Struggling with Paid Ads? Here's Why Your Strategy Isn't Working [Endless Customers Podcast Ep. 59]

This transcript has been generated by AI and not checked for accuracy.

Tanner Holman
0:00:00
Alex, if you are a business and you're running paid ads, the one thing that you have to do

Tanner Holman
0:00:04
is...

Alex Winter
0:00:14
Join us for Impact Live 2024 in Hartford, Connecticut, this October 14th through the 16th. Over three days, business owners, CEOs, and marketing and sales leaders will learn proven strategies to drive business growth. Attend expert-led sessions on marketing, sales, leadership, and AI, and get a chance to network with industry pros just like yourself. Discover how companies like yours are dominating their markets. Secure your spot at impactplus.com backslash impact-5.

Alex Winter
0:00:46
And for all of our endless customers listeners, we have an exclusive discount code that'll save you a hundred bucks. So when you're on the checkout page, just enter the code ECPOD100 in all caps for a hundred dollars off. We'll see you there at impact live 2024 up in Hartford, October 14th. Welcome back to endless customers, the show that helps you earn trust and win more business in the age of AI.

Alex Winter
0:01:08
I'm your host, Alex winter. And today we are joined by Tanner Holman. He's a paid ad strategist here at Impact. Tanner, welcome to the show.

Tanner Holman
0:01:18
Thanks for having me.

Alex Winter
0:01:20
I am pumped to have you. This is a really cool topic because we haven't really hit on this one a lot on this show and it's about paid advertising and paid media and it's a hot topic. I think a lot of people have questions, want to get more involved, but it's complicated. There's a lot of moving parts to it and I'm glad we have an expert to talk to because I don't know all the inner workings of this either. So I hope it's cool.

Alex Winter
0:01:43
We're going to pick your brain today and really get into it.

Tanner Holman
0:01:45
Happy to.

Alex Winter
0:01:46
Awesome.

Alex Winter
0:01:47
All right.

Alex Winter
0:01:48
So we're all about creating trust building and organic content, content here at Impact. And if you think about they ask, you answer and just everything that we teach through endless customers, the mentality is very much about building trust, being helpful and We want to try to figure out the best ways to bridge those gaps with paid advertising as well So the swell team which is our paid team here at impact You help a lot of brands and a lot of customers and a lot of clients do that

Alex Winter
0:02:13
So can we talk a little bit about how even though paid may seem a little old-school advertising pushy how you can still build trust and how you can still be honest and do it in in a

Tanner Holman
0:02:23
Decent way rather than like a grimy way, I guess. Yeah, yeah, totally. It's really interesting. You know, I've worked with a lot of brands in a lot of different industries over the course of my career,

Tanner Holman
0:02:34
but the Taya sort of foundation really provides some really strong groundwork for paid ads in itself, right? Because the concepts are still the same. We have to build trust, we have to engage with our customers

Tanner Holman
0:02:49
and our potential customers in this case and start to build a relationship with them before they may even be searching for the product that they need at the current moment.

Alex Winter
0:02:59
Yeah, so how do we do that? Like as a business leader or as a business owner, I wanna build trust, I wanna meet people where they are, but maybe the organic piece isn't working as well as I had hoped it would or we're trying to gain traction

Alex Winter
0:03:12
as we're scaling and building momentum, how can a paid campaign help with, just help with the overall push towards gaining traction? And then what should business owners be thinking about as far as the technical piece, the budget, do they hire outside, how does all that work?

Alex Winter
0:03:29
Or what's the best mindset to be in

Tanner Holman
0:03:30
as you start to entertain the idea of paid? Yeah, yeah, definitely. One of the benefits in my mind that paid has over the organic side, and they both have merits, don't get me wrong. I'm definitely on board with,

Tanner Holman
0:03:43
all of these avenues are worth pursuing. But one of the big benefits for paid is that you can scale it up or scale it down as needed, right? So say you're creating organic content, you're starting to see some traction, but it's not quite moving as quick as you want it to.

Tanner Holman
0:03:59
One of your easiest options is to start gaining data and gaining traffic and traction through paid. So whether you're running on Google and you can target things that people are already searching when they're in the market for your product or researching your product or service, you can start to send traffic there at a higher rate than where you may be at organically right now. Now, is that going to get results right away? Not all the time. Sometimes these

Tanner Holman
0:04:20
things take time to scale, but it helps you get the data points that you need to then start jumping in and say, Oh, well, maybe if I tweak this on our landing page, or maybe if I say this instead of that, we can start to test things at a much faster rate than you can typically get from that organic presence when you're just starting out

Tanner Holman
0:04:35
or starting to build that machine up.

Alex Winter
0:04:37
Gotcha, gotcha, okay, that makes sense. So what should businesses, or what is an ideal situation, and I know there is no perfect scenario, but what is a primo situation that this is when you want to start leading into paid advertising?

Tanner Holman
0:04:52
Yeah, no, that's a great question. So I've worked with companies that are essentially startups, family owned, family operated, as well as all the way up into big C-suites, multi-billion dollar companies in some instances. But they all run into the same foundations

Tanner Holman
0:05:06
that they need, right? You need to make sure all of the other pieces outside of the marketing are aligned and well-oiled and functioning. You need to make sure your marketing and sales are aligned. Is what we're saying on the marketing side,

Tanner Holman
0:05:18
lining up with what's happening when someone gets on the phone with these potential opportunities. But more than anything else, you need to know your customer in and out. You need to know what they want.

Tanner Holman
0:05:26
You need to know what they're looking for, what they need, and be able to start answering those questions. Because if you can get in front of those questions and start answering them before they come to your sales team and ask,

Tanner Holman
0:05:36
you're building that relationship. You're making your sales job so much easier, that from there, it's really just a matter of scale with data and budget. So if we take a step back and say, I can send 10,000 users to your website in 30 days, what are your conversion rates looking like? What is your conversion to contact rate, contact to lead, and start getting a pulse for where you can ebb and flow this up without those metrics

Tanner Holman
0:06:03
or those processes thoroughly outlined. It's a lot slower to scale, right? Because you have to, it takes longer to figure out what's working, what's not working. But if you have these foundation pieces all set up and ready to go, then the data sort of speaks for itself

Tanner Holman
0:06:16
on the direction. And then you can start scaling into different audiences, different product or service offerings, different geos. Something that I like to do is, you know, if we have a national company, let's start with one area. Let's hone in really, really well in this area

Tanner Holman
0:06:31
so then we can start scaling that out. Instead of testing everything, everywhere all at once, let's take this one piece, get it humming really well, and then duplicate it out best as possible.

Alex Winter
0:06:40
That's really fascinating. I've never really heard that, and it's cool to hear that because I feel like a lot of times people try to blank it. It's like the spray and pray idea or mentality of like, let's just, we want to hit the entire nation, let's go all 50 states, let's just blast it and see what happens. And it's just interesting

Alex Winter
0:06:57
to hear you say that. It seems to be more strategic to dial it in geographically in a smaller area, test it, A-B test it, which would do all the science behind making sure that the campaign's dialed in and then expanding it out to a wider geographic net. That's cool. You also said something earlier that I have to ask. So it definitely plays into a larger marketing strategy and I think that is a big misconception and I hear this all the time on the street and with clients and with people and interactions

Alex Winter
0:07:25
that I have too that there's almost like two different buckets I hear a lot where like marketing is doing one thing and then we either hired an external team or we have a paid specialist but like they're kind of doing separate things and that can be a problem. Have you heard that happen? And can you maybe talk a little bit about that? Because I do agree with what you're saying

Alex Winter
0:07:44
that paid drives traffic to a certain place. So you also need to have that journey mapped out in order for it to be successful. Otherwise, it's gonna fall short. You can send 10,000 people to a website, but if your website isn't up to par

Alex Winter
0:07:56
or doesn't have a call to action or some type of conversion point, it's not gonna do anything, right?

Tanner Holman
0:08:02
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So in instances where like, let's say, talking about a product where you're signing up on the website to request a demo, most people understand that requesting a demo is going to be talking to a salesperson.

Tanner Holman
0:08:14
But if you go into that call as the consumer and you jump in and want to get a pulse for what you're actually dealing with, and the person jumps on and immediately starts talking about price or tries to sell you in that moment without building that trust and building that relationship

Tanner Holman
0:08:27
either before they sign up or when you're on the call, there's a mismatch there. Right. You want to make sure that what the expectation you've set on the front end, you're following through on the back end. If I'm signing up for an ebook or an infographic or some side of some sort of upper level download, you're probably not ready to purchase yet.

Tanner Holman
0:08:43
So then someone at the business picks up the phone, calls them, tries to make that deal happen. You're starting to lose that trust because they haven't given you that indicator that they're ready to push and actually purchase this product. They're still in that research and information stage. I always say that ads are a really great amplifier.

Tanner Holman
0:09:02
We can add a lot of fuel to what is already working, but at that same time, it'll amplify a variety of issues if there's things that aren't teed up and ready to go or things that can be easily tweaked and changed to make that whole system work better. A lot of times people think that paid ads and organic are sort of their two own silos, but all of these things play together. So without those pieces set up, then you're really just setting up for more issues than

Tanner Holman
0:09:28
you already have.

Alex Winter
0:09:30
Can we talk a little bit about misconceptions? I feel like there's a lot of preconceived ideas with business owners and with just people in general that if you throw money into paid, you're gonna get instant results. Like I'm gonna spend 100 grand this month on paid ads and we're gonna get all these leads

Alex Winter
0:09:47
and our business is gonna go to the moon. And it doesn't necessarily work like that. It doesn't always work like that. And can you talk a little bit about why that's a misconception and what people should really be thinking about

Tanner Holman
0:09:58
to actually get the traction they're looking for? Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, you know, you could spend a hundred grand, you could spend 10 grand, you could spend one grand. All of those budgets can work, but you have to have the proper pieces in place

Tanner Holman
0:10:09
to make that system work. So, let's say we spent 10 grand, we got a hundred contacts, maybe half of those contacts went to a lead, maybe 25% of those contacts actually became a sale. What levers can we start looking at to boost those numbers? Do we need more contacts?

Tanner Holman
0:10:25
Awesome, let's start working out on where we're sending people on the website, changing that conversion or conversion path to start boosting those numbers to get more people in. Do we need more people going from contact to lead? Awesome. Let's start working with the messaging and aligning. Okay. Are these people actually ready to move forward or are we just peaking their

Tanner Holman
0:10:42
interest? Is this an infographic download or is this a pricing request? And then if we're talking, okay, well, these people are making it to our sales team, but they're not actually becoming sales, right? They're not actually becoming a customer. Well, then what is not aligned with the path that we've sent them on, whether that's from ads or organic, spoiler, it's probably gonna be a little bit of both.

Tanner Holman
0:11:01
And then what can we start to then blend or change to start creating this path and making sure that people are reaching out, have the information they need, they're ready to move forward, they know what they can expect when they actually get on the phone with the salesperson, saves the sales team's time, boosts their numbers, everyone's happy, right?

Alex Winter
0:11:19
And that's the goal, that's what we want, right? We want people to be happy, but we want it to be effective too, and that's the effectiveness drives the happiness, that's the result, right? So I feel like there's a lot of businesses

Alex Winter
0:11:29
that are a good fit for paid advertising. Are there businesses that maybe aren't a good fit? Or like for business owners,

Tanner Holman
0:11:35
who maybe shouldn't be entertaining the paid idea. Yeah, it's much less type of business or industry that can't do paid ads, right? Paid ads can work in any industry, any segment, for almost any product. But the biggest thing that people run into

Tanner Holman
0:11:50
is they try to use ads as that silver bullet solution. They need results now, they need revenue now. If you are too impatient, you're not willing to give each individual platform or campaign the time and the investment that it takes to make that be effective,

Tanner Holman
0:12:04
then you're gonna miss the mark. And odds are, you know, your first attempt at this, you will miss the mark on your first campaign. But what matters is the data that you get back, how you proceed and change things to move forward. It's what you do after you start launching these ads

Tanner Holman
0:12:18
that makes things grow, right? If, you know, your first piece of content you create, odds are it's probably not gonna be a home run, even on the organic side. But, you know, you start to leverage that data, you start to see how people are engaging with that content

Tanner Holman
0:12:30
and that can really help craft your next steps of how do we move forward, what do we need to do to really move the needle and ultimately start growing revenue.

Alex Winter
0:12:37
Yeah, no, that makes total sense. And I think that plays back into what you were saying earlier about when you have the option to go nationwide with a budget or a client and you would rather hone in on a specific geographic region to start because you need to test it.

Alex Winter
0:12:50
And it's similar to what we do with websites. We talk with Vin and we talk with Mary and all the experts on our web team and they say the same thing. It always comes back to the data. So data's king, data doesn't lie. So you have to use those metrics to make decisions.

Alex Winter
0:13:05
And I love that you said, too, it's probably not going to work on the first go. You need to almost make those mistakes and experiment and try it out to figure out what is gonna resonate with your audience, what is gonna stick with your audience, what the messaging should be.

Alex Winter
0:13:19
Is that fair to say that that's the right mentality to have going into it?

Tanner Holman
0:13:23
That's totally fair to say. It's exactly right. I think a lot of people tend to need to reframe what an ad is or how an ad is supposed to perform. If we're talking to someone who has never heard of your company before, then it's gonna take

Tanner Holman
0:13:36
a little bit more to start being effective and start to nurture them into your system, into your workflows and eventually have them become an opportunity and a customer. If the first time someone seeing your business is an ad and it's trying to get them to convert and buy right now, in most industries, that's not how things actually work, right? People need to be informed.

Tanner Holman
0:13:54
They need to make decisions. They need to evaluate where they're at so they can make the best decision for them. Now with ads, we just need to help align what that best decision is and make sure that they know that we are that best option and how we can start to craft that relationship to make sure it's effective for everybody. Trade ads aren't a business only result, right?

Tanner Holman
0:14:14
The thing that people miss most in this equation is the customer, the potential customer. Who are we talking to? You don't know them in and out. You don't know what is keeping them from moving forward or when they're needing to move forward, what that price is going to look like. These are all pieces that without the customer

Tanner Holman
0:14:30
knowing those, you don't have a relationship, right? If I jump in and say, say I'm a potential customer and I need a roof. Odds are I don't need a roof in this moment, but there will be a time in the future where my house is gonna need a new roof.

Tanner Holman
0:14:44
So do you want to be the person who's competing at the back end where only when people are in market searching, that's the only time you get found, or you wanna start building that relationship earlier, where by the time I need a roof,

Tanner Holman
0:14:56
I know exactly who I'm gonna go to because they've already built a relationship with me.

Alex Winter
0:15:00
That's a huge mindset shift right there. That's a really good point. So I'm curious, I'm gonna go off script here for a second because you got my wheels spinning, right? So you work with a lot of clients and a huge range of businesses from industry and size.

Alex Winter
0:15:13
Have you worked with companies that had a paid campaign that was running and they just were throwing money at it but they didn't really know what was going on, how it was working, they weren't checking the data, they were just kind of like doing it because they know they're supposed to

Alex Winter
0:15:27
but they don't really understand how it works. Have you experienced something like that and could you maybe just tell us a little bit about what happened with that and why you should be mindful

Tanner Holman
0:15:34
of those things? Yeah, absolutely. We started with a client probably about a year, year and a half ago. Very well established business, well established in their industry, arguably probably one of the top businesses in their industry. They have a well-known name, but their marketing was very fragmented, right? They're a big business with a lot of sub products and services.

Tanner Holman
0:15:56
And what they ran into was there wasn't a point person keeping their finger on the pulse of cohesive messaging. They didn't quite know what was working, what wasn't. They were spending tons of money, but it was fragmented. So they had some money going towards this product, that product, and another product. But because everything was so fragmented,

Tanner Holman
0:16:13
they didn't have that cohesion, that messaging, they weren't able to tell what was working, what's driving these things, what's driving these opportunities. So we started engaging with them. We sort of challenged them.

Tanner Holman
0:16:23
We just asked them, what is working here? What can we take away from this and start optimizing forward and they didn't know. So we had to take things back and start from the top. And the first thing you need to ask is, who are we talking to?

Tanner Holman
0:16:35
What do they care about? What motivates them? And most importantly, where are they at in their journey for getting in front of them? So they're a new platform. Sorry to cut you off, but so really like,

Alex Winter
0:16:45
going back to basics, like shifting the mentality and the first step of the approach and going back to the personas of who you're trying to speak to. So it was like almost hitting the reset button, it sounds like.

Tanner Holman
0:16:59
Exactly, it was a complete reset. We had ended up turning off all of their campaigns and starting from scratch because there were so many different things going on that weren't cohesive, they weren't playing well together, everything was different.

Tanner Holman
0:17:11
So we jump in, we start from the top, who are we talking to, where are they at, then we start to meet the customer where they are. So are they on Facebook browsing, you know, memes for the on their lunch break? Awesome. Well, we need to introduce content that's that's engaging and informative rather than by now. If are they on Google searching for the product right now?

Tanner Holman
0:17:30
Great. We can get more direct. We can start jumping in saying, get a price, get an estimate or learn more about these individual facets and start to build that relationship in a different way.

Alex Winter
0:17:42
Gotcha, yeah, that makes so much sense because different personas play on different platforms and different social media platforms. So you have to think about that and think about all the different facets of when they're engaging with this content.

Alex Winter
0:17:54
That makes so much sense. So it's got me thinking too, and I'm curious, I said earlier, like, oh, my company's spending 100 grand a month on paid, and I just threw that number out there because that's a big number.

Alex Winter
0:18:04
Six figures a month is a lot of money on a paid campaign. But generally speaking, I know this is a loaded question, but generally speaking, what should people be entertaining for a budget when it comes to paid advertising? Like maybe a monthly or an annual, I don't know what's best, but like budgeting-wise,

Alex Winter
0:18:21
what should people be expecting or thinking about?

Tanner Holman
0:18:23
Yeah, I would sort of throw a question back out back to you or the person who would be talking to in this instance and say, what are you trying to make happen? Are you trying to make a profit on a specific product? Are you trying to get more lead volume? You trying to become a thought leader in your industry? Each of these goals have a vastly different strategy with different levels of engagement

Tanner Holman
0:18:43
underneath them. If you need more leads, then you may want to stick to a platform like Google Ads where you have additional opportunity and a certain level of intent behind it. If you're trying to become a thought leader, you're probably more into LinkedIn, Meta, these platforms where you can start to engage at a high level, but that may not translate into leads, right? Because you're crafting that relationship. We're not

Tanner Holman
0:19:04
going click, invert, sell. We're trying to plant ourselves in their brain and we focus on things like reach and frequency. How many unique users did we get in front of? How many times did we get in front of them in that particular period? We're talking specifics on price. There's a couple of ways to look at it.

Tanner Holman
0:19:21
With agencies, the agency fees, you're typically paying for experience or depth in various platforms and really if experience overcoming obstacles, right? So, you can find a cheap agency or a Fiverr freelancer to run ads for you,

Tanner Holman
0:19:34
but they may not have that experience behind them to say, oh, well, when I hit this roadblock, here's what we need to do, here's that path forward. We're talking about specific platforms and how much do I need to be spending where? It's highly, highly dependent on the business.

Tanner Holman
0:19:47
Are you a local business? Are you a national and international business? Each of these things are gonna play into a big factor of your targeting. So for me to say, yeah, you need to be spending $30,000 on ads each month would be a little disingenuous

Tanner Holman
0:19:59
to the individual businesses, right? It's a very nuanced equation of what are we trying to make happen, where do we need to make it happen, and how many people do we need to get in front of to make the end result, meet our goals.

Alex Winter
0:20:12
Yeah, that's really well said. And again, there's parallels here with the web team, and I keep going back to it, because I was talking with Mary Brown earlier here in office and it comes back to really thinking about your audience. Again, and it's like, if you want to meet them where they are and you want

Alex Winter
0:20:27
to build trust you have to you have to think of all these factors and not just throw money on it thinking that like set it and forget it and hopefully it works it's a living breathing thing just like your website so you're constantly going to be adjusting shifting changing and fine-tuning to get it to a place that

Tanner Holman
0:20:44
makes the most sense and that sounds like the budget may fluctuate depending on those factors. Absolutely it has to right I mean there could be a change two weeks from now that just completely disrupts the Google search ecosystem. If we look back at meta over the last couple of years, there's been changes to what we can target, who we can get in front of and how we can get in front of them to where these things always have to be fluid. That's why it's so important when you're running paid devs to exactly like you said, keep your

Tanner Holman
0:21:09
finger on the pulse and make sure that it's not just a set it, forget it, because it can become very easy to lose money very quickly if you start to operate that way.

Alex Winter
0:21:17
Yeah, well, and bottom line, it always comes back to ROI. And I think the mentality shift for business leaders and for marketing leaders out there is, and it's happening to me right now, is like you could just throw a bunch of money at it and hope it works, or you could really get strategic

Alex Winter
0:21:30
and think about your audience and do exactly what we've been talking about and ultimately know that you're investing this to hopefully get a return on your investment and that return comes with the journey that you create to get to get people bought in to get people to have that trust in your your vision your business whatever

Alex Winter
0:21:47
whatever the case may be so that's a really big piece is thinking about the ROI so with that what are some common roadblocks when starting with paid advertising that people should expect or can you give us some like maybe misconceptions that people are like thinking is gonna happen when they start but the reality is this is this is what you should be

Tanner Holman
0:22:04
thinking about and getting ready for. Yeah, oh man, I could talk about this all day long. The number one thing that I see and that really irks me when I'm either auditing accounts or talking to other people running ads is everyone, the first time they start running ads,

Tanner Holman
0:22:18
tries to take their audience from zero to 100. They are asking you to marry them on the first date. It's the joke we always make. But, then it ignores.

Alex Winter
0:22:26
No whining, no wine. Exactly. Okay.

Tanner Holman
0:22:28
Exactly. It completely ignores the one thing that matters most. And that's the person that you're talking to, right? You have to get that understanding of where they're at. You know, we have run plenty of campaigns that purely the goal is to get them to a blog to consume it. Then we follow up with different campaigns after that to start nurturing them

Tanner Holman
0:22:44
through the process. But very rarely is there going to be a circumstance where I run an ad to an audience, it's the first time they're seeing it and we're asking them to buy in that moment. Because that's the fastest way to lose trust, right? They immediately know if they fill out that form,

Tanner Holman
0:22:57
they're going to get hounded by sales, they know they're not ready to move forward there yet, and so you're significantly limiting your opportunity to craft that relationship and start to get yourself in the mind of these people so that when they're ready to move forward, they know that they can trust you

Tanner Holman
0:23:12
and that you will do the right.

Alex Winter
0:23:13
Yeah, so true. I actually recently had a paid ad that I saw and I was like, ooh, this is cool. And I clicked on it and it took me to a form fill that basically wanted, you know, like my first born child to have a worth of information that I had to give

Alex Winter
0:23:26
and that I instantly fell off. I was like, nope, I'm not filling out this form. So that's a really interesting point and it literally happened to me and I'm sure it happens to a lot of people out there. So it really does matter where you direct people

Alex Winter
0:23:37
and thinking through what that journey looks like.

Tanner Holman
0:23:40
And to make that effective, it goes back to that foundation, right? If they had maybe provided you with a download or a document and maybe got your email at the most and started to provide you with more helpful information, they might even be able to speed up that timeline

Tanner Holman
0:23:52
of when you're able to or ready to move forward. But because you got there, you saw that form, you're like, okay, I know what's gonna happen next. They're gonna try to sell me. You weren't ready. They lost you completely.

Tanner Holman
0:24:02
So that click, that money that was spent to get in front of you was arguably wasted in that moment because instead of building that trust, they went straight for the revenue. And unfortunately, that's not how paid ads works because everyone likes to think, okay, well, I spent, let's just say I spent a thousand dollars this month. I didn't make a thousand back. Well, how many opportunities did you just open up in that moment of people who are now

Tanner Holman
0:24:25
starting to leverage and build trust with you so that when they're ready to move forward, maybe it's in 14 days, maybe it's in six months, that you've planted that seed so that they'll go to you first and even considering or searching for it if they're competitors.

Alex Winter
0:24:37
Right, and then once that client converts, how much is that client actually worth for net revenue to your business? So that all plays into the equation. That's a really good point, really, really good point. So I have to ask this because we talk a lot about AI

Alex Winter
0:24:50
on this show and I'm going off script again, but I love talking with you and you just like, you have my wheels spinning and I really, I really wanted to ask you this. So for the future with AI and with everything that's happening, what do you see like paid ads doing

Alex Winter
0:25:05
as we move into 2025 and beyond with artificial intelligence?

Tanner Holman
0:25:10
Yeah, I mean, I leverage AI almost daily in the paid ad space. It can be really helpful at parsing out data, helping make sense of a lot of the different data points that we look at day in, day out. I mean, any one campaign, there's probably 10 to 15 metrics that you really need to keep an eye on because that can help take the next steps.

Tanner Holman
0:25:30
And same with the creative side, right? If you need help iterating out on ideas or or even a starting point with ads, AI can be a great resource to help that. And for me, it helps speed up my timeline of completion. Right. For when I'm launching a new campaign, the hardest thing for me to do is get that first iteration, that first idea out there of what is important to these people.

Tanner Holman
0:25:50
And you can start to leverage that and move forward. Now, I don't think that we're in a situation right now where, you know, AI is going to replace paid ads because there's there's so many nuances that are unique to business that it's going to continue to be more of a tool rather than replace me. And maybe I'm maybe I'm hopeful there, but I have confidence that where paid ads or paid ads experts, in my experience, is very crucial, is being able to distill information and relay the important information back to our clients so that we can move. Right. I could jump in and share, you know,

Tanner Holman
0:26:26
six months worth of those 15 data points, but without having someone who knows, okay, well, this number's a little off, here's what we can change it. That's gonna be where we come in and say, awesome, well, we have all of this awesome information,

Tanner Holman
0:26:39
but how do we move forward and how do we prioritize what's important based on the goal we're trying to achieve?

Alex Winter
0:26:43
Yeah, no, that's such a great point, and you just got me thinking again that, for people out there that are thinking about hiring a paid strategist or maybe leveraging AI instead of a paid strategist, you guys are bringing the strategic thinking

Alex Winter
0:26:56
in that experience. And it's that high-level thinking that goes back to endless customers and they ask to answer, that's building trust. And I sound like a broken record, but it's like the human piece of it

Alex Winter
0:27:07
that's the most important piece that plays into the strategy. And then I'm sure AI can help expedite a lot of the tasks and the in the trenches type of work that you have to do, but you still need that high level thinking and that human piece

Alex Winter
0:27:20
to help connect with other humans. It's definitely a huge, a very important piece of the equation. Yeah, so I wanted to ask, because you work with so many companies, do you have a story, or do you have, I'm not asking you to name names

Alex Winter
0:27:35
or anything like that, I know that you have some pretty big clients you work with, but overall, do you have a story that you could share with somebody who maybe was doing paid and it wasn't working great, or they weren't using paid and they started working with you,

Alex Winter
0:27:48
and just where it's taken them in their business over time?

Tanner Holman
0:27:51
Yeah, yeah, that's a really interesting one. There's plenty of clients. What happens more often than not, speaking a little bit more broadly, is that we start to work with a company. Odds are, if they're starting to work with us,

Tanner Holman
0:28:03
they've probably run ads in the past, whether they're running them in this moment, depends on the situation. But so we jumped in and the first thing we do before we even sign a contract, before you pay us at all, we run an audit on the accounts and say,

Tanner Holman
0:28:16
okay, well, what's happening here? What can we make sense of to put our best foot forward? Does this even make sense for you, right? Like, does this system fit your business? So kind of going back to the example I shared with you earlier of the company that was very complicated,

Tanner Holman
0:28:31
but well-known in their industry, but they didn't have that cohesive message, right? So with any client, we start from the top. We say, talking to, what do we care about? What motivates them? Once we start to put our best foot forward on the content,

Tanner Holman
0:28:43
what we're gonna say, then we have to put our fingers in the platform, right? We have to say, who are we getting in front of? What capabilities do we have in the platforms to get in front of them? Google search. Awesome. We can name exactly what we want them to type in and when we're going to show up.

Tanner Holman
0:28:58
It's social is a little bit different. We have distinct demographics, interests. So this company specifically was very fragmented. They didn't know it was working. So we had to craft this whole new plan, essentially focusing on from the consumer's perspective, a completely different brand.

Tanner Holman
0:29:12
Each of these sub products were known as their own brand. Well, how do we bring these all into one? So then we start jumping into the data. How do we, how do we, how much do we have to invest to build a relationship? How much do we have to invest

Tanner Holman
0:29:25
to push them over the finish line? Cause these are two completely different goals, right? As we started to peel back the layers for this company, we started to craft different stages. So what are we saying to people when it's their first time hearing about us?

Tanner Holman
0:29:37
What are we saying to people when they've engaged with us? Maybe they visited our site, maybe they filled out an upper level form of one of those downloads or more informational pieces. And what do we say when they've engaged with us enough for us to assume that they might be ready to move over the finish line? So from our perspective, we jump in and we

Tanner Holman
0:29:54
teach them what do these individual pieces mean? What is reach? What is frequency, impressions, clicks, CTR? I could I could bore you to death with all of these metrics for what most people like. But the biggest thing that we have to do is teach them what these mean

Tanner Holman
0:30:07
and what is important for their goals. So if an example I like to use, if a lot of people say, you know, I'm running all these ads, it's getting a lot of impressions, but it's not getting clicks to the site,

Tanner Holman
0:30:17
I need click-through rate. What do we do to nurture that? Awesome, we jump in and we start crafting the message in the platform. What is gonna nurture these people to click? What often happens next is,

Tanner Holman
0:30:29
okay, well, we're getting people to click but they're not converting. Well, the ad itself has done its job there. It's engaged the user, it's gotten them to the website. So what's not working on the website when we get there? We start to craft conversion rate,

Tanner Holman
0:30:40
different landing pages, aligning that messaging to the ad.

Alex Winter
0:30:43
Right.

Tanner Holman
0:30:43
Awesome. People are converting, now they're not becoming customers. So where's that mismatch from the sales team and the landing page of what these people are expecting on the other side. So I'm getting really long winded on you,

Tanner Holman
0:30:55
but throughout all of this process, we start gathering data. And as we start to build this out, we're building a relationship with the brand, we're engaging people. Over time, they start to find

Tanner Holman
0:31:05
that they're getting more opportunities through digital. They're also getting more opportunities through organic because people are very rarely that one-to-one conversion. Right, if I see an ad on Facebook, maybe I leave Facebook and go look up their website and browse that way. So it starts to become this, again,

Tanner Holman
0:31:21
that wave that lifts all of the ships. So they started to find more opportunities. Operations people and sales people were getting feedback about the ad specifically, like, oh, I really love this ad, it really helped engage us, or we really liked what we saw, et cetera.

Tanner Holman
0:31:36
Oh, that's cool. Then revenue started to climb. And then as we start to get that revenue, we say, all right, well we invested this much over this quarter. You got this much back, or this much of a boost

Tanner Holman
0:31:45
in your revenue this quarter. And we start to look at a marketing efficiency ratio of okay, well maybe if we add 10% more budget, can we expect 10% back? Do we get 5% back? Do we get 15% back?

Tanner Holman
0:31:56
And start to capture those data points to nurture our next steps and how we're gonna move forward.

Alex Winter
0:32:01
Wow, yeah, there's really a science to it.

Tanner Holman
0:32:04
It's so much data that it would bore you to death if I showed you my screen for a day.

Alex Winter
0:32:10
So what would you recommend for people, because I've tried to do paid ads on my own, you know, I've done like the Facebook, Instagram, whatever, you know, I'm gonna try to boost this post or whatever, so I feel like a lot of people have done that on the personal level,

Alex Winter
0:32:22
but what would you say for people out there that are trying to do this on their own and would you recommend hiring a consultant or hiring an expert? Like what does that look like for people out there that are listening and watching?

Tanner Holman
0:32:35
I would absolutely recommend that you talk to someone who does this day in, day out. Anyone can jump into the platform and run ads. Anyone can jump in and spend money on Facebook, on Instagram, on Google. They make it very easy

Tanner Holman
0:32:46
because that's how they make their money. Right. Now, you touched on something that I always urge people against, which is those boosted posts, right? That is Facebook's easiest way to get someone who doesn't know how to spend money in these platforms to spend money in those platforms.

Tanner Holman
0:33:02
What I always say is, even if you're not engaging with an expert or an agency or whatever you may find best for you, make sure that you're running through the actual platforms themselves and focus on the metrics that matter. So if we're talking Facebook or Instagram, for example, more than I focus on any other metric in those platforms, I focus on reach and frequency.

Tanner Holman
0:33:22
Reach is how many unique people did we get in front of. Frequency is how many times did we get in front of them. Going back to what I've probably said a hundred times on this is, no. Can you reasonably expect that the one time someone sees your ad that they're going to convert?

Tanner Holman
0:33:36
I always say no, and my reason being is that, how many ads do you scroll by every day on Facebook or Instagram, Alex?

Alex Winter
0:33:44
More than I could even try to count, yeah.

Tanner Holman
0:33:47
How many of those were you actually ready in the moment to either even click on the ad, let alone move forward with that product or service, right? Yeah, very low if zero, but I guess not a lot, yeah. So if you instead saw the same company with a relevant message and probably differing

Tanner Holman
0:34:04
content pieces so that it doesn't get stale, say three times in a week, you'd probably be more likely to remember that company versus the one that you saw one time on one random day when you were scrolling for a dog picture or something like that.

Alex Winter
0:34:18
Totally, no, it's so true. And now that we're talking about it, just like I'm like almost doing my own audit of my psychology as I scroll through social media, right? But I definitely see things that, like what attracts me or what I end up clicking on

Alex Winter
0:34:33
are things that showcase the products in an interesting way or that there's more that I can interact with or learn. But if there's a hard pitch or a hard sell, I'm definitely not clicking on those things. Or like, oh, if you click this now you get 50% off. Those are, I swipe right past those.

Tanner Holman
0:34:49
Yeah, and there's a place for those, right? Maybe you'd be motivated for 50% off if you had been on the website looking at a product for a week or a couple of times. Awesome, well then let's spin up a retargeting campaign and get it in front of those people

Tanner Holman
0:35:01
that have already signaled that interest to us. But if you've never engaged with them or you've never talked to this person before, the odds of them moving forward are pretty low. And then we can get into all kinds of other psychology about this, of how much did you just cheapen your brand

Tanner Holman
0:35:14
that you're willing to give 50% off right off the bat, right? There's so much psychology that goes into pricing and just the way people are looking at your product that ads can really help solidify that at the start of the relationship rather than when they're already in the process

Tanner Holman
0:35:29
of wanting to buy in that moment.

Alex Winter
0:35:31
Well said, Tanner. I feel like I have a lot to digest from this conversation. I've learned a lot just in the short time that we spoke and we're definitely gonna have to have you back on the show, but before we wrap up, is there one thing or is there something you wanna leave

Alex Winter
0:35:45
our viewers and our listeners with that they should really, like if you're gonna take away one thing from this episode about paid media and about paid advertising, it should be this, what would you say?

Tanner Holman
0:35:54
Follow through and consistency. You know, if you only have the budget or the patience to run ads for one month, don't run ads, save the money, save your time, save your headaches until you can come back and have that follow through and consistency because it's very rarely the first go

Tanner Holman
0:36:12
that you're gonna find success, it's constant optimization and iteration. And if you've been running ads for a long time, they're very well could be either something that you missed the first time or something that changes that you need to essentially start from scratch

Tanner Holman
0:36:25
or start rebuilding. So ads can be really complicated. I could talk about the data and the different pieces that we look at all day long, but ultimately what you're doing is you're talking to one person

Tanner Holman
0:36:35
who is potentially going to do business with you. So build that relationship just like you would in person. You're not gonna ask someone to marry you on the first date. You're gonna start to build that trust, build that relationship, just like everything they ask you answer goes through.

Tanner Holman
0:36:48
That still applies to ads. There's no difference in the psychology of the person that you're talking to, so don't forget that.

Alex Winter
0:36:56
Tanner, great insights. I feel like I learned a ton during this chat today. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Alex Winter
0:37:00
Thanks for having me.

Alex Winter
0:37:01
All right, and thank you for everybody out there listening and watching. This is Endless Customers, a show that helps you earn trust and win more customers in the age of AI. I'm Alex, your host.

Alex Winter
0:37:09
We'll see you on the next one. We'll see you on the next one.

Tanner Holman
0:37:11
the next, video!!