How 7 Figure Home Services Brands Dominate With Video

This week, I sat down with Jonathan Bannister, founder and CEO of TopServe Digital. Jonathan spent years in sales and then law enforcement as a police officer before stumbling into digital marketing back in 2015. A decade later, he’s built TopServe into an agency hyper-focused on one thing: helping home services companies use video to build a brand that people actually remember, not just another lead-gen line item.

Jonathan makes the case that private equity roll-ups are quietly wiping out the personality of small, family-run home service brands, and that video is the best tool owners have to tell their story before that happens. We get into how to actually structure a video marketing funnel (top, middle, and bottom), what content to shoot if you’ve never picked up a camera before, and why chasing “impressions” isn’t a dirty word when it comes to video.

We also dig into Jonathan’s theory on brand equity, why it now takes 16 to 18 touches (not the old 5 to 7) to get remembered, and how his team uses addressable geofencing to follow a single rooftop across streaming TV, display ads, and social. Jonathan also previews his upcoming book on why building a memorable brand matters more than chasing rankings.

The Key Takeaways

Below are the most essential insights from my conversation with Jonathan Bannister that you can apply to your home services business today.

1. Brand Equity Beats Lead Generation

As private equity buys up more and more home service companies, Jonathan warns that the personal, family-run feel of a local brand disappears once a PE firm’s processes and procedures take over. His advice for owners who aren’t planning to sell or who have the next generation taking over: stop treating marketing as a pure lead-generation exercise and start investing in brand equity, because your story is the one thing a PE-owned competitor can’t copy.

“You have to get out there and tell your story, and you have to start focusing on brand equity instead of lead generation.”

— Jonathan Bannister

2. Build Your Video Content Like an Oil Funnel

Jonathan breaks the video funnel into three stages. Top of funnel content is broad, educational, and runs with no offer at all, so it can be shown to a wide, cold audience without scaring them off. Middle of funnel content, shown only to people who engaged with your top of funnel video, builds trust with testimonials and story brand videos about who you are and why you got into the business. Only at the bottom of the funnel, once someone has been warmed up, should you introduce an actual offer.

“Just think of a funnel as a true oil funnel. It’s got a much wider mouth at the top, and then the oil goes down so that it doesn’t make a mess when you’re putting it into the car. Well, that’s the way that the funnel needs to work with these videos.”

— Jonathan Bannister

3. You Don’t Need a Camera Crew to Start

Jonathan is adamant you don’t need a fancy production company to get started. Ask your sales team for the objections they heard this week, ask your CSRs for the complaints that came in this month, check Google’s “people also ask” box for the exact questions homeowners are typing in, or just ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini for hyper-relevant content ideas for your city and trade. Then shoot it on your phone with a cheap clip-on microphone.

“You can get a full-blown college education on YouTube if you really wanted to. So today, if you don’t know what kind of content to shoot, it’s just your fault, because you can go to AI and ask it.”

— Jonathan Bannister

4. Focus Your Video on the Services That Drive 80% of Revenue

Before shooting anything, Jonathan’s team asks which services make up 80% of a client’s revenue, whether that’s panel change-outs and generators for an electrician or roof replacements for a roofer, and builds the entire funnel around those. That means core assets like testimonials, service page videos, and story brand interviews, plus five to seven educational videos built specifically around that one high-ticket service.

“We know that these two services, generators and panel change-outs, that’s what’s going to drive revenue. So when we go there, we specifically start crafting that funnel and we go, okay, let’s create five to seven educational pieces around that particular service.”

— Jonathan Bannister

5. Be Omnipresent Across Every Channel

Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok each treat the same video differently, so Jonathan’s philosophy is to be everywhere your customers might be rather than picking one platform. That doesn’t mean you need an expert managing every channel. Post the same video across all of them, watch which platform gets more engagement, and tweak the hook, pacing, or edit until it performs on each one.

6. It Now Takes 16 to 18 Touches to Be Remembered

The old marketing rule of thumb was that a customer needed 5 to 7 touches before they’d remember your business. Jonathan says that number is outdated in a world of endless short-form scrolling, and today it takes 16 to 18 touches. That’s the thinking behind TopServe’s addressable geofencing approach, where a direct mail piece to a rooftop is followed by matching ads on streaming TV, display, and social, with frequency increasing during high-demand moments like a hail storm or a heat wave.

“The number today is 16 to 18 times. You have to touch people 16 to 18 times for them to remember who you are, because of short form content.”

— Jonathan Bannister

7. Teaching Customers to DIY Won’t Cost You Business

Jonathan pushes back on the fear that showing people how to fix something themselves will kill your calls. In practice, most homeowners still won’t do it, and even if they could, they’ll remember the company that armed them with useful information. Putting power in your customers’ hands builds trust, and trust is what gets you the call when the job is bigger than they expected.

Looking Ahead

Jonathan’s biggest challenge to home services owners is to stop blaming the algorithm or their marketing company and instead become the Chick-fil-A or Starbucks of their local market, the brand people recognize and search for by name before they ever need the service. His upcoming book, tentatively titled around the idea that building a memorable brand matters more than rankings, digs deeper into this brand equity framework, and it’s expected on Amazon sometime in May. You can find Jonathan and TopServe Digital at topservedigital.com, or look him up on social under handles built around “Jonathan is Marketing.”

“You’ve got to become the Starbucks or McDonald’s or Chick-fil-A of your market. And how do you do that? You have to put content in front of them over and over and over, and expect nothing in return at that time.”

— Jonathan Bannister