A marketing masterclass by Casey Sprabary

Casey Sprabary, former marketing manager of Frymire Home Services, gave an electric presentation at Service Nation’s Eastern Summit in Charlotte last week, focusing on budget management, campaign tracking, and more, and we penned some notes.

The setup: She started by emphasizing the importance of having a dedicated person to watch every penny of the marketing budget. 

• Casey’s budget lives in a spreadsheet split into three tabs — budget, actuals, and comparison — and broken down by line item, separating direct mail from radio, radio from GLSA, etc. 

• She recommended using an expense management system, like Bill.com, to create digital credit cards for each vendor, with spending limits, to prevent overcharging.

The nitty gritty: Every campaign — direct mail, PPC, emails, and even truck wraps — should have unique phone numbers or QR codes so it’s easy to track exactly where leads are coming from.

• On KPIs, Casey watches abandoned calls by time of day, reasons for unbooked leads, and average ticket by campaign. She wants to know if email drives bigger tickets than direct mail, for example. 

• For abandoned calls, if most are during a certain time of day, it could be a people problem. She wants to understand what type of problem it is to make decisions accordingly.

Stand up: She got everyone on their feet to participate in a scenario: 

“You had 137 unbooked lead calls for the month and have noticed a similar trend for the past 2-3 months. 70% of them were due to ‘needed sooner appointment’. Where can you make changes?”

In the room was Billy Stevens, founder of Sera. He worked in our group and said, “The 70% is because you don’t fully understand what’s already on your board. You don’t know which calls can be unassigned based on equipment age, for example, and replaced by those lead calls.” He pointed, of course, to technology as the solution.

Challenges: Casey addressed cross-browser and cross-device attribution. Sometimes, a customer will click a PPC ad, but then decide to wait a week before revisiting and booking from their laptop. She said, “If you can’t pin it down, let it go and focus on what matters.”

• “100% revenue attribution doesn’t exist; there are too many layers,” she added.

Takeaways: She closed by encouraging contractors to go beyond clicks and talk more about data with their agencies. If an ad gets 700 clicks, for example, that’s great, but how many calls did it drive?

• Her formula for calculating ROI is “Revenue Generated – Dollars Spent / Dollars Spent.” So, if you spent $25,000 to drive $100,000 of revenue, in Casey’s terms, your ROI is 3.0. 

• Plus, she noted, “Go slow to go fast, and dump failing campaigns ASAP.” 

The big picture: Her main message was to understand the “Why’s” behind campaign tracking, budget management, and revenue attribution. She said, “Understanding those drives ROI, and ROI drives informed decision-making.”

Editor’s note: This article was updated to reflect that Casey Sprabury no longer works for Frymire Home Services.