Special Guest: Frank Patierno with FullThrottle.ai

In this episode of Digital Marketing for Contractors, hosts Janet Mobley and Caitlyn Noble from FatCat Strategies talk with Frank Patierno of FullThrottle.ai about innovative ways to turn website visitors into customers. The discussion highlights how businesses can maximize their existing website traffic using AI-driven marketing strategies to improve engagement and conversion rates.

FullThrottle.ai helps home improvement contractors identify and reach potential customers who visit their websites but don’t fill out contact forms. By using privacy-compliant technology, businesses can reconnect with these visitors through targeted digital and offline marketing, ensuring they stay top-of-mind during the decision-making process.

FullThrottle.ai’s tools help businesses refine their marketing efforts, allowing them to engage with interested homeowners through strategic digital advertising, direct outreach, and personalized follow-ups.

For contractors looking to enhance their marketing effectiveness, understanding and leveraging website traffic is key. This episode offers insights into how businesses can optimize their outreach, build stronger brand recognition, and ultimately drive more sales. Listeners can learn more or request a free website analysis at fatcatstrategies.com.

Want to find out how we can create a custom digital marketing game plan for your contractor business? Schedule a call with us at fatcatstrategies.com.

Transcript

Janet Mobley: Welcome to Digital Marketing for Contractors. This podcast is hosted by Fatcat Strategies. We are a full-ervice digital marketing agency located in Raleigh, North Carolina. And we work with home improvement contractors just like you to drive leads, sales, and growth through digital marketing. My name is Janet. I'm the founder and managing partner. Today I have ble with me. Caitlyn, introduce yourself. Hey, I'm Caitlyn, head of client services here at Fatcat,

Janet Mobley: and we are so excited to have an amazing partner join us today on this call, Frank from Full Throttle. Frank, do you want to introduce yourself?

Frank Patierno: Yes, thank you for having me both of you.

Frank Patierno: I'm Frank Paterno from Full Throttle AI. I am the vice president of strategic partnerships over improvement home services. And just a little bit about Full Throttle AI. What we do is we are a marketing technology and it's a closed loop advertising circle. So, if you have a siding or a window company, people are coming to your website. You're doing all kinds of things to drive that traffic to your website. What we do at Full Throttle is we identify who those households are that are actively shopping you and…

Janet Mobley: Yep.

Frank Patierno: checking you out on your website, even if they never filled out that contact me form. We do this in a privacy compliant manner with our patented technology. And we resolve down to the residential address.

Frank Patierno: And from there, we immerse that household with digital offerings, display, video, as well as offline offerings. We send direct mail. We take someone who's interested and we continue to nurture them to bring them through the funnel to help you get more results from the website traffic that they're already spending time and…

Frank Patierno: money to have on your site.

Janet Mobley: That is awesome.

Janet Mobley: So, I always like to translate this into something that, maybe my mom or dad could understand. Frank, what you're saying, we know what you do, but I'm going to try to translate it. You're taking anonymous visitors to a website. So, let's say it's a sighting or a window website. Someone visits that website, they did not fill out a form. Your technology identifies the actual address of that home and then you can facilitate marketing campaigns to send messages to those homeowners through display advertising and…

Janet Mobley: direct mail. Is that right?

Frank Patierno: you've got it.

Frank Patierno: So yeah,…

Janet Mobley: Nailed it.

Frank Patierno: we pick someone all they have to do is share their location…

Frank Patierno: because we are privacy compliant. I think that's an important aspect is and…

Janet Mobley: Okay, it is.

Janet Mobley: Yes. yeah.

Frank Patierno: and if you go to homed depot.com it says will you share your location. So when you're fixing a roof or windows or siding it's kind of the price of poker. So, people say yes to that and then we're able to, like you said, display video and the direct mail. Here, I'll hold it up. I don't know if guys can see me. This is a really big 6 by11. This is beautiful.

Janet Mobley: Perfection. Yeah,…

Frank Patierno: When it shows up in your mailbox, it stands out and it's like, "Hey, I was just talking to ABC Roofing online on their chat or I was just checking them out and then now I'm getting a postcard.

Janet Mobley: now I'm getting a postcard.

Frank Patierno: I see them when I'm watching TV." It's outstanding.

00:10:00

Janet Mobley: I mean, I'll dive right on in because I've definitely gotten a chance to play with the tool and I know I've recommended it to quite a few of our own clients. and I'm blown away with the technology behind it. It is so easy from an agency's perspective, but also I've had my own clients log in and use it. And to see where those addresses came from because that's something to know. There will not be a first and last name associated. You're going to see it's 234 Maple Street. It is exactly.

Janet Mobley: And the beauty behind this partnership, whatever we're calling it, this new AI tool, is that we then can take information out of, your CRM,…

Frank Patierno: save magic, right?

Janet Mobley: the client, your CRM, and we can upload it to try to cross and match. You guys call it safe match or matchback. they've matched the names of people. So, you're not going on and sending somebody who maybe did convert a postcard or a display ad. I mean, you still could. So, you're saying, "Yeah, let's take this 234 Maple. Maybe they bought something from you last year." Yep. they've come back to your website. They didn't fill out a form.

Janet Mobley: We can take the data out of the full throttle system, import it into a sighting contractor's CRM and …

Janet Mobley: 234 Maple is Mrs. Thompson. They're already in your CRM and now they're hitting your website again. and Flip, too. I mean, you can upload that information out of the CRM into Full Throttle and get that information as Very good.

Frank Patierno: So that's the from a privacy compliance standpoint.

Frank Patierno: That's the way it would flow,…

Janet Mobley: Yeah. Yes.

Frank Patierno: Because what we're doing is collecting personal ID information and your address is a personal ID information. We can't push information to you. now there is another level you can set up an API for the majority of people who don't have an engineering team,…

Janet Mobley: Right. That's right.

Frank Patierno: You will share back with us, hey, here's all the addresses of people that became an appointment last month and…

Janet Mobley: Okay. Yep.

Frank Patierno: all the people that became a sale last month. Maybe you had a hundred sales.

Frank Patierno: What we're going to say is we're going to bump it up against the list of people we identified and sent marketing to and Full Throttle will say, "You know what? 62 of those folks we identified and we remarketed to." we're not telling you we're the only reason you got a sale. Of course not. You had to get them to the website. There were always multiple tactics, but we're part of their journey,…

Janet Mobley: Y knows.

Frank Patierno: Because we stayed in front of them with the display and the video and they got that piece of mail two days later. And then they did what we wanted them to do. They reached out to you guys and they set up that appointment. They became a sale. So, you're able to see real concrete business decisions, right? And business KPIs. Who became a sale? A click is nice, but if I said, "What's a click worth to a sighting person?" He'd be like, "I don't know." If I said, "What's a sighting job worth?" He'd be "$28,500.

Janet Mobley: Yeah, and so it really does like of course you did. You explained exactly what I was trying to explain better. and it's an amazing tool. I've definitely seen it work. that's why we have you on this call. we talk to all different types of home improvement contractors. a lot of them you're driving around right now listening to us, right? …

Janet Mobley: if you're interested in this tool, it's a pretty awesome tool. I couldn't recommend it more. Frank, tell us about the ideal customer for this platform.

Frank Patierno: If someone is traffic to their website…

Frank Patierno: because that's where we begin, right? We don't drive traffic to the website, partners like Fatcat do that. Or if someone,…

Janet Mobley: That's our job. Exactly.

Frank Patierno: that's your job, Or if you're Mr. ABC Roofing, it's your job or Mr. and Mrs. to drive that to your website. What we do is we come in at that point. When you have two, three thousand people a month coming to your website, think of that as fruit at the top of a juicer. And then Full Throttle comes along and we help you squeeze more juice into your cup at the bottom because we let more people that were on that website and…

Janet Mobley: That's no.

Frank Patierno: we stay in front of them. Again, you didn't fake them out into getting to your website.

Frank Patierno: There's no, lose 30 lbs in 30 days, some weird gimmick. They didn't like their windows or their roof or their siding. And that's why they're checking you out. And if they're checking you out, they're probably checking out two or three other people because home improvement,…

Janet Mobley: 

Janet Mobley: They shut No,…

Frank Patierno: yeah, they should. And home improvement is not inexpensive. Most people will not just take that first person they talk to and write the check or the first person you look at online.

00:15:00

Janet Mobley: especially if it's a 304 $50,000 job, they're going to Exactly.

Janet Mobley: 

Frank Patierno: God,…

Frank Patierno: absolutely. You're going to be really the more diligent person to do the research. And if you keep seeing a brand show up in front of you, that builds a familiarity. And familiarity builds trust. And we all do business with people that we trust. And that's what we want to have happen. I want you to win those jump balls.

Janet Mobley: You bring up a good point with the whole lose 30 pounds in 30 days.  Our entire audience listening to this podcast and all of our customers, they are in the home improvement business, right? Your websites are representing information about installing a new roof repairs, kitchen remodeling, decks, siding, windows, doors, etc. It is unlikely that people accidentally come to your website. They weren't tricked into clicking on it.

Janet Mobley: They weren't tricked into losing 30 pounds in 10 days. They weren't tricked into, some other kind of scheme to cut their phone bill in half, right? So, if you have people visiting your site and you've worked really hard to make that happen, full throttle can help you leverage more of that investment. Absolutely. Because you invested on building the site, you invested in campaigns to drive traffic to the site. And what full throttle is going to do, Frank's analogy, is squeeze more juice out of that fruit. There are people visiting your site that are not taking that step to either call or…

Janet Mobley: fill out a form. And Full Throttle gives you exposure into the households that are there looking at your services.

Frank Patierno: I like to think of it like this.

Frank Patierno: If you had a showroom and…

Janet Mobley: Yes. and…

Frank Patierno: someone came into your store, you would absolutely go up to them, introduce yourself,…

Janet Mobley: greet them,…

Frank Patierno: find out why they're there. Because, if you had an employee and they didn't do that, you'd be like, "I think it's best that you don't work here anymore. I need you to be in front of our customers." your website for all those areas you talked about,…

Janet Mobley: right? Yeah, absolutely.

Frank Patierno: the roofing person, right? The deck person, your website is your virtual showroom. Yeah. Every day, people come in, spin around, and walk out the door, and you never said, "Hi, how can I help you? Who are you?"

Frank Patierno: What we're doing is we're giving you the opportunity to know,…

Frank Patierno: hey, 235 Maple Street was in here, and you can stay in front of 235 Maple Street, and you can see the pages they were checking out. And if you're someone who has multiple lines, right? They have bathrooms, you have kitchens, you have windows. Wouldn't it be nice to know what 235 Maple Street was checking out?

Janet Mobley: Yes. Absolutely.

Janet Mobley: And then you can craft the messages through this tool. I don't know why I keep calling it something different every time.  through full throttle, you can craft messages "Hey, that 235 Maple Street was looking at gutters and only gutters." I mean, or right, and we have a lot of sighting clients.  If 235 Maple Street is in a neighborhood that was built in the '9s and we already know that all those homes have vinyl siding and that you've been doing a lot of resides in that neighborhood. you got 235 looking at your website, you can send such a tailored message about replacing vinyl siding.

Janet Mobley: So, to your point, Frank, if you're a company and…

Janet Mobley: you do roofing and siding, you don't have to guess because you know what pages they're looking at and now they're in this neighborhood that has old sighting. It's really cool.

Frank Patierno: You can do all kinds of things with this.

Janet Mobley: Yeah. Yes.

Frank Patierno: Some people have canvasing teams. I love the mapping feature on our website because if you're going to send out your crew, wouldn't it be nice to send them where the fish are nibbling?

Frank Patierno: So you can actually say, "Hey, give me where all the traffic came from the last two weeks." And we have sales managers who do this and you'll look at a map and you can zero right down into neighborhoods. Now, I don't encourage you to go up knock on the door and be like, "I know you were on my website because that is super creepy."

Janet Mobley: Yes, that is super creepy.

Frank Patierno: But if you know that happens all the and…

Janet Mobley: The timing, I mean, it's a coincidence.

Frank Patierno: we've had great anecdotes about people saying that…

Frank Patierno: where someone was like, I was on your website and then here you are at my door. I guess you're the one I should talk to. I was like, "Yeah, I guess you should

Janet Mobley: That's exactly I mean so your instinct is probably sparked.

Janet Mobley: I mean this is a really cool tool. I mean we are in a day and age right now where digital marketing PPC SEO is not enough. And it's changing pretty rapidly. It's changing rapidly. Social media is changing.

Janet Mobley: I mean, the rules are changing. so we've got your interest. Do you have any other success stories, I mean, yeah. Tell us some anecdotes that would help people understand the full journey of what your customers experience when they on board with you.

00:20:00

Frank Patierno: That's great.

Frank Patierno: So, it's very easy. I like to tell people we start off we're about two minutes and two minutes to start, after we have a demo,…

Frank Patierno: if you're like this is for me, I would send you over an agreement. And what that says is you're going to allow full throttle to put our technology on your website and collect this information. And in those terms, you're going to know that we do this in a privacy compliant manner. And this is important because if there was ever a data breach, that's a terrible black eye to you person.

Janet Mobley: Right.

Janet Mobley: A thousand%

Frank Patierno: If there's a data breach, Full Throttle goes out of business.

Frank Patierno: So, no one cares more about this than we do. And that's why we constantly test to make sure that we hold your client's information safely. I want that to be put out there first and foremost because that is a pillar of what we do is safety at full throttle. Then two days later, we're going to send you over the script, which you're going to give to your web master, put it on yourself. It's going to take 30 seconds, and it's going to start collecting the homes that come to your website and…

Janet Mobley: Yes. Yep.

Frank Patierno: share their location. And then you and me and our performance management team will get together in a couple weeks and we're going to get to look at your actual data. And Caitlyn has seen this. It's really cool to be able to see pages and pages of here are all the addresses that were on my website. And we only care about the addresses in the area where you do your that 50 mile radius, that hour drive or whatnot. We don't care.

Janet Mobley: It is cool.

Frank Patierno: Say you lived in Georgia and you have traffic coming from Pennsylvania. We'll collect it, but we're not going to send remarketing to those folks. Just the people in your area would we ever send marketing to. And that's what we love. We put the script on quickly. We analyze it and then we're able to give you accurate pricing because our price and everyone wants to know this is based upon how many homes we can identify your potential customer base and…

Janet Mobley: Right. Exactly.

Frank Patierno: which combination of tactics. Do you do three of the five? so whatever it is, we'll kind of give you those menu options. A, B, C. Yeah.

Janet Mobley: Why don't you run us through the tactics again just in case people are,…

Janet Mobley: and just trying to figure out exactly what they're executing. And it's a menu to Frank's point. I mean, he's going to list them out and their team is amazing in terms of coaching about which tactics go the best. If you can't full throttle in and…

Janet Mobley: do everything, you can handpick some of these tactics. So, what are they? Yeah. Yep.

Frank Patierno: Yeah, and…

Frank Patierno: great point. We'll meet you where you are.

Janet Mobley: Yep.

Frank Patierno: Display and the direct mail piece, those are the static assets that we have. And know that full throttle can help you with the creation of those two assets. And then beyond that, we have three different video offerings. One is the online video, which think of that as snackable content. So if someone saw, hey, the hockey game last night, what happened? You click on it, Mr. Advertiser, your commercial airs, and then they come on to tell you the game went into overtime, etc.

Frank Patierno: If you are looking at longer form content and you're doing this on that free adup supported television on your apps, maybe you're watching on a tablet, you're watching on the Roku channels or Tuby or Pluto, we can put you in fulllength sitcoms in movies and one-hour dramas. And that could be, like I said, on a smartphone, a tablet, or a large connected television.

Frank Patierno: And then the third area would be the connected television platform where someone would have to sign in with an account that is still ad supported such as a Disney Plus or a Paramount Plus and…

Janet Mobley: Mhm. …

Frank Patierno: those ads are going to air on large connected television. think about that 60inch in the living room that multiple people in the family are going to be viewing. So those are the five areas display direct mail and then the three video assets.

Frank Patierno: And little sneak peek, I'm real sneak peek. I'm really excited about this. We are actually working right now on creating video assets utilizing AI to help people who don't have commercials. So, this is something coming up in second quarter.

Janet Mobley: awesome. That's fant.

Frank Patierno: Little ahead of ourselves, but we are really excited with being able to offer that to the folks who don't have a full service agency or haven't created that video yet. We can help you guys get up and get running.

Janet Mobley: That is So, one of the things I like to do is restate and recap. So, let's say you are a one-day bath contractor in South Carolina. If you partner with Full Throttle and you already get at least 2500 visitors to your website every month, Full Throttle can take those anonymous visitors, hit them with a display ad online, hit them with a postcard, hit them with a TV commercial on Tuby, Pluto, some of those free streaming,…

00:25:00

Janet Mobley: and hit them with a TV commercial on the signedin platforms like Paramont and Disney. And I think I missed one.

Frank Patierno: And then you can also do that snackable video…

Frank Patierno: where if you're interested in something. Yes.

Janet Mobley: The pre-roll. Yeah. So, you're watching the summary of last night's game and it's a nons skippable. You can't skip it, right? You have to watch that little ad insert. So, that homeowner will go back to 235 Maple. They visited a one-day bath website. Now, they're getting a postcard and they're seeing commercials everywhere they go.

Janet Mobley: And if that one day bath company has a canvas team and they want to do it, they can send canvasers into the neighborhood. Brilliant. yeah,…

Frank Patierno: We are here to think about it.

Frank Patierno: Unfortunately, there are gaps in everyone's marketing because s just you're constrained by budget.

Janet Mobley: right. It's awesome.

Frank Patierno: We are helping to fill in those gaps in a very efficient manner. So, you guys know there's no silver bullet. Otherwise, we would sell it to the person and it would be wonderful.

Janet Mobley: So I think the only qualifier…

Frank Patierno: But the fact that we're not sure if it's going to be the mailpiece or the display or the video, but more often than not, it's going to be the combination of everything they do and see that's going to say, "You know what? I should go with ABC one day.

Janet Mobley: if correct me if I'm wrong if somebody has a website and they're not getting say 2,2500 visit a visits a month you're not able to collect enough data.

Janet Mobley: I just want to make sure that the right companies with the right website traffic volume are connected with you guys.

Frank Patierno: That's true…

Frank Patierno: because what we are is we're resolving that traffic down to a household level. So on their Google Analytics that's counts every device when the fact of the matter is that could also be myself on my phone,…

Frank Patierno: my wife on her phone, our home computer. So that Google Analytics number is actually much smaller as far as homes you could do business with. So yeah, I need you to have traffic in that 2500 range because that's probably going to resolve down to maybe, 400, 500, 600 homes and that's a target that you can go after and we can get results for you.

Janet Mobley: Yeah. That's right.

Janet Mobley: So listeners,…

Frank Patierno: But if it

Janet Mobley: if you've got a website and you haven't hit, 2,000 visits a month, that's where Fat Cat can help you.  100%. That's what we do. We drive traffic to the website and then get your website visited enough that opens up other opportunities for you to continue to expand the sophistication of your marketing. It's all about the marketing journey. and Frank, we just want to thank you. I know we're running out of time here, but it's been an amazing asset to our clients. We're continuing to introduce it to more and more clients.

Janet Mobley: We want to introduce it to the listeners. if somebody wants to learn more about Full Throttle, I mean, so we're going to have a page on our website. So, you can go to fatcat strategies forward slashcon convert and we'll have information sort of summarizing what we talked about today. You could also just reach out directly to full throttle and to We'll also put that information on backcatstrategies.com/convert. and if you reach out directly to Frank at Full Throttle,…

Janet Mobley: just be sure to mention Fatcat. And Frank, didn't you say you'd have a free demo or an offer for our listeners if they miss Fat Cat?

Frank Patierno: Yeah. …

Frank Patierno: we will take them through a demo and the people that mentioned Fat Cat, we will do a free analysis with them where they can see that potential on the website. it's outstanding for them to know, what would a monetary commitment be going in? And I want them to see, hey, if we had a thousand folks that were identifying, what can we kind of expect for a result from that?

Frank Patierno: Over the years,…

Janet Mobley: And so that free analysis is not just demo data.

Janet Mobley: These are real homes that have actually visited that company's website. So you're showing you're really putting your money where your mouth is. hey guy, these are a thousand homes that came to your website that didn't fill out a form. That's what you're showing them in that analysis.

Frank Patierno: yeah, that's anybody…

Frank Patierno: who came to their website and shared their location. When it comes to who filled out the form, it's only 3 to 5% of people that are filling out the form. So you're getting 95 to 97% of people…

Janet Mobley: Y right.

Janet Mobley: That's a good point.

Frank Patierno: who you hadn't touched and now their address.

Frank Patierno: And for those who had filled out the form, when we are tapping them on the shoulder, we have a much higher percentage of your total sales than we do of your total appointments in the way we nurture it.

00:30:00

Frank Patierno: Because there's still that period of I signed up for the appointment, but before I let you in my home, if they feel better about your brand, your conversion rate is so much higher.

Janet Mobley: I need to trust you.

Janet Mobley: That's a really good point. That is a great way to end this. Yeah. Frank, thank you so much. You've been a fantastic guest. Yes. You want to wrap us up? Yeah. No, thanks everybody and we are so grateful to have Frank  As we mentioned, Full Throttle, amazing partner. Go to fatcatstrategies.com/convert to learn more. you can also just visit fullthrottle.ai to learn more as well. that'll be all for this episode. That'll be Catch you on the next one. Thanks, Frank. That was awesome. Thank you. All right. Bye bye.