053: Online Ads – What’s Working Now With Emily Caddell

Title: Online Ads – What’s Working Now With Emily Caddell

Guest: Emily Caddell

Peter: Welcome to the Biz and Life Done Well podcast, where we explore what it means and what it takes to do business and life well. I’m your host, Peter Wilson. If you’re like me, you’re intrigued by stories of common people who have achieved uncommon success in business and life. Join me as I interview fascinating people about how they got started, their successes and failures, their habits and routines, and what inspires them. Today, my guest is Emily Caddell.

She is the director of marketing for newsmarketing.com.

Emily: Hi, Peter.

Peter: Good to see you today, Emily. Excited about our topic.

Emily: We’re going

Peter: to talk about online ads in all the different avenues that are available today, specifically focusing on what we see working. We’ve got a whole bunch of different platforms that people use. We’ve got Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn ads, Google ads, couple others, YouTube, Twitter, Snap. Some of those we don’t have a whole lot of experience in. I was having a conversation the other day with one of our clients and they were saying, well, Facebook, nobody uses Facebook anymore.

But what’s the reality of that statement?

Emily: So when we say nobody uses Facebook anymore, honestly, it’s kind of the younger generation that’s not using Facebook. But for most of our clients, most of their customers are still on Facebook. They’re still using it. And just at the upper level, so Facebook is now technically Meta, owns Facebook and Instagram. So when you’re advertising on Facebook, you’re also advertising on Instagram, which can go to a little bit younger of an audience.

That’s also kind of fading into an older audience as well. But your clients are still on Facebook as much as people say they’re not using Facebook, they are.

Peter: They’re lying.

Emily: Oh, yeah.

Peter: I mean, the stats prove it out. I mean, people say they don’t go on Facebook anymore, but I think it’s become such a part of the fabric of our daily online lives. Mhmm. I mean, certainly, there are some people that just refuse to go Facebook. But for the most part, I mean, the numbers don’t bear that out.

We just see a massive amount of people still using Facebook. Absolutely. Groups. They wanna see, pictures of their friends’ kids and

Emily: Mhmm.

Peter: You know, they’re

Emily: they’re just

Peter: going on there.

Emily: Definitely. And it’s a much more personal platform than some of these other platforms. On Instagram, you’re gonna follow a lot of accounts that you don’t necessarily know the person. But on Facebook, you typically know most of the people who are in your feed or you follow businesses that you know and like. So most of the time, people on your feed are gonna be people that you know or, again, businesses you like, services that you like kind of thing.

So it’s much more tailored personally to you.

Peter: Yeah. For me personally, I use the groups a lot. I’ve got like some fishing groups and some boating groups and, you know, just some other random groups that I’m a part of. That’s a really powerful piece of Facebook. So let’s just dispel the myth right now.

Emily: People

Peter: are still going on Facebook and there’s still opportunities to get in front of them with your ads. There is some good targeting capabilities on Facebook, even though the recent Apple iOS changes and all that made it harder to target audiences For the level of campaigns that we’re talking about running for our clients, it seems to be working still well. And we’ll we’ll go into the specific types of campaigns, in a minute here. So let’s talk about Instagram a little bit. You mentioned something about when we were talking before the podcast, something about reels.

So what are reels on Instagram?

Emily: Sure. So reels are videos. A lot of them have like different kinds of music or whatever. A lot of like informational things are just little snippets. I think they can be up to a minute or so, but people usually try to keep them short.

And so actually like, if you’re on your Instagram app, the middle button is just reels and you’ll just basically be scrolling through reels. So it’s really what Instagram is focusing their algorithm on right now. Like that’s what they want to see. So a lot of like static posts aren’t going to get seen as much as Reel. Like for example, I posted a Reel about my son that’s like a two second Reel, just following a trend kind of thing.

And it has like 10,000 views on it at this point, which is like, I only have like 900 followers, like personally, I, you know, the views on it is just insane. And so it’s really like really worse for just getting a lot of awareness, brand awareness.

Peter: And so and the the the unspoken truth is that it’s insta it’s Instagram’s answer to TikTok.

Emily: Yes. Exactly. They are basically copying TikTok. They came out pretty pretty soon after TikTok started getting really popular. And actually a lot of people will post the video on TikTok and then bring it over to Instagram and have the exact same video on Instagram as a reel.

Peter: Okay. So you can do that. You can Yeah.

Emily: You can do that.

Peter: Make a video and post it on both platforms. Are there ads in reels? Can you promote a reel?

Emily: Well, if you can’t really promote a reel, don’t believe. So Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. Not yet.

I haven’t really promoted reels. I think they’re really more on organic traffic.

Peter: Okay.

Emily: So So that really do a well a good job to on them. They’re to be seen as much as you want. So

Peter: right now, if you’re interested in doing Instagram Reels, for example, it could be a good organic activity where you’re going to make posts for your business and put them there, maybe reuse your TikTok videos as well, but you’re not necessarily gonna be able to control how often they get seen and yet. I mean, I I I would imagine that Instagram’s gotta be promoting reels at some point.

Emily: Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Peter: Just a matter of time.

Emily: When are scrolling through Reels, you will come across an ad, but it’s not really like promoted Reel. It’s just like an ad break basically once

Peter: Like a post?

Emily: Yeah. Which happens on your stories as well that you’ll be scrolling and then all of sudden you get an ad that’s not someone you follow. So you would get those, but they’re not really promoted reels.

Peter: Okay. So when we talk about ads on Instagram, one of the cool things that I do like is the fact that you can set up a campaign on Facebook and then just add on Instagram, not necessarily specific things like stories or maybe you can, but the fact that you don’t have to have a separate account, you can just run it all together.

Emily: Yep. So, yeah, when we set up a Facebook campaign, that’s also going to Instagram as well. So people will see it when scrolling through their feed as a post or, I mean, they’ll come up in stories, they’ll come up, I think when you’re scrolling through reels type of thing. They do just show up in random places on Instagram.

Peter: Okay. So Facebook and Instagram, a powerful duo for online advertising. A couple others I wanna talk about. I mean, we gotta talk about TikTok. TikTok is really taking the world by storm.

I think we all know what TikTok is and how much of a time suck it can be if you find yourself going down that rabbit hole of looking at TikTok videos. Yep. Oh, yeah. So, I know personally, some my daughter has done some TikTok videos with her friends, and, I mean, they just had, like, just tons and tons and tons of traffic. Now they weren’t running ads, but we did recently start running, some ads for a client on TikTok.

Mhmm. And it is a viable platform, for advertising. And we’ll talk about the specific types of ads that you can run, on the platforms here in a minute. But Mhmm. Just to say right now, TikTok is very competitive for us with Facebook and Instagram.

So that that seems it’s super popular, and it just seems to be working relatively well for specific types of ads. Another one I was gonna talk about is LinkedIn. Now LinkedIn, you can run ad campaigns on LinkedIn. We have run b to b, and that means a business trying to sell to other businesses. We have, specifically run a couple campaigns for some clients on, LinkedIn.

It’s pretty expensive per lead to do that. Of course, if you look at the value of the lead, the lifetime value of the the, you know, the clients they’re picking up could be significant amounts of money. The one area where we don’t have any experience with LinkedIn, but I’ve heard that it does work certainly is hiring. And then another platform, I mean, obviously online advertising, Google just continues to dominate, especially for paid search ads, which we run for a lot of our clients, and that’s where you have a keyword. Say you’re a roofer and you want to find people that want a roof.

You, you know, buy the keyword roofing company near me or roofers near me or best roofing company, things like that, then your ads show up. They click on it. They go to your website. Pretty basic stuff. Very effective and continues to be very effective.

We have not seen much impact at all from the Apple iOS changes just because the main thing you’re trying to do there is you’re trying to get in people in front of people who are looking for your specific service. I mean, if they’re searching for something, they have an intent. So we call that intent advertising versus all these other platforms we’re talking about. For the most part, you’re relying on targeting in some form or fashion, but you’re really interrupting people because they don’t they’re not necessarily looking for that product or service

Emily: that putting in. So, yeah, it’s much more of a cold audience on these other platforms, but Google is a very in intent type of search.

Peter: And then the other a couple others I just wanna mention before we dive into the types of ads. So we’ve got, YouTube. We’ve certainly done a little bit of work on YouTube. It’s been in in conjunction with paid search ads on Google and other types of campaigns that we’ve run specifically on that on the Google platform. So it’s just an extension.

We’re using YouTube right now as an extension of other campaigns that we’re running on Google for our clients. One of the ones that we’ve seen work for a long time is little banner ads that pop up on on the videos. Those have been happening for a long time. I know one of our clients is a auto repair, Brett’s Auto Repair, and I’ll go on to YouTube, I’ll see his banner ads pop up on the videos. So that seems to be very effective.

Good for branding and, a good extension of the remarketing platform where we’re trying to get people to remember the brand or come back to the website once they’ve visited, which is what remarketing is all about. And those are that’s so a couple that we don’t do at all and have no intention of is Twitter and Snap. So I don’t know if you wanna add anything about those two platforms.

Emily: Yeah. We don’t really suggest sticking to either of those platforms. I mean, I definitely think Snap out a little bit. I think Twitter stated out a little bit. And yeah, just kind of seems like a waste of time for customers or for businesses to be involved in.

We really we don’t personally get on there as biz marketing. We really don’t suggest that our clients spend their time on those platforms. Right.

Peter: Well, and just to be clear, we don’t, work specifically with any e commerce, brands. We, very limited amount of ecommerce work. If we do it, it’s gotta be just a few products. We don’t do that’s a very specific niche, requires a specific skill set to do. So we’re not talking about people that are trying to sell a product on a platform directly.

We are primarily looking for people who are trying to book appointments with potential customers. Usually it’s a higher end item they’re selling. We work practices, for example, who are trying to book an appointment with a new patient. We work with, other forms of health and wellness. We have a physical therapy clinic we work with.

We work with chiropractors as well. They’re trying to find people who are looking specifically for their services. And then in addition to folks that are doing things like home services, like, roofing, like we talked about roofing contractors earlier, auto repair, things like that. So we have an opportunity to get in front of people on these platforms, but we’re not trying to sell a specific product at that time in real time where people are gonna put their credit card into the website and Exactly.

Emily: Yeah. Yeah. We’re kind of starting a conversation with the business and the customer.

Peter: Exactly. So one of the areas that I wanted to talk about though, it seems to be very important for most businesses is hiring. And we have come up with some good strategies for hiring, for recruiting. So let’s look at like the Facebook, Instagram hiring. How’s that how that works?

What’s what’s that look like?

Emily: Yeah. So the Facebook and Instagram hiring processes, we usually set up what’s called a lead ad. So instead of someone clicking on your ad and going directly to your website, if they click on an ad, there’s a form that pops up, that gathers their information. So it really works for hiring because people can just immediately fill out their name, their contact information, how many years of experience they have, any question that you wanna ask them.

Peter: Except not all questions.

Emily: Not all questions.

Peter: There are significant amount of rules around hiring ads, which is something we found out. Things, you know, things evolve and you just have to stay on top of things.

Emily: For example, you can’t ask someone’s location.

Peter: Right. And why is

Emily: just so you can’t discriminate against a location. Like you can later on say like, oh, we’re only interested in someone who lives right here for hiring, but, just so if there’s someone who lives far away, saw your ad, which hopefully they wouldn’t because we target them pretty centralized to your business. You know, that was like, oh, I’m wanting to move here to do this and you are not interested in that. You can later on say that, but Facebook is really trying to cut down on any discriminatory prices.

Peter: So so so basically, you could say, oh, this person lives in this ZIP code. I I don’t wanna hire somebody from that zip code for whatever reason. So you can target zip codes Mhmm. Right, with ads?

Emily: You cannot target zip codes with ads.

Peter: Oh, so you just have to target a city?

Emily: Yeah. Kind of target an area. But yeah, you cannot target in the

Peter: right Okay. Because all the other ads, you can target a zip code.

Emily: Yeah. Yeah. But Facebook cannot on just on hiring.

Peter: On hiring ads. Okay. And so so hiring ads, we’re just gonna grab their so we found a workaround where we get a name and a phone number.

Emily: Mhmm.

Peter: Then we send the person a text message with a link to the website where we have all the questions that we wanna get answered. We found that that to be pretty powerful because what was interesting is people were clicking on the link and it’s in their their, you know, text messaging inbox. So they’ll likely so it’s gonna it’s gonna be in their inbox until they delete it or whatever. Right? Exactly.

So they’re clicking on the link. We’re finding about 50% of the people that filled out the lead form actually go to the website complete the full application form that we’re putting out there. So it’s a pretty powerful way to use platform. So we start off by just asking for name and phone number, and I and I think maybe email, and then, doing it that way. So

Emily: It really prevents people who are actually maybe not that committed or not that interested, but are just like, oh, I’ll put my info in because it does take that second step. So if they’re clicking the link, they’re clearly actually interested in going further with the company. That’s really, it’s really worked out that way, really well for hiring ads. Yeah. The lead ads are really great for Facebook and Instagram for hiring.

Peter: And then the other types of ads that we were gonna talk about. So we’ve got lead ads. Oh, I know the other kind we were talking about is traffic ads where you’re just driving traffic to a website. Now we can do that with Facebook, Insta, some of these other platforms, and we use that to work together with remarketing. So we’re driving traffic from Facebook to the website.

They’re not filling out a form or anything like that, but then they go to the website. Once they go to the website, they get tagged with a cookie from Google, and then we’re able to put them in our remarketing retargeting pool and show ads, to them as they so it helps build the brand, basically, even if they only saw the saw the website for just a split second the first time.

Emily: Yeah. So they can go to the site and then we’ll kind of follow them all around the Internet. How many days is remarketing? Are they in the remarketing pool? Five hundred and

Peter: Google Google Ads remarketing pool will work for five hundred and forty days. So if they visited your website, you can follow them with ads for up to five forty days. And those ads are display ads. Those are ads that are banner ads and those types of things. And there are ways to actually run YouTube remarketing ads as well, where you’re running videos to people who’ve come to your website and things like that.

A little more sophisticated. So we’ve talked about remarketing ads, lead ads, and then the hybrid lead and text message ad. I guess the the last one that I wanna touch on a little more is just a regular lead ad, which is available on for example, we’re running those, and we’re running hiring ads on TikTok right now using a TikTok lead ad and doing the same thing we’re doing with the Facebook campaign where we’re we’re just getting the name and the phone number and then send him a text message. Those are those seem to be performing about the same as about as well as the Facebook ads. In fact, in some cases, they’re beating them on a cost per lead basis.

But the last thing I wanted to talk about though was getting back to lead ads by themselves. So if you have a service of some sort that you’re trying to sell, and it doesn’t seem to work for high, high, high value products Mhmm. Where most of the clients we work with are used to just getting, oh, I wanna lead, and they’re ready to buy today. Right? Mhmm.

And Mhmm. If you’re buying a roof, $20,000 product, we haven’t had massive success yet with that level of, product. It’s probably better to use it for a lower ticket item like a, an appointment of some sort.

Emily: It works really well. Very low cost per lead. And yeah. So we basically ask probably close to around five questions, again, contact information, and then maybe a question directly surrounding your business. And then that information gets sent directly to the business.

So they can directly call that person, email them, however they wanna handle that lead. We leave that up to them. But we do suggest a very quick turnaround on those, contact forms just immediately reaching out to that person and saying, alright, let’s get this booked kind of thing. So it’s a great way to get those get that cold audience and move them into a much more interested audience.

Peter: Exactly. Yeah. Yep. This has been a great conversation today. I know we’ve covered a lot of ground here.

I’m sure folks have a lot of questions as well. And, what I’m gonna recommend is if you’d like to schedule a consultation with myself, and I can loop in Emily as well, go to our website, bizmktg.com. Got a big book consultation. It’s a free consultation that we’ll book with you. You know, we’ll just kinda learn about what your goals are, what your needs are.

You know, take a look at, our experience, and we’ll we’ll see if there’s something that we can offer you that will help you, grow. And if you’re already spending money online, we could also analyze, to a certain degree what maybe what you’re doing on your own or what another vendor’s doing for you and offer suggestions. We’re not in the business of trying to get you to switch, but if we think that there’s a better way to serve you, we’ll certainly tell you that. Is there anything you wanna add, Emily?

Emily: Yeah. No. I think that’s a great again, we’re just here to help, here to kind of be the authority on ads kind of thing. Like, we know what we’re doing, and so we’re here to just help you. That’s really what we’re interested in.

Peter: Well, Emily, thanks a lot for today. Look forward to another conversation real soon. Thanks for listening to this episode of Biz and Life Done Well with Peter Wilson. You can subscribe to us on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and most of the other popular podcast platforms. Please tell your friends about us and leave us a review so even more people will find out about us.

Thanks again. We’ll see you soon.