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This week's episode of Automation Unplugged we’re bringing you a webinar we recorded in partnership with Lutron in April 2025 called “Make Your Marketing Dollars Work — A Strategic Guide for Growth.”

About this episode:

In April 2025 we saw new U.S. tariffs drive market uncertainty — and in volatile times, cutting your marketing only hands momentum to your competition. That’s why in this session we share short-term tactics to boost visibility today, plus long-term strategies that keep your pipeline full for years to come.

You’ll hear from myself and Kendall Clark, Senior Director of Sales & Marketing at One Firefly. We were joined by Laura Jean Null, Marketing Operations Specialist - Residential Luxury, at Lutron Electronics.

In this webinar, we’ll cover:

• How to navigate 2025’s volatile economy without losing visibility.
• Quick-win tactics like targeted Google Ads and branded van wraps to drive immediate leads.
• Foundational plays like SEO and events that build lasting momentum.

SEE ALSO: AU #302: Bryan and Marc Rizzo on Legacy, Leadership, and Life Safety Systems

Transcript

Ron:

Let's do it folks. We are here for a One Firefly and a Lutron sponsored webinar, Make Your Marketing Dollars Work: a Strategic Guide for Growth. These are certainly odd or interesting times and we're gonna talk about how, and in ways to think about investing in your business through marketing, both in ways that are gonna drive short-term and long-term benefits. And, we, this dream team here is, very excited to be with all of you. So I'm just gonna go ahead and click and we're gonna get started. And then we'll get introductions and make sure everybody knows who is here on our panel and we'll jump right in. Time is of the essence. Kendall, take us through our agenda.

Kendall:

All right. So we've got about an hour here together. We'll start off, as Ron said, some quick introductions. We also wanna kick off at the top and give you guys an overview of the 2025 Lutron program. So that'll be a little bit of information about your DMC credits, but also for those eligible, the One Firefly credits that we offer in tandem with that. We are gonna spend just a few minutes on the state of the economy and how to be planning the next 6, 9, 12 months of your business. And we're gonna do that by separating into two different buckets. We're gonna look at short term tactics for success if you need some immediate wins right now. And then we're also gonna take a look if you're trying to look more long term, and be building that dominance in the next few months. And then finally, we're gonna attempt, we're gonna do our very best to conclude with some questions, but as always, the questions are open. We like to see those as they come through. We'll try to answer, the chat is open and we love to interact with you all and we appreciate you all joining us. So my name is Kendall. I'm the Director of Sales and Marketing here at One Firefly. I have been in this industry now for 11 years and my background is actually in web design. So I am super passionate about how you can grow your business through your digital presence, and I'm excited to be here with my wonderful co-host, Ron.

Ron:

Yes. Hello everybody. Happy Friday. Hope you're all having an awesome day. And, I know it's been a weird week, but I hope you're all happy to be here with us right now. I know we're excited to be with you. My name's Ron, i'm the CEO and Founder at One Firefly. Been in the space, been working with technology contracting businesses for the last 25 years. I know I look like I'm just a day over 30, but I've actually been working with all of you for a number of decades now. And actually got started at Lutron. We'll talk about that. But, been here at one Firefly for the last 17 years and we're super pumped for this partnership with Lutron and to be presenting this valuable information to all of you. Rebecca, can we get you introduced and explain or define your role here in the webinar?

Rebecca:

Yeah. Hi everyone. I'm Rebecca. I'm the Corporate Marketing Lead here at One Firefly, so I head up all of One Firefly's marketing initiatives. I am here today to help MC, so if you guys have questions during, or when we get to the Q&A part, please feel free to drop them either in the chat or the Q&A section. As Kendall mentioned, they'll try to answer some in the moment if you have them, but if not, know that I'm collecting them and we'll do our best to get to them at the end. And for anyone who missed my earlier message, we will be sending out a copy of this recording to everyone. It will hit your inbox tomorrow morning.

Ron:

Awesome. And Laura. Laura Jean Null: Hi everyone. My name is Laura Jean Null, otherwise known as LJ, and I'm on the Lux Rezi marketing team for Lutron. You guys probably have met Kyle Yamamoto at some point, whether it's been on a One Firefly webinar in the past, or at CEDIA. I work hand in hand with her on dealer communication and engagement and in a little bit today I'm gonna walk you through our Lutron dealer marketing credits. Otherwise known as the DMC.

Ron:

Awesome. Laura Jean Null: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Ron:

No thanks. Thanks Laura jean, we're happy to be here.

Kendall:

All right. A little bit about us. So we are One Firefly, we're a digital marketing agency that solely serves the CEDIA space. We've been in business since 2007 and we have a team of over 80 marketing experts that really just specialize both in their marketing field but in this industry. I think we've got eight or nine content writers, SEO strategists, graphic designer, web designers. Social media, you name it, we've got it and we do it all in-house. And we help manage marketing for over 650 dealers each and every month. I love that number because we get to help you all grow. Recently, in the last year or two here, we released our Amplify People division to help provide industry hiring support. We know that when you're growing your business through marketing, hiring happens, and in some cases hiring needs to happen before you can grow your business. So they go hand in hand. And that's why we went down that venture. And Ron, I think you said speaking of a day over 30, I'll have you start bottom left.

Ron:

So I studied engineering in school and Lutron plucked me out of college and they sent me down this path as a sales engineer. And that's actually where it all began. I actually, I'm noticing that says 2003, it should say 2000. So I started at Lutron in 2000 and I've been working with technology integrators throughout North America and around the world ever since. And in terms of the partnership or business collaboration, right out of the gate when One Firefly was born in 2007, we were actually doing engineering and we were designing, in many cases, Lutron lighting control system designs and plans. And we were doing the engineering behind the scenes work for integrators. And, of course, One Firefly has transitioned and added marketing services as early as 2008. So it's been quite a while. And in 2014, One Firefly started building the website solution for integrators. There's now, we've done more than a thousand websites across the internet for integration businesses. But that's when we started then putting in obviously Lutron branding and marketing and content. Again, Lutron's imagery and content assets they make available to their dealers are nothing short of spectacular. So loading that content into websites. And then back in 2021, we, One Firefly, have been doing video shoots and we actually partnered with Lutron and did a video shoot, act actually down at the Ketra facility down in Austin. And then at one of their demo, beautiful demo, I think it was in a demo apartment, that's actually where you see a picture of Kendall there, also in Austin and in that just added to our library of beautiful media that then was available for deployment into websites. And it was in 2022 that we formalized this relationship with DMC. So One Firefly becoming a named partner, in the DMC program with Lutron. Obviously marketing is instrumental to your business and to every business out there, Lutron acknowledged that. And they want, smart, intelligent use and use cases of marketing funds that are ultimately gonna be designed to drive your business and drive you forward. And that's also why we do these webinars, just pure education purposes. And here in 2025, the program has continued and we're excited. This is actually the first of four webinars this year that we're bringing to all of you. So again, if you have questions about that, hopefully Laura, or LJ, is gonna cover that here eminently. 'Cause we're gonna go into the DMC program with Lutron. Make sure you know how that works. And, additionally, and I'm actually gonna call Kendall real quick. We, One Firefly, in the new program year, additionally added funds. Do you wanna describe that real quickly? Because Lutron's, again, making amazing funds available for all of you, but then One Firefly, additionally added funds as a credit based on your tiered level.

Kendall:

Yep, I'll, we've got a couple slides on it that show the categories, but at a high level we have the, it's tiered right along with the Lutron tiers. Let's jump to the next slide then, about how to redeem. And we, LJ you could just talk high level about things. Laura Jean Null: Yeah. So first we've tried to make the process for using your dealer marketing credits, and getting them reimbursed simple with a three, easy step process. So first you would complete the work with One Firefly. Then you submit the page receipt to Lutron, and then our One Firefly team will review it and apply that credit for the job we have on file. So getting into the process, looking at the screen that you have right now, when you go into My Business, there's this tab at the very top that says DMC. Once you click on the DMC tab, you will get a view and you will be able to see the credits that are available to you. Then you can click on the redeem credits, where there are a couple simple questions that will prompt you to answer, and you can attach your invoice or receipt file and submit it. Within about 24 business hours there, it will be reviewed by our Lutron team, and your redeemable funds will be updated. Now, if you do not have the DMC tab on your My Business portal, please reach out to your sales rep. Sometimes this is just an instance of the principal level access or not. Your sales rep will be able to work with you through this. And then finally, as a quick reminder for the new 2025 DMC policy, 50% of the original loaded DMC funds will expire by July 31st, 2025. So this is a perfect time to use these funds and utilize our relationship with One Firefly.

Ron:

Okay. So is it use it or lose it? Laura Jean Null: Yes. Yes it is.

Ron:

Okay, so everyone, hope your ears have perked up. Let's make sure we use those dollars to drive growth. All right, Kendall.

Kendall:

And then just a quick overview of the One Firefly credits. So as Ron mentioned, we wanted to also put a little extra in through this partnership. If each of our tiered Lutron dealers will also get an additional credit for One Firefly related services, and in order to redeem that you'd simply just meet with a member of our team. We like to really get to know you, understand you and your business, recommend some solutions, and then when we do decide, and you'd like to move forward on a solution, we will verify your dealer level. And I believe you can also check that on the dealer locator. And then credits will automatically be applied to that work. So you can see here the level and then the One Firefly credits that are additive to that DMC. So it's a really exciting opportunity to invest in your business. And speaking of investing. Ron, I will, I'll toss it over to you here. We were talking about this concept when people are looking at their marketing dollars, the concept of spending it. Of course, yes. Use it or lose it. Understanding that, but the difference between what investing your marketing dollars look like.

Ron:

And so if you look at the way Lutron has made funds available, and Lutron is in a category, I would say one of the best in terms of always making dollars available for you, the business owner or operator, to ultimately invest in the growth of your business. But you could spend that money and buy t-shirts or run a pizza party for your team or you could spend it in some way. That's cool because it's a credit. I would even put in this category, you could take funds and maybe pay an outstanding balance with a manufacturer, right? There's a manufacturer that that's all they do. And or there's the idea that you're investing your money to help aid the growth of your business. And so if you think about your existing customer base and you leaning and really loving on those existing customers 'cause they're most likely to buy from you again, or most likely to refer you, to new folks. If you're looking at the role of this thing called the internet and the way that your business is populating and showing up in search, or now we're gonna talk about showing up in AI or showing up on social media, in some cases, just to aid the reference check. That that person that's been referred to you and are they ultimately finding you and are you the business owner controlling the narrative? All of those types of activities are really better when you're investing and designing the growth plan for your business, and that's how we recommend that you think about it, it's how we think about even investing in our own marketing funds here at One Firefly. When we're attending a show or running a strategy online, we're really designing that to aid our ability to accomplish our business goals. And that's what we want for all of you, especially even when the times are a little weird like they are right now with all these tariffs and whatnot.

Kendall:

Good. I think we're gonna jump to a little poll. All right, so we wanna understand how is your 2025 outlook, at the end of 2025? How are things looking so far? We've got a variety of here, 31% and up somewhere between up 20 and 30%, 11 to 20, one to 10 flat, maybe down over 2024. And obviously I know it's been a long week and it is a Friday morning, so you could just also answer. We're just taking things day by day and that's okay too. I get that.

Ron:

Great. We have 27% participation so far. All right. That just jumped to 40% participation.

Kendall:

Oh, wow.

Ron:

The more of you that answer, the more accurate, you all will have this immediate takeaway to understand what is this snapshot, cross section of the industry? How are you guys feeling? Right now we have 50% of you have given us an answer. It's so appreciated when you guys jump in and just tell us like, what are you seeing? Even if what you're seeing or forecasting right now this week is different than what you were thinking in January. All of us are taking things day by day. And by the way, we're not gonna hold you to this if you say you're gonna be up or you're gonna be down. This is just...

Kendall:

All anonymous anyway.

Ron:

Anonymous and it's just a moment in time and, maybe a super interesting week to ask all of you this question. Maybe we'll give it 10 more seconds here. 62% of you, by the way, have participated. Thank you so much. Really seeing some interesting answers here. Oh, look at this. How is your 2025 look? So wow, 8% of you are gonna have a 31% plus up year. Awesome. 12%, 21 to 30%. So I'm gonna add that up. 20% of you are gonna do 20% or better growth year over year, over '24. 31% of you are gonna see some respectable growth, 11 to 20. 20% of you are gonna see something, you're gonna grow more one to 10%. So I'm gonna add that up. Holy bananas, people, that's 70% of you are expecting growth this year, despite the chaos of the last week or the last couple of months, frankly. And then 9% of you look like you're gonna be flat. 8% of you say that you're gonna be down, and then 10% of you are just almost ready to throw in the towel and you're like, we're taking it day by day. Which is, but you're here attending this webinar with us, so you're ready to fight. All right, so the current state of the economy, how many of you feel like this right now after trying to figure out how to handle tariffs on, tariffs off? I'll just give you another random data point, right? So we had a newly elected president back in November. It's not political, you don't like that person, or not like that person, like that admin or not, market surged. And then what I heard, we heard here at One Firefly, all across the country is like right around December, projects started to slow down. Even the big projects were started to slow down in their commitments. So you take that, the wobble, knee, wobbliness, is that a word? Wobbliness of the marketplace. I'll say another word. The volatility. It's allowed a lot of us, given us pause to reevaluate what's gonna happen this year, and then you take the last week. And, let's be honest, it was a little bit chaotic here with these tariffs. Obviously, a lot of manufacturers are coming out with their talking points in terms of what they're recommending, whether there's price increases or pass through tariffs, and these poor manufacturers are trying to figure out how to handle this. It is, I feel for my friends in the industry that are out there at manufacturers trying to figure this out, as ultimately they want to communicate with you. And then for you, are you going to take price increases? And I hope if you encounter a price increase, you're immediately gonna pass that through or start communicating to your customers. You certainly don't wanna be eating that. That can be very dangerous for your business. But then there's tariffs on and tariffs off. So it's admittedly very hard right now. It's very hard. Some of you may find this interesting. One of my personal hobbies is I like to study macroeconomics, and so I'm always encountering different sort of thought leaders around the subject. I do that because I think it's interesting and I think it's very complex and hard, which makes it interesting. And, times like these, sometimes zooming out and looking at the big picture helps. And so this is just, maybe a random, but interesting data point for you in that of the, the last 11 waterfall... so waterfall decline means the market drops off the cliff, like the market's dropped off the cliff in the last week, right? So seven of the 11 last times that happened, it was actually a V recovery, right? So if you're in statistics or probabilities, it's just something to be mindful of. It's just because things go down, it doesn't mean they stay down very long. Now, four of the 11 last times that happened, the market retested the lows. So all does that mean is if markets drop that ultimately it can move along and it can hit the bottom again. The sad news with me presenting this to you is I can't tell you what's gonna happen next. But it's just interesting to understand history. A lot of times, history rhymes and so it is not doomsday and it is not the end of, it is not the sky is falling. It's just a matter for all of us as operators in business to understand. Many of us have been at this for a long time. We've been through the COVID scare, we've been through the Great Recession. Some of us went through, some of the, early two thousands, particularly the dot com bubble. So there's what goes up comes down, and what goes down goes up. Things tend to tend towards the mean. Just remember that particularly as you're making decisions for your business. Obviously this was two days, this almost feels ancient now. This was a day or two ago when the markets bottomed out with tariffs and then immediately surged and had the best increase in market history, only to then have, oh, no, China, the US and China are gonna go at it with tariffs and immediately plummet again. It's just weird times. So the thing that I want you to think about is just what does this mean for your customer, right? So that's, and again, maybe your customer is or isn't owning a super yacht. For some of you in attendance, you absolutely have customers that own super yachts, but I just, I want you to think about, ultimately, how does weirdness in the marketplace affect your customer? I have a little secret. A lot of your customers have people helping protect their net worth, and in fact, when markets are predicted to go down, they're shorting the market and they're actually making more money. It's not the hard rule. Everyone isn't making money when it goes up and everybody isn't making money when it's going down. But here's just a shocking detail. 10% of households in the United States hold 67% of the wealth. Many of you know this, again, a political statement, it just is. What's another detail? Is that the top 1% are getting more wealthy. And why is that? For everyone here that owns a house or, if you're fortunate enough and you own real estate or you own assets, your assets have appreciated a tremendous amount just in the last five years. I bought my house in 2018 and I, again, apolitical statement, the house value's about doubled 2018 to the present. It shouldn't work that way, but it has worked that way. So because it is, I want you to think about, many of you, not all, many of you are ultimately serving that top 1% of society. Maybe it's the top 5%, depends, maybe it's top 10%, right? But when you then take that little segment of the marketplace and break it down, there's actually a spectrum. There's a spectrum of wealth, right? The person that is upper middle class is probably pausing, more likely to pause big purchasing decisions when a market is showing volatility or when interest rates are high, right? What's another detail? That upper middle class individual is probably very sensitive to mortgage rates. They're probably less likely to move into that next home because they need to get a mortgage. Their current home is mortgaged at 3%. Right now it would cost them, I don't even know current rates, let's call it 7% or six, somewhere between five and 8% today to get a new mortgage. Anyone that knows that answer, drop that in the comments. I'm actually curious how much a current mortgage costs. But people are slowing down their purchasing decisions. And when you have extreme volatility, and my goodness, if someone's actually watching the news, which I try to not do 'cause it's terrifying and not terribly healthy, but if you are watching the news, those people are super cautious right now. And if you're gonna go do a project, you might be really concerned about what the impact of increased fees are, particularly as it relates to tariffs. Whereas if you look at the segment of society, let's call it the ultra wealthy, often, not always, those folks, even in extreme volatility, they're actually doing even better. Why? Because they have talented people managing their money, helping them make money in good times and in bad times. So I'm just pointing that out, that when times are volatile, like right now, it's likely gonna impact different types of customer segments that you all serve differently. The person that is gonna mortgage a house or do a construction loan is likely impacted by rates differently than the person that is gonna pay cash for a project. And their money makes more money every year than most of us will make in a lifetime. So they are likely, potentially less sensitive to ultimately what they're gonna do. It's important for you all to know the types of customers you want to serve, whether it's the customers you serve today, or the customers you're designing your business to serve in the future. Because then through marketing, we wanna be out communicating to those constituents. Those constituents. So that's really the setup for just economic conditions. We choose, as business operators 'cause you're here on a marketing webinar, to thrive in good markets and in bad markets. It's really about being nimble and designing your business for growth regardless of what the world's throwing at you. And I know that represents you because it's Friday morning and you're on a marketing webinar with Lutron and One Firefly to learn how to move your business forward. So we're gonna run another quick poll. And again, this will be fun. We're gonna share this information real time. What size projects have you seen slow down, if any, in the last six months? So if you've seen a slow down, some of you are gonna say nothing has slowed down. Some of you are gonna say very particular types of projects have slowed down. Right now we have 55, fifty something, so let's get to 60% participation. Couple more of you. Give us, weigh in here. What are you seeing slow down, if anything? 5, 4, 3. One more percent. We're just looking for one more percent. I need a one or two more votes. Weigh in. You can do it. And there you go. Boom, Rebecca, let's close that down and share it. Okay. So what's, what size projects? Kendall. Do you wanna take us through the results?

Kendall:

Yeah, it's pretty interesting. So at our largest percentage, 35% of you are saying that you have not seen any slowdown, that's very positive. The next highest, and it's gonna tier from highest to lowest, and it's actually inverse of project size. So we're seeing 28% of you, so pretty close to that 35% seeing projects smaller than that 50 K project slow down. Then it lowers. 15% say that the 50 to 150K project sizes are slowing down, 12% of you are saying the 150 to 500 K projects are slowing down. And then 2% picked that 500 K. And then it does look like 8% of you said that everything has slowed down equally. So really interesting data. I imagine also it's very market specific as well, but...

Ron:

My immediate takeaway from this, Kendall, is that the big projects are still moving and the smaller projects have been more susceptible to these economic periods of volatility. You need to be mindful of that folks, as we're going out and telling the world we want more projects, what are we gonna market towards? And remember, this will be different six months from now and 12 months from now. That's the game of business is it's always, the target's always moving.

Kendall:

Absolutely. So I saw this quote that Ron and I both liked, and it says here that in a downturn, people don't stop buying, but they become more selective about who they buy from. So that's, we're gonna start getting into the marketing side of things, and we wanna take a look at that. So I want you to think about, based on your results or your answers to that poll, are you looking for immediate projects now? Do you need to fill your pipeline right now? Or do you feel like you've got a good pipeline, you've got good projects in the works, but you wanna make sure that you're fortifying your next 6, 9, 12 months. And the reason I want you to think about is that for us as a digital marketing agency, when we get to talk and get to know each and every one of you, no two businesses look the same. So no two mix of marketing solutions look the same. Depending on your current state, depending on your goals, depending on your pipeline, there's a variety of different variables that we wanna look at. Basically if you are saying that you need projects in the next, I mean you need projects tomorrow or else, things are drying up and you don't feel like you have that good pipeline, then what you're gonna be doing there is we wanna look at solutions that are more short term. What can we immediately turn that water faucet on to start getting some of those projects in the door? We still may put a little bit of effort towards that long-term, maybe brand building type activities, but we wanna address what's immediate and what's right now. So if you fall into that other scenario, maybe you said that things aren't quite, slowing down yet, but you do wanna make sure that you're maintaining that steady pipeline, building that marketing market dominance, then what we would switch are to marketing tactics that are more focused towards long-term growth. Of course, there are avenues that we can get some immediate quick wins, and we'll go over both of those. But just a very simplistic look is, there's hundreds of different marketing tactics and we wanna put together the combination that's gonna support your business growth goals. And one of the most common questions I get multiple times a week is Kendall, how much should I spend on marketing? And the answer is in depth. First of all, I'll say that the umbrella of marketing covers a lot of different things. The wraps that are on your vehicles, that's marketing. The events you go to, maybe the lunch that you take that builder or architect or designer to, that's all marketing. Your t-shirts that are on your tech specs, marketing. And then of course any sort of digital marketing or market brochures, physical marketing assets that you create. That's all under this umbrella of marketing. And what we recommend is that you should be spending about two to 5% of projected revenue in marketing. It's gonna be about that 5% if you're looking for aggressive growth goals. One Firefly, we actually invest about 7.5% of projected revenue into marketing. But we always wanna make sure you're at least staying in that maintenance mode. During these kind of tumultuous times, it's very common for people to wanna pull back in marketing, and it's actually one of the most important times to keep your name in front and also gain a little ground because there are others. Your competitors are not marketing and you should be. So I also, one more analogy I gotta throw out there, and I thought this was funny. I always recommend to our customers that when you are thinking about marketing spend, it is not about how much you can immediately put in now. We wanna make sure that you are investing in something that you can maintain long term. I do not want, we don't want anybody going and brushing their teeth for an hour straight because it's not gonna make a difference. We want you to be brushing your teeth every day for a few minutes, making nice, steady progress, and keeping your brand visible and attracting new customers. You like that analogy, Ron?

Ron:

I do, I love it.

Kendall:

So let's jump into tactics that make an immediate impact. And Ron, I think you're gonna cover these.

Ron:

I am. So when you think about immediate impact, some of you, as Kendall described, are in situations and we just, we learned there from that poll that some of you have project types that have slowed down, they have pulled back. And if that's true, I know many of you, particularly if you've been in business for a little while through ups and downs in, in the business cycle, you build up a team and you wanna maintain that team. You don't wanna have, if you can help it, you don't wanna have to lay team members off and then bring team members back on. And if marketing is in the cards for you to be investing in marketing, then these immediate impact strategies have a higher probability if executed, to make a more immediate impact and, dent in what your current truth is in terms of volume of projects or leads. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna rapid fire go through these. By the way, these are not gonna necessarily, strike you as terribly exotic in that they should feel. This is natural. I know that I need to do this. So the first one is your vehicles. Your vehicles are parked in front of job sites. Guess what? All of those neighbors could be future clients. They're driving to the job site. We pulled up this amazing stat, it, I say it astounded both Kendall and I, which is how many impressions are your typical vehicles out there in a modern city in the United States? How many are they seeing on a regular basis? This is per day. There are tens of thousands of eyeballs that could be on your brand if your vehicle is appropriately lettered or marked or wrapped. Now that said, you can do this like anything in life, you can do it well and you can do it poorly. So I'm showing an example here on the screen of LP Custom Solutions. We actually just finished this vehicle wrap, a few months ago, and Luis, the owner of this business here in Fort Lauderdale, just sent us these pictures of his beautiful new wraps. If you looked at the previous version of his wraps, they were very nice, but they were dated. And why were they dated? Because they showed pictures of interiors, of homes and technology. So that's an example. If you practice certain methods in wrapping your vehicles. They can date themselves very quickly and not make you look like the modern technology businesses that you are. It's very cost effective. This is one of the foundational elements. You should love your website. Your website should be beautiful and attractive, and you should love your vehicle wraps, and it should be quickly identified as to who you are, how to get in touch with you, and why they would wanna get in touch with you. And that's really the role of vehicles. Next is Google ads. Google ads, one of the graphics on the slide a few moments ago was a water faucet. The idea I can turn a water faucet on and I can turn a water faucet off even today, right now, in the spring of 2025, I can invest money in a Google ad strategy and I can, with confidence, know that I am at the top of page one of search. So we're gonna talk about other strategies here in a few minutes about how to get found on the rest of that page. But if I want to be found at the top of page one of search, even though a Google ad only garners you about a 1% to 2% click-through rate compared to much higher rates for other portions of that page, it's a volume play. You ultimately are getting people that are typing in search queries. I'm looking for a Lutron motorized shading installer in my town. You could show up right there at the top of that page. And this is a strategy called a bottom of the funnel strategy. Meaning if someone's typing in a very specific query into Google, and if you show up with an ad, the person that clicks that lands on your page is much more likely to ultimately convert. Meaning picking up the phone to call you and or filling out a form on your website. Or maybe they're gonna engage with live chat on your website. So this is a numbers game. And ultimately you want, and I'm doing this with my hand 'cause this is the number of words, this is called a phrase, a key phrase. The more words you put, the more specific the search, but the higher the quality the visitor into your website, right? So if you just did lighting control. You're gonna get a lot of volume. Not a lot of those people are your customers. But if someone says, I'm interested in Lutron Radio RA retrofit lighting for my project or my home, oh my gosh, there may be few. There will be fewer people searching. They are very qualified. If they land on your website and that's what you want, you can turn this strategy on or off as your business needs it. All right, the next detail we are gonna look at here is, sorry, looking through. Sorry, I'm struggling here. There we go. And how much should you spend on your Google ads? We don't recommend you spend less than $1,500 a month. Maybe a thousand. Maybe there's use cases or applications. But I need you all to be mindful, depending on the size of the city that you're in, and it is geographic specific. When you are putting money into a bucket, you are doing something called it. You're paying money cost per click, CPC. So if it is a very large market and you maybe have competitors that are also doing this, then you're gonna need to spend more money. You, and you can do this in your Google ad settings. You're willing to spend more money for that click. So you can either mandate that or you can set it to the algorithms, the AI algorithms, in fact, with Google that can help do that budgeting. Because what also could happen, I don't wanna scare you, is if it's not properly configured, you could blow through your whole budget in 24 hours and then have the rest of the month and you're not visible. So what you probably want to do is design your visibility in Google Ads to last the month. And so you just need a good marketing partner, a member of your team that understands how to do that so that within your ability to invest in the strategy, you have that spread over the appropriate number of months. All right? You all have a pot of gold and many of you are not using that pot of gold, and that is your customer list. So you have customers that like you, they've purchased from you, they trust you. We recommend you communicate with them on a regular basis. Guess what? There are technology changes. There's new exciting fabrics and motorized window treatments. There's new retrofit technologies that are now available. There's new keypads and finishes that you could be communicating. You can be adding sensors, so there's some energy efficiency in the use of the technology in the home. All of those things, many of your customers are gonna find that super interesting. And so we recommend, and it is still one of the best ways to stay in touch with your customer base is through an active email marketing strategy. Or maybe, what do we have? We're in spring. We're coming into summer. Some people are gonna have their kids going on school vacation. They're gonna be out by the pool. Maybe you give them an article in the newsletter of: Top 10 summer songs to listen in your outdoor audio system, right? So that's called an opinion piece, right? The idea there is to present thought leadership. So you're giving them an opinion about what they could be doing. That type of content has significantly higher engagement, meaning they click, they read, they act, than if you are not presenting thought leadership, right? So all email is not the same. Better is better. There are better types of communication to put in front of your customers to remind them that you exist and to remind them of all the new and exciting technologies that you could help them with. Even if you did their job three years ago, maybe they have forgotten about you a little bit. Email is a good way to stay in front of them, and selling to your existing customer is always less expensive. A better investment of your dollars than solely trying to bring in the new customer that does not know you. They don't know you yet. They don't like you yet, they don't trust you yet. So it is slower and it costs more money to do that. We would advise you should be going after both of these audiences communicating with your existing customer and trying to pull in the new customer and then direct postcards, right? What’s old is new again? Certainly during COVID and maybe one could argue over the last maybe 10 years or so, print in the mailbox had fallen out of fashion well, because it has fallen out of fashion. If you actually are sending correspondence to your customers or target audiences that don't yet know you yet, but maybe they're in the right neighborhood where you know you have a good opportunity, the right type of customer, the right type of needs in that neighborhood. You now can target those audiences and put a message in front of them and ask them to do something. So marketing, regardless of your channel, is always define the audience. What is the message? What's my call to action? Direct postcards are a very cost effective, this is low dollars, high impact that makes it valuable. It's a very high value marketing tactic that many of your competitors are not doing. And so you know, the data is compelling. 42% of recipients read or scan direct mail. I'm not gonna lie, I don't go to the mailbox, but my wife will bring in the mail, I don't know, maybe once a week and I'll walk over to her desk and I'm actually gonna, I flip through what's come in. It's almost like a curiosity. Wow. Somebody sent us mail. I wonder what it is. So you all could benefit by putting out messages around lighting, shadings, technology, all the amazing things that you all offer. Alright.

Kendall:

Ron is that, that data point 42% of people do what you do when you compare that to a newsletter. Getting a 40% open rate on a newsletter is the high end of average. We're very happy with a 40% open rate. So it's very interesting equivalent, but with tangible or a digital delivery. I just, I find that super fascinating. Yeah, let's jump into some tactics for long-term impact. So one of the biggest things that we're gonna talk about here is SEO for Google. And just to give you a brief rundown of what is SEO, when you go to Google, you type in a phrase, a lighting designer near me or lighting control systems near me. You are going to get a Google search result. And what that Google search result will contain is a couple different things. Top of the page, you'll see those ads, the people paying for that top spot. But just below that, you're gonna see a couple different types of content. You might see a Google map for a three pack with different businesses. You might see that people also ask with the question drop down, and then you actually will see those Google search results. All of those things with the exception of the ads are SEO. Those are areas that you can show up in, and there are tactics that you and your business need to do in order to show up in those different places. So some of those tactics are to build your experience, expertise, authority, trustworthiness, and we do that through various things. Content creation, technical optimizations, fixing the broken links, increasing your paid load, page, load speed. Optimizing your Google business profile. All of these things are things that we would do to you, your website and your Google business profile that help you gain that visibility, gain that trustworthiness in Google's eyes. And what's interesting is once you capture that spot, hopefully that nice top spot, you stay there. You stay there until a more dominant piece of content outranks you. So Google says, Hey, you've earned that top spot, but there's always a chance that somebody might try and come in and top you. So SEO is a long-term play, but once you capture some of those good rankings, you stay there and you stay there for a little while.

Ron:

One data point for the audience. I want you leaning forward. SEO is one of the best return on investments you can make in your business. In terms of marketing spends, it's slow, but as Kendall just said, it lasts. So when you're saying, what does that placement yield you in? Leads and visibility. It can deliver fruit to your business for years to come, even though you only spent money on the effort once.

Kendall:

Yep.

Ron:

But Kendall, what about everybody using AI these days.

Kendall:

Yeah, similarly, we also want to make sure that LLMs, large language models, think your ChatGPT, your Perplexity, people are using these tools, these AI tools more now than ever in order to do research. So we also want to make sure that you and your business and the solutions you offer are a part of where those AI tools are looking and capturing content. And how do we do that? Of course, we wanna make sure you have great content on your website, but there's actually some interesting things that we need to do to your website in order for those LLMs to be able to crawl and see that content. So what that's called, you'll see these words, structure and schema. Those are fancy words for some coding on the back end of the site. Structured markup, and schema markup that allow those LLMs to see exactly what that content is about and grab that content and deliver those best search results. And what I love about this is of course, we're shifting toward, it adapts to the user behavior that we're shifting towards. I'm using LLMs more. We're gonna queue up a quick poll here to see how you are. So we wanna know, we'll do this quickly. How often are you guys using AI to answer questions? Weekly? If I were, participating, it would be, it has replaced most of my Google searches because I truly use it day in and day out.

Ron:

And I'll even give a derivative version of that query folks. And that is, you might go to Google, type in your query, but at the top of the page, Gemini gives you an answer and it's called a generative search result. And that answer is the answer to your question. So it means that you, the visit, you the person on the internet doing a search, did not in fact go and visit a website. So it is a complex world today where we business owners have to be thinking about, am I controlling the narrative and controlling how the world is ultimately gonna search and find my business? So that's why page one in its entirety of search matters, the ad position, the organic SEO position, and now the generative search position. So if you're reading or finding those results valuable, that means you're using AI. Kendall, what do we have here?

Kendall:

Yeah, really interesting. It looks like 14% of you are in the same camp with me as I am using ChatGPT and others. It has replaced most of your Google searches, but at 30, 59% of you are saying that you use it at least once or multiple times per day. Really interesting, and it just shows we've taken this poll a year ago, this would've looked completely different. So it really shows how we're all interacting with technology online. All right, we've got two more in this long-term impact category, and the next one is imagery and videography. High level here is that when you post shots, beautiful shots of your team or the projects that you work with, you build trust. People like to see other people that they're working with, you understand, they demonstrate your expertise, professionalism, and when you are looking for, we, like we talked about earlier, when you're looking for a particular caliber of project, you need to make sure that type of project is living on your website, on your Google business profile plastered across the internet. So when one of those types of homeowners or business owners reaches your website or your social media, they say, oh yeah, they do projects. Exactly like I'm looking for. So seeing is believing. Believing leads to buying. And then last but not least, events and events. I've been adding these little catchphrases at the bottom here, and I think this one really stands true. When you give value to your community, to your homeowners, to your trade community, you gain trust and opportunity and events do just that. You can network with new partners by sponsoring a local organization, chapter meeting. Maybe you provide some education to the community by hosting CEU training courses. There's a lot of different ways for you to get involved, meet new people, and these are great super effective marketing efforts that can start to build those relationships long term. And the last thing we say here is that if you are thinking about one of these events. Make sure you've done your homework. We need to have an attractive invitation. We wanna have attractive collateral to leave behind. And then also a follow-up process. Who's accountable on your team to following up with each of those attendees and how will you continue to nurture them?

Ron:

I think the number one request we at One Firefly have seen this year entering into 2025, is how do I grow my relationships with architects, designers, and builders and trade partners? And the answer is there. There is no super silver bullet low cost action. If I invest a hundred dollars a month or a thousand dollars a month, I'm magically gonna forge a relationship with an architect doing very premium projects, that does not exist. Going out and supporting that architect through training, collaborating with your teammates at Lutron or your local rep and going into that architect and being valuable and doing that. And, giving 10 times before you ask for something in return, you're gonna find ultimately that is how those relationships are forged. And the few and the brave that do that, Lutron certainly gets credit for practicing this support for the architect and design community for many decades now. That is why Lutron is the leading brand that it is on planet Earth because they've done that work with specification community and it's an awesome idea. It's hard work, but if you focus and you do that, it's incredibly rewarding. So when should my business invest in marketing? I'm gonna pause here and I'm mindful of time. Drop down into the comments, the chat. When do you think this answer? What am I about to say on the next slide? When should my business invest in marketing? There we go. I see some people, dropping in some answers. There you go, Theresa. Thanks for that answer. A says now. Janet says right now, Mihi says immediately, oh. There you go. Anthony says, before your business was started, Ted says yesterday. Ooh, that's a good answer yesterday. So I appreciate that participation. The answer is always your business is trying to achieve some outcomes. Maybe right this minute you're trying to survive. If for many of you, 'cause we asked you guys, are not gonna survive, you're gonna thrive. You're gonna grow 10%, 20%, 30% plus this year. That means that you are trying to take ground, you're trying to enter markets, you're trying to sell certain product categories. You are trying to serve certain types of clients. All of those items are what we would call business objectives. If you know what you're trying to accomplish, then what we do is we align marketing strategies. We develop a marketing strategy with various tactics that are supportive of your business strategy. So these ideas, marketing and business strategy are not separate. They're hand in glove. They go hand in hand. So that is when we say, oh my goodness, One Firefly says, invest 2% to 5% in marketing. Yes, it's because your business is trying to do something. We ultimately help you reduce friction in accomplishing that mission. If your brand is well known, you are talking to your existing customers and you are trying to bring in new customers. That is with your clarity of business objectives and the clarity of the audiences you would like to serve. That's where marketing gets put into gear and now helps. If you think of the metaphor of a ship with a sail, that is the wind in the sail of that ship that ultimately is gonna take you to that destination, which is your achieved business objectives. So we, it has been our pleasure to be here with you for this webinar. Of course you can reach out to One Firefly if you wanna talk strategically about your business. I warn you right now, if you call us and say, great, how much does that cost? Our team is not gonna have an answer. 'Cause my goodness, we need to know who you are, what are you trying to achieve? What do you currently have in place so that we then can be additive to that equation to help you go and accomplish those goals. And it'd be our pleasure, zero obligation for any sort of purchase or transaction. We'd love to meet you. We'd love to have that conversation and try to be helpful so that you all have a great 2025. And Rebecca, do you wanna, I know we're at the hour, some of you will need to go, but if you wanna stay, we're gonna take a few questions.

Rebecca:

Yes. We'll take a few questions and actually we had a comment from Kendall who says they're glad we're getting the recording to share with the team. Yes, you will get the recording and we will keep recording through questions. So if you need to pop, pop. We do have it looks like we already answered one question that, if we're looking to completely revamp our website from the ground up, can DMC be used for this with One Firefly? And then there's a follow-up component to that, and that says: even if we're building a new website.

Ron:

I'm gonna let LJ answer that. Laura Jean Null: I would say yes to that answer, because it is to improve your brand from marketing. But again, I can't, I guess I clearly can't say yes. Once you put everything through and submit it through the process, our team will be able to like, review it and say yes or no. But I think you should be able to, if it’s to grow your Lutron business.

Kendall:

We've had many people do page revamps, homepage, new website build. We have a lot of Lutron content on our web model. Charles, I'd love to have our team show you some of that. So a lot that can really help you grow the lighting and shading side of your business.

Ron:

Agreed. And by the way, earlier in my talk I said I didn't know what the mortgage rate was, and I had a number of people tell us it's between 6.3 and 6.7% right now. So thank you, Layla. And actually a few folks. Phil, thanks for chiming in with that answer.

Kendall:

Yeah. Rebecca, what other questions you have?

Rebecca:

Yeah, we have a good one that we had a listener ask, what are some really quick things that I can start doing right now to immediately improve my visibility online?

Kendall:

Ooh, that's an interesting question.

Ron:

You wanna take that Kendall.

Kendall:

Maybe I'll take a stab at, then you can add on. I think the number one thing that businesses could do first is to do a little audit of yourself. I think it's an audit all the way around. Ron talked about this boat analogy. We need to know where you're starting from and know where you're going. And if you don't have either of those defined, no matter what magic potion I try to throw at you, you won't know if it's effective because you don't have those things benchmarked. So take a look, look at your vehicle route, look at your website. Start writing down areas that you think might be stronger or weaker or might need some additional help. And then go from there. Because then you can eat that elephant one bite at a time. Maybe it's updating a couple images across your site, or maybe it's revamping and getting back on social again. There's a lot of things you can do, but take a look at your existing, existing state.

Ron:

Yeah, I love it. It's hard to ever think of it like this way folks. If you go to the doctor and your first question to the doctor is, what medicine should I take? The doctor, hopefully, if you have a good doctor, is gonna ask you lots of questions in order to understand, and they might even want to know, what else have you done? What are your sleep habits? What is your diet? What's your exercise? What other medications are you taking? Are you allergic to any medications? These are all really good questions to ask if they're gonna then be prescribing solutions. I'm not trying to act like marketing is a mystery, but it's very much based on current state and objectives and within that framework. Your team at One Firefly has a lot of data. We have, we are managing business marketing efforts and we have for many years. And so whether you're interacting here in the picture on the screen, you get Josh and Kat and Stephen and Kendall. If you're interacting with any of those folks, they're gonna have a lot of experience under their belt based on what they're learning about your business, to then make recommendations on actions that are likely to help you accomplish that goal, whether that's a short-term goal or a long-term goal for your business. And then you say, exactly, I know, but how much does it cost? There are things that cost hundreds of dollars and things that cost thousands of dollars. Generally, really good best practice is plan to invest in your business, 2% to 5% of your revenue into this thing called marketing. Some of you, many of you are spending less than 1% right now, so simply going up to 2% might be a hundred percent increase in your efforts. So it's all relative.

Rebecca:

Okay. Yeah. We have a follow up question from Charles. Is there any sort of average cost we're able to give for a four to five page website with a Lutron brand page?

Ron:

Wow. Super specific. So I love that. I'll start out with One Firefly has a web product called Atlas that's a one page website solution, and it's around a hundred to a, between, depending on bells and whistles, one to $200 a month. It's a monthly website as a service product. So by definition, I don't have to be into a multi-page website. There are reasons to sometimes do a small website and activate marketing versus putting all the budget into a website now. And there are opportunities or times when you should do a website and do marketing and SEO 'cause it's gonna open the door for a lot more of an integrated approach to building your brand online. So a website that is, I'll just say a smaller website to a larger website. I'll just do air quotes here with One Firefly. It's scary for me to do this, but I'm gonna do it anyway. I'm gonna give you some numbers because you really need to understand what's included. And a way for you to know that is if you connect with one of our team, and we can take you through it, but generally on the low end, about $10,000 for a site, and on the upper end, maybe closer to $30,000 for a site. And we also have creative, we have general billing models and payment models, and we also have some opportunities to spread that expense over more time. So it just, it really gets down to the custom configured approach to your website and marketing.

Rebecca:

Awesome. Thank you. It looks like that's all the questions we have. If anyone on here has additional questions, please feel free to reach out to us at this email right here and we're happy to get back to you with some answers. Thank you everyone for joining us today.

Ron:

Awesome. Bye everybody.

Kendall:

Have a great weekend.

Ron:

Thanks everybody.

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Ron Callis is the CEO of One Firefly, LLC, a digital marketing agency based out of South Florida and creator of Automation Unplugged. Founded in 2007, One Firefly has quickly became the leading marketing firm specializing in the integrated technology and security space. The One Firefly team work hard to create innovative solutions to help Integrators boost their online presence, such as the elite website solution, Mercury Pro.

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Resources and links from the interview:

• Lutron Partnership Inquiry Page
• 5-Minute Marketing: SEO Video Series

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