get your name out there and there still wasn't a guarantee. We would do things like parades in the town. We would do things like broadcast television. The one time we went viral, I spent $18,000 on a 30 second commercial. Okay. But we were in the Super Bowl. People were tipsy watching the Super Bowl. The Panthers were in the game. We made it. And the lightning struck. But now with simpler tools like TikTok, find some trends that you think are funny, things that make you chuckle when you're looking around and stuff and just do it as a company. Let the consumer get to know you. You don't have to spend a lot of money. This could be one of the cheapest aspects of digital marketing that you participate in. Period. End of sentence. It's better when you do it. Your digital marketing can help you. We can help you.

38:25 Mat Rogers

You can help them. But it's actually better if you tell your own story because you're going to help your digital marketing company get higher quality leads for you. Period. End of sentence.

38:33 Dan Leibrandt

Absolutely. No, we talked about that on the last podcast that we did that we live in a trust economy. And really the way I like to think about marketing or specifically things like SEO and customer acquisition is in relation to competition. So many companies, not many, but a good amount of companies are starting to take advantage of this. They might be creating videos like the Rian and Noelle you're talking about or other companies that are making videos, are making something fun. And people trust those companies more than yours because, oh wow, no, that's okay. I can tell what it would be like if Joe came to my house. Okay, wow, okay. That's so cool that Anna answers the phone that way. Okay, now I'm ready to call her and I can expect her to pick up the phone. Just little things like that. At the end of the day, I feel like marketing is separating yourself from the competition, right? So if we can do things like that, again, the trust, the trust is so big with the search engines, but it's also so big with people.

39:29 Dan Leibrandt

And I think the search engines are actually optimizing for what we're looking for. Yeah, right.

39:34 Mat Rogers

Isn't that interesting? AI cannot replace trust. It can augment the consumer's ability to trust you, but it still needs the human connection, the trust component that we can build by virtue of our brand messaging. That's actually like really fascinating.

39:46 Dan Leibrandt

You need the real ingredients but then the AI can help you put together the meal.

39:51 Mat Rogers

Yeah, so true. So true. You can have all of the tools. We talked about it a little bit today. You can have all the tools and still do a shit job, right? You can have all the AI tools instead of shit digital marketing. Or you can have the right tools with the right components and the right branding messaging and the right trust components and put those things together and see completely different results, all using the same tools. It's interesting.

40:15 Dan Leibrandt

So talk to me about some of the tools that you're using. Are you using ChatGPT or do you have anything for automation? And is there anything that pest control companies need to have in place?

40:26 Mat Rogers

So we, everybody uses Chat now. Chat is getting more and more advanced as it goes. We're using different models for different things inside of Chat. We are using Google's Gemini, particularly for the work that we do for paid search. It is much more integrated into the deep history of paid search activities that we have and that Google has access to. For paid search specifically. So we use that for paid search. We're also using tools like n8n for ourselves personally. We were touching on this a little bit at the beginning, but n8n is right now is great at building AI assistance. And one of the ways that we can clean up shop internally at Lizard and also our PCOs can clean up shop is taking redundant and minutia activities and using artificial intelligence to handle this shit and getting that salary that payroll that benefits out of the way.

41:22 Mat Rogers

Clear that off the table. So you got room to do other things. And so those are three of the tools that we use most heavily on top of the natural, like the old school, we still have to, for broken API systems, I mean, we live, that we work in a very broken API landscape. None of our tools talk natively to one another well. They're getting better. God bless you guys. Please work harder. God. But none of our PCOs tools talk really well to each other. And so we're still using things like Zapier, way old hat, but not really.

41:55 Dan Leibrandt

No.

41:55 Mat Rogers

We're still using things like Zapier to augment and help us pivot for our clients on the back end. But even in HighLevel, HighLevel is making big advancements for AI and AI services providing its clients from 24/7 presence on their website to answer questions that it can be taught. It can talk price. It can talk service. It can talk all these things to not quite an n8n level, but AI that can provide additional support and automations to get people off of your payroll to create better margin for you. Because if you have a better margin, you are much more marketable when you're ready to sell.

42:29 Dan Leibrandt

Just a quick follow up question because I feel like that some of this stuff may be too advanced for some, maybe a lot of pest control owners. Talk to me about how you're using ChatGPT. I feel like a lot of people aren't even taking advantage of that. So do you use it for ideas? Do you use it for content? What do you use something like ChatGPT for?

42:45 Mat Rogers

Well, think about how you and I are using it right now. I've been talking to chat so much that it knows who I am. Right? It knows who I am in a good way. It knows that I'm salty. I need to drop a four letter word every now and then to let people know that I'm serious as shit. It knows how to talk like me. I fed it all of my stuff. So if I need help bouncing around an idea or creating an exposit on something or create a script for something, it can give me a foundation that I can build on top of and go from there. But specifically, one of the things that we're using ChatGPT for is we're exploding in terms of SEO. Okay. And the workload used to be incredibly hands on. You know, yeah, you wrote a book.

43:27 Mat Rogers

God bless you Bridget. God bless you, Alison. I miss you girls. Right? The work used to be very manual. Right? Hours of keyword research, right? Hours of content creation, hours of execution on that content. And then the next month rolls around and you do it. We can cover so much more ground now still having our fingerprints all over this stuff, still providing the correct schema, the correct signals to AI, the correct signals to Google, the correct signals to the website, the correct signals to the business profile. We can do all of this stuff in a fraction and I mean a fraction of a fraction of the time for many more components, which helps my bottom line. Right? And so the new guy that just jumped on with us, Jesus, he loves this stuff and eats it up and we're building tools using n8n to help us accomplish our SEO activities at a much more aggressive rate. We can cover so much more ground so much faster. And that's one of the ways that we use ChatGPT internally for sure.

44:23 Mat Rogers

Do we do heavy research with it? We run things by it. We ask it if we're doing it right, asking how it's working in the market. Right? Asking if there's a better way to do it. Right? All the time. All the time. My chat window is open. She's probably listening to me right now. Stop listening. I'm not ready to talk to you.

44:38 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah. No, I was just telling you before the show and you found it kind of creepy that I did deep research on you before we did the show. That's weird. So ChatGPT went to all the different sources online and even different social platforms like LinkedIn and it gave me a whole summary on who Mat Rogers is.

44:55 Mat Rogers

That scares me and actually makes me want to make sure I'm like dotting on my eyes and crossing on my...

44:59 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah. No, you have to be careful. That's that. You have to be careful with what content you're putting out now because AI, ChatGPT, all these large language models, and even search engines now are pulling from everywhere. So you have to be really cautious about what you're putting out there.

45:13 Mat Rogers

But where is the date for chat right now? I actually don't know. What it used to be months, months behind, but I think it's much more caught up now.

45:20 Dan Leibrandt

I don't know the exact date. I know it's at least six months prior. It's pulling because a year ago or so, it was 12 months. It's fairly recent. No. Yeah, that's definitely closing. So great stuff. I think we'll end out here. Last thing I want to ask you Mat is what is your... And I know you have so much to say to PCOs, so you can rant here as much as you want. What is your final message to PCOs? What do you want to tell them? What do they need to know? What is your call to action?

45:51 Mat Rogers

I want to speak to the camera. Listen, one of you know who you are. We didn't really duke it out. You were very kind on a particular Facebook group the last couple of days. Your belief, your mindset that this new renaissance of digital marketing is going to run over the little guy. It's not. I'm begging PCOs now and particularly the little guy and particularly the medium guy who are trying to grow their business. Make it on the PCT Top 100. Sell with Paul Giannamore one day. Take advantage of this new digital marketing landscape. Take advantage of it. Embrace it and partner up with the digital marketing company that is embracing it so they can help you get your voice out there and grow the shit out of your company. Because that's what you're here to do. You're not here to be the same size for two years in a row. What terrible manual labor you do crawling under houses, using injection tools, digging trenches around houses, getting covered in chemical and showering off every day. How awful would it be to be the same size two years later? Partner with the digital marketing company that is going to take your brand voice. Take the building blocks necessary for AI to put some fucking jet fuel in your engine and help you take off into a new stratosphere and tell those big guys, I'm here, I'm here, I'm not going anywhere.

47:09 Mat Rogers

You need to pay attention to me and when you're ready to buy me, get ready to cut a big ass check because AI has not just grown the shit out of my company, but it's also created efficiencies inside of my company. So I'm running lean and you better have a big multiple. That is the thing I'm begging for the most for these PCOs in these communities that I work with. I want your success. I want your success because I saw that success happen inside of my family. That success changed my family's life. We went from a double wide to my dad doesn't even know how many cars he owns right now and if his liver is even functioning properly. So please, I want that same type of what day is it victory for you on the other side of whatever. I want you to be at a car show, throwing out a check for a car that you fall in love with, that you've never able to buy yourself because you're too busy trenching around homes and flooding it with termiticide. Please take advantage of this digital marketing renaissance and let it blow your company up in all the right ways.

48:04 Dan Leibrandt

Absolutely. And for full transparency, Mat actually does run a separate marketing agency. So we are technically competitors. But friends, yeah, no, no, we're frenemies. We run different businesses. We do some of the same services, mainly pest control. But yeah, no, we're good friends. There's plenty of pie to eat. So we're not too concerned. So yeah, if you want to contact Mat's company, that is Lizard Marketing, I believe it's lizardmarketing.com.

48:27 Mat Rogers

.co. That's it.

48:28 Dan Leibrandt

Okay, so you can visit their website if you're interested in working with them. And Mat, where can people find you on social media connect with you?

48:34 Mat Rogers

You can find me everywhere. I'm on TikTok. I'm working on that. I am one of those guys that like don't like selfies. So if you go to my Instagram, you won't see a lot of those, but you can find me on Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Instagram. You can find me in those spaces.

48:46 Dan Leibrandt

Awesome. So all those links will be in the description. Make sure to go follow Mat everywhere. Go check out his company if you're interested. And this has been such a great podcast. I feel like we really covered a lot. And thanks so much for coming on, Mat.

48:56 Mat Rogers

Such a pleasure. Always a pleasure.

48:58 Dan Leibrandt

Absolutely.