LEARN WHY UBIQUITY BEATS PERFECT ROI MATH AND HOW SMALL, DAILY TOUCHES TURN COLD LEADS HOT.

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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

Ian Robertson
Welcome back to the season finale of Inspector Toolbelt Talk. To be honest with you, it’s kind of hard for me to believe that we’ve been on for five seasons. We’re very proud. We’re one of the most listened to podcasts in the home inspection industry. We have 1000s of followers, and you guys have just been awesome. Every season has been the best season, and the comments and suggestions and thank yous and everything have all been awesome. So thank you all for making Inspector Toolbelt Talk great, and for just making this the most enjoyable podcast that anybody could ever do.

So on that note, I wanted to end season five, and we’ll be back in January with the beginning of season six, as usual, we’ll be back. But I want to end the season on a humorous but important note. So the title of this podcast is, Ubiquity Is King, and the humorous part is my team here at ITB makes fun of me relentlessly for my $10 words here, and one of my favorites is ubiquitous, and it just means something that’s everywhere. Everywhere that you turn around, there it is. In the marketing industry, that’s actually a real term, ubiquity is king.

So the reason why you drive down the road, and if you live in the northeast, there’s a Stewart’s on every corner, or there’s an In-N-Out Burger around every bend, or if you’ve ever seen a Starbucks on both sides of the road facing each other, companies realize that you could have the best product in the world, but if you’re not ubiquitous, it’s really hard to sell your product. Ubiquity is king. Be everywhere. And I say this because we had our podcast on the slow season mistakes. I love that podcast because it touches on things that we do that actually hurt ourselves in the short run and the long run. And this is one of the primary ways that we hurt ourselves during the upcoming slow season through the holidays. Ubiquity comes not from really hyper targeting something. We also oftentimes will use buzz words and phrases like, what’s your KPIs in other words, key performance indicators, or what’s your ROI, return on investment, and things like that. And we do it in weird ways. We may not always use those buzz words, but we say, how many inspections did they get out of this? And I’ve always said those are really bad performance indicators, because it has nothing to do with ubiquity.

As an example, billboards, if you had a billboard, can you say how many people you got from that billboard? Most of the time not really. Wearing your logo on your hat or your shirt or having it on your vehicle, can you say, I got four inspections from that last year, I’ll keep doing it. Or do we rip it off, say, well, I didn’t get any inspections from it. No, because oftentimes what we’ll call it is Top of Mind marketing. That might be a more familiar term to us, Top of Mind marketing keeps us out there, which is also very closely related to ubiquitous marketing. So let’s forget all of those items for a moment. You know KPIs and ROIs and all that stuff. Let’s measure things by how ubiquitous it makes us. So oftentimes you’ll hear me talk about the four touch rule, sometimes called the Five touch rule, depending on who you’re talking to, and that means we have to touch a client in one form or another, figuratively speaking, nobody go out there start touching people, at least four times before we convert them. The problem is we only pay attention to either the initial touch or the final touch, or the actual conversion. There’s three to four touches in between that we forget how important they are, and they’re just as important as the all the rest of the touches, and almost as important as the conversion itself.

So here’s an example. Take advantage of customer journey. So a customer starts to buy a house, starts the process of looking at houses. Now their agent has, you know, three inspectors that they recommend, and in the initial pamphlet, they see your name and your logo and your phone number. That’s the initial touch, but very much forgotten by the person who is actually being figuratively touched. So for instance, that buyer will probably forget that you exist because they’re focused on something else. But now imagine that buyer getting up to the point where they have that one to two week contingency to hire you, they now see you in an ad online. Oh, well, that’s interesting. Or they start looking up mortgage rates, or, boy, that was a weird thing in my chimney. They wonder if that’s local to my area, and they see you there. Now they also remember you from a first time home buyer seminar. Or maybe they start finding videos of you online with your TikTok or YouTube channel or something like that. By the time they get to the point where they’re like, I need to hire somebody, what’s the likelihood that that person is going to hire you? Very, very high. It turns a possible lead into a hot lead and skips everything in between. By the time they hire you, what they’re going to tell you is, I got your name from my agent, and they literally did, but they didn’t mention everything in between that led them to hiring you, which is ubiquity. Initiating a lead and converting a lead are two different things. So however, we can get ourselves out there to touch people with our marketing is extremely important. It’s micro marketing in multiple channels.

So there’s lots of ways that we can do this. I do hate paper marketing, but it’s still important. Having our brochures and business cards out there in as many places as possible, and even the quintessential easiest thing to do, every old guy in my market does it, hang up your business card in the diner. You know, is it going to make a difference? No. Is somebody going to really hire you off a billboard at Joe’s diner? Probably not. But, you know, there was a dog trainer that we were looking for and everywhere I turned around, the guy’s name was there, including hanging up at a diner. And I’m like, man, this guy’s everywhere. And I ended up hiring him because I’m like, if he’s everywhere, he’s got to be something or somebody. Be everywhere. Take advantage of, not super hyper focused marketing, but every bit of marketing that you can.

Now, that does come with caveats. Some marketing is cheaper than others, some is more effective than others. If our marketing plan is to hang our business card up at every diner so that people see it at every diner, that’s not going to be an effective marketing plan, but it is low return, but low cost and low effort. So you carry your business cards around with you everywhere. Make it a habit to pass them out to everybody that you meet, everybody that comes on site for the inspection, whether you like them or not, they all get a business card. Be ubiquitous. Now online, our YouTube channel or TikTok, could we run a couple of cheap ads? And I say cheap ads, it’s really hard to do very high value targeted ads with YouTube and TikTok. But can we run a few ads? Are we putting out content? Well, I only had 15 people that watched that video. I don’t care. That video took you 45 seconds to make, and it took you less than two minutes to post, and it was free. Unless your schedule is so packed out that you’re doing three inspections a day, seven days a week, you should be posting a video on multiple channels every day, every other day, something, be ubiquitous. Join Facebook groups. Now, I say Facebook groups for a very specific demographical reason. So young and old will often join neighborhood groups. But young people don’t have a whole lot of money right now to buy homes in this particular market, they will soon, but in this particular market, it’s social media trend. So who’s on Facebook? People who are in a demographic of age group that can afford homes. Join the neighborhood groups. I belong to three of them. I’m in the age group where I’m in between the Instagram and the Facebook age group. But you know what? I watch it, because I live in a small town, there’s bears in our neighborhood, and sometimes I’d like to know when the bears coming down the road, and the neighbors will post, hey, he got into my garbage can or, you know, silly things like that, but that’s where I am. There’s a painting company that markets on there, very, very good, actually, like, they’re very discreet about it. Their name is just like, Mike’s Painting or something like that. But he goes, hey, I’m in your neighborhood painting this house. And then he’ll just contribute things, not advertise. And then every once in a while, mention it. I’m like, oh, neat. Low overhead marketing. But you know what, if I need a painting guy, I’m going to at least look at him. These are low overhead and ultimately, low return ways of becoming ubiquitous, because ubiquity as a whole is valuable.

So if you would like a gallon of water being your marketing, we need a gallon of marketing. It’s hard to get a full gallon, a half a gallon, or even a liter, or anything of water out of one marketing channel. And if we do, everybody eventually hops on the game board. And you know, it becomes less valuable, less volume, kind of like Google Local Service ads were a couple years ago. You just hopped in and started getting work, and now there’s so many doing it, you’re not getting that much juice out of it. So instead, go after 1000 different channels of one drop, one drop of marketing everywhere—be ubiquitous.

So why am I saying that this is important for our last episode of season five of Inspector Toolbelt Talk? Because this is the time of year we become ubiquitous. I have talked to so many inspectors over the past three, four weeks, and it’s the same conversation every year, let’s be honest, same conversation. Ian, work has dried up. It’s magical. No home inspector has ever had this happen to them. And I’m like, every home inspector’s having it happen to them this time of year. That’s this time of year. And I always return with a different question. What have you done with your free time? What marketing have you done? What plans have you put into place? And they’re like, oh, well, you know, I want to do this and I want to do…I’m like, don’t tell me what you want to do. What have you done, let’s say, over the past three days? Same answer. Not a whole lot. A lot of what we call underwear marketing, stuff that you can do at home in your underwear. Oh, well, I’m building a list of realtors. This guy from India said he had a list of realtors in my area, so I bought one off of him, you know, those kinds of things. Okay, let’s step back and let’s think of not one or two marketing avenues, but 30 or 40 small ones, even the low value ones, business card up in the diner, probably lowest value, besides the penny saver, putting that up in the diner. Have we put our business card up everywhere possible? When we’re at the grocery store, are we leaving a card with somebody? When we’re in between inspections or out to dinner, are we finding people to give our business card to, people that we meet everywhere. How many real estate offices have we visited? And I don’t want to hear that nobody’s at the real estate offices. We’ve had a podcast on that. Several of them. There’s still valuable people there. It’s still worth a trip. What free marketing have we done? How much have we posted on our social media? How much have we tried to educate our market? How much have we looked into continuing education for real estate agents? We just had a podcast on that. We need to become ubiquitous. We need to be everywhere. We need to be the Starbucks that faces each other on the same road on opposite sides, so that nobody has anywhere to go but us. Can we join those local Facebook groups? Can we post more TikToks? Listen, if you don’t like Tiktok, that’s fine. Post a YouTube video instead. Better yet, get over your dislike of any social media platform and start posting. Do I enjoy posting social media? Not really. It’s not my favorite thing to be scrolling through all these different dances, but you know what? It’s effective. And even if 100 people see your TikTok video, cool, you’ve touched 100 people in that journey. It also adds validity when they’re thinking about hiring you. How many agents have you taken out to lunch? How many agents have you taken out to coffee? How many local events have you gone to? Like, if we’re in a small town or a big city, they’re going to have local events. What about BNI groups?

And some of those things that I just mentioned, you have to pay a small fee for, but I can guarantee you that if you sit down and do not find 30 to 40 ways to market for free with just a little bit of time, you’re not trying hard enough. You should have several 100 little dropped marketing areas that you can go to make sure that you touch clients every which way that they turn. What about our website and SEO? One of the things that one of our website clients mentioned to us was that they’re like, why are a lot of your blog posts not directly home inspection related? It should be talking about, this is what I look for in a home inspection. That’s what I look for in homes by home inspection, home inspection, home Inspection. I’m like, because people look up a lot of stuff around the home inspection. So if I’m buying a home and it has a hydronic heating unit and they say, oh, it’s a boiler. What if I don’t know what a boiler is, I’m going to be looking up what’s a boiler. Or are boilers common? How do I maintain a boiler? Those are the things that we want to post about. Same thing with our social media posts. Everybody likes to say. It should be marketing, marketing, marketing. That’s not good marketing. Being in someone’s face saying, buy this drink, buy this drink, buy this drink, is not going to be as good as, you know, Pepsi saying it’s refreshing. We have Zero Pepsi. You know, everything that people want around it, they tell them. There was that example from that book, I think it was, Remember Your Why, where Apple didn’t come out with the first mp3 player, obviously. They came out with the iPod. The mp3 player that was big before them came out, and they said, here’s your mp3 player with all this stuff in it. And people didn’t really know what any of that meant at the time. Apple came out and said, you want to have 1000 songs at your fingertip? Here you go. Way better, way cleaner marketing, because they were going for what people were looking for. How many songs can I have? Poof, that’s what they wanted. They didn’t want to know all the details about the iPod or things like that. And obviously that was a fantastic marketing campaign. So that’s what we should be doing, too. To be ubiquitous, we have to get out of just, how do I get them to hire me? We need to become an authority in the area, post on our blog and post on our social media with everything related that they could possibly ask. Is there a mortgage guy in the area? Cool, take our phone visit them and say, hey, my name is Gary, and I’d like to do a quick video with you for my home inspection channel. Do you have 30 seconds or minute and a half? What mortgage guy is not going to want that advertising? Cool. And say, hey, I don’t want anything back. But you know what they’re probably going to ask for? Hey, why don’t you do a quick video with me? Do that in 20 different mortgage places. The real estate offices are a little harder to get into. But if we’re an attorney state, can we do that with the attorneys? If we are in a state where we use closing companies, can we do that with the closing companies? Do quick educational videos. We can do that on our way to dinner, on our way to pick up our kids at school, leave 20 minutes early, whatever. These are free and ubiquitous ways to market.

So, no matter what our budget is, no matter what our schedule is, this winter, before the first episode of season six of Inspector Toolbelt Talk, I want to see all of you be ubiquitous. I want to see you guys everywhere. I want to, if I go and I’m looking at houses, I want to see this one inspector pop up around every turn and everything that I search and everywhere that I go. So these are just a couple of small ideas. Sit down, write down a list. Have 30, 40, to 100 different small ways to become ubiquitous in your market.

But listen, you guys are an amazing audience. Thank you so much. We’re looking forward to season six. If you have ideas, shoot us an email or a message in one form or another. [email protected], you can send it that way. If you’d like to be on the show, if you have a subject you want to talk about, we’d love to have you. But either way, we’ll see you in season six. And thank you for listening to Inspector Toolbelt Talk.

Outro: On behalf of myself, Ian, and the entire ITB team, thank you for listening to this episode of Inspector Toolbelt Talk. We also love hearing your feedback, so please drop us a line at [email protected].

If you’re enjoying the conversation, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button. Our podcast is available on all major podcast platforms. For more information on our services and our brand-new inspection app, please visit our website at Inspectortoolbelt.com.

*The views and opinions expressed in this podcast, and the guests on it, do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Inspector Toolbelt and its associates.

PODCAST SUMMARY/BLOG

The season closes on a simple truth: ubiquity is king. Rather than chase a single silver-bullet channel or obsess over last-click ROI, the smarter play is to show up everywhere your clients turn. Top of mind beats top of funnel when the decision window opens. People rarely credit all the nudges that led them to you—an agent’s list, a short video they scrolled past, a neighborhood post they saw, your card at a coffee shop—but those touches compound. When a buyer finally hits the inspection contingency, familiarity feels like trust, and trust wins speed-sensitive choices.

This approach reframes metrics. Counting inspections from a billboard or a logoed hat misses the point. These are awareness assets that stack. The four-touch rule reminds us that initial and final interactions bookend a series of quiet nudges that matter just as much. If we only measure the last click, we fund the finisher and starve the starters. Instead, measure how often and how widely your brand appears across a buyer’s journey: search results, local groups, short-form video, agent mention, community presence. The goal is saturation, not precision targeting that leaves gaps.

Execution comes down to micro marketing in many lanes. Think in drops instead of gallons: business cards everywhere, quick posts on YouTube Shorts or TikTok, light ad spends to keep your face in feed, joining neighborhood Facebook groups where homeowners actually hang out. A single video may get 100 views and still be valuable because it’s fast to make and free to distribute. Frequency is a feature, not a bug. When you can’t outspend, you can out-consist. Especially in slow seasons, consistent low-friction actions build momentum you cash in when the market warms.

Local presence multiplies this effect. Visit real estate offices even if they feel empty; connect with the people who are there. Join community events and BNI groups. Take agents for coffee. Record 60-second expert clips with mortgage pros, closing attorneys, or title reps and post them everywhere. You loan them reach; they often reciprocate. Each collaboration plants your name in another corner of the buyer’s path. Authority grows when you educate without selling, and reciprocity tends to follow. These are low-cost touches with trust baked in.

Content should chase the questions clients actually ask. Skip the “hire me” pitch loop. Write blogs and shoot videos that decode boilers, hydronic heat, GFCI trips, attic ventilation, roof lifespans, radon basics, and escrow timelines. SEO works best when you answer real, adjacent problems in plain language. Think Apple’s “1,000 songs in your pocket,” not a spec sheet. When someone searches “boiler maintenance checklist” and lands on your guide, you’ve won relevance before you ask for the job. That relevance becomes the invisible assist in the final choice.

Use the winter lull to build this grid. Aim for 30 to 40 tiny, repeatable plays: daily shorts, weekly Q&A posts, neighborhood group participation, business cards in everyday places, agent coffees, micro-collabs, and small ad tests. Stack small wins until you feel “everywhere.” Ubiquity isn’t luck; it’s layers. When buyers finally need you, they don’t wonder if you’re legit—they already know your name and reach for it.