1000 Ways to Market Your Business

Leveraging Paid - If You Build It, They Won’t Automatically Come

• Samantha Scott • Season 2 • Episode 4

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On this episode of 1000 Ways to Market Your Business, Samantha Scott, APR, is joined by Paige Johnson, Marketing Assistant at PTE and a Meta Certified Media Buying Professional. The two discuss why the saying "if you build it, they will come" doesn't necessarily apply to digital marketing.

The episode explores ways to leverage paid strategies to grow your business, including advertising with Meta, LinkedIn campaign management, and Google pay-per-click.

Have a question or feedback to share? Visit www.getpushing.com or one of our many social media channels. We look forward to hearing from you.

#marketing #business #communication #strategy

Samantha:

Welcome to the next episode of 1000 Ways to Market Your Business. I'm Samantha Scott APR. And today we're talking all things paid and with me, I have Paige Johnson.

Paige:

Hi, I am Paige. I am PTE's Marketing Assistant. I am certified in Meta media buying so that's going to be media buying on Meta platforms that has Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. But today we're also going to talk a little bit more about the other strategies with paid with PPC, LinkedIn campaign management. So we'll dive into a little bit of everything with paid.

Samantha:

Yes, awesome. I'm so glad to talk about this because I think people for a long time thought, you know, if they build it, they will come, right? And it's still important to have organic elements in your marketing strategy online. But you really have to marry that with some paid to see the performance that you want. So why don't we talk first about why leverage paid? Why should that be part of your strategy? Aside from just wanting more eyeballs on your content.

Paige:

Right. And I do agree. I think there is a good way to balance the organic and paid, but there is a lot of benefit from doing paid. And it can be done with a variety of businesses. You know, it can be small businesses, it can be huge companies. So the beauty in it first and foremost is that if you want a wider reach, wider visibility for your brand, a bigger audience overall, when you put paid behind your marketing strategy, you're going to achieve those results, not only quicker, but on a larger scale. The reach of organic has a limit and it takes more time. So what you can do with paid can happen at an exponential pace compared to that. Both are important. You should use your strategy for social, behind paid, what works organically. But I think first and foremost, to summarize that, is that when you put money behind your marketing strategy with paid media, it just accelerates the reach and the amount of people that your brand gets in front of.

Samantha:

Yeah, I like to say it's short game, long game, right? So, short game, I need instant gratification, then you definitely should put some money behind it. Long game is you build your content, you build your following and your audience and your engagement. But I also want to touch on something you said about audience and reach. So, we're not saying that paid just means, oh, let's put this out to the masses. No, you can get very specific with targeting in your paid, and I know you're going to touch on that some more. But I think that's really important to keep in mind. If you have specific audiences and people that you need to reach or you want to reach for your business, paid's a great way because organic is literally that. It's out of your control. Anybody can see it and it's presented to anyone that gets connected with it. So, a lot more control with paid than with the organic. It's also really measurable, which we all know, I love data. If you listen to any of our other podcasts or if you listen to my LinkedIn series, you hear me talk about data a lot. So it's highly, highly measurable and that's really important. So you can determine your ROI, the return on your investment, and that's through any of these. So whether it's on social media or PPC, which is pay per click, Google, Bing, et cetera. So, why don't we talk through the tools? I know there's three main ones. Maybe we'll think of some other ones that we want to talk about too. But let's start with the first one. I think it's kind of the 800 pound gorilla, the most easy entry for most: Facebook.

Paige:

Right. So Meta Ads Manager and the Business Manager is kind of a comprehensive tool, a specific place where you can manage everything within Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Within these, you can run those paid ads. What's really important when you do that is that you set the objective that you really, really want to see your results. So we talk about conversions when we began and that paid ads really can help you get those conversions. And a common mistake that people make with paid ads is selecting the wrong conversion for what their objective is. So, those are going to be awareness, traffic, engagement, leads, and app promotion. A lot of times people will say, I'm not an e-commerce business, so why do I need to run paid ads? I'm not selling anything online. So this is where the objectives come in, where it's very common to use paid ads to bring that awareness, engagement, get people to your website to learn about you.

Samantha:

So we really want to leverage paid strategically, and I think you're so smart to start with objectives because that's what we should be doing with all of our marketing is what's the end goal? What are we trying to accomplish? What behavior are we trying to drive out of the consumers or people that are looking at our ads? And of course targeting as well, which I know you'll talk about that too. And I think that's so important is making sure your ads are set up with the correct objective and then the rest will follow the creative, the setup, the copy, everything else.

Paige:

Right. So yeah, the first thing is definitely making sure that you have the strategy behind your paid ads. You should never just run an ad and see what happens. It starts with that, what do I really want out of putting money behind something? So that's again, the, the awareness, the sales, the leads at promotion. And then from there, like you said, we move into audience targeting. The beauty of audience targeting is that you can look geographically, you can go, you know, all of the U.S. You can narrow down based on age, gender, likes, dislikes, if they're married, if they have kids, and so you can really narrow down your audience as needed to put money behind ads that you really want your people to see, that you want your audience to see, rather than, like you said, with organic, it's often just kind of seeing what ends up happening and who it ends up reaching.

Samantha:

It's so unfortunate sometimes we hear about these kind of spray and pray approaches, like,"Oh, I'm just going to put it out there and hope somebody picks it up." And you know, we've actually worked with clients in the past who have had somebody else doing their work, and I'm not saying that we're perfect, but, you know, we'll come in and they'll say,"Oh, well, they were saying we're getting, you know, these many thousands of impressions or this many leads." But maybe it's a company that can only service in their market, right? So they can only work here, but they're getting people out of state that are looking at their content. Well, that's not valuable leads. Those are not valuable leads. So we want to make sure that you're very targeted, very specific. And the other thing I want to touch on is budget, too, right? And these objectives. So you don't have to have thousands of dollars to do this. You can spend$20 on boosting a post and see results. You can spend 200, 2,000, sure, but don't feel like you have to go into it with a huge budget. The other thing is with your budget is you can spread it out. And so if you're differentiating your objectives, maybe you have two ads that are running. Nothing says you have to have one ad that covers every single thing. So maybe you have one that's for awareness, one that's for lead gen or website generation. There's lots of ways that you can do it and you can run more than one ad at one time.

Paige:

Right. You can have a small budget or a large budget. And I've seen, you know, budgets of$50 get 40,000 impressions and budgets with$500 get 40,000 impressions. I think the important thing, though, is that when you're looking at the results, is that you know what it means and you ask yourself what the why is. A lot of times, numbers look good, you might have a large reach, but

Samantha:

No action was taken.

Paige:

Yes, nobody actually went to your website. So I think a huge thing with paid is being curious, wanting to know the why, and always testing and seeing what's working with your audience, both organically and paid, but specifically on paid, whether that's A/B testing, different types of creatives, narrowing or widening your audience, looking at how they're responding, why, what's working, what's not working. It's never a good idea to just throw money and come back in a month when the budget is gone and say how'd it go. You should, I think, always monitor, refine it. In real time. In real time. Yeah.

Samantha:

So I want to peel apart a couple of things you said for those of you who might not be as familiar with what we're talking about. So impressions. Impressions are the number of people that have been exposed to your ad or your organic content. Eyeballs on it, essentially. But what we're talking about here in terms of conversions or clicks is did someone take action? If not, you're really just looking at a popularity contest. Oh, that feels good that, you know, 4,000 people saw this, but if they didn't take an action, they didn't click to go to your website, they didn't want to learn more, they didn't play the video, they didn't do whatever behavior you want, it's really meaningless at the end of the day. I mean, there's some awareness benefit, but, that's something really, really important to keep in mind. The other thing with targeting is you can get very specific and so your budget reflects that as well. Facebook tends to be very, very cost effective, and you can really track what's the click through rate, what's the average cost per click, so that's CTR and CPC, click through rate and cost per click. Those are important things to look at, and absolutely, what's happening as a result? Did someone see it and then act on it? And then what did they do as a result of that? Because we don't want to just lead the horse to water. We want that horse to drink. And that's why reporting and reviewing your analytics is so important. And to your point, I will reiterate, because I think it's so very important, is you have to monitor in real time. It's not set it and forget it. Oh, okay, I put it in place and then at the end of the month I'll check on it. Because if something's bombing, you want to make sure you stop that bleed immediately. Or if something's going really, really well, why not pour more fuel on that flame? So make sure you're checking your campaigns mid month, throughout the campaign, and make adjustments as needed.

Paige:

And I will say too, part of the beauty of Meta, before we move into PPC, that you just reminded me, is that we can target with audiences interests, location, and everything, but we can also deliberately target people in the funnel for if they visited our page, they visited our website, they've liked something previously. So we get to revisit people where they're at.

Samantha:

Yeah, remarketing. That's a great point, Paige. So remarketing, think of a product or a service that you've looked for. Maybe you were looking for a pair of shoes, you didn't purchase them, but now you're getting served ads over and over again for these shoes. That's remarketing. You are a warm lead. So that company is trying to sell you those shoes and that's a really great point.

Paige:

Yeah. And you don't have that ability with organic. I mean, usually people who see your content organically are going to maybe be more likely to interact with it or more loyal. But when you do this audience targeting and you're able to find people who have showed a little bit of interest and then, bring them back. That's really the beauty of paid is that you're targeting intentionally and, specifically.

Samantha:

And to that point, you can segment people that are already familiar with your brand or like your page and those that don't. So that's also helpful. So if you've got a campaign that's really targeted at capturing new customers, well, you want to exclude everybody that already knows about you. Don't spend your money on them, they already know you. So make sure you're looking at that audience segmentation as well.

Paige:

Yeah, definitely, something that's interesting is that you can exclude people, include specific people, and then you can do groups of people that look like the people that you want to include.

Samantha:

Yes. Lookalike audiences. Talk about that.

Paige:

So that's really interesting is that, with the software for Meta, they can make an audience that looks just like the one that you want to target. Maybe it's a email list or someone who has interacted with your page, Metas AI essentially can make a clone, but it's a whole new group of people and it's really effective in targeting people that are going to be likely to engage with your brand to use those lookalike audiences. You don't want your ads or your campaigns to compete with themselves. So it's nice to have another group of people that you have not yet targeted, but would be very similar to your audience.

Samantha:

Yeah. So to translate that, because we nerd out on this stuff all the time, what she's saying is you can input demographic data. So say you have a list of your top 10 best customers or even a larger list, right? What's some information about them? So, you know, demographic information, location, all that kind of stuff, you put that in via their email list or what have you and Facebook runs that against the millions and billions of other people using it to find other people that are just like them, and to market those folks because they're most likely to behave in the same way as your best audience.

Paige:

Right. Yes. That was a better simplified version. And while we're on this topic, actually, it reminded me more of the AI and I think a common misconception with running paid ads or I think in social media in general, is using AI to optimize everything. I think a lot of people see...

Samantha:

Be very careful.

Paige:

See like that, Facebook, for example, will say you can use AI to optimize your budget, to optimize your creative, to optimize your audience targeting. And so I think it's a common misconception that you should just hand it over and let AI run with it.

Samantha:

Don't do that.

Paige:

For campaign budgeting, it can be very effective. For example, you have$1,000 and it's going to distribute the budget to the audience that is receiving it better or to the ad that's receiving it better. It can be useful, but it also makes you lose a little bit of the control that you have. And then with the audience targeting, the software can reach beyond who you want to target, which can be good, but then it's, do you want your budget to go to people who don't really fit your target demographics and audiences? And then one step further, you can use AI to optimize your creative, where then it can kind of touch your copy, put headlines,

Samantha:

change graphics,

Paige:

change graphics, where it might work with some cases, but it all goes back to the original strategy of like, what is your brand voice and do you want to be received in a different way for every audience member, or?

Samantha:

Well, and I would also say brand consistency. Right. And control, you know, and remember too, AI is learning. So there's a lot it can do. Like I think your example of the budget, how it optimizes budget, it's really good at that. Right. But the creative updates, at least as of now, in early 2024, it's not quite there yet. So you have to be very careful. We've had an experience where we trialed it, and what it came up with was way off brand and we would never recommend that. So, trial and error to a degree, but always be very careful and monitor, which is also why you have to keep an eye on your campaigns.

Paige:

Yes, and with monitoring, even I've seen recently that I'll go in and there's two ads in an ad set, one is getting 75 percent of the budget and one is getting 25. I mentioned asking the why earlier, it's getting more of the budget, but is it getting proportionately the right amount of clicks and actions?

Samantha:

Are the results matching the budget?

Paige:

And so that would be a scenario where I might not listen to the AI and turn one of the ads off and let it kind of level itself out. Ultimately AI is a great tool, I just think that before you use it, you should know the limits and the capabilities.

Samantha:

And as I have often said, speaking on the topic of AI, it still requires the human element. There's some human logic that it just isn't capable of yet. And to wrap up this Meta conversation, I would just add one other thing, which is, you can run simultaneous ads on Facebook and Instagram, but just keep in mind that may not be the best play for your brand or business and realize that while you might have some overlap in your Facebook and Instagram audiences, there's probably going to be some differences too. And the etiquette, the style of Facebook content versus Instagram content is different, so keep that in mind, what works well on Facebook may not work as well on Instagram or vice versa. So don't always take the easy route and just hit the button to make it go on both. Keep that in mind.

Paige:

100 percent agree. And I think going off of that, moving into LinkedIn campaign manager, this is a platform that is not a part of Meta, but thinking about where you want to meet your audience and how you want to speak to them on which channel. LinkedIn campaign manager is very similar in layout and organization as Meta, but of course it's on LinkedIn where people are in a networking, trusting, professional mindset. If you're talking to other people in business, LinkedIn is a great place to be. We also believe at PTE that your company doesn't need to be everywhere at once. You don't always need to be on Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram. You don't need to be everywhere. So if it's a good fit, LinkedIn can be an excellent tool for, you know, banks, sales, marketing, like I said, you're meeting people where they're at and putting money behind great content that resonates with them when they're in that professional mindset and mood.

Samantha:

A great example of LinkedIn would be, some content, for an ad would be value added, resources, education, helping people learn more about something or helping their business grow. It's not so much about buy this product or come to this event. That's not really the place for it on LinkedIn, but more if it's something that can help their business grow or create return that way, that's a really great tool. So think eBooks, blogs, podcasts, things like that. Anything that could be valuable to them and help them in their profession.

Paige:

I agree.

Samantha:

That's a great place for LinkedIn. Yeah, so, okay, well now let's go into Google pay per click. You can do pay per click advertising on other things like Bing and other browsers. We're going to focus on Google today. It's really, again, kind of the big kid in terms of everybody stacking up here. So why don't we talk a bit about that. I think people kind of get confused when I'm searching in, you know, Google, what shows up, what's paid versus organic. You know, not everybody's super tuned in on that. How, how can somebody differentiate that? And then why would you use it display versus others?

Paige:

Yeah. So I think to simplify it a pay per click ad is the brand is paying when someone clicks on the ad, so that's going to be the cost per click that they end up having as a result of meeting their audience where they are when you search on a search engine.

Samantha:

I'll chime in there. This is a great example of your short term versus long term. Yes. So we absolutely advocate for SEO, search engine optimization, putting out the best content you can on your website and organically rising through the ranks of billions of pages. So when someone searches for your business type and or name, you come up at the top of page one. But that takes a long time and a lot of effort from the metadata that's in the back end of your site, tags, links, all kinds of stuff that we're not getting into today. So the short game is Google pay per click, where we can set up a budget and hit start, and immediately you're going to show up there on the top couple. And if you want to identify what's paid versus organic, it'll say sponsored or ad, what have you, and they're usually on the very top of that search bar.

Paige:

Yeah, exactly. The benefit, like Samantha said, is that immediate visibility. You're meeting your audience where they are. If I'm searching"black blazer," or I'm selling a black blazer, excuse me, I want my audience, when they search it, hopefully I'm the first or second to pop up. The way I see PPC, and tell me how you feel, I think that it goes hand in hand though, with the paid and organic, because PPC is a lot about intent. And so people are searching cause they're trying to find something. And so this goes hand in hand with using paid and organic social to bring awareness so then your audience is aware and then when they go to search for you now they know and they can find you and you're meeting them where they're at at every stage of the journey.

Samantha:

Yeah, I think you touch on a really great point is it takes on average seven times for someone to be exposed to something before they remember it or take action. So hopefully they've been exposed to something on Facebook, on Instagram, in a search, on LinkedIn, on YouTube. I mean, there's tons of different places. You can do YouTube advertising as well. I knew we were going to come up with another one. Yeah. That would be a fourth one. Yeah. We'll have to cover that on another edition of this podcast. But, yes, you want people to have that familiarity so that once they're in the buying mindset, they just pull the trigger and they move on it. I think it's also important to keep in mind that we are not advocating that you do one or the other. Or even both, necessarily. Walk before you run. We are big believers in quality over quantity. So make sure if you're going to start in paid you pick one and you pour yourself into it. There's tons of educational resources. If you want to comment on this, feel free, we'd be glad to send you links and resources. There's lots of ways to learn. So we would say do one thing really, really well and then add on to the next. And keep in mind, like you said earlier, that not every channel is right for every business. Right? I don't necessarily think like professional service firms should always be on TikTok, for example. Nor do hair salons necessarily need to be on LinkedIn. So, it just depends on what you're trying to accomplish. But, what are some other tips and strategies for using PPC, Paige?

Paige:

The basics are going to be using keywords, knowing what people are looking for when they're looking for your brand.

Samantha:

Yeah, and making sure that you're not just pulling those keywords from what you would use or what you would search for. Because, you know, you're too close to it. There are keyword volume search tools that are free that you can use, even when you set up your ads, you can do that. So you might think, you know, if I'm a nursery, that someone's going to be searching for trees or perennials or what have you but maybe somebody's searching for how to make my yard look better. You know, you have to keep that in mind. What are your customers using or targets using to search for your business or service, not just what you're using.

Paige:

Right. And I think that's true of all marketing strategies. It's a common mistake or misconception that you are your target audience. And a lot of times you're not, even if you think you are. So making sure you're using those keywords, like you said, that are relevant and that people are actually searching for, not that you just assume.

Samantha:

And it's about what they need or want, not what you're trying to sell.

Paige:

Yes.

Samantha:

And so when you keep that in mind, you're helping solve a need or a problem, you're much more likely to generate the traffic and the attention that you're looking for.

Paige:

Right. And going hand in hand with that, making sure you're using negative keywords as well. A negative keyword is something that when people search for your brand or what your service or offering is, you don't show up.

Samantha:

For example, we don't do event planning. I do not like that. I've planned a wedding. I'm good. I don't need to do any more of that. So I would not want someone searching for event planner in marketing and to have our business show up.

Paige:

So definitely best practices is using the right keywords and then the right negative keywords as well to make sure that you're not paying for those clicks for value that's not going to be added to you or the person searching for you.

Samantha:

All right. Well, how should we wrap this up? What are the highlights that if somebody is listening to this, you really want to make sure that they grasp when we're talking about paid?

Paige:

Ad creative I think is the number one thing I would suggest for people who are going into paid. I think when you put a strategy behind something and you create something that you're willing to put money behind to represent your brand and reach more people, the first thing is, is ad creative.

Samantha:

And that could be visual content that's still, so photos or video. We didn't really touch on that, but video is very powerful in paid because you think about the doom scrolling, you want to catch them with attention and sometimes moving graphics can do that in a better way than still. And you can do display advertising as well as non display or image or non image advertising on pay per click as well.

Paige:

Everybody kind of receives ads and digital ads differently. Some people don't want to see sponsored content at all. So I think it's really important putting yourself in the shoes of a consumer and thinking about the content that's put in front of your audience, how they're going to digest it. There's so much that people see on social platforms, on their browsers, and so giving them high quality creative, that's the ad copy as well, so what you're asking them to do or telling them that you can solve for them, and then the photo, video, GIF, whatever you use to grab their attention. I think the biggest thing is making sure you have the quality creative, you're speaking to the right people, that you're not spray and praying like we said.

Samantha:

It goes back to marketing 101. Yeah. If you've got the right offer and the right people, the rest will follow.

Paige:

Yeah.

Samantha:

So it's all about the consumer, as with all marketing. And we hope that these tips and tools about paid, so we talked about pay per click, Meta, as well as LinkedIn, have been helpful. And of course, if you've got questions, we'd love to answer them. So feel free to leave comments below and tune in for the next episode of 1000 Ways to Market Your Business.