Should We Cover ALL The Platforms With Paid Media Ads? – 287
In episode 287 of the AM/PM Podcast, Tim and Kenny discuss:
- 01:30 – There Are A Million Different Ways To Buy Traffic
- 04:30 – Kenny’s Story And How He Got Started In Business
- 05:50 – “Media Buying” In Different Industries
- 08:00 – Should Our Business Have Exposure Everywhere?
- 10:30 – What Is The Difficult Point In Using Paid Ads?
- 14:00 – How Do You Know If Your Ads Are Converting?
- 16:30 – Don’t Look At An Individual Campaign For Effectiveness
- 20:00 – Consider It As A Brand Awareness Play
- 21:30 – How To Balance Prioritization?
- 24:30 – Exposure And A Long Term Investment
- 27:30 – Invest In Testing Paid Media Ads
- 29:15 – How Do We Test On A Budget?
- 33:00 – What Metrics Should You Actually Be Looking At?
- 35:30 – What New In The World Of Attribution Tracking?
- 39:30 – Focus On The Things That You Can Control”
- 41:15 – An Advice For Beginners In Media Buying
Transcript
Tim Jordan:
When I talk to brand owners, they’re usually smaller companies. They’re companies that don’t have a huge marketing team. They might not have a ton of resources, but we’re all looking at a million opportunities for paid media. We see a million platforms, a million possibilities, and we can’t necessarily handle them all. Well, myself, me, I feel like maybe I should focus on just a few. I shouldn’t even try to worry about all of them. Our guest today actually has a different opinion and he has that opinion based on a lot of experience. So in this episode today, we’re gonna talk about why you may potentially think about running paid ads or paid media on all platforms and exactly what that might mean for your brand. It’s gonna be a good episode. We’re gonna have a lot of questions myself, as I continue to learn. Make sure to listen to the end. Here we go. Hi, I’m Tim Jordan and in every corner of the world, entrepreneurship is growing. So join me as I explore the stories of successes and failures. Listen in as I chat with the risk takers, the adventurous, and the entrepreneurial veterans, we all have a dream of living a life, fulfilling our passions, and we want a business that doesn’t make us punch a time clock but instead runs around the clock in the AM and the PM. So get motivated, get inspired. You’Re listening to the AM/PM Podcast.
Tim Jordan:
Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the AM/PM Podcast. I’m your host, Tim Jordan. And today we’re talking about buying traffic. Now for most of us that are listening, we’re eCommerce sellers. And we understand roughly what that means, right? If it’s on a platform like Amazon or Walmart or eBay, we’re buying ads, right? It’s PPC. If we are trying to drive traffic to a website, it could be social media ads. It could be Google search ads. There’s a million different ways to buy traffic. Now, in this episode, we’re not gonna get too deep into actually how to do that. We’re not gonna talk about efficient buying practices and we’re not gonna talk about, you know, copy versus keywords and all that good stuff. What we’re talking about is this question that I’m frequently asked, which is, do I buy media everywhere? Do I buy placement everywhere?
Tim Jordan:
And myself, as I said in the very intro, tend to think that we can’t be good at everything. Like we need to focus on some specific applications, become experts at a few, instead of dabbling in many. Now, before I started actually with this episode and hit the record button, I was listening to our guests today. Maybe give me some indication that I might be thinking about this wrong. And that’s the best part about this podcast, right? We bring in a lot of different ideas. We bring in a lot of different expertise and we kind of give you as much information as you can to let you decide. Now I will start off by saying that at the very beginning, like the very beginning of this podcast, we’re going to make the case for buying media and buying exposure on every platform. Now, as we back into the episode, and as we kind of go down this rabbit hole, we’re gonna talk about maybe how to do that realistically, and how to do efficiently. And that the answer is more complicated than just put your brand out there everywhere. It’s much more complicated than that, but without further ado, let me bring in the true expert at this. His name’s Kenny Gray, welcome to the podcast.
Kenny:
Hey, thanks for having me.
Tim Jordan:
And I know that we’ve been trying to get this podcast S quarter for a while and kept running into hiccups. And it’s largely just because you and I are busy, right? Small businesses. We have scheduling issues and stuff comes up and the kids are sick and this meeting took priority. And like technology happens, all that stuff happens. Right. But that kind of defines exactly who we are as like these I hustler entrepreneurs, right?
Kenny:
Oh yeah, absolutely. I think it’s interesting that even brought it up too, but among the whole COVID issue, everything else going on in the world you know, tracking issues in our space we’re still as busy as ever.
Tim Jordan:
Well, the reason I brought that up is I have a point, we can’t get to everything. We can’t do everything. We can’t be experts in everything. I can’t even get on all the time and make the scheduled podcast recordings, right. There’s stuff that changes all the time. And we’re thinking about selling our products. Now I will say Kenny has experience in not just selling products, he’s got experience in selling a lot of things digitally and online, but like for myself, when I’m selling a product, I to not get tunnel vision and focus on only one thing I’d like to think, Hey, there’s a bigger, wider world, we need to expand a little bit. But I also try not to get too distracted, like shiny object syndrome. The way my brain works is like a little puppy dog chasing butterflies in a field full of flowers, right?
Tim Jordan:
Like I’m jumping all over like crazy. I’m chasing everything and for myself, and even for like the people that I consult with, I have been telling people, Hey, maybe you need to figure out where you’re good at like where your ads are working best at, and focus on those. And Kenny, I understand that’s not necessarily your idea. You have a little differing opinion. You have some different strategies just before we get into that, let’s talk about where you come from. I know that you come from true additional digital marketing. You even have experience working as a media buyer for companies like the golf channel. Right. So some pretty big names here, but how did you end up kind of getting down this path into entrepreneur yourself and starting this agency, which is great media.
Kenny:
Yeah. So I guess like all of us, I was pretty ambitious and I knew at the end of the day, I wanted to work for myself or I wanted to take on a lot of responsibility and wear plenty of hats where I could learn a little bit of everything. So it all really started yeah. With the golf channel. A lot of SEO, a lot of analytics, a little bit on the media side. That was really just to get my foot in the door where I got a role with a small all agency where I got to be, you know, put right in as a media buyer where I was in the accounts every day, I was consulting on the strategy, coming up with the creatives. I got to do a lot there. And then eventually I just asked, I’m like, I wanna do a little email. I wanna learn how to build a Shopify store. I wanna do the SMS. I wanna do more and more. And eventually, you know, I outgrew that agency. I started freelancing and then I started outgrowing freelancing, and now I’m building a team I’m trying to, you know, get our name out there. I’m trying to help more brands, just more from internally versus, you know, through other outlets.
Tim Jordan:
Yeah. I love that. And I mentioned it before, you’ve actually done media buying and digital marketing across a lot of different industries. Right. So it’s not just e-commerce what else have you worked in?
Kenny:
So I guess like the first ones we really got into was when keto was huge, we do the keto PDFs. We do keto supplements and that just kind of opened the door. Then we got into fitness, apparel, larger supplement companies. Then it kind of rolled into some lead generation. We were just doing a huge concert that’s coming up. We were selling tickets for them. Lead generation also falls in with like real estate. We’re looking for people who are potential franchisee owners, which is a really fun, but difficult one just to actually qualify people and find the right people on social media, which isn’t always the easiest task, just to find big decision makers who have $80,000 to spend on a franchise right away. So definitely a little bit of everything.
Tim Jordan:
And I love that because there are so many different silos of business, right? Like different I don’t know, industries, different types of selling. And sometimes we get pigeonholed into one specific type of selling or type of marketing or industry. And we don’t realize in the bigger, broader world, there are other crazy things happening, right? People are figuring things out, people are making great strides. And when you have your fingers in multiple industries and multiple types of selling, it probably gives you a better perspective on how to perform some of these functions appropriately and correctly, because you’re getting exposure to a much wider world. Right. So I appreciate that and I love that. And I think that that’s going to definitively add value to your topic. So yeah, let’s pretend I’m a client. All right. I’m a client. I’m selling an e-commerce brand.
Tim Jordan:
I’m selling 5 million a year, but I want to outsource my paid advertising. Right. And we sit down and I say, Kenny, gimme a pitch. Right? I want your agents, you to give me a pitch. I’ll tell you though. My experience has been that some of these platforms, whether it’s social media or search engine, or what influencer marketing over have sucked for us. So we’re only focusing on two right now, if you’re gonna take over our strategy, do you want to go back and try to put my brand on everything? And what’s your philosophy, Kenny? Is your philosophy that we should have exposure everywhere?
Kenny:
The short answer is yes. And let me get into it. We gotta think about how big brands operate, even if you’re a small business the way these media platforms are working. Now, you don’t need a large budget. You can come up with great creative, great targeting, and you can still reach your audiences and still make a minor impact. Obviously, you don’t have like Sony’s budget and you can’t, you know, you don’t have a million dollar budget every month, but we could really make $10,000, $20,000 a month work for you. And I’m gonna always stick with the omnipresence marketing approach. We wanna go where people are online. We are digital marketing. So people aren’t just on Facebook, that’s a little naive to think people aren’t only using Google. People are only watching long videos on YouTube.
Kenny:
People aren’t only scrolling on TikTok these days, but they are doing a little bit of all of that. We’re all guilty of it. We all have multiple apps that all of these platforms are also connected to. So I feel like if you’re a small business and you’re just like, we’re only gonna do Google, we’re gonna do shopping ads and we’re gonna do search terms. You know, how are they getting to Google and even getting, you know, looking for your brand at all. That’s where everything else would come into play. So maybe you aren’t maybe you’re on Facebook and you aren’t getting those conversions, but maybe you’re drumming up some conversations you’re getting clicks, you’re getting views. And if we go back to an old school traditional marketing and advertising view we have to look at it. You have 20, 30 touchpoints before somebody’s gonna make a purchase with you or even engage with you at all. So, you know, whether it be Facebook, then we follow them on Instagram. Then maybe we get them to watch a video on YouTube. Then you have your short very entertaining content on TikTok. All these touchpoints. Add up. We even have clients who are doing billboards still on major highways. Why? Because that’s where people are driving. That’s where they are. Their eyes are locked on there. It’s another touchpoint.
Tim Jordan:
So you said something that I want to expand on a little bit, you mentioned the term conversions, right? And I think you said something effect of, even if you’re not getting sales conversions, you’re getting branding. And I think that one of the hardest things about marketing is figuring out how to balance data with intuition. I was part of a conference in Chicago a few years ago. And there was a friend of mine who had a company and she had hung a banner on the ceiling with her logo on it. It was like $7,000 just to hang this banner up. It didn’t even say, go to booth number this or this. It didn’t say what the product was. It’s just the logo. And I said, man, how much that banner cost? She said $7,000 to be on the ceiling at the entrance to the McCormick Center in Chicago.
Tim Jordan:
And I said, how on earth are you gonna know if that worked? She says I don’t like, there’s no way to actually track that. There’s no data. So one of the biggest problems that I have with running digital marketing ads and running paid traffic on different platforms is that the data doesn’t show that it’s actually selling. Right. So if I run Facebook ads all day about something, and I’m not getting clicks and I’m not getting sales, or if I’m getting clicks, but not getting sales at all, like I assume that’s a failure. So what you’re saying is correct me if I’m wrong to imprint into a buyer’s mind, the idea or the message or the concept of your brand, it takes a lot of touchpoints. I’ve heard guys like John Lawson say seven or eight. You said the term 30. So correct me if I’m wrong. But what you’re saying is there is value in getting in front of people’s eyeballs, even if they’re not making the purchase decision right that. Second, and we can’t backtrack it through data to know that those ads and that, that very dollar that we spent converted to a certain, I don’t know, amount of revenue.
Kenny:
Oh yeah, absolutely. And that is the difficult, cool part. Some of it’s very hard to measure, or some of these metrics would cover, you know, maybe 90 days, maybe 180, maybe it takes a full year of all those touch points. So brands really need to focus on their long term goals, long-term metrics just kind of like what you were saying, maybe you’re getting a great clickthrough rate. Maybe you’re getting a ton video views. Maybe they’re watching 95%, if not a hundred percent of your videos on some of these social platforms and they’re not converting. But a lot of people shouldn’t expect a day one click, and then to purchase we’re a little bit more savvy on the internet and all of these digital platforms now. So the day of you know, creating like I’m with stupid t-shirt for 25 bucks and expecting a profit is kind of over as we’ve seen with some of these tracking issues.
Kenny:
And just with all the, you know, the tighter margins with all of these companies are facing. So you wanna go long term here. So maybe even it might just be capturing an email for your email system, cause email’s converting like crazy right now, and that’s hard data, but I think they all kind of play into each other, so we need to focus on that user journey. So if you’re not getting conversions, maybe you shift your focus on Facebook for engagement, traffic, building up your social presence. And eventually, they click over, they shop a little bit, they observe and one day they’re gonna go into Google or whatever search engine they might be using. And then they’re going to search for your product and that’s where they’ll convert. So sometimes we see a crazy conversion rate on Google, but that might have been from an engagement that we made 30, 60, 90 days ago, but it was also, they kept seeing our video. We kept hitting different pain points for them. We kept acing all of their objections to eventually, Hey, you know what? I paid all my bills, my credit cards all paid off. And now, I wanna treat myself and your service or your offer your product, whoever it might be, might be what they decide that day.
Tim Jordan:
So I use an example of the brand solo stove. It’s these stainless steel fire pits that have kind of like taken the nation by storm. It was a big thing. This Christmas, I got one and supposedly in a few weeks, I’m interviewing the CEO of that company. And one thing I’m gonna ask him is how do you know, like, how did you know that those mountainous volumes of dollars that you spent on Facebook ads with turn conversion? Cuz me, I saw Facebook ads, multiple Facebook ads, multiple creative, multiple videos, multiple message for like months before I mentioned to my wife, like, I think this thing’s really cool. We should get one for your dad for Christmas. And then she bought one for him and it landed on my front porch. And I looked at the box. I’m like, this is so cool. I wish I, I had one and then she bought me one too. Right. But like, how do they know? Because you can’t track that, that the dollars that they were spending six months ago, for me personally, to view this ad were converting enough. Like, like even if it’s six months down the line to make it worth it, to spend those dollars upfront on that platform if they’re not getting immediate sale.
Kenny:
Yeah. That’s really difficult. That’s a question we have to deal with clients almost every week. Cause everyone’s like, why do we spend this much money? And we’re not seeing it right now. So for a lot of brands, you really have to come up with a good strategy. You need to poke as many holes in it as you can. You just need to actually plan out this work. Well, a big thing we have always say with my clients or, you know, my internal team is we wanna plan the work and then we wanna work the plan. You can make too many pivots, make too many adjustments. You’re not really gonna know what actually moved the needle for you. So you need to have exercise patients whenever you start to go into the execution process. And the biggest term, I think we’re a lot of agencies are also throwing around as media efficiency ratio.
Kenny:
And that is a little bit more old school where it’s like, Hey, how much are we spending? And then how much are we making? And you know, does that make sense? We’ve done that with a supplement brand, starting in July, where they were doing 20, 25 grand every month. We identified the products that had very high margins things that were kind of outliers that wouldn’t be in straightened competition with the large supplement companies. We planned our work, we worked the plan. They just had their first 100K month this month. And now they’re about to hit 130K today,
Tim Jordan:
Which is good numbers. I love that. And what it sounds like you’re saying is we can’t look at an individual campaign to determine effectiveness. We have to look at–,
Kenny:
You don’t wanna get too granular. It’ll give you anxiety. It’s gonna stress you out. You’re gonna start changing everything and then you’re never gonna figure out what’s going to work. So you’re also bringing in your offer your product to market. That’s what you can do with paid media. And you can basically test the market. Like, are you getting the clicks? Are you getting conversions over time? That’s another difficult conversation sometimes where it’s, Hey, we tried this, what? Everything that we’re, you know, trying right now, it isn’t working. So now we have to look at the brand, the offer, cause there’s times where we get great metrics on engagement, video views, but people just aren’t converting. So then you kinda have to pull back, kind of go through your user journey, look at your website, look at the offer. And you really just gotta start poking holes in it. And like, why isn’t someone converting on this? You know, you can’t be completely crazy if you brought it to market.
Tim Jordan:
But you’re saying it’s not a complete loss. If people are watching the videos, not buying because you’re still imprinting in their head, something. You can still see the length of the video. They watch go, man, they’re still watching 45 seconds of this. Like, like we are having some benefits. So even though we can’t see the sales, you’re investing right? Investing, now you need to obviously get down to some granular level and make sure that you do have the right funnels. You do have the right offers and, and all of those things. But you’re saying that the branding is valuable. So if I understand what you’re saying correctly, although we do need to be careful not to say don’t ever get granular, but I think what you’re saying is we can look at the total number of dollars that we spend. So instead of we’re spending $10,000 on Facebook and $10,000 on Instagram, we’re like on the same $10,000 on Google ads. And you’re saying, Hey, if we’re spending $50,000 a month and our revenue is X. So like our total cost per acquisition is at a reasonable number. And the number that we love, like maybe we need to understand that this is more, or at least somewhat of an art, not only a science. And even if that Facebook ad that we’re spending $10,000 a month on, that’s not getting conversions may actually be driving awareness to the brand and is causing organic search on Google.
Kenny:
Oh yeah, absolutely.
Tim Jordan:
Right. So if, and if we look too granular and say, well, Facebook sucks, turn it off. What we may find out is that it’s gonna impact our web traffic too, right?
Kenny:
Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean it’s just kind of how I personally shop and I’m sure it’s how you know, a majority of people do shop as well. You might see the product that you really like on TikTok, but I don’t really wanna use the TikTok web browser. So I’m gonna go over to Google. I’m gonna Google it, do my own research. Maybe look up some reviews, maybe look at some competitors. And that’s just the reality of how the user journey and the internet works now because we all are familiar with that process. Before, one day click and purchase was a little bit more reasonable, but now people are a little more skeptical and they wanna make sure they’re working with a trusted brand and they’re not gonna have to call their credit card company. There’s a lot of different levers to pull, a lot of different angles to consider.
Tim Jordan:
And I guess the, a great example of this, you already brought up, which is the billboard on the side of the road, right?
Kenny:
No way to judge that one.
Tim Jordan:
No way to judge that one. Absolutely. But it obviously works because people spend a ton of money on billboards and obviously, you know, Coca-Cola still has billboards, you know, around the area I live that doesn’t have any call to action on website. It’s just the logo.
Kenny:
Yeah. And maybe it makes sense for your brand. Like this billboard that I’m talking about, these are for car detailing products. When do you see billboards? You’re in your car? You gonna see that and then you’re oh man, my car is filthy. It doesn’t look good right now. I want it to look good. What’s top coat. So it’s definitely a big brand awareness play, but it’s not like you can, all right. I see that. All right, I’m gonna purchase it right now, but it’s just gonna be embedded in your brain next time. And then you go onto you know, social media or anything then you’re gonna see the brand again. And it’s like, oh, okay. Like, let me give ’em a shot. They’re all over the place. Yeah.
Tim Jordan:
You go to Amazon and you’re scrolling. You’re like, oh, McGuire’s I remember that car wax. Yeah. I heard
Kenny:
Of them. Yeah. You build trust over time.
Tim Jordan:
So it sounds like what you’re saying is too many people make the mistakes of assuming that paid advertisement paid marketing, paid placement can be, I guess, judged as success or failure based on an immediate clickthrough rate to purchase. But what you’re saying is we need to be investing in the brand and I’ve heard will say that like our cell phone is the new billboard. Right. So if someone is sitting on the couch scrolling, and they’re seeing that, like there has to be value that with heart attack. All right. So I also don’t believe that you think that we should just recklessly throw money at every platform and every type of ad and all of that stuff. There’s a balance. So let’s talk specifically about, cause you yourself said it, you said, Hey, if the product makes sense, like the car detailing thing on a billboard makes some sense, something else may not. Right. So once you have determined that maybe one specific type of ad placement or one specific platform or one specific audience is, is best for the brand that you’re working with or the one that you’re selling, how do you balance prioritization? Like, do we say, all right, we’re gonna invest more money in Instagram for this, you know, female healthcare, you know, skincare item, but we’re not gonna completely pull out of Google ads or, or what do you do in a situation like once you’ve determined that one platform is better than another.
Kenny:
Yeah. So like we were talking about with your product or you’re just overall offer we have to think about where the demographic is going to be and what they’re going to be using. I think an interesting example is using with search engine search engines like Google and Bing. Most of us use Google just by default, big name, biggest company in the world, or one of the biggest but there are a good amount of people using Bing. And I think a lot of people are like, why Bing is the search engine that’s installed on most new computers coming in for Microsoft. So our parents, they’re probably just gonna type it in and they’re gonna hit Bing first. So just by default, they’re using Bing. They don’t care. It’s essentially the same idea. They’re just a different platform.
Tim Jordan:
Well, one of my secrets here because a product that is tailored towards an older generation, Bing ads are like stupid cheap, and nobody ever thinks about it and the conversion rate can be ridiculously high. Like you said, it’s the native browser. So it’s like 60 and older is the perfect target for that.
Kenny:
Yeah, exactly. That’s where they’re gonna be. So if you’re going for 60 and older, maybe TikTok, isn’t where they’re gonna be. So maybe that’s actually, you know, you can get to a point where like, all right, maybe I can rule that one out. You could still try and target 60 plus maybe throw $20 a day at it. You know, cuz you know, sometimes there’s like a small group that they’re still gonna be looking on there. There’s gonna be browsing a little bit, but not quite like the 25 year old range right now. So you definitely have to focus they’re same idea, the older group they’re definitely gonna be on Facebook, look more versus TikTok or Instagram. So you definitely wanna pay attention, break it down. Like you were saying, like, you don’t wanna be granular every day, but eventually you do need to get a little granular in the data and then try and see where your traffic’s coming from, how much you’re paying for it. I think it’s all beneficial in the long term, but some of it will get you wins faster than others.
Tim Jordan:
Yeah. I completely agree with that. So you even said something that sounded foreign to me, you said, Hey, even if it’s, you know, 60 and older where you know, being in Facebook’s be your target still throw $20 on TikTok. Do you think that $20 really matters? Do you think that if I find a platform that’s not performing for me at all, from what I can tell and going by your, your statement that like every platform needs some presence, do you still think that even if it’s a platform that totally sucks it up for you that $20 or $30 a day is still valuable just because you’re getting more exposure globally.
Kenny:
I think exposure is a big term. We keep throwing around as well as investing what you keep saying. Yeah. You’re investing into your brand long term here because you know, the 60 year olds today it’s gonna be a different batch five years from now. And we’re gonna keep seeing that as these new generations, like we’re we grew up on the internet, the younger generations, they definitely grew up and they’re very savvy if not, maybe even more than we are and it’s gonna continue. So I think for the long term play. Yeah. but is there gonna be like a cutoff point? Yeah. Eventually, you are gonna have like reach a certain point, like, all right. I can’t dedicate budget to that right now, but I wouldn’t ever rule out testing it. You just don’t know what you don’t know when you are testing, you know, when you’re buying media basically.
Tim Jordan:
So this is like chess versus checkers essentially.
Kenny:
Oh yeah, absolutely. Maybe three years ago. Yeah. You could run something and then you’d get a, a, an immediate con conversion and you’d be able to see the success of that campaign. And you could actually scale a brand product, whatever it might be. But now since all of the tracking has been kind of removed and our ability to see exactly what people are doing when they do it we have to kind of focus a more traditional sense. Like we’re spending this much, we’re getting these views, we’re getting these clicks. And now we’re starting to see the data come in down the road. Same idea with that supplement brand, we don’t see the best CPAs, you know, Facebook great and Google, but over time with the learning, what the LTV of these customers are it is built up and it is just self, like compounded on itself where our first goals were like, let’s hit a thousand dollars a day. Let’s hit $1,500 a day. Now we’re steadily breaking 5k days yesterday was like a seven K day. So they just have all this momentum built up just by you know, trusting the strategy, planning the work, and working that plan.
Tim Jordan:
Now, when we got started, I kind of set the stage that you and I were at odds we disagreed, right? Like I think since we have limited resources, we need to get really good and focus on one thing. And what you’re saying is no, Timmy, you’re a dummy. If you don’t like try to get some, some brand presence everywhere. Now I suspect that we’re actually not that far apart. And the reason I say that is because you are still focusing on focusing, right? Like you’re, you’re focusing on maybe having a little presence on all these places, but you’re still breaking down and figuring out what is working the best and spending the majority of your focus on that. And it sounds like a lot of this is based on testing. So if I had to guess you could give some good advice on testing and that you’re going to tell me if I had to guess my crystal ball. You tell me that, like, when you start, you’re going to have to invest a lot of focus, at least on all these platforms, make sure you’re giving it a fair shake and make sure that you’re giving it a fair chance. And then you’re going to realign it back off after 30, 60, 90 days of testing. But if you don’t invest in the testing, you’re not gonna know which works best. Is that right?
Kenny:
Yeah, no. You said it perfectly with, you know, paid media, you really have to test, especially we need to focus on what platform we’re gonna be on and what type of creatives are gonna work. What type of copy works best? What landing page is gonna, you know, load the quickest when you are using that platform’s browsers. So yeah, you’re testing almost they’re in cycles. They might be 60, 90 days cycles. The idea is eventually you’ll have some legacy campaigns that work. Those will just kinda run alongside while you’re continuing to test because all of these trends are changing. People’s needs, are changing. People are getting more accustomed, you know and even the economy’s changing, so people have to adjust their prices. So sometimes you just can’t let something run, especially if you include your price and your copy or the creative.
Kenny:
So all these little levers are constantly changing. So yeah, it’d be great if you always just have legacy campaigns and they run forever, but you should be trying different angles. One of the big things, actually, since we just talked about it COVID started I hate bring that up again, but we were working with the snack foods brand and the more, the biggest things when those first two months came in, it was a real pain to go to the grocery store. Things were getting sold out. It was just a pain to leave your house just in general. So what we did, we kind of just created a promo around bulk orders, so people could buy in bulk, delivered to their front door end at a discount. And for this particular you know, snack food brand, they probably had one of the best months they’ve had in the last five years just by doing that and kind of reacting to the market, reacting to what’s going on in the world. So you have to leave room to pivot as well.
Tim Jordan:
Yeah. And I love that about small businesses and these solopreneurs and hustlers is cause we can pivot. So if we’re going to test, how do we test on a budget? And the reason I say that is because, you know, a big company like Nestle or Coca-Cola or Nike, like they could spend of money on a lot of different campaigns over nine months. And at the end of nine months, look at it and go, okay, this worked, let’s stick with this one, you know, yada yada, but as small brands, we don’t always have a large budget and it’s not just the budget of the ads. It’s the budget of the creative because we have to have TikTok videos made and Instagram reels videos made and Instagram post and Facebook videos. And like, and sometimes that gets really expensive. So for small brands, what’s your piece of advice to them about dabbling on multiple platforms, multiple channels, multiple types of ads, multiple search engines without completely wrecking your budget on the creative being produced, as well as the ads being run with the understanding that sometimes you can’t measure success for many, many months.
Kenny:
That’s a great question and a great way to look at it, especially for smaller brands. Cuz if we’re looking at, you know Nestle where we’re looking at Clif Bars, we’re looking at Nike they can afford to test, obviously, they have the funds story. They can be very dialed in and they know how the market’s gonna work out. So they can basically go in leading with the, you know, their best for first impression. But small brands can do that as well. And the good news is, especially for digital marketing even Facebook reported this, I think in one of their quarterly reports last year is you know, lower quality content is going to perform better for you versus the higher quality content. I think you know so higher quality content, sort of the something you might see on like a TV commercial, or even like a YouTube, I think those are great. Those are great for branding, building loyalty, letting people know like, okay, they have the budget, they’re like a real brand and they’re operating.
Tim Jordan:
Yeah, there’s a time and place for it.
Kenny:
E exactly. But if you’re just doing regular, you know media placements like on the newsfeed and stories a simple selfie video will go a lot farther than trying to spend five grand on a very polished graphic design, not ruling that out by any means, but if you are a smaller brand you’re trying to grow then pay attention to the trends and where you’re at. Like don’t go on Canva and use one of their templates and then plaster that everywhere. You know, maybe just that static image with some text, with a call to action might work on Facebook. You don’t wanna do that on TikTok. On TikTok, it’s gonna be more native. It’s gonna be more it shouldn’t interrupt the user’s experience while they’re on that platform. Our whole idea when we’re advertising on the platforms is, you know, Facebook into TikTok, Instagram. They want us to keep the users on the platform. They wanna make sure we’re showing them a product or a service that they want and engage with. So that’s when you have great engagement metrics, you are getting cheaper traffic. You’re finding the right people for conversions who are actually interested in your brand or your offer. So we need to play into those biases as well.
Tim Jordan:
So we’re using a lot of creativity. We’re using a lot of intuition. We’re trying a lot of things, but we have to use data too. We have to actually sit down and figure out what’s working. Now, one thing that I see a lot of with companies, and it doesn’t matter if to e-com business or a service business or whatever is sometimes we make judgements of success or failure based on poor expectations. All right. And if we have poor expectations we’re not knowing how to correctly judge this thing as success or failure, should we spend more money on it? Are we missing big opportunity what? So as we are continuing to invest in and, and buy traffic on multiple platforms, what are the correct metrics to look at to determine if this is working or not? And you don’t have to get too deep into, I know you can go six hours on metrics, but like give us a high level indication of what metrics should we actually be looking at to know if this is or not.
Kenny:
Yeah. That’s a fun and difficult question. And another one that we kind of deal with like every week. So yeah, definitely when you’re going for an Omnipresence way really what you’re wanting to look at is we all pay attention to conversions. First conversion rate your AOV. Basically anything sales related is what everyone’s gonna look at first. But maybe you’re not seeing that maybe the tracking’s getting lost or maybe they, it just isn’t populating. Maybe it just isn’t there. So yes, balancing your expectations when you go into each platform is gonna be crucial as well. Especially if you’re brand new, you need to season your account. So to speak, you need to season your pixel, the data set the algorithm up to where it is trying to find the people that you want. So if you’re not seeing those conversions, then maybe we’re going for engagement.
Kenny:
We’re going for traffic. Those are those touchpoints that you need where eventually they will Google you or they’ll look up or they’ll sign up for your email. So just don’t rule yourself out if you’re not a great return on ad spend right away, but then start looking, how many clicks am I getting? What’s my CPM. Like, what’s it like to get those thousand impressions? If I’m posting videos, how much of that video is, are, are people actually watching? So you might just you know, beat yourself out. You know, you might beat your own worst enemy and beat out yourself from this competition just by ruling yourself out or cutting something off too early, where you, you just said it earlier, where it maybe three months later you finally purchased something which I’ve done as well. It’s like, oh, I’ve seen this brand for a while and I finally wanna get it.
Kenny:
Today’s the day, but it’s not gonna populate back to that campaign or on that day. So you’re not really sure where it came from. So that’s where the media efficiency ratio comes in a little bit into play. But back to the metrics, engagement metrics are solid in every platform. So whenever they click off your off the platform is when we kinda start losing that data. So we can see the video views in Facebook or YouTube and TikTok. We can see the clicks, we can see the reach and how much it costs. So that’s hard data, that’s real. We can see it. And it’s a good health indicator on how your content, your brand, your creatives are being received by your targeted audience.
Tim Jordan:
And is there anything new or exciting happening in the world of attribution? And, you know, cause we’re talking about you can’t always see this. You can’t always track people. You can’t always connect the dots. And for those of you who don’t know what attribution is, it’s basically a way to monitor the source of traffic. Right? So a very common one that we all know is like cookies, right? Right. So, so cookies is a type of attribution tracking system, but there are some that get very, very complex. Like we know that Amazon just added last year, their new attribution system, where if I have a Pinterest post that highlights a product and pushes people to Amazon, I can actually track all the way through to figure out that Pinterest post gave me certainly, you know, number of sales or impressions, but in the world of attribution, it sounds like a lot of what we’re saying is like, well, we kind of have an idea, but we don’t always know. So we need to make decisions the best that we can, but we don’t always know. Is there anything new or exciting coming down the attribution pipeline, that’s gonna help answer some of these questions,
Kenny:
What I’m hoping and what I think will happen is eventually these issues are gonna backfire on everyone. I think with the ability not to target people based on what they’re actually interested in.
Tim Jordan:
Wait, when you say tracking issues, you’re talking about the–,
Kenny:
IOS updates
Tim Jordan:
Yeah. The iOS updates.
Kenny:
And now that Android updates and now the email.
Tim Jordan:
Yeah. It was easier before then, but it’s much more difficult now.
Kenny:
Yes. So basically it would just tell you exactly what somebody did on your website, where they browse to what purchase they made and for how much, but, and you
Tim Jordan:
Think it’s gonna backfire.
Kenny:
I think it will backfire in the long term because even, you know, where ads aren’t going anywhere, right. We’re gonna see ’em no matter what. So I’d rather be advertised something I’m actually interested in and something that I’d like to learn about versus the highest bid, which is probably what is going to eventually happen because all of these smaller businesses and brands I’ve been hearing it there, CPAs are up by four or five times, that’s gonna kill your margins. There’s no way you can last on Facebook ads that way, especially if you know, you’re not like us where we are in 15, 20 accounts throughout every month where we get to see all the different angles and ways to you kind of navigate these waters and kind of, you know, withstand these changes. So one of the other interesting ways to answer your first question, I haven’t seen anything really reputable that actually works a hundred percent.
Kenny:
We’ll use some third party tools for tracking we’ll use offline events. There’s also people who will, you host their websites on their own servers. So they have way more control over the data, but it doesn’t mean it’s gonna pass over to, you know, the platform accurately either way. So there are little ways to navigate around that as well. So maybe you do have an offer, maybe it’s let’s say I’ll check one of my supplement stores for an example, with you know, Astro flavor, doing a huge thing with this testosterone booster. So if we wanted to figure out which channel was working, we could create one funnel. Maybe we use like Zipify or something. We make one product funnel that is specifically for Facebook. So the only way people would even land on that page would be from a Facebook ad. Then we do the same thing. We duplicate it and make it for Google, make it for TikTok, make it for–,
Tim Jordan:
And not even the ad, but like on the Facebook, you’re putting a different visual call to action. So it does not get testosterone.com, it’s boosted testosterone.com. And if anybody searches, boosted testosterone, you know, that that was traffic exactly. Coming from visualized imprinted Facebook,
Kenny:
Right? There’s no other way somebody could get there. So it’s fair to say all the traffic to this landing page is only from our advertising efforts and then any conversions or anything that happens on that page. We can say, okay, from this campaign or these bunch you know, of campaigns that were running to this landing page, this is the Facebook traffic. This is how they reacted. So then I mean, it’s a couple of extra steps for sure, but at least you can see that hard data of actually what is happening. So it’s kind of focusing on things that you can control in the whole process of your business versus things that you can’t like, the tracking like there’s no one that I’ve even come across with. And I, I deal with a lot of media buying groups, a lot of agencies and a lot of just, you know, shrug shoulders is we’ll hope it works and we’ll do our best try and match everything up. We’ll use UTM parameters, we’ll use third party tools, but I haven’t seen anything that is a hundred percent accurate. Like it used to be a ago.
Tim Jordan:
Yeah. That’s, that’s a lot of stuff I’ve been taking notes here and a lot of different ideas and concepts. And like I said before, I love the idea of, you know, putting minds together and, and convincing people that maybe there are more than one way, you know, to do things. Like I said, going into this, I thought, well, Hey, this is gonna be like, this is gonna be conflict, cuz I have my way, you have your way. But it sounds like we’re very much aligned in that we can focus on multiple things as long as we’re honing in and primarily focusing on the ones at work, the ones that don’t. And also, I think it’s interesting that we both agree that not everything’s trackable like some absolutely you just can’t figure out every single thing. And that’s one of the hardest I dunno concepts to try to explain like I work as a consultant for service based companies, right? Banners on ceilings at trade shows. Like how do we quantify that? How do we describe that? And sometimes we do have to just look at the whole holistic thing and say is what we’re doing working is our entire mark marketing budget working. We don’t know every little piece. And yeah, there may be a piece that we’re spending on that doesn’t work, but we don’t know that. So we don’t wanna start shutting stuff off cuz we may kill off something that we actually need. So yeah,
Kenny:
Exactly.
Tim Jordan:
Very interesting philosophical thoughts, you know like strategic thoughts and a lot of times we do.
Kenny:
Well you have to be creative.
Tim Jordan:
Yeah. The word, the word that you use granular, like we try to get too granular and have all the answers. And sometimes the answer is that we just don’t have all the answers and that’s important too. So as we get wrapped up here is anything else that you’d like to, to kind conclude with as a piece of advice for people that are thinking about getting started on media buying, like they’ve never started this journey. They don’t even know where to start. They don’t know where to look. They’re overwhelmed, they’re confused and they don’t know how to take that first step. What is the first step?
Kenny:
I mean it kind of comes back to us you know, plan the work, work the plan, but before you can even start that piece you know, really go through your ideal target audience. You don’t have those large budgets, so spray and pray probably isn’t going to work as well. So, you know, if these are first impressions you’re making, so do your research pay for the extra advice, if you need to you know, lead with you know, your best foot forward, basically. I just see too many people get discouraged and just say, ah, this probably isn’t gonna work. But they haven’t really put in that right effort or they just thought we could throw something up like again a year or two ago little things like that would work and you could get those CPAs, but it just isn’t like that anymore. So you really need to put a little, a bit more effort into your strategy, thinking about the user journey and just kind of getting really dialed in on each platform.
Tim Jordan:
Love it makes a lot of sense. We appreciate you being on. If anybody has any more kind of questions for you, they can probably track you down on all of the social media stuff. Right? Kenny Gray.
Kenny:
Yeah, Kenny Gray or Grayt Media, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn. I’m all over there.
Tim Jordan:
And great media is spelled Grayt Media. So playoff your last name. Great with a Y, which I think is really great. Yeah.
Kenny:
Thank you for spelling it out, I liked it.
Tim Jordan:
Grayt Media. We appreciate being on. We appreciate the conversation. I know that this was probably a little bit more conversational than a lot of our podcast episodes, cuz I like fighting through these ideas and concepts and I like asking questions for myself and letting you listeners kind of over here sometimes that’s more valuable than just having a guest jump on and just start spit, you know, kind of the script. So I appreciated this, Kenny, if there’s any ever anything I can do for you, holler at me, let me know. We appreciate you being on and we’ll see all of you listeners on next week’s episode.
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