I recently sat down with Tyler Roberson from Diesel Laptops (brilliant longtime client) to discuss online marketing for their “The DL” podcast.
The original post with podcast summary is available on the Diesel Laptops blog.
Full Transcript
Tyler Roberson:
Welcome to the DL, the podcast show that talks about everything to do with truck repair and diagnostics for the heavy truck and construction industry. I am your host, Tyler Robertson the CEO and founder of Diesel Laptops. Welcome to the DL I am your host Tyler Robertson, where we talk about everything to do with truck repair and the heavy equipment industry as well. So this episode we’re going to be talking about online marketing, which is a subject I think a lot of people know not much about, but probably would like to learn a little bit more. So hopefully that’ll happen today. So with me today, I have Ed Goss from Ten Thousand Foot View. Ed, welcome to the show.
Ed Goss:
Thanks, Tyler. Good to be here.
Tyler Roberson:
Awesome. So we’ve been doing business for a while, right? So I think I was… It was funny, we were in a meeting today in the conference room and I got a couple of marketing people in there and I’m like you know what I think my company was this entire size of the number of marketing people I have now when we first started doing business with each other. So you’ve done a great job for us through this process. I know you live in Canada so you got a little bit that Northern accent, I do too I used to live in Northern Minnesota. So I’m sure listeners that’ll come through a little bit but Ed why don’t you talk a little bit about how you got into online marketing and what your company does.
Ed Goss:
Sure, absolutely. So I actually came out of the medical devices space initially and I was doing sales and marketing. And in one of the companies I was with I started working with Google Ads and it really just kind of opened my eyes to the fact that small businesses needed an alternative to SEO that was a little more reliable, you could dial up and down. And that was the aha moment for me and I literally quit my job overnight and open an ad agency with no previous agency experience. So it was an interesting first year I think by the end of year one we had eight clients and gone up and up from there so it’s been quite a ride.
Tyler Roberson:
So the unique thing about what you do with online marketing it’s not like you can really go to a college to get a four-year degree. I know that stuff like that exists today, but it’s such a changing world that’s going so fast I don’t know how they do that. But is it for the mainly most part seminars and learning on the job? How do you go about getting into this business?
Ed Goss:
Yes, absolutely. The platform providers like Google and Facebook they do have a certain amount of learning they put out there but it tends not to be very practical, it’s more understanding the technical aspects of the platform. So you really do need to supplement that with learning from third parties so there are a lot of great courses you can find out there. A lot of it is really just reading and staying up to date because things change so quickly as you said, I spend probably about 20 hours a month just learning and keeping up to date.
Tyler Roberson:
Yup. It’s changing fast and you mentioned an acronym earlier that our user or people listening may not be aware of which was SEO. So let’s talk about online marketing in two aspects. There’s SEO which is search engine optimization and then there’s the pay-per-click stuff. I know there’s 1000 other online marketing stuff, but let’s focus on those two for a second. So explain SEO and why it’s important to someone that has a business or a web page.
Ed Goss:
Sure. So SEO stands for search engine optimization and effectively what you’re trying to do is generate more organic search traffic for your website. Organic simply means you come up in the results for Google naturally and people click through to your site. The nice thing about SEO is that it’s essentially no cost per click, so the clicks are free but of course, you do have to have an initial investment to build up the credibility with Google so that you’re high up in the rankings.
Tyler Roberson:
So I get spam emails all the time from people saying, we will guarantee you first place on Google organic searching. Who are these people that are promising this and can it be done? How do they do it? What’s going on there? Explain that a little bit.
Ed Goss:
So I mean they’re absolutely ways to improve your rankings with SEO and they’re kind of the reputable, credible SEO companies or agencies and then there’s everybody else. So usually the ones that promise everything don’t deliver anything and the ones that do charge a good buck for what they’re doing, they really do it right. The biggest concern you have to have with SEO is somebody doing things that will negatively affect your site. So spam tactics, things they call black hat, building essentially links that don’t have any value for your site you really must avoid that kind of thing. So always look at a few different options, vet them, get references, make sure that they have actually delivered something of value for others.
Tyler Roberson:
So I’m not an SEO expert by any stretch of the imagination here, but what I’ve learned is that when people talk about search and randomization it’s how relevant your pages but it’s also how relevant other people think your page is. So you can have a perfectly designed page that’s SEO optimized to a tee but if nobody in the Internet’s linking to it, you’re probably never going to rank anywhere with Google.
Ed Goss:
Exactly right. And that’s primarily when you’re buying SEO services, you’re buying three elements. One is the keyword strategy so which keywords should you show up for? Two, you’re buying onsite work which is going to make as you said, make your site very efficient and look good to Google. The third piece is link building and if you don’t do a good job of link building you’re not going to get any rankings whatsoever. So that’s really probably the hardest part and that’s where partnering with an agency or somebody who knows what they’re doing will help. Because they’ll know how to go out and get links that are relevant for your industry and actually add value.
Tyler Roberson:
So I think a lot of these black hat or spam people that offer this first page Google, you know what I see is they have some private blog network out there that’s just putting spam blogs all over the place to try to build link backs which really doesn’t work. Because if you have a healthcare website and it gives you a link back in our case to diagnostic tools, Google probably doesn’t care at all about that link at all.
Ed Goss:
Yeah and in fact it’s worse than that. You can get penalized and maybe what works today in black-hat in six months it’s no longer credible. So you pay a company and hey things look great for three or four months and all of a sudden your rankings tank and they’re gone and you’re gone and now you’re really in trouble.
Tyler Roberson:
Yeah, and you can get your website blacklisted by Google entirely if you do enough shady stuff out there right?
Ed Goss:
Right. Yeah, exactly.
Tyler Roberson:
Yeah. So I see it all the time and I hang out on some of those online marketing forums and those places and people are always offering that stuff and for me it’s always been man Google is pretty clear, we want to see link growth naturally occurring out in the world not someone out there trying to do shady stuff. It reminds me kind of back in the late ’90s early 2000s if you wanted to rank good, you just kind of have like a black text on black background and just spam the same words over and over again. But Google has gotten pretty smart over the years have they not?
Ed Goss:
Yeah, I mean that tactic’s not very sophisticated. By today’s standards, there are many more sophisticated let’s call them black hat strategies or tactics, but even those ones I mean these days you’re just much better off doing things the right way, following best practices. Listen to what Google says; if you follow their advice you’ll do well.
Tyler Roberson:
Hey at Diesel Laptops, we rank organically for diesel diagnostic tools and it’s not because we have a great page but it’s because we have so many partners and link backs and things we’ve done to try to get our link backs to our sites so that we increase with Google. And you’re absolutely right, I would much rather pay for or get free people coming to our website versus the amount of money we spend with Google on the pay-per-click. So let’s talk about pay-per-click for a second. When people say pay-per-click what are the major platforms out there that people are spending money on to get their ad in front of people and get a click to their website?
Ed Goss:
So right now the three leaders I mean Google by far number one, Facebook’s close second and then Amazon ads behind them and Amazon is gaining very quickly. But I would say Google really is a universal platform, it works for almost any type of business. There are exceptions of course but that’s usually where most people want to start.
Tyler Roberson:
So I mean, Amazon they’re more about products right?
Ed Goss:
Mm-hmm (affirmative)-
Tyler Roberson:
So if you sell a widget or a wrench or a screwdriver I read this a while back, I don’t know how true it is, but most people began their product searches now on Amazon versus Google. Is that what you’ve seen too?
Ed Goss:
Yeah, absolutely. It’s a big problem for Google and in fact, Google is launching a service to compete with Amazon now so that people will be able to shop on Google but for the time being yes, absolutely. In fact, half of all consumer sales in U.S. are through Amazon.
Tyler Roberson:
It just absolutely crazy how big Amazon is in that entire space. So when we talk about Google pay-per-click, I think the thing to break down to users is when they type in a search, there are multiple different ads that come up, right? There’s the shopping ads or merchant whatever they’re calling it nowadays, then you’ve got your paid banner ad listings that show up. You may have some side ads and there may be some other things sprinkled in there and they have… Well, talk about some of the other ones. They’ve got YouTube, they have remarketing, they got all kinds of stuff going on. So can you talk about some of those other services?
Ed Goss:
Yes, absolutely. So within search itself, you do have shopping ads when you’re making a product-centric type of search and then below that, you typically have a series of search ads. Then you’re going to have a whole bunch of organic content so that’s where you may see references to YouTube videos. If it’s a local type of search, you may see what they call local pack where you might even see a map and a few top listings. And then you’re going to get into your normal organic, your 10 original Google listings as it was in 2002, and then you may see a few more search ads at the bottom. So there’s a lot going on Google and in fact, this is one of the reasons why a lot of small businesses are going away from SEO is because the amount of real estate now dedicated to organic is really small.
Tyler Roberson:
Oh, it is crazy. I know what I’m looking at because I pay for those ads, right? So sometimes I search products and well I’m not clicking my own ads here because I’m not going to cost myself two or three or $4, whatever the click is for that. And you get a dig down quite a ways now to find those organic listings on there. And I mean that’s the way the world works though, right? You want to be on the top you got to pay some money with those guys. But let’s talk about the other ones that have really gained steam in the last couple of years, which is the social media stuff. So how does Facebook today compared to where it was a couple of years ago in terms of online marketing and what you see on there?
Ed Goss:
I mean Facebook came out of the gate and they were really strong and they’ve done well. I’d say the biggest change that’s been on Facebook is more drive towards automation and Google is certainly going that way as well. But we found with Facebook the ideas around targeting your audience based on interests and demographics is being replaced by what we call lookalikes. So essentially these days you track people that come to your site and those people that are buying from you and then you just upload that audience to Facebook and say, this is what my clients look like and Facebook figures it out from there.
Tyler Roberson:
So I haven’t been on Facebook in a while, but when I was on there years ago kind of looking around, I mean you could get down to I want to target people with this job title, in this city, in this religion, in this. There were all these things and I know they scaled it back there due to privacy issues, did that ever come back or is it still kind of we’re not going to quite let you guys dive down that deep into our customers?
Ed Goss:
Yeah, so Facebook’s kind of I don’t want to say come full circle, but they’ve gone back and forth on that. And I know for a while they removed job titles and then they brought that back and income level and then they brought it back. So it’s hard to say where that’s going to go and I think really Facebook in the future, they are going to focus more on this lookalike and automated audiences where you just let them figure it out. And honestly, for most small business advertisers, you’re probably better off doing that because it’s really complicated to figure out who you should target.
Tyler Roberson:
I mean that’s what we do a lot of. I mean we do pretty much everything with you, but I know that’s a big part of it is doing the lookalike where we say hey, here’s 5,000 people that bought on our website, here are their profiles and you spit that into Facebook and then it figures out everything behind the scenes. And it’s not telling you who they’re targeting, they’re just telling you what those people look like. And I think don’t those things take a little bit time to kind of build their audience and expand out or is it quick? How does the process look?
Ed Goss:
So it can be pretty quick, but it really depends on the volume of contacts that you give it as a seed audience. So if you’re anywhere South of 1000 you’re probably not going to get a lot of traction but once you get to a couple of thousand people, you can definitely see that lookalikes will work really, really well.
Tyler Roberson:
Another big one that we were talking about today is LinkedIn. So I’m on LinkedIn all the time. If anyone follows this podcasts or follows me on YouTube I’m on there a couple of times a week, I just posted something 20 minutes ago on there again. So I love that business to business audience, but we’ve never actually spent money advertising on there. You’re starting to see more people dipping into the LinkedIn network and trying that one out?
Ed Goss:
So LinkedIn has come a long way in terms of what they’ve offered. I mean it used to be a very basic platform and I’d say within the last 18 months, they’ve added a lot of features to catch up to the Facebooks and the Googles of the world. So you can do things like remarketing, they now have integrated conversion tracking, so you can much better optimize your campaigns. LinkedIn is still really expensive relative to some of the other platforms. $10 a click is pretty common whereas you might see a couple of bucks on Google depending on your niche and Facebook like 50 cents. But to reach a B2B audience, nothing beats LinkedIn, you can get in front of exactly the people you want to.
Tyler Roberson:
So I think the thing to realize why it costs more when I look at it, people go on Facebook to watch cat videos and see pictures of their family and just to have fun, right? So it’s not the exact target market for us to say hey, buy a diagnostic tool in between that cat video and whatever else is going on. But that’s not really what people do on LinkedIn, people are actually going on LinkedIn for business. They’re on there job searching or networking or building their brand and LinkedIn has basically said, because we have such a targeted demographic that’s here for business, we’re going to charge you more. Is that basically the gist of it?
Ed Goss:
Yeah, I think that’s part of it. I mean, I think part of why Facebook has been so successful is because they deliver native content that looks like it’s a post, and that’s how they can convert extremely well because people stop and read the content. I don’t think LinkedIn is there yet, although they’re trying to go that direction. So it’s hard to say why they charge more when a lot of stories we get from small businesses is they go there, they spend a bunch of money, they don’t get anything and they leave. But it’s what the market will bear and I guess they believe that you’re going to do a better job of reaching your audience.
Tyler Roberson:
So let’s talk about that for a second the content of the ad. So what we’ve noticed here over the years, spent a lot of money on this whole thing is if you go out and just put an ad out there and just say hey, we’re Diesel Laptops, we sell tools. It usually doesn’t go too far right?
Ed Goss:
Right.
Tyler Roberson:
But when you get more ingrained with what you’re trying to accomplish like hey, here’s a free white paper or here’s a coupon code for our website or here’s a new product you may have never seen. Those tend to do a little bit better in terms of the traction that they get on those platforms.
Ed Goss:
Yeah, absolutely. And there’s a lot of psychology that goes into that and scarcity is one thing. So whenever you offer a deal particularly if it’s a limited time thing or limited quantity, people don’t want to miss out. So that’ll definitely get people clicking and people transacting on your site and then there’s just a lot of other drivers that get people to click. And yeah, just kind of saying this is who we are that can work for brand awareness and at least get people to know who you are and what you’re about, but you’re not really going to get a lot of clicks and a lot of transactions doing that type of advertising.
Tyler Roberson:
Yeah. And there’s a lot you can do with online when you talk about clicks and following people through them. I mean things are pretty advanced now, you can put an ad on a platform whether it’s YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google whatever and you can actually follow that click all the way through to the website to see what they bought or how many times they came or did they make a phone call? Did they do a webchat with you? You can get pretty end ailed so it’s almost overwhelming it seems like the number of little tools that are out there to try to manage this whole thing. If one really wanted to do it themselves is there some basic one-on-one tools or websites you’d encourage them to visit to try to learn or get involved in this a little bit?
Ed Goss:
Yes. With respect to the tracking you mean specifically or?
Tyler Roberson:
Yeah. Talk about… You know what? Let’s even back up a step. Say I’m a small business owner, I know nothing at all about online marketing and I want to go learn more what are some one-on-one places to go just to get an idea of what they’re getting themselves into.
Ed Goss:
Yeah, so I would actually say go to Udemy which is an educational site and there are a lot of great video courses there. One in particular for Google Ads, it’s about 25 hours long and you’ll learn about I hope only half of what I know at this point but it’s an excellent course. And really just taking the Google course isn’t going to cut it so if you really want to learn Google Ads even for your own business you don’t have to maybe take all 25 hours, but at least dig into the parts that are relevant for what you’re doing.
Ed Goss:
There’s a good community on Reddit around pay-per-click and around SEO and around Google Ads specifically. That’s a great place to go for help and I’m on there myself so I actually respond to people that are having some challenges with their advertising so it’s a great support page. Google has a support group, there are lots of Facebook groups. So it really depends on what platforms you want to work with, how far you want to carry through do it yourself and that kind of thing. There’s lots of help out there you really just have to reach out.
Tyler Roberson:
So you mentioned Reddit and I’m guessing most of my listeners and viewers have probably never even heard of Reddit, but the story here is I actually found you on Reddit years ago. So if our users aren’t familiar with Reddit, it’s reddit.com and it’s basically a huge message board with probably the world’s biggest message board I’d assume at this point.
Ed Goss:
I think so.
Tyler Roberson:
Yeah, it’s absolutely huge. And there’s a, they call them subreddit. So there’s a subreddit for pay-per-click, a subreddit for SEO, a subreddit for diesel technicians, a subreddit for… There’s a subreddit for everything and it’s really people that really know that space pretty well or people that are looking to get help so you’re absolutely right that’s a great resource to go to. Let’s carry the theme a little bit about that small business owner. So say I am a small business owner, I have a mobile maintenance operation or I have a shop that I work on trucks and I got nothing, I got nothing at all.
Tyler Roberson:
Maybe I got a website, maybe I don’t even have that. And I’m like man I want to go grow my business and I want to do it online what are some one-on-one stuff? I know make a website is probably number one there. But say you build a website and you use GoDaddy or Wix or one of those places to build just a one-page simple website, what are we doing step two, three, four, and whatever else to get the marketing ramped up?
Ed Goss:
Yeah, absolutely. So Wix, by the way, is a great choice because it’s what we call WYSIWYG interface drag and drop so it’s real easy to work with for somebody who hasn’t built a website before. Whereas if you get into like a WordPress, certainly there’s going to be a lot more utility and capability but doing it yourself on WordPress the first time is really going to be a challenge. So absolutely get a website up and running that’s step number one.
Ed Goss:
There are a lot of free tools out there that you want to have to support your website, Google My Business is a great one. It really helps with just kind of existing on the web. Some people now are saying it’s more important than the website I wouldn’t agree with that necessarily. But it tells Google who you are, what you’re about, what you offer and has become like a hub for even communicating with your prospective clients and existing clients.
Tyler Roberson:
So one more note on that for the listeners. Google My Business. Literally go into Google and just type in Google My Business?
Ed Goss:
My business right.
Tyler Roberson:
And basically what they’re going to do is they’re going to make you fill out a page about your company. Your address, your phone number, your website, you can upload some pictures and then they do it the old fashioned way. They send you a postcard in the mail to validate you actually live at that address. Which is crazy that Google is sending postcards in the mail to validate things but that’s how they do it.
Tyler Roberson:
Then you get this postcard and you go back to the website and you put your code in. And what will happen then is when someone Googles your company name and they’re in your city you literally get that nice listing then it shows your hours of operation, your website, your phone number and really most small businesses don’t do this. So it’s a good way to get to the top of the search results with Google real quick in that space and a lot of places.
Ed Goss:
Yeah. And again, the important thing is it’s really only going to show up typically for your brand, but it eats up the whole top of the page and that’s important for your brand. As your company grows you want to own that first page, you want to have your website in the top listing, your Google My Business, a LinkedIn profile, a Facebook page and all of that stuff. And on that note those are other properties that you want to have as the next stage. Is you want to have a LinkedIn company page, you want to have a Facebook company page and that presence. If you’re going to be generating a lot of video content in your business then you want to have a YouTube company page. So those are all supplemental assets where a lot of your potential customers are going to find you.
Tyler Roberson:
Yeah, you’re absolutely right because if you Google Diesel Laptops what comes up is, of course, our website, but usually LinkedIn’s right behind it, the Facebook page is right behind there, and then a bunch of our YouTube videos are usually right there as well. And the crazy thing is those are all free, you’re not paying money to do any of those things but those are all great one-on-one stuff. And I’d even go one step further to tell people when they do set those basic one-on-one platforms up, don’t let them just sit there and do nothing post at least once a week and it doesn’t have to be complicated. Post a picture of a customer’s truck you’re working on, post a picture of you just sitting at your desk it doesn’t matter. Because I think again, I’m not in this industry but I’ve always felt social signals matter to Google in some way or shape. Have they ever told you guys anything about social signals or is that a big mystery there what happened?
Ed Goss:
So I mean they’re links generally speaking and if they’re links pointing back to your site then as we talked about they’re going to help you with SEO so absolutely. Reddit, in particular, you are able to go on there and post direct links back to your sites so it’s a great place to participate with your audience.
Tyler Roberson:
And by the way, it’s going a little bit in the weeds here but if people are doing research and they start seeing these things about do follow and no follow, I think that’s the right terminology there is it no-follow?
Ed Goss:
Mm-hmm (affirmative)-
Tyler Roberson:
Yeah. So explain the difference between a do-follow link and a no-follow link.
Ed Goss:
So a do-follow is inherent there’s no comment about that, it’s just follow automatically and a follow link just tells Google that you should pass link juice to this page we’re pointing to. A no-follow, on the other hand, tells Google we do not want to pass link juice or link value to this site. And it’s important to use those if you have sponsored links like say an ad that you run on your site, you don’t want that to be followed because you don’t really want to give SEO credit to somebody that’s paying for that placement.
Tyler Roberson:
Well, I think a lot of people they start learning about this stuff like well I’m not doing any no follow links but at the end of the day the link still does lead back to your website, right?
Ed Goss:
It does.
Tyler Roberson:
So they’re not totally irrelevant, they’re just irrelevant to Google but to your audience that’s actually looking at it they still are relevant so-
Ed Goss:
Sure and they can click through and arrive at the site and that definitely has value depending on again where that link is and how many eyeballs are on it.
Tyler Roberson:
All right, so let’s go back to that entry-level person again, whether they’re selling truck parts or working on trucks or whatever industry, it doesn’t even matter. They’ve done the basics now they’ve built a website and it can be a simple one-page website. They’ve got a LinkedIn company page, they have a Facebook page going on and they’ve done that one-on-one stuff but now they actually want to spend some money to do the pay-per-click stuff. And there are really two paths in front of them now. One, they can spend the time to figure it out and when I say time it really is money too because now you’re spending your own money to learn how to do these things that you have no idea how to do that’s the other part of it.
Tyler Roberson:
Or the other path is hiring somebody to come in and do it for them. So in my case, I went to you because I just was like I am out of time, I didn’t have time to manage all these ad spends we have going on everywhere. And when you start digging in that rabbit hole it gets pretty deep pretty quick with all the intricacies and all the techniques and strategies you can do. So that’s why Diesel Laptops went to you and we still do a little bit on our own, but we mainly use you for everything else. But say a new customer’s in there and they want to go hire somebody, what should they be looking for? What questions should they ask? Because there’s a lot of shady online marketers out there.
Ed Goss:
First and foremost you want to make sure that you’re right-sizing. So if you’ve got $500 a month to spend on direct ad costs you don’t want to go and hire an agency and pay them $2,000 to manage that, that’s just kind of a sensible approach. So, first of all, think of the type of individual or size of agency you want to work with before you start your search. Some things to look for when you’re… Well first let me tell you where you can find an agency or a freelancer so there’s a lot of good resources. On the lower end of things there’s Upwork, which is essentially a job brokerage site. So if you want to hire someone you go on there you post your project and then different competitors will bid on that.
Ed Goss:
And then you can pick and choose from them to do interviews and finally hire somebody so that’s a great resource for the low end. So if you’re just starting your business, you’re just kind of getting into Google, you probably want to go with a freelancer that’s low-cost, great option. You can go on Reddit so pay-per-click subreddit and a lot of agencies are there. As I said I’m there, a lot of my competitors are there and you can just say hey, I need somebody to help me out with Google Ad words and I have 1000 a month to spend and then appropriate agencies and freelancers will reach out to you so that’s another great resource.
Ed Goss:
And then probably the best thing to do is ask for a referral from somebody that’s happy with their current agency that’s in a similar business or at least is spending the same amount of money what you’re thinking. So those are three great avenues to find somebody appropriate. Probably the biggest got you or the biggest warning sign is an agency that won’t manage your own Google Ads or Facebook account. So if they come to you and say don’t worry about it, leave everything to us you just pay us a bunch of money and we’re going to deliver leads. You want to have control over your own account for many reasons.
Ed Goss:
One for transparency, you want to see what’s going on in terms of what’s actually being spent on the account and you want to know how much you’re actually paying in fees. Somebody just says give us $5,000 a month we’ll take care of you well how much of that is going in your pocket and how much is going into advertising? The other part of it is if you want to move away from that agency or freelancer six months down the road if you don’t have access to the account now all of that work and money that’s been invested to that account is not portable. So you’re not able to just move forward with that onto another agency.
Tyler Roberson:
So I talk a lot about my team here. I think a lot of our marketing team was really new to online marketing when they started here so I’ve been really talking hard with them about okay, you put X dollars in, it goes in this magic box called online marketing, you get something out on the other side. So what are some of those things on the other side you should be looking at? If I go spend X dollars what goals should I have at the end of the day?
Ed Goss:
So for most small business advertisers the goals are either leads generated or direct sales. So if they’re selling a product online, then it’s direct sales. With respect to leads, one of the biggest challenges we find with small business is they really don’t have a good understanding of what they should be paying per lead. So for example, if they’re a dentist we’ll have a discussion with them and we’ll ask them that question, we’ll say how does 25 bucks sound? It sounds pretty terrible to me because an average new client for a dentist is probably worth $25,000 lifetime.
Ed Goss:
So if you expect to acquire that client for $25, you’re probably not going to have good results. So it’s understanding what the value of your client is and what’s reasonably affordable to target and of course, you can always lean on the agency. So if we’ve worked in your niche, we will have an idea of what your competitors are already spending. But that’s a really important number because if you pay too much for lead, you will soon find yourself out of business. And if you pay too little, you just won’t generate enough because you won’t be competitive.
Tyler Roberson:
I think you make a good point about what’s the actual value of that customer, especially in a service industry like dentistry or truck repair. Because one customer… I mean, let me tell you a story here. You helped us run ads years ago and it was for a customer. Well, this customer ended up working for, the guy that found us ended up working for this fortune 500 company. And when I talk, I’m not talking a company as $1 billion in revenue, I’m talking to the one that does billions of dollars in revenue. And granted it’s been a long sales cycle with this customer but it’s finally come into fruition now.
Tyler Roberson:
So and we still hire X more expensive products, so for us paying 75 or 100 bucks a lead isn’t a big deal to us because we can absorb that in the cost and it’s really a virtual salesman is what you’re doing and offering to people. So say I have a garage, I’m a shop owner, I work on other fleets trucks and they came to you and said, “Hey, I want to spend some money and go market.” What platform are you putting them on and what strategy would you use to try to market their business?
Ed Goss:
So right out the gate, we’d probably go with Google Ads just because universally as I mentioned before, it tends to work for almost any business with some exceptions. But the beauty of search marketing is that you are serving your ad to somebody at the moment they are looking for what you have to offer. That’s very powerful because virtually every other type of advertising which we colloquially call display is showing ads to people when they may or may not be interested. You’re saying okay, this is sort of the person and the type of customer that I want and I’m going to put my ads in front of them and hope for the best. But with search you’re showing them the ad when they’re actually looking.
Tyler Roberson:
So when I’m on Pandora and I see an ad show up of my local automobile dealer that’s a display ad, they’re there on the Google Ad network and they’re just putting their ads wherever people are in that geographical area right?
Ed Goss:
Yeah and I mean they’ve probably targeted you because of maybe your income level and maybe they’re targeting males with a particular type of ad. So there is some thought into that and contextually it’s in a placement that’s something along the line of automotive so that’s kind of the way it works. But-
Tyler Roberson:
It’s funny, I get people that will text or email me randomly or send me a picture like “Man you guys are advertising everywhere. You’re on Pandora, you’re on Yahoo Finance or all these places.” And I’m well I am but I’m not paying them, it’s all come and going through. There are really two main online display ad networks, right? There’s Google and then we have the whole Microsoft thing going on.
Ed Goss:
Yeah and I mean there are some other independent networks out there, but they’re kind of affiliated. So Google reaches a lot of inventory and then there’s also AdSense which is Google’s other sides. So if you’re a publisher you can actually run ads on your site and earn some of the revenue from that so Google reaches all of that inventory. Facebook, of course, has a big network of display as well but the important thing we do with your display ads, and I don’t want to share all your secrets but we use something called custom intent audiences. And we can now build up in Google an audience that’s representative of what people are interested in very precisely. So what they’re searching for on the web, what type of sites they’ve been recently visiting and we can target them exclusively. So while somebody might go to Yahoo and see your ad, it doesn’t mean everybody going to Yahoo is seeing your ad. Only those people that we’re interested in targeting.
Tyler Roberson:
So I think the big takeaways here is online marketing… I mean I built my company through online marketing a lot of thanks to you right? So we did it through online marketing, obviously, we have salespeople and trade show and all those things. So I’m not saying do just online marketing, I think you need to have a little bit of a well-rounded branding and doing all those things to grow your business. But it doesn’t need to be complicated if you’re starting out, just keep it nice small and simple. The great thing about online marketing is you can see the results, you can know how many people saw your ad, how many clicked on them.
Tyler Roberson:
And if you’re selling products or even leads how many leads you got, how many phone calls you got and you can record the phone calls to analyze them. You can really dive really deep into the whole thing to figure out I put X dollars in, what did I get out on the other side of it? And the more you spend, the deeper you go obviously it gets more complicated as all those things happen. But for that small business guy, I can just say keep it easy, like you said do the Google pay-per-click thing. Would you recommend small businesses do anything with online Facebook or just stick with a Google?
Ed Goss:
So Facebook is great for some specific things. So one thing certainly is what we call lead magnet type of campaign. So let’s say you have a free ebook or something you’re giving away the cost per lead on Facebook to do that kind of ad is really, really inexpensive. And what you can do is build up a huge list of potential prospects. Of course, the quality of those prospects are not the same as if you had them contact you for a quote, but by having that big volume you can then do email marketing or other followup items to nurture those leads so it’s really effective at that. It’s really good for selling low ticket consumer goods, so clothing, makeup, things that anything under really $200 you can sell really, really well through Facebook.
Tyler Roberson:
So two years ago I saw a ton of t-shirt ads come on all across Facebook like one after another. And then on these message forums, this whole online marketing is like this weird underground where people come up with strategies and they don’t use the strategy, they sell the strategy to another marketer and then that guy goes and does anything. Were you caught up at all that whole Teespring craze that went on with the t-shirts and all that craziness that was going on a couple of years ago?
Ed Goss:
So no, but we did have one client that came up with a t-shirt design and we did because we were doing a lot of business with his core company, which was completely different. He just he’s kind of a mad inventor type of character and we ran a campaign and it really didn’t do that well. And I think there is a real art form to that Teespring and that and we’re not it so we just kind of helped him out and I think this will work and it didn’t really work. And that goes to show you that again with agencies choose somebody that really is a good fit for your company. Don’t just go with somebody because hey they have a great website.
Tyler Roberson:
I think it’s hiring an employee. You got to ask them the right questions, do your background checks on them, look for reviews, ask them for references, don’t be afraid to ask them hard questions on exactly how are you going to do this for me? Because a quick story here and this just happened last week on LinkedIn is I saw someone post that “Hey, all of a sudden I had three dentists office within a day of each other all message me the exact same message wanting to connect with me on LinkedIn.”
Ed Goss:
Probably the same picture of the same dentist yeah I would not doubt it Right? From iStock.
Tyler Roberson:
My thoughts were there is some online marketer convinced three different dental offices, whether they’re real or not who knows to basically pay them money to go find new customers for them. So their strategy was then okay, we’re going to go on LinkedIn and we’re basically going to spam connect with people across LinkedIn that fit a certain demographic in a certain city and they just turn that bot on and then they did it for two more customers as well. So now I feel bad for these dental offices because they have no idea what message is being sent to all their potential customers out there. Because what happened was is this person that’s complaining about it saying what’s going on? I’m getting spammed by dental offices, I’m never going to do business with them. And that dental office, I’m sure he just stroked a cheque or she served a cheque and they went and did something. Do you see a lot of that just kind of shady mass online marketing stuff?
Ed Goss:
Yeah, we see a lot of it and there’s a big push in my industry to niche down. So the theory is that if you niche down to a specific industry that you can become the expert of that industry and then it’s much easier to get customers. But what we see a lot of is an agency that has no expertise they will create 50 campaigns and they’re all just okay, here’s dentists, here’s doctor, here’s plumber, here’s diesel equipment and they’ll just fire off all these ads professing to be the so-called expert in each niche when in fact it’s just a highly targeted campaign pitching something they can’t deliver.
Tyler Roberson:
So my advice for anyone listening to this if you don’t do any online marketing and you want to first thing first do some research. Don’t just go hire somebody and don’t just go on Facebook or Google ads and make an account and start spending money because you can blow through money quick on Facebook and Google if you don’t know what you’re doing so that’s number one. Number two, if you do decide you want to go down that path after you’ve done your research, start small and just realize you’re going to be spending money you probably won’t have to spend if you went with an agency.
Tyler Roberson:
Because you’re trying to figure it out and you’re learning as you go and it costs money to do those things. But if you do go with someone, just ask all the right questions and be comfortable with them. And if you’re a small shop don’t go to a guy that’s got 500 employees that do marketing, that’s probably not the right fit. And you made a comment earlier if you were seven years ago and my company was a size today, you’re probably not the right fit for us.
Ed Goss:
Exactly right yeah. The agency should know as well as the potential client and we walk away from deals that are too small or too big for us.
Tyler Roberson:
So it’s about finding the right business partner to work with you guys. You don’t need to get pushed into a two year, three-year contract with these people and pay X dollars. A lot of them will do no contracts or short contracts. There’s initially work on that that you guys have to do to get people set up with the accounts and get the ads built. And then after that, it’s adjusting and then tweaking and then going through. So you guys do put a lot of work into getting all that stuff out but just be really careful on who you pick, be smart about it. Any other last-minute advice for anyone that’s trying to find someone out there to help them with their online advertising?
Ed Goss:
Yeah, well I’d say from a budget perspective when you’re spending less than $1,000 a month you probably do need to do it yourself to make the numbers work. Once you exceed that amount of money, you should be working with a pro even if they charge you say $300 or $400 to manage that budget, they’re probably going to save you that money in the first month anyway. You’re going to save money, you’re going to get more performance and you’re going to be freed up to take care of other parts of your business.
Tyler Roberson:
It’s like hiring an accountant to do your taxes. You could probably muddle your way through it and do it yourself but a professional, they’re going to do it right and they’re going to do it quicker and you’ve got their insurance and an expert to help you in your business. So that’s really how I view agencies such as yourself. So otherwise, Ed if people want to get ahold of you if they are interested in engaging with you or asking questions what’s the best way to get ahold of you?
Ed Goss:
Probably go to the website, which is tenthousandfootview.com that’s all letters, tenthousandfootview.com or you can call me directly believe it or not at 416-725-7757.
Tyler Roberson:
Awesome. So Ed, very good to have you on the show. Hopefully, the listeners and viewers here got a little bit of something out of this whole thing. I really appreciate you coming here. I know you got a plane to catch back to Canada here so thank you for your time sir and I really appreciate coming on the show.
Ed Goss:
Thank you.
Tyler Roberson:
Awesome. Thank you very much.
