Title: How To Reach Your Prospects With Effective Advertising – **1PMP Series**
Guest: Chris Goldman
Peter: The one page marketing plan chapter three, the third box in the nine boxes in the one page marketing plan, and it is what Alan Dib calls reaching prospects with advertising media. 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.
My guest is business coach and marketing strategist, Chris Goldman. We are going to be talking about the one page marketing plan chapter three, the third box in the nine boxes in the one page marketing plan, and it is what Alan Dib calls reaching prospects with advertising media. If you haven’t decided on your target market and you haven’t crafted a message for them, you should not be putting advertising out there. It’s a great way to waste money. So if you haven’t selected your target market or crafted your message, listen to previous podcasts that we’ve done on those topics and, of course, get Alan Dibs book.
And if we have some copies left, we’ll be giving them away. I’ve got about 20 more copies available for free. Send an email to free@bizmktg.com. We’ll send you a free copy of the book. We’ll just mail it to you.
We’re talking like old school paperback copy. Today, we’re talking about reaching prospects. You are paying generally to get your message in front of folks. So where do we start with this, Chris?
Chris Goldman: I’m gonna be asking you a lot of questions today because this is really more in your area. Let’s set the table a little bit here. He has a great illustration he uses for marketing, and he wants you to not think in terms of being a hunter, but in terms of being a farmer. A hunter wakes up in the morning, goes out and hunt something to eat for that day, and the next day they have to repeat it. A farmer is planting seeds that’s gonna provide crops that’s that’s gonna gonna last you months after month after month.
And when we get into marketing and messaging and now our media, we really have to be thinking in terms of not the quick hit as much as we are the long term value. We’re gonna use these tools. Let’s talk about the base of it. Why do we need a website, Pete? Because a lot of people do ask that.
Do I really need a website today? What’s the point? What’s the purpose?
Peter: The point of a website is it is the one digital piece that you have 100% control over. Over. The name, the look, colors, it’s the one piece of media that you can control 100%. And what I mean by that is if you just rely on a Facebook page for your business, Facebook controls ultimately what your Facebook page looks like. And they constantly are changing that, and I’ve seen some companies rely on that.
And then Facebook makes a change, and next thing you know, they’re hurting. They’re like, wow. We had great business, and now the phones aren’t ringing. So you wanna have a piece of real estate, so to speak, out in the digital world that you can control 100. That’s really the primary reason.
And you wanna give folks a place to go to if their friends refer them. And if they refer the name of your business to a friend, the friend should be able to just Google the name of your business, and your website should pop up.
Chris Goldman: So that piece of real estate you control makes a big difference. Now once we have the the we have the market down target market, we’ve got the message. Now we’ve got our media home base, which is your website. What do we wanna do typically next in the digital marketing world?
Peter: The next thing we wanna do is we wanna figure out where the target audience or target market is going to most likely be. When when you go to Google, you know, it’s a verb, Google it, and you Google something, for example, roofing contractor near me, you’re going to see ads at the top of the page for sure, whether you’re on your phone or on your desktop because that search roofing company near me has a high commercial intent. Anything that Google can monetize, they are going to do that. By monetize, mean, they’re gonna run ads for it. The good news is is if you have a roofing company, if you wanna get in front of people that are searching for roofing company near me or things like that, you can can run ads and that’s Google search ads.
As a company, you pay each time somebody clicks on your ads. Now I happen to work a lot in the roofing space, roofing contractors, and we know roofing contractors are gonna pay anywhere from say, well, maybe $20 to $40 per click. That can add up pretty quick. So if you are in a highly competitive space and the the amount of money that people are spending, you know, for example, getting a roof done, that’s probably $20,000, the cost per click is gonna be more expensive than if you were looking for tacos near me. In fact, tacos near me, there might not be anybody advertising for those keywords.
So as a roofing company, you pick the keywords that you wanna be shown your ads shown for. People search for that. They see your ad. They click on your ad, and then they end up at your website. One of the things that we have to do if we’re going to run any kind of advertising, online or offline, is we have to have tracking in place.
One of the things that we do is we set up a call tracking number. So if somebody comes to your website and they had been on a Google ad, they’re actually gonna see a different phone number on your website. It’ll forward directly to your line. You don’t have to worry about that. But they’ll call that number, and then we have a record of that person calling based on the ad click from Google.
So it’s super important to have call tracking and form submission tracking on your website. So if somebody comes to your website from an ad that you’re running, you know how they got there. And the technology has been around for at least twelve years, maybe more. It’s very standard in the industry now, and a lot of people use it. Whatever you do before you spend money, make sure you get that set up correctly on your website.
Chris Goldman: So If you’re not doing this, it it’s really important to understand. If you’re not doing this, you’re not gonna be able to know what’s effective for your company and the audience you’re trying to reach. And after all, the goal is not just getting our name out there. Pete, what’s the goal, Pete?
Peter: Alan has in his book. He said, don’t use advertising to get your name out there. Rather than getting your name out there, you’ll fare far much better by concentrating on getting the name of your prospects in here.
Chris Goldman: So we wanna make sure that your message is clear to the customers you’re targeting through the media that you’re reaching them with so it actually generates the customer coming into your space, your digital showroom, if you will.
Peter: Whether or not they’re ready to buy today, which is, an interesting phenomenon that you see with Google paid search ads. That is intent marketing, meaning people are actually searching for you. They have an intent. So it’s a perfect advertising. Right?
When that’s why Google is worth $1,200,000,000,000 now because people have an intent. They’re looking for you. They’re looking for a service, and they get served ads for that service. It’s almost like the old phone book where you would, you know, you would advertise on a page in the phone book and the specific page you decided to be on was the service you were offering because people would grab the phone book and use that as the source to find something. So it really was intent marketing back then as well.
It’s just a modern version of the phone book in some ways with respect to intent. But Google paid search ads and Bing paid search ads right now are the best way to find people who are really looking for a product or service. From a advertising perspective, it doesn’t get much better than that. That’s kind of the place that we start.
Chris Goldman: And we don’t wanna minimize the concept of name recognition, brand recognition. That’s very important. We don’t wanna minimize that. But if you’re just throwing stuff out there to get your name recognized without the right structure to support it, it’s not gonna do what it needs to do for you. Okay.
So here’s some other things we have. We have website. We have the Google Ads. Tell me about the current world of social media ads. Primarily, when we think of social media ads, we’re thinking of Facebook, and we’re thinking of Instagram.
They’re always changing and shifting. What do, clients need to know?
Peter: One thing I wanna preface all of this discussion by saying that we are focused on companies that are selling a primarily a service.
Chris Goldman: Yes.
Peter: We are not talking about ecommerce companies that are trying to get a direct sale every time somebody clicks on an ad. So just bear that in mind as we go forward here. With respect to social media ads, they are good at finding a group of people based on demographics, for example, or location. And Google Ads can do location. In fact, any advertising that you’re gonna spend money on, you should be able to control the location.
Right? You don’t want it just to go all over the place, which is a problem with radio advertising, for example, because radio signals go everywhere. So so that’s one thing to bear in mind is how well you can target down to the spot that you’re looking for. Facebook ads, see, are still very effective. Now there are different types of Facebook ads that you can run.
One of the types of ads that we find to be very good is called a lead ad. What happens is somebody sees the ad for your product or service, they click on it and they fill out some information, the call to action on the ad could be booked now, get the download. In any event, you’re going to collect the user’s email address and or phone number and name and their ZIP code as well. So you’re going to know where they’re located, and that information is then gonna get sent to your business. Now maybe there was a promise of a a PDF you were gonna send them or some offer that they were gonna capture or a coupon that they were capturing.
And so you’re obviously gonna respond with that. But now that you have their information, that really is that step that we were looking for is getting them so you’re knowing who are the people that are seeing your ads and reacting to them and responding. So again, going back to what Alan Dib said, it’s you’re faring much better by concentrating on getting the name of your prospects. So really what you’re doing is you’re getting leads. You’re not necessarily getting a sale.
It obviously depends on the product that you’re selling. But Facebook is really good at that. And what I tell a lot of our customers is Google paid search ads are the lowest part of the funnel. People with a high intent for your product. But what if they’ve never heard of your product, they don’t even know to search for it?
Chris Goldman: Yep.
Peter: Google ads aren’t gonna work. Right? So you’re going to have to then use what I call interruption advertising, which is Facebook. And Facebook ads are tied to Instagram as well. So if you’re running a campaign on Facebook, you can run the same ads.
It’s a different version of the ad, but you can run that same type of ad on Instagram as well. So those are all two tied together. So we kinda lump those two platforms together. Obviously, each of those cam each of those platforms has its own pluses and minuses. For example, Instagram seems to be really good for doing ecommerce.
Right? Mhmm. I see a lot of things that I’ve never seen before on my Instagram feed and there’s always a little shop button there. Mhmm. They show me just enough to really intrigue me.
And so I click on it and and next thing you know, I’m shopping for something I didn’t even know existed five minutes ago. One thing I do wanna note though is that with all of these, new types of ads that you’re running on Instagram, you know, five years ago, not everybody was on Instagram. It seems like a lot of people are on Instagram now, is that you’re gonna need to have video assets. Yeah. So just running a static picture ad is really difficult to get responses now.
Videos and video ads really is kind of the gold standard and it’s just kind of the way every everybody’s going. So that interruption type advertising, Facebook and social media really effective. The cool thing about it also is if you have a loyal following of customers and they see your ad, a lot of times they’ll like your ad. Yeah. And they’ll comment on your ad.
And so that will actually boost the effectiveness of your ad. I think Facebook ads and Instagram ads are a great place to start. TikTok, you really have to have a person who understands that platform and understands what resonates on it if you’re gonna attempt to use that platform. You can’t just take some videos and feed them up there. You can, but you’re you’re not gonna get very good results.
TikTok is really kind of a beast of its own right now. And I would say if you can’t find a specialist, don’t even go there. Yeah. The other thing that I wanted to talk about with video is YouTube, which of course is owned by Google. Hopefully, everybody knows that.
YouTube ads can be extremely effective because now on YouTube, you can make your ad associate with any video on the platform. So think about that.
Chris Goldman: Amazing.
Peter: So you’ve got a video from a competitor for their product. You could literally tag your ad to show on their video. Now that’s pretty sneaky. Right. So but the YouTube is a very effective platform.
We’re running campaigns for one of our clients on YouTube, and we’re getting really good results. Now one of the things you have to bear in mind though is the ads should be well produced. Now some people will say, oh, you know, you could just take a video on your phone and blah blah blah, and there’s sort of this movement to do that. But we found that if you’re selling a high priced product I mean, if you’re just selling little widgets for nothing, then, yeah, go ahead and do whatever you want on your phone to make a video. But I’m not saying phone video is bad, but you need to have a good production value, whatever you’re using for your platform.
But if you’re selling something of big value, for example, let’s go back to roofing, you’re gonna need to have an ad that was produced well. Yeah. Otherwise, that will reflect poorly on your company, and you could look fly by night if people don’t spend the time to get the video produced well. Go ahead.
Chris Goldman: Think of it this way. If I’m a law firm and I’m doing advertisement on Instagram or on YouTube video and I’m and I’m looking, I’m not gonna build customer brand loyalty through doing that and confidence, and they need to have confidence. Now one thing that we wanna make sure we don’t miss in all of this is people are filling out forms and giving you their emails. If you’re not backing up that information with email marketing, then you’re really missing out. And I know every day, you probably open up your email.
You’re like, I gotta go through this whole list of newsletters that I get and just delete, delete, delete. Every time a person looks at your email to delete it, they’re seeing that you sent them an email, and they’re getting some content. A lot of great marketers will tell you is having people unsubscribe is not a problem because as long as you have more subscribers than unsubscribers, you’re still growing your list. And if you have an open rate above 20%, you should just smile and say, okay. Great.
So I get those advertisements every day through all the advertisements I’m going through, and I usually, on any given day, I’ll open up four or five of them because they catch my attention. Alan did does a great job of this on the email marketing and the media.
Peter: Oh, yeah.
Chris Goldman: Is you wanna have a good tagline that’s gonna get their attention, kind of a a topic line, and then you’re gonna wanna decide what kind of approach you’re gonna take. And there’s a couple that he talks about. One is more like a blogger who’s gonna write, you know, two to 3,000 words and put it in there. And if the content is strong, people will read it. I know that we do on marketing.
There’s a couple of marketing newsletters we really get into because they give you about five or six great pages of internal depth. So I’ll read that one more than I will, you know, just a a standard one. But there’s also I can read really quick and leave an email that also is attractive. That if I can glance at it, can get the information and move on in a few seconds, also very effective.
Peter: Mhmm.
Chris Goldman: I guess the key here is don’t try to live in Neverland.
Peter: Right.
Chris Goldman: Try to pick exactly what you’re going after and what you’re gonna do. Now something else that’s kinda making a comeback, talk to us about actual old snail mail, Pete.
Peter: Yeah. I’ve seen resurgence in snail mail, and it’s true because a lot of companies are now switching to digital only. That means that, in theory at least, you should be getting less mail in your mailbox. And a lot of companies are now using postcards and other forms of advertising to reach out. Now the people that I see all the time are like the credit card offers.
I mean, that’s that’s normal. But I’m seeing some companies send out really well produced postcards, for example. And the nice thing is, like, think back ten years ago, we didn’t have QR codes. If we did, nobody used them. Thanks to COVID, everybody knows what a QR code is.
Chris Goldman: Mhmm.
Peter: Now if you’re producing anything in print, you wanna have a QR code on there because we can program a QR code with what’s called a universal tag. And so if somebody scans that QR code, which will go to your website, we know what they did on your website. And if they decide to call you or text message you or fill out a form on your website, we know that it was that QR code that they scanned before they did that. Now we don’t know who the individual was until they reveal the details. I mean, I don’t wanna get too creepy here.
But it is yeah. So we’re looking at with snail mail, postcards, for example, having QR code for sure, having an offer, having a phone number that happens to be a call tracking number that was assigned just to that campaign, and also a web address that goes to a special offer. But most people, if they see a QR code or a phone number, they’re probably gonna either scan the QR code or call the number if they wanna take advantage of the service. Now the other thing is folks wanna text. So if you’re putting a phone number on there, make sure that it’s text enabled and say call or text us
Chris Goldman: Yes.
Peter: And have a way to respond to those. We’ve got some systems that do that. But you wanna make sure because what we’re finding is the younger folks out there, for whatever reason, don’t wanna talk to people on the phone. They just wanna send a text message. Those are some things that are really important.
And if you have a website, of course, you wanna make sure you have a call us or text button on your website for mobile users in addition to the forms that you would normally have on your website. So I I see snail mail as being effective. I do have a client that uses Google Ads. They are in a lot of print ad mediums, and they’re doing radio. And I had lunch the other day with both the owners.
And I said, how do you measure the success of each of those? He says, I don’t worry about it. I know they all work together. Now we are putting tracking numbers on everything just so they have an idea of what people are doing. But, what they’re saying is that the radio feeds the website.
He said, you know, the web and Google is probably getting more more credit than it deserves because people are hearing our radio ad for the name of our company and then googling the name of the company. Yeah. Obviously, that looks like a Google search, but in fact, it was started by the radio.
Chris Goldman: Yeah. It’s prompted by it. And and, hey, a a couple of things here to just think about. When you I first identify your target market, then you craft your message. We had this experience with one of our clients the other day.
We’d done all the work on their messaging. And when they went to the radio station, said we’d like to do some advertising. Radio station said, do you have an idea of what you wanna say? They said, yeah. Here’s our marketing message.
And the radio response was, oh my gosh. You know your message. And they were able to quickly get ads up and working and getting their name and their message out there. All the media requires the messaging. And one of the ones that is popular and they’re still feeling their way through it, though, are the podcast commercials, which are becoming more and more effective.
Because now a lot of people don’t listen to live radio. They listen to prerecorded podcasts that have inserted advertisements at strategic points. And so doing the recording, yes, that’s good, they’re gonna give the option. And as a business owner, you wanna really think that through. Maybe there is a podcast specific that your customers you’re learning, a lot of them listen to or the people you’d like to reach are listening to, and you can connect it with that.
Peter: Right.
Chris Goldman: Great strategy.
Peter: And there’s one other platform that we’ve run a campaign or two for, which is Spotify. So Spotify has an ad supported subscription, and then they have the paid subscriptions. But the free subscription or the free Spotify has ads, and I pay for mine, so I don’t hear the ads. But one of our clients wanted to get on Spotify, and it was nice because it was relatively approachable. It was about a $2,000 buy to get started.
And it’s a targeted audience, so there’s actually more targeting available on Spotify, but you’re paying more per person to reach Yeah. The people. But you can be more specific about who you’re reaching. So for certain target markets, Spotify would be a consideration in addition to the podcast platforms that you can target your market.
Chris Goldman: Okay. So one more thing that I wanna make sure I drop in here relative to the one page marketing plan of what we’re doing here is we walk you through this. Yep. As we said, you’ve gotta get your target market first, your message second, and your media third. But you also have to understand that just like we said, the media without the market and the messaging does not work.
You can have a great identified target market and have a great message, but if you don’t get it out there, it’s not gonna work for you. So it this is not an either or thing. This all works together. And all actually, all nine of Alan Dib’s featured one page marketing plan I call them quadrants. They’re not quadrants, obviously.
Peter: Yeah.
Chris Goldman: So sections and tabs.
Peter: Each row each row before, during, after. Yep.
Chris Goldman: They’re so critical in this media part. You wanna do it strategically so you’re getting the most for your money. One shout out to Pete, the team that works at Biz Marketing with this, is they’re constantly tracking the data. What’s working? What’s not working?
And I love this Alan Dib quote. He has in there people ask me all the time, how can you measure the effectiveness of a campaign, a marketing campaign? And he said, I can answer that with one question. Did the campaign make me money? Now there’s a lot of data under that to support it, but if you want a easy way to measure it, let’s try this for a time and don’t just try it for a day.
Try it for a season, and you’ll know if it’s making you money or not. Depending upon what kind of services and products you’re selling, it is going to be a trial and error sometime, and you shouldn’t panic at that. That’s just part of the process.
Peter: Right. Well, there was one other thing that Alan talked about that I wanted to share, which was protect your business from a single point of failure. And what he means by that is if you are just relying on one source of leads in your business, Like, a lot of businesses just rely on word-of-mouth when they get started. Mhmm. If you’re just standing on that one leg for marketing, you’re really putting a lot of risk, and you should have at least three legs to your marketing strategy.
And I would encourage you as a business to think about that. Make sure you’ve got more than one leg that your marketing and new business is relying on.
Chris Goldman: Yeah. Well, we certainly hope that you’re enjoying this one page marketing podcast and gaining some insights from it. Again, if you’d like to have the book, you can email us at free at biz m k t g dot com, and we will send you an actual physical book that you can mark up right in and use it as you’re going through the day. And we want to make sure that you know that we are all about helping you win online. That’s what we wanna see.
We want to see businesses win. We are here to help in any way that we can. Pete, what’s your final word for the day?
Peter: Thank you, Alan Dib, for writing this great book, The one Page Marketing Plan. I’m holding up a copy of it right now. 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.
