Featuring:
Steve Cox,
Founder, Planit
Steve Cox Hi, Jon. How's it going? Yep. Thanks for having me on.
Jon Watkins No, we're pleased to have you here. So this is a bit of a confusing area for some small business owners, you know, often our audience aren't media savvy or media specialists. Can you start by just breaking down exactly what we're talking about when we say paid digital media. How does it work? How is it different to me just posting constant content on Instagram? Just break it down for us?
Steve Cox Sure. Okay. So kind of in the most simple terms, paid media is is advertising that you pay a platform or a media owner for, so media owner in the olden days would have been a newspaper, a radio, local press, a billboard, those sorts of things. Increasingly, people's first foray into paid media is through digital marketing. And that will be advertising on something like Facebook, or Google or Snapchat, Instagram, those kinds of things. The difference really between paid and posting, or what anything you do that doesn't cost any money typically is called referred to as organic, it means you go and do something on your own social feed or something that generates some interest without paying a media owner any money. So the difference is between paid media and organic media is obviously paid media has a far greater opportunity for reach and scale beyond those people that you already know. And also, so if you think if you do a post on LinkedIn, let's say even if you've got 10,000 followers, the average engagement rate on LinkedIn is something like 1.2%. So that means or it can be as high, let's say it's even yeah, so 1.2%. So let's say you've got 1000 people on your LinkedIn, if you post it, you might get 10 people who actually are actually engaged with the post. So you can see that's a) very low, and it's b) people that you already know. So what you're not really doing there is expanding your reach, or anything to do with growth. So whereas paid media enables you to be extremely targeted in the people that you go for. And it also enables you to scale. But obviously, that comes with with risk. You know, quite it's quite easy for small businesses to fire lots of money into these paid media platforms, because they are literally designed to make you spend money. So Google, Facebook, which are often the entry level, places where people go to start their paid advertising, people who spent you know, they spent billions of pounds on algorithms and reporting systems. And, you know, the platform is just designed to tell you that everything's working, and you should put more money in. So you kind of got to be a bit careful about it. But there is great opportunity there if you get it right.
Jon Watkins Okay. And just briefly, what's Planit's role in that? How do you help small businesses before we get into some sort of tips for how to do it? Just kind of explain to the audience what your role is in that?
Steve Cox Yeah, sure. So we I mean, we're an agency that's got two distinct parts of our business, we've got the enterprise area of our business where we deal with, you know, big companies, people like Vodafone and NBC and The Telegraph and people like that, but an equally exciting, interesting and relevant part of our business is the work we do with small businesses. So we recently won, well, recently were shortlisted for, an award at a very prestigious award ceremony, which was for the Founder's Pack. And what we do with the Founder's Pack, which is probably the best way of describing how we help small businesses is that we will assist them in getting everything they need ready to enact paid media effectively. Because, you know, one of the things that people often do is they will put together a business plan and there'll be a line in the budget for marketing at some point. When or they'll think I'm doing quite well, I'd like to grow, I'd like to do some marketing, they will log into Google, maybe watch a couple of tutorials. And they will, you know, get started on their paid media. Now that, you know, that's obviously potentially quite risky. But essentially what we do is we tend to assist the small business with all of the stuff they need to do before they do pay media, which I think one of your questions is featured on later, which is really interesting, because if you do too early, the chances of wastage just increase exponentially. And then once they are at a stage where they are ready to execute the paid media, if the budget is significant enough to involve an agency, then we will carry out the planning the buying the strategy, the day to day monitoring, all the recommendations around that. So we effectively act as a outsourced version of their internal marketing team.
Jon Watkins Right, okay. And we're gonna get into some of those tips around how to do it effectively if you're a small business in a minute. But on our previous podcasts in this series, we've heard a lot on, you know, how different social platforms in particular work better than others for small businesses or different sectors when it comes to paid digital marketing? And I know, we're not just talking about social channels here, but what are the most important digital channels for small businesses to focus on?
Steve Cox Sure. I mean, this is a great question. Because you've effectively got, it depends on what your business is, and what it is you're looking to achieve. And then how much level of demand exists within the market for your business or a competing business, right. So to illustrate that really well, we break advertising channels down into push and pull. So push would be where you're interrupting someone's day, and you're putting a message in front of them. And they tend to be the social channels. So that would be Meta, Pinterest, Snapchat, you know, somebody could be doing anything, they could be scrolling, you know, looking at pictures of their grandkids, looking at stuff to do at the weekend. And then all of a sudden, they see an ad that says, I'll try this product or try this service. So that's kind of push. And those channels are really good for anything, where there's a lower value kind of impulse purchase. So like retail, you know, you might buy, you might be stopped, in the middle of your day, by an outstanding pair of shoes. Or you know, as the ones that keep talking to me are the kind of strange featured trouser adverts that you get on Twitter, I always find them quite engaging, but that probably says more about my body shape than it does about the advertising! But then you've got so those sorts of things will interrupt your day, and you will go okay, that stops me that's interesting. And it's all about stopping the thumb on those channels. So if you've got something that somebody doesn't necessarily need, but they might want, the social channels are really good. You can use video, you can use really engaging images, you can do all those sorts of things, you can stop them. And if your prices, price point is low enough that it's not going to break the bank, then you might make that sale really quickly. But if on the other hand, you are a boiler repairman, and you know, you know, people don't sit there going, oh, there's an ad for a really cool boiler. Then for those channels, you'll probably be looking more at what we will call the pool channels, which is search, an SEO which isn't a paid channel, but from a from a paid point of view, it'd be search, which should be Google Ads. Now remember, Google Ads is quite interesting. If you're really, really new to advertising, you might not even know that search ads are actually ads. You know, a lot of people don't necessarily know the difference between a paid ad and a social and a non paid ad on Google. Whereas effectively, what you're doing on Google is you're paying to make sure that when somebody does search, you're kind of higher up in the hierarchy of demonstrated ads. So if you are somebody just at the most extreme scale, if you're like what we call the broken boiler type campaign, then you need to be in search. If you want to be doing pushing products and stuff that people may or may not want, then it's definitely more social. And then you've got the things in the middle, which are things like slightly longer consideration, phase items, like it might be having your conservatory done or buying a new couch or those sorts of things, you're not going to do it instantly. But you are going to but it is something you might look at. And you might click on a few items before you do. So. Really, all brands unless you are the extreme version, which is as I say, the broken boiler type analogy, you need a combination of push and pull. And that depends on where you are in your kind of growth, your brand awareness and all those type of things you need to consider all of those, but really, it's a mixture of all of those.
Jon Watkins Right? And so breaking that down, you know, paid is about you're effectively I guess paying for the privilege to push your ad in front of relevant audiences and make sure that they're relevant; people that might buy your products or services. how granular can you go with sort of targeting audiences so you know, how detail can you be about the people that you want to be served up your your content.
Steve Cox Yeah, I mean that that you can go fairly detailed. I think a general rule of advertising though is, the more detailed you go, the smaller the audience that you can access within that individual platform. And then what that does is it actually pushes up your costs. So let's say you're advertising on Meta, and you want to advertise to people who like football, for an example. There's lots and lots of people who like football, but that's not necessarily going to be the best targeting for you. Because you know, people who like football could be interested in betting, streaming sports, where, you know, scarves, match tickets, any number of things. So, if you if you go too broad, that then kind of challenges your targeting. But if you go to refine, then it makes it quite expensive. Because every time you add on a targeting variable, that ad platform will increase its cost per 1000. So you can go super, super targeted. So you know, on Twitter, for example, you can target followers of one individual person. But you know, if that person's got 10 followers, then your ad campaign is going to last about two seconds, because you'll put your money into the platform, it will serve those 10 ads. And that will be the end of the campaign. So you can go really, really targeted. But the key to good targeting on social platforms is really to get a lot of associated items that are relevant together. So if you look at that follower example, rather than going for followers of one person, you get specifically segmented followers of 20 people and then some hashtags, which would also be related to that. And you build up an audience, which is a accumulated audience of lots of different highly relevant targets. And then you work that out based on your budget, and then you go from there.
Jon Watkins And then with the you mentioned, content, and you mentioned, you know, that you can you can use video, you can use photography, you can use all sorts of different types of, of content, are there one or two, just best practice principles for creating good engaging content that that's likely to engage audiences?
Steve Cox Yeah, I mean, the big thing to people. I mean, first of all, there's some really basic stuff. So we talk about upper funnel and lower funnel. So upper funnel is people who are at the very much at this starting point of awareness. So if you've got a new, a new product that you're bringing out that no one's ever heard of the first thing you need to do is you need to let people know roughly what it is. But then you don't necessarily get them to buy it. Okay, so you're not the first point I would say is right at the very, very top of your journey, try and just be informative, as quickly as possible, and use moving images where possible. Okay, the other factor to bear in mind is, when you're advertising on social channels, 90% of people have the sound down. So don't, you know, don't necessarily think about music, if you're advertising or words. And if you do have words, make sure that you have text over the top of the video of the key words. So somebody's watching it without sound can still see the words. You know, we use the analogy internally, which is stopping the thumb. And that's what you got to think just imagine what you're doing. When you're on a social media channel, you are constantly scrolling, constantly scrolling, something's got to be really interesting, really quickly. One tactic I like to do is if you are targeting people who are 45 to 50, then if you overlay the targeting, and the platform that you're using are 45 to 50. That's great, but call it out in the ad copy as well, because then that adds some self personalization. So you can take that further still. So you could say, if you're 45 to 50, and live in Birmingham, that will have a greater engagement rate than saying, Would you if you're interested in a pension, which is what that particular example related to? So make it relevant to the user? Make it as short as possible? Try and use moving images where possible, imagine it without sound?
Jon Watkins Yes, good. That will make sense. It's just make it as relevant and appealing to individuals as possible. I wanted to try and grab a an example from Steve, of how this might work for one of your small business clients. So exactly what they're doing and how they that they're engaging an audience through paid you mentioned to me when we were prepping for this that one of your clients is a small chain of hair salons for example. Yeah. How might just explain for the audience exactly how they're using paid to get in front of their audience.
Steve Cox Yes, so they've got it. They use it quite tactically. So they don't necessarily have what we call an always on approach, which is really clever way to do it because they've they've mapped the I'm trying to think of the word here. They're kind of got the capacity, and they're busy periods, I guess when they're busy in the year. So what they've done is they've looked at times of the year where they're less busy. So it tends to be like in August when lots of people are on holiday, there's less people having their hair done, cut all those types of things. So what they've done there is that they have strategically identified that they have at higher margin products. So that would be hair colouring. And they have big downtime during those periods. So what they've done, but they've still got all of the overheads of the staff, the building, all those kinds of things. So this is kind of a bit of a margin call with them. And they've realised that if they so they operate a colour sale during that period, so that colour sell enables them to fill this fill the salons at a times when they're less busy. And the content really is it's discounted, but it's not too heavily discounted. And it's moving images of really cool styles and lots of relevancy around the people who work in the shop. And the the local area. So they're creating relevance by talking about the region, the people, it's a discount, and they're talking about the fact is downtime, so they're creating a kind of a value exchange for the consumer so that they know exactly what's happening.
Jon Watkins Okay, that makes sense. That's a example from an established business. Is it different if I'm a particularly early stage business? Or I'm just starting out?
Steve Cox Yeah, absolutely. The single biggest mistake if I can start with there, I don't know if that's one of the questions that you asked later on. But the single biggest mistake we see with early stage businesses, because we often our first engagement with brands is that we audit their previous their current activity. And the single biggest mistake we see with early stage businesses, but this does also carry right the way through to larger businesses, but it can be more damaging to much earlier stage businesses, that they don't focus enough, at the very early stages, on making sure that they've got all of the kind of building blocks in place to be able to do paid media. So you know, unless you are a business that cannot thrive, that cannot generate business without running paid media, our advice is not to do it for for a sustained period as possible. So, you know, most businesses that will go to market strategy that exists outside of paid, some of them don't. So for example, we have one client that we work with sporadically on a consultancy basis, who's a house clearance business, they need paid media, if they don't have paid media, they won't have any work. But that's because of the size they are now. But when they very first started, everything that they were doing is word of mouth. So the tips that we've really got for smaller businesses are invest in either your own personal research or getting a specialist or a consultant in to give you all of the building blocks that you can put in place to create a proper digital business, which is you've got to do things like you've got to make sure all of your Google Analytics are tracking properly, you've got to make sure you've got all the relevant ad platform pixels on the on the site, the biggest one is email marketing, most people do paid media and then go okay, now it's time to do some email marketing, because I've got an email list. Well, actually, your email marketing should be in place stage one. Because actually, you know, as you're getting those people to your website, you've got to show that value proposition. The other thing that smaller businesses need to do because they've got less of a brand is is tell their brand story. Depending on the type of business it is, you know, people might think that if you are a boiler repair guy, you don't have a brand story, you just got some boilers and some prices. Well, actually, your brand story might be that you used to work for British Gas, you are extremely well trained, you're a family run business, you've lived in the area, you've been working with your customers for 10 plus years. And you've all you've your recommendations to date have been word of mouth. That's an amazing brand story. And we'll give people that kind of trust and that sort of social proof, to moving on to social proof, we'd say get your customers to say good things about you. Customer service goes a long way people still buy from people, old school things like testimonials still work, absolute wonders. So if you can spend half an hour to an hour a week on your website, when you're at that very early stage of things, it really is money well spent, because constantly updating Google likes it from an SEO point of view. And you know, it's just a really good way of increasing that organic reach. The other factor is as well that just touching briefly on organic reach is search engine optimization is considered a bit of a dark art. We don't do it. We're a paid media agency. But all search engine optimization actually means is a lot of the time for really small businesses is going onto your website going onto the meta tags and labelling the pages as to what the content is on the page. So if you've got a page which says Five ways to fix your boiler, then go to the meta tagging in the website and just write five ways to switch your boiler on the tag, and then Google will know what it is. So it really is, if you're early stage, you're not spending money, do all the free stuff really well. And if that means you got to pay a consultant, a small amount of money to do it for you, all the better.
Jon Watkins Yeah, and that brand story point came up on our other marketing podcast as well, that it's just everybody's got a good story. And that gives you a bit of a USP, it gives you a reason for people to buy into you over somebody else. And that's pretty straightforward. So that's, that's really good advice. Another thing that comes up a lot is around how fast changing this sector is, or the media, media spaces in general, you know, changing algorithms and things like that we've been hearing a lot about, what trends do you recommend we keep an eye on in your particular space.
Steve Cox I mean, the big one is, is privacy across digital marketing as a big umbrella topic. So in March 2021, Apple changed the privacy rules so that apps could no longer track your behaviour, which is kind of huge, it meant that things like Facebook weren't getting. So pre 2001, Facebook, were getting all of the information from every single app, back to episode and Facebook themselves being an app. So from every single website about what people bought, within that platform. So things like SEO, Facebook was doing a lot of the work that traditionally marketing teams would have had to have done. So like a classic example of that is, if before 2001, if you were on a website, and you added a pair of shoes to your basket, but didn't purchase those shoes, Facebook would get a message saying Steve added the shoes to his basket and didn't purchase these shoes, you could set very basic rules that would say if he didn't buy it, then just retarget Steve with a picture of those same shoes. Now, you can't do that anymore, because 90% of people are blocking Facebook allowing them to track that app. So what's happened is there's loads of businesses that we've seen develop over the pre 2001 period who were effectively allowing Facebook to do all of their remarketing. So the big changes really are around privacy and the use of your own what's called first party data. So first party data is data where the consumer has expressly given you the website owner permission to use that data. The most obvious example of that is email marketing. So we're noticing so that email marketing agencies are absolutely booming at the moment because of 10 years of neglect, because people were allowing Facebook to do their marketing for them. So email is a brilliant channel. It's you know, it's not something that we offer as a service. But it's something that people should do more of. And it's, you know, gather that first party data, create value exchanges for consumers to give you their email address, whether that be exchanged for some free content, a discount. And then once you've got that treat it really really carefully, you know, all of the algorithms and all those kinds of things. They're changing all the time. But I think for the small business audience, without getting super duper technical, that would be my biggest tip. The other factor is as well, that a lot of all the platforms, Google Facebook, all of them are increasing their use of AI and automation, which actually, if you kind of do a bit of research should make them easier to use. However, there are risks inherent with that, because by setting a machine to go and do your optimization for you, you, you do run the risk of optimising to the wrong thing. So a classic example of that is if you're a lead gen business, Google can optimise to generate leads. But unless you feed your data back into the platform of the people that have actually converted, it won't be able to optimise to those people who've actually bought your product. So your cost per lead might go down. But your cost conversion might go up dramatically. So my advice to small businesses, upload your leads to Google. But just be aware of everything that you're doing. And yeah, and just keep up with the rules yourself. There's loads of really good easy blogs and things like that to use that will give you lots of advice. It's a brilliant traffic website for in the US called perpetual traffic, which is all about paid paid marketing, particularly in tracking and optimization and algorithms. So if you're interested in getting into that, that's a brilliant podcast, the other one which is the paid search podcast, which is another US based podcast about paid search and there's they also have another one called paid search Q&A, which is seven minute episodes which deal with specific issues so they're really really useful and yeah, you know, the paid search ones also quite good for getting to sleep if you're awake at night.
Jon Watkins All right, brilliant. And just to two, couple more really quick points really measuring success? How do you know that it's working, you know, beyond sort of sales going up and things like that? Is it easy to track if you're getting good results for this? And you should continue?
Steve Cox Yeah, I mean, this is this is possibly the thing that we talk about the most, with our advertisers, because since iOS 14, what's working is is the hardest thing to figure out. It's really easy if you're just doing Google, for example. So if you're just doing Google, is Google working? Yes, Google is working, if you then start to add on other platforms. So now I'm doing Google and Meta. Okay, well, which is working, because both of the platforms are designed to extract money from their advertisers. And they will both have their own what they call attribution windows, which means whether or not they claim the sale. So if you add up the sales you get from Google, Facebook, Twitter, and meta, it'll be more sales than us, it'd be more sales than you can see in your back end system, which is something that we always have to explain to small business owners that that's how they track. So if you're using either your own Google analytics platform, or Shopify or Magento, or your own billing system, that will say 100 sales, if you add up the sales from all of the different platforms, it might say 150. And that's because that sale has been touched by three or more by two or more channels. So they're kind of both right, but they're not, right, from the business's point of view, because in your mind, you're paying twice, but actually, what is happening is there is multiple touchpoints on the way to a sale. So customers, you know, think about how you buy, you might research on Facebook, you'll have a look on Google, you'll look at a blog, you'll get an email, and then your purchase. So all four of those platforms will take the credit.
Jon Watkins Yeah, so they're all claiming the credit, but you're actually only seeing the one sale.
Steve Cox Exactly that. So there's ways of doing it, it depends on the scale of your spend, and the mixture of your investment in media. So if you are, yeah, if you're not spending very much, then my advice is just use what you can see in platform and then kind of cross tabulate that with what you're seeing in your own systems, and then make a bit of a gut feel judgement, yeah. A lot of founders will know where the marketing's working, it's quite astonishing, like the kind of media planners we have are amazed at how close to the numbers, the average small business owner is, I mean, it's my business. So I know that feeling completely. But if you then start to get to his phase, where you're spending £20-25,000 on marketing across a few platforms, and we would recommend you look at some sort of attribution platform, which is another whole topic. And if anybody wants to talk about that, then just message me is probably way too deep for this. But what it does is it creates a single point of truth across all of those channels, it can look at things like lifetime value, if you've got a subscription business, then it's super important to have something like that. But yeah, there's a whole heap of ways you can do it. And again, perpetual traffic, if you just go to that website, sorry, go to that podcast, and then just search for an episode on attribution, and you will be able to find out everything you need.
Jon Watkins Amazing. It's fascinating stuff. I guess the final big question that our audit audience always wants to know not least given the huge financial pressures that we're all under right now is how much this costs it? Can you give us a sense of what a small business might need to commit in terms of money to start getting new customers coming in? Using these channels?
Steve Cox Okay, cool. So if you were to do it independently, without an agency, and to do it yourself, you can probably if it's a search campaign, you can start with quite low levels of spend, you can start off by bidding on your own brand, which a lot of people think it's crazy people say I would have got it anyway. Well, you wouldn't necessarily have got it anyway. Because there'll be other people bidding on your brand, you might not have the high quality score. So bid it bid on your own brand, I would say, as much as people's feels totally counterintuitive. You know, why would I pay Google for someone who's already searching for my name? Well, two reasons. Number one, the cost of your own brand, if you're a small brand will probably be like 20 per click. And you might as well do it as a defensive position, stop other people bidding on it. So you can start off really low. You can start off on Facebook, or meta or like 50 pounds a day. And you can get a you can get a bit of a sense as to whether it's working. So yeah, I mean, you know, I would say if you do want to start it yourself, then you can start off with a relatively small amount of money, a few £1000 a month, that type of thing, you know, but if you wanted to use an agency like ours, we look to work with agents with brands that have an appetite to spend sort of 10,000 plus pounds a month on media. And yeah, and we've recently launched; I mentioned the founder's pack, which we will shortlisted on, we've recently launched another PAC where instead of engaging in a full paid media engagement, people can come to us for a smaller amount of money, we can run an audit and come up with a marketing plan and a set of budgets. And that typically takes four to eight weeks. And then at the end of that four to eight weeks, they can make the decision as to whether or not they want to move into a paid media kind of management and optimization phase. We help brands, you know, do that for investment decks, business planning, all that kind of stuff. So yeah,
Jon Watkins Steve, it's really interesting and debunks a lot of hard to understand issues and messages around around that. So thanks for sharing all of that. It's been really interesting. That brings us to the end of this episode of the FSB podcast on tips for digital marketing and like to thank Steve for giving up his time and sharing that tip those tips and that guidance. I'd also like to thank our audience for listening to this episode and remind you that you can subscribe to the FSB podcasts and receive regular updates and guidance on the big issues facing small businesses. And please do also remember that you can find a whole host of additional webinars, podcasts and other content on the FSB website, and fsb.org.uk. Many thanks.
Steve Cox Yes, my pleasure. Goodbye.
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