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How Productized Marketing Boosts Home Service Leads

An interview with Ian Hoyt at Wilbur Marketing

Welcome to this week’s edition of The Workbench, a resource-rich weekly newsletter and podcast for home services entrepreneurs.

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This week, I sat down with Ian Hoyt, founder of Wilber Marketing, a productized marketing agency serving home service businesses of all types—from HVAC and plumbing to fence installers and chimney sweeps. Ian previously built growth teams in the tech sector, and he’s brought that playbook to local business, combining transparency, scalable packages, and innovative marketing strategies.

Ian openly shared his biggest learnings on how to boost conversion rates, leverage underused ad channels, and build dashboards that provide real insight—not just fancy numbers. 

The 7 Key Takeaways

Below are the most essential insights from my conversation that you can apply to your home services business today.

1. Maximizing Lead Flow With the Right Services

Ian and his team at Wilber Marketing focus on controlling and scaling lead volume, not just running ads or building websites. Their approach is to bundle trackable channels—digital and traditional—based on where they see the biggest growth opportunity and efficiency for local service businesses. This helps them iterate quickly, share learnings across clients, and focus on real ROI.

“We focus on, we call our services the lead flow packages. So anything that relates to having control over scaling your lead volume is how we qualify if this is a feature or a service that we want to include in our packages. So what that means is… paid search, social ads, LSAs, local SEO… but we're looking forward into other trackable, scalable channels that might have more growth opportunity, meaning it's not fully diluted yet with everyone. So connected TV is a really big opportunity that we'll be launching soon… as well as direct mail… We're really just looking at how can we do traditional channels better and more efficiently, and then use some of those typical digital channels and add our strategy on top.”

- Ian Hoyt

2. Reaching New Customers with Connected TV

While many home service businesses are cautious or unfamiliar with connected TV ads, Ian sees this channel as a future growth lever for businesses that have maxed out their primary digital channels. Connected TV provides trackable results in a way old-school local TV commercials never could, and Ian believes it's a game-changer for ambitious local service companies ready to scale.

“It’s not the first place I recommend going for a lot of our initial customers… Typically, I am reserving it for, okay, we’ve kind of maxed out some of our other channels that are the quickest wins or the most efficient wins right now… Connected TV versus what we call linear TV… allows us to be able to see some of that data. And that’s why it’s interesting to us. Not a lot of people are harnessing the self-serve connected TV opportunities that are emerging… so we’re just looking at how we can do that for… those bigger home service companies looking for that next channel once others have hit their ceiling.”

- Ian Hoyt

3. The Power of Productized Services Over Retainers

Dissatisfied with the ambiguity and stress of traditional agency retainers, Ian built Wilber Marketing on a productized model. This means clear, transparent packages with set deliverables, tailored to the typical growth stages of home service businesses. This transparency improves trust, client results, and gives his team more bandwidth to actually move the needle versus just reporting activity.

“There’s a lot of reasons why we did it this way. One is because I’ve been on the agency side… Most agency experiences that I had were terrible. Every client has different desires and scope of work and… team is supposed to manage that… Meanwhile, the client doesn’t really know what they’re getting… So we wanted to structure the packages in the same cadence of the prospects we talk to and really where they’re at in their stages of business… Not only does it make it transparent for our customers, but it allows our team to efficiently resource accordingly so that we can spend a maximum amount of time on every account and make sure that the results… are the ones we’re actually giving them, not just a deck every month that says like things are great.”

- Ian Hoyt

4. Quick Wins: Website Conversion and Data Visibility

Ian outlined the most common, high-impact mistakes he sees on new client sites—simple errors that can crush conversion rates and waste ad spend. He stresses the importance of UX, copywriting, seamless lead capture, and robust tracking. Even before taking on a new customer, he insists their site must be set up to convert leads. If not, his team makes it a priority to fix these basics before launching any campaigns.

“We won’t even take on a new customer unless we feel like their website is actually going to convert well. If it’s not, we make that recommendation… Making sure that their website is in a position to actually convert. That can mean a lot of different things… user experience; the copy… the technical side… making sure all the different ways your leads are submitting information is seamless… So really focusing on conversion rate optimization, ensuring that we have at least an opportunity for success there is important.”

- Ian Hoyt

5. Building Actionable, Not Just Pretty, Dashboards

Many home service businesses—and even their agencies—get lost chasing cost per lead, but Ian has a different view. He’s pushing to integrate real business data from CRMs and ad sources into custom dashboards that show true ROI, not just lead counts. This makes it possible for owners to actually make business decisions and connect their marketing spend to revenue—across both digital and traditional marketing.

“A beautiful dashboard is worthless if not getting you the answers you need to take action… There’s a lot of different tools. There’s a lot of different data centers and they all don’t talk to each other… what we’ve been actively working on… is how can we take some of the most popular CRMs… and integrate with our data modeling so that we can process and match that to our lead… sources… not only what your return on ad spend is, but also… on a per customer basis… Because I think traditionally… marketing companies will say your cost per lead is this… But then how does the cost per lead translate to CAC, right? And like, how does that translate into return on ad spend? That’s what I care about.”

- Ian Hoyt

6. Real AI Use-Cases That Drive Efficiency

AI is changing the game for agencies and home service businesses alike. Ian describes how Wilber uses AI to streamline workflows—especially for ideation and creative drafting—but always with a human eye for final content quality. On the practical side, AI tools like LeadTruffle have materially improved client results and sales process efficiency.

“We harness AI daily… if you’re not, you’re going to be left behind. So from, you know… inspiring creative or getting great drafts of creative going… I tell my team harness it, but also don’t forget that creative is important. And I don’t think the AI models we have are quite there yet… On the practical side, what we’re doing together with Lead Truffle… that’s been an amazing efficiency gain… It is saving our clients and customers money and time, not only on the lead side, but also on the just like sales process and upside.”

-Ian Hoyt

7. Adapting to AI-Driven Search Channels

As AI search tools rise in popularity, attribution and visibility around these new channels remain a challenge, but the future impact is huge. Ian is tinkering with ways to track and optimize for these sources knowing that customer journeys are no longer just about Google but now could start in ChatGPT or similar AI tools.

“We’re still sorting out the best modes there… AI search, right? They might refer your site as a source. But a lot of people will then go direct once that referral and the response is made. So understanding how we can find ways to connect the dots is going to be a huge opportunity, but yeah, we’re still working through that.”

- Ian Hoyt

Looking Ahead

Staying Focused on Home Services and Channel Innovation

Context: Wilber Marketing is less interested in spreading out to new verticals and more focused on continuing to expand service and channel offerings for home service businesses. Ian plans to beta test new methods like Connected TV and direct mail, all with a strict focus: if it doesn’t drive qualified leads, they won’t pursue it.

“We’re very focused on making sure we stay in the home service space. What we’re thinking about doing is just expanding on the service front or the feature front… Like I said, Connected TV is coming out here soon… that will be beta testing with our existing customers and then rolling that out as a proper part of one of our service tiers… If it’s not driving leads, we’re not going to do it. So there’s a lot of marketing out there. We’re focused on the lead side of the equation.”

- Ian Hoyt

Wow! You made it to the end; thanks for sticking with us.

The full interview is available on YouTube below, Spotify here, and Apple Podcasts here.