Pest Control Marketing That Actually Works

Cube Creative Design
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Pest Control Marketing That Actually Works: The Growth Podcast Stop wasting money on marketing that doesn't deliver. Pest Control Marketing That Actually Works is the weekly podcast for pest control business owners who want real results, not empty promises. Hosted by Adam Bennett and Elisabeth Pallante from Cube Creative Design, each 20-minute episode delivers practical strategies you can implement right away. No fluff. No theory. Just proven tactics from a team that's spent 20 years helping pest control companies grow. What You'll Learn: Every episode tackles a specific marketing challenge pest control operators face. From building a website that converts visitors into customers, to running Google Ads that actually pay off, to creating content that ranks on page one. You'll hear what works, what doesn't, and exactly how to tell the difference. We cover topics like: Getting more leads from your website without spending more on adsBuilding a review strategy that brings in new customers on autopilotCreating content that ranks for searches in your service areaRunning paid ads that generate profit, not just clicksUsing email and automation to turn one-time customers into recurring revenueHiring marketing help without getting burnedWho This Podcast Is For: If you run a pest control company with 2-15 trucks and revenue between $250K and $5M, this show was built for you. Whether you handle your own marketing or manage a small team, you'll get strategies sized right for your business. Episodes are designed for busy operators. Listen on a drive between service calls and walk away with three clear takeaways you can use that week. About Your Hosts: Adam Bennett is CEO of Cube Creative Design, a digital marketing agency founded in 2005. He's helped dozens of pest control companies build marketing systems that deliver consistent growth. Elisabeth Pallante is Content Operations Manager at Cube Creative. She leads the content and SEO strategy that has helped clients increase web traffic by 154% year-over-year. They're joined regularly by Chad Treadway, Chief Marketing Officer, along with social media specialist Hannah Kilpatrick and web project specialist Emily Porter. What Makes This Show Different: We don't sell ads or sponsorships on this podcast. Every minute is focused on giving you value. We share the same strategies we use with paying clients because we believe in leading with generosity. At the end of each episode, we offer a free marketing audit at marketingthatactuallyworks.ai. No obligation, no pressure. Just a clear look at what's working in your current marketing and what's costing you money. New Episodes Every Tuesday Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Leave a review if the show helps you. It's the best way to help other pest control operators find us. Ready to stop guessing and start growing? Hit subscribe and join us next Tuesday. Pest Control Marketing That Actually Works is produced by Cube Creative Design, a HubSpot Gold Partner agency based in Western North Carolina. Learn more at marketingthatactuallyworks.ai

  1. 1d ago ·  Video

    Creating a Marketing Calendar That Actually Gets Executed

    Here's what nobody tells you about marketing calendars: the plan is almost never the problem. Pest control companies build great calendars in January. By March, most of them are dead, because the busiest week for marketing is also the busiest week on the trucks. In Episode 41 of Pest Control Marketing That Actually Works, Adam Bennett and Elisabeth Pallante of Cube Creative Design break down why marketing calendars fail. They explain how to build one small enough to survive peak season. Your three key takeaways: Calendars die from execution, not ideas. They're too big to survive a bad week, and nobody's name is on the tasks. "The office will post more" isn't a plan. "Sarah posts on Tuesdays" is.The smallest calendar that still grows you has three beats. Weekly is a Google Business Profile post plus review asks. Monthly is one real content piece. Quarterly is a seasonal email to your customers.When you fall behind, skip, don't double up. Miss a week, drop it, and hit the next one. The streak matters more than the score.In this episode: The timing trap that kills plans built in the slow seasonWhy owned content dies without a calendar while paid ads keep runningWhy pausing Google Ads can raise your cost per lead 30 to 50% on restartWhere to find content ideas: Google's related questions, your office, and your techsWhether the owner should own any marketing taskWhy every calendar needs at least two names, even at a two-truck shopHow far ahead to plan, and why real tasks only go 90 days outOne Thing to Fix This Week: Pick your weekly beat. One task, one person's name, one day of the week. Put it on that person's calendar as a recurring 15-minute event. Get your free pest control marketing audit: marketingthatactuallyworks.ai See how your site looks to AI search with your free Cube Score: thecubescore.com Next Tuesday: Chatbots and Live Chat: Converting Website Visitors 24/7, with Emily Porter. New episodes every Tuesday. Follow on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

    Creating a Marketing Calendar That Actually Gets Executed

  2. Oct 6 ·  Video

    Listener Q&A: Reviews, SEO Timelines, Moving Your Office, & Life After Referrals

    How many leads does it take to land one customer? Adam and Elisabeth say that's the wrong question. The number that matters is how many leads you're losing after the phone already rang. In our second Listener Q&A, we answer five real questions from pest control owners. We cover lead leaks and close rates, why review recency matters as much as review count, how long SEO really takes, what happens to your rankings when you move your office, and what to add first when your business runs on referrals. Three Key Takeaways It's a leak problem, not a lead volume problem. Your real close rate, booked jobs divided by leads, tells you more than any lead count.SEO is a 6 to 12 month channel, and that's the argument for starting now. Waiting until you're bigger just starts the clock a year late.When referrals stall, add something you own before something you rent: a site that converts, a complete Google Business Profile, and a real way to ask for reviews.What We Cover Three to five cold leads per customer, and why most shops lose leads after the phone ringsHow starting prices on your site filter out tire kickersNurture sequences for leads who don't book right awayWhy a stalled review count hurts, even with hundreds of reviewsTexting review requests: about a 98% open rate vs. about 20% for emailWhy "wait until $1M to do SEO" is expensive adviceSEO fast wins that move in weeksMoving your office: proximity, re-verification, NAP consistency, and duplicate profilesWhy referred customers still Google you before they callOne Thing to Fix This Week Pull last month's leads and last month's booked jobs. Divide booked jobs by leads. That's your real close rate. If you can't get the numbers in 15 minutes, add a lead source field to your job software. Resources Free pest control marketing audit: marketingthatactuallyworks.aiFree Cube Score, see how your site looks to AI search: thecubescore.comThe Leak Check Worksheet (Episode 40 download)20-Point Pest Control Marketing ChecklistRelated Episodes Episode 8: Word-of-Mouth Marketing Isn't Enough AnymoreEpisode 16: The Customer Review System That Generates 20 Reviews a MonthEpisode 24: Local SEO Beyond Google Business ProfileEpisode 32: Listener Q&A Part 1Next Tuesday: Creating a Marketing Calendar That Actually Gets Executed Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify so new episodes show up on their own.

    Listener Q&A: Reviews, SEO Timelines, Moving Your Office, & Life After Referrals

  3. Sep 29 ·  Video

    Upselling and Cross-Selling Your Current Customers

    Most pest control companies close one sale and move on to chasing the next lead. Meanwhile, the customer they just served is five to seven times cheaper to sell to again than a stranger. In this episode, Adam, Elisabeth, and Chad break down the math behind revenue per customer and show you exactly how to grow it. Three key takeaways: Your existing customers convert at 60-70% on a second offer, compared to 5-20% for new prospects. Most operators never make the ask.Timing is everything. Pushing add-ons at sign-up converts at 5-8%. Offering them four weeks in, after the customer has seen results, converts at 25-40%.Three services, one system. Mosquito programs, termite monitoring, and wildlife exclusion are the highest-margin cross-sells, and a simple tech recommendation at the right moment is all it takes.You will also hear the "Service Stack" framework for packaging your services into tiers that move customers up, the CRM triggers that automate upsell timing, and why a $500-per-year customer should be an $900-per-year customer with no extra marketing spend. Hosts: Adam Bennett, Elisabeth Pallante, and Chad Treadway from Cube Creative Design. Get your free pest control marketing audit at marketingthatactuallyworks.ai Score your website at thecubescore.com

    Upselling and Cross-Selling Your Current Customers

  4. Sep 22 ·  Video

    Cube Score in the Wild: Reading Real Pest Control Sites Live

    We built a tool to grade pest control websites. Then we ran seven real sites through it and found out it was wrong about the two most important ones. Chad Treadway has audited over 200 pest control sites. In this episode, he walks through what happened when we put seven of them through the Cube Score, our proprietary grading tool that measures Identity, Authority, Proof, Transparency, Structure, and Visibility on a 0-to-600 scale. The headline finding: a five-location Southeast operation with over 1,500 reviews across their markets scored 136. A small Midwest company with 58 reviews, whose site was built by an AI website builder, scored 414. After manual verification, both sites are worth about 430. The 278-point gap was entirely about which site let the crawler in the door. The Southeast company's web host was serving a captcha challenge to every crawler that asked, including the AI ones, while their robots.txt file said "come on in." The AI-built site scored high because it produces perfect machine-readable structure on demand: clean schema markup, heading hierarchy, geo pages, a pricing page, semantic HTML. Along the way, Chad pulls real findings from the other five sites in the sample: A site that ranks #1 organically but carries two different phone numbers and two different business names (a copy-paste from another web build, not an ownership change)A company with the best About page in the set, owner photos, team bios, founding story, but zero pricing anywhere on the siteA site with 563 Google reviews, perfect AI search citations, and 20 mentions with top-3 placement, that still loses the conversion because thirteen staff members have photos and no written bios The episode's core argument: a score measures what a machine can read, not what a business is worth. Before you act on any website score, ask what the crawler actually retrieved. And go check whether your own host is blocking the crawlers you want to reach you. Three key takeaways: A website score measures what a machine can read, not what your business is worth.An AI-built site can outscore a 25-year operation because it produces perfect machine-readable scaffolding. Form is not the same as substance.Before you act on any website score, ask what the crawler actually retrieved. Then check whether your own hosting is quietly blocking the crawlers you want. Download the Cube Score Self-Audit Worksheet to grade your own site across all six sides. \Free pest control marketing audit: marketingthatactuallyworks.ai Get your Cube Score: thecubescore.com New episode every Tuesday. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.

    Cube Score in the Wild: Reading Real Pest Control Sites Live

  5. Sep 15 ·  Video

    Commercial Accounts: The Content That Wins Property Managers

    Most pest control companies want commercial accounts but have websites built entirely for homeowners. In this episode, Adam Bennett, Elisabeth Pallante, and Hannah Kilpatrick unpack why that gap exists and how to close it. The team shares Cube Score data from a dozen pest control sites pursuing commercial work. The finding: commercial-facing pages averaged 185 out of 600 on the Cube Score while the same companies' residential pages averaged 380. The biggest gaps showed up in Authority and Transparency, the two dimensions commercial buyers weight most. The episode walks through five content layers a property manager needs to see before they request a proposal: a dedicated commercial services page, case studies with measurable outcomes, a clear proposal process, pricing transparency, and a separate commercial contact path. Most pest control sites have zero of these five. Hannah covers the three channels where commercial buyers actually find providers. LinkedIn posts with specific commercial outcomes (complaint reduction, inspection pass rates) get 4x to 6x more engagement from property management professionals than general pest content. Commercial Google searches use completely different keywords than residential. And local business association directories convert better than most companies expect. The hosts also debate whether commercial pricing belongs on the website and discuss when a company should chase commercial work versus shoring up residential first. This week's quick fix: Write a 200-word paragraph describing your commercial services, property types, and proposal process. Publish it as its own page. Then post the same summary on LinkedIn with a photo of your truck at a commercial property. Two touchpoints, 15 minutes. Three Key Takeaways: The content that wins homeowners actually pushes commercial buyers away. Property managers need different proof, different language, and a different path to contact you.A commercial-ready website needs five layers: a dedicated page, case studies, a clear proposal process, pricing transparency, and a separate contact path.Commercial buyers find you on LinkedIn, through commercial-specific Google searches, and in local business directories, not the same channels that bring residential leads. Download the free Commercial Account Readiness Worksheet at marketingthatactuallyworks.ai Get your Cube Score at thecubescore.com Hosts: Adam Bennett (CEO), Elisabeth Pallante (Content Operations Manager), Hannah Kilpatrick (Social Media Manager) | Cube Creative Design

    Commercial Accounts: The Content That Wins Property Managers

  6. Sep 8 ·  Video

    Website Conversion Optimization: Advanced Tactics

    A pest control company came to us after another agency redesigned their website. Beautiful site. Conversions dropped 40%. Same traffic, fewer calls. That is the most expensive website mistake in pest control. In this episode, Adam Bennett and Elisabeth Pallante break down the Conversion Stack, the five layers between a visitor landing on your site and that visitor picking up the phone. Most owners skip straight to changing button colors. This episode shows you why that is the wrong starting point. Three key takeaways: Your conversion rate matters more than your traffic. A one-point improvement on a page you own pays you back every month without another dollar spent.Work the Conversion Stack from the bottom up: speed, clarity, trust, friction, then the ask. Most owners skip to the ask and wonder why nothing changes.Your highest-traffic page and your highest-converting page are probably not the same. Find the gap. Send your money where the conversions are. We walk through real client data: a seven-field form cut to three that lifted submissions 40% in the first month. A client spending $2,000 a month on Google Ads sending everything to their homepage while their termite page converted at three times the rate. A company that went from 3% to 7.5% form conversion just by adding starting prices. We also get into the fix-vs-rebuild question, and we don't agree. Elisabeth says fix first because motion beats perfection. Adam says sometimes motion on a broken foundation is just expensive motion. The Cube Score's Structure side might be the tiebreaker: below 40, rebuild. Between 40 and 60, fix first. Above 60, you're tuning. The math: 1,000 visitors at 2.5% conversion is 25 leads. Move it one point to 3.5% and that is 35 leads. At $300 per job and a 50% close rate, that one-point improvement is worth $1,500 a month, $18,000 a year, from a page you already own. And unlike an ad, the fix stays fixed. This week's fix: Pull up your website on your phone. Open your highest-traffic service page. Try to call your own company in under two taps. If you can't, that is the fix. Fifteen minutes in any CMS. Resources mentioned: Free pest control marketing audit: marketingthatactuallyworks.aiCheck your Cube Score: thecubescore.comEpisode 26: The Transparency Problem (pricing deep dive) Hosts: Adam Bennett (CEO), Elisabeth Pallante (Content Operations Manager) Produced by Cube Creative Design Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. New episode every Tuesday.

    Website Conversion Optimization: Advanced Tactics

  7. Sep 1 ·  Video

    Fall Marketing Strategy: Preparing for Pest Season

    Everybody in this industry calls fall the slow season, so everybody spends less in the fall. That's the mistake. Adam Bennett, Elisabeth Pallante, and Chad Treadway on why September through November is the highest-leverage window on your calendar, and what to build in it. What's in this one: Fall demand doesn't drop, it moves indoors. Rodents, spiders, stink bugs, boxelder bugs, cluster flies. Every pest control site in America has a mosquito page and a termite page. A lot of them have no rodent page at all, which is backwards on ticket size and backwards on urgency. Nobody comparison shops for three days after hearing scratching in the ceiling. The Six Month Rule. New service and local pages on pest control sites generally take three to six months to settle where they'll rank. So run the calendar backwards: if you want to be visible for termite swarmers in April, you're writing in October. Every publishing decision is a decision about a season two quarters out. That's why fall is the Build Season. Why waiting is the expensive option. There's a large pest control community advising operators to hold off on SEO and content until a million in revenue. Chad's take: you're not deferring a cost, you're deferring the start of a compounding asset, and you can't buy those three years back at any price. Organic traffic is down roughly 27 percent overall as AI answers absorb clicks (HubSpot, 2026), while AI referral traffic is up about 3x year over year (Search Engine Land). Going quiet in the shoulder season is the wrong response to both. A disagreement we left in. Chad says when September revenue is soft and the schedule has holes, his honest advice in that room is to put the money in Google Ads and keep the trucks moving. Elisabeth says that's the call that keeps these companies on the treadmill after eight years. Adam refuses to settle it, and then names the one case where this whole episode is wrong: if your capacity is seasonal, marketing into fall demand generates leads you'll disappoint. The build list. A real rodent page. The overwintering pest content nobody writes. A winter service page. Your remaining local pages. And the page most pest control sites are missing entirely: a seasonal pest calendar for your actual service area, month by month. Anybody can write a rodent page. Only you can write the calendar for your county. On the Cube Score, that lands on Structure, Visibility, and Authority. One Thing to Fix This Week: open Google Search Console, last twelve months, filter your queries for rodent, mice, and rat, and see which page is ranking. If it's your homepage, you just found your fall project. Free pest control marketing audit: marketingthatactuallyworks.ai Get your Cube Score: thecubescore.com New episode every Tuesday. Next week: Website Conversion Optimization, Advanced Tactics, with Emily Porter.

    Fall Marketing Strategy: Preparing for Pest Season

  8. Aug 25 ·  Video

    Customer Lifetime Value: Why Retention Beats Acquisition

    Most pest control owners can quote their cost per lead to the dollar and can't tell you what a customer is worth. In this episode, Adam Bennett, Elisabeth Pallante, and Chad Treadway run the numbers that change marketing budgets. Not lead volume. Lifetime value, churn, and what it actually costs to replace a customer you already had. What's in this one: The lifetime value math, three numbers deep. Annual revenue per customer, average years retained, gross margin. Chad walks a standard quarterly plan out to lifetime gross profit, and Elisabeth points out that the one number doing all the work in that equation is the one nobody checks. The Retention Point. Adam names it: the dollar value of one percentage point of annual retention. On a thousand customers, that's ten customers times your lifetime gross profit. Then he introduces Replacement Cost, which is the share of last year's ad budget that went to buying back customers who walked out the back door. The four places pest control customers leave. The first-year price roll, the technician change, the missed appointment, and silent churn on annual plans where nobody cancels because nobody asks. Three of the four are communication problems. Why your website is a retention document. When a customer gets a price increase, a lot of them go back to your site to decide whether they're being taken advantage of. On most pest control sites there's nothing there. Two sides of the Cube Score cover this directly: Transparency and Proof. About 92 to 93 percent of pest control companies publish no pricing at all (Marcus Sheridan's buyer behavior research), and companies that do publish see two to four times the conversion lift. Our own twist: the bigger payoff isn't the first sale, it's the third year. A real disagreement we didn't edit out. Chad says if you're under 70 percent retention, cut your lead spend. Elisabeth says that's how you lay off a technician in ninety days. Adam won't resolve it, and then complicates the episode's own advice: retention marketing on top of bad service is lipstick. One Thing to Fix This Week: pull your cancellation count for the last twelve months, divide by your starting customer count, and calculate your Retention Point. Fifteen minutes. Free pest control marketing audit: marketingthatactuallyworks.ai Get your Cube Score: thecubescore.com New episode every Tuesday. Next week: Fall Marketing Strategy, Preparing for Pest Season.

    Customer Lifetime Value: Why Retention Beats Acquisition
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About

Pest Control Marketing That Actually Works: The Growth Podcast Stop wasting money on marketing that doesn't deliver. Pest Control Marketing That Actually Works is the weekly podcast for pest control business owners who want real results, not empty promises. Hosted by Adam Bennett and Elisabeth Pallante from Cube Creative Design, each 20-minute episode delivers practical strategies you can implement right away. No fluff. No theory. Just proven tactics from a team that's spent 20 years helping pest control companies grow. What You'll Learn: Every episode tackles a specific marketing challenge pest control operators face. From building a website that converts visitors into customers, to running Google Ads that actually pay off, to creating content that ranks on page one. You'll hear what works, what doesn't, and exactly how to tell the difference. We cover topics like: Getting more leads from your website without spending more on adsBuilding a review strategy that brings in new customers on autopilotCreating content that ranks for searches in your service areaRunning paid ads that generate profit, not just clicksUsing email and automation to turn one-time customers into recurring revenueHiring marketing help without getting burnedWho This Podcast Is For: If you run a pest control company with 2-15 trucks and revenue between $250K and $5M, this show was built for you. Whether you handle your own marketing or manage a small team, you'll get strategies sized right for your business. Episodes are designed for busy operators. Listen on a drive between service calls and walk away with three clear takeaways you can use that week. About Your Hosts: Adam Bennett is CEO of Cube Creative Design, a digital marketing agency founded in 2005. He's helped dozens of pest control companies build marketing systems that deliver consistent growth. Elisabeth Pallante is Content Operations Manager at Cube Creative. She leads the content and SEO strategy that has helped clients increase web traffic by 154% year-over-year. They're joined regularly by Chad Treadway, Chief Marketing Officer, along with social media specialist Hannah Kilpatrick and web project specialist Emily Porter. What Makes This Show Different: We don't sell ads or sponsorships on this podcast. Every minute is focused on giving you value. We share the same strategies we use with paying clients because we believe in leading with generosity. At the end of each episode, we offer a free marketing audit at marketingthatactuallyworks.ai. No obligation, no pressure. Just a clear look at what's working in your current marketing and what's costing you money. New Episodes Every Tuesday Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Leave a review if the show helps you. It's the best way to help other pest control operators find us. Ready to stop guessing and start growing? Hit subscribe and join us next Tuesday. Pest Control Marketing That Actually Works is produced by Cube Creative Design, a HubSpot Gold Partner agency based in Western North Carolina. Learn more at marketingthatactuallyworks.ai

Information

  • Creator
    Cube Creative Design
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    41
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Cube Creative Design

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