Empowering Healthy Business: The Podcast for Small Business Owners

#25 - Digital Marketing Basics for Business Owners

• Cal Wilder • Episode 25

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Part of running a healthy business is being able to attract new customers. I am old enough to remember life before internet and phones became ubiquitous. These days internet-based marketing dominates in many industries, and the catch-all term for all kinds of online marketing is Digital Marketing. Joining this episode is Kevin Roy, founder and owner of Green Banana, who helps us understand today's digital marketing landscape and how to navigate all these options and opportunities.

More specifically, this episode includes:

  • The Importance of Defining Your Target Audience
  • When SEO and Adwords Are Best
  • When Display Ads on Social Platforms Are Best
  • SEO vs. Google Adwords
  • Social Platforms for Display Advertising
  • When and How to Engage Professional Marketing Help
  • Determining a Digital Marketing Budget
  • Timeline for Launching a Digital Marketing Program
  • Pitfalls to Avoid

Reach Kevin at https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevincharlesroy/ or GreenBananaSEO.com

Sponsored by SmartBooks. To schedule a free consultation, visit smartbooks.com.

Thanks for listening!

Host Cal Wilder can be reached at:
cal@empoweringhealthybusiness.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/calvinwilder/


Moderator:

Welcome to the Empowering Healthy Business podcast, THE podcast for small business owners. Your host, Cal Wilder, has built and sold businesses of his own and he has helped hundreds of other small businesses. Whether it is improving sales, profitability and cash flow; building a sustainable, scalable and saleable business; reducing your stress level, achieving work life balance, or improving physical and emotional fitness, Cal and his guests are here to help you run a healthier business, and in turn, have a healthier life.

Kevin Roy:

Welcome to today's episode of the empowering healthy business podcast. So part of running a healthy business is being able to attract new customers or new clients or new members or whatever you call them in your organization. And that marketing and sales function is critical, and I am old enough to remember life before computers and phones became ubiquitous, we had print ads that came in the mail or businesses are relying on radio or TV or billboard advertising, but these days, the internet dominates marketing in many industries, and I guess the catch all term is digital marketing. And so joining me today is Kevin Roy, founder and owner of green banana, who's going to help us understand today's digital marketing landscape and how to navigate all these options and opportunities for our businesses. Welcome, Kevin. Thanks for having me. I'm really happy to be here.

Cal Wilder:

I'm looking forward to kind of getting a refresher and and some education myself, because they're just so many options out there, so many different technology platforms. Then once you decide on the platforms, you've got to think about video versus audio versus text. I remember 25 years ago, if you had a business and you had a half decent website and you sent out a marketing newsletter periodically, that was pretty good, but that doesn't necessarily cut it today, in 2024. So maybe you could walk us through, you know, what are the the principal digital marketing channels or tactics or platforms that you typically see your business clients use? And then we can get clear on any of the vernacular for, for how we describe these things.

Kevin Roy:

Yeah, there's a lot of shiny things on the in digital marketing, and I am still, you know, I'm always fascinated by the latest and greatest shiny thing. And because I'm obsessed with digital marketing, I'm always looking at those things. But I think the most important thing to start with is defining your audience and defining how your audience is going to be buying your product or hearing about your product. There's tons of digital marketing like, for instance, like we specialize in search engine optimization. We do tons of Google AdWords. We also do social advertising on every social channel, whether it's Facebook, Insta, Tiktok, LinkedIn, X, whatever they want to call it next. We do display advertising. We do geofencing and geotargeting. And some clients will call and say, we want to just do this, and the first question we ask them is, who's your audience, and who do you want to sell to, and what's your product? And I think that is very, very important to define, because that will lead into which marketing medium is going to work best for you.

Cal Wilder:

Right. So let's say we're talking about a business to business services organization like a lot of our clients are. How do they, you know, try to figure out which channels would be most effective for them.

Kevin Roy:

If you have a product or service that people are actively looking for and they know how to define it. So let's say tax saving accounting tips. People are actively Googling like that. So if you have one of those, then it's search engine optimization or Google AdWords, or both. We'll go back to this. There's generally two types of marketing. There's Push Marketing and Pull Marketing, you know, or you know, tactical or branding, depending on on what you want to call it. If you have a specific service or a specific product that people are looking for, it is more often than not, Google AdWords or SEO, because people are actively looking for that, and then you want to pop up on the top of page one, whether you're paying for that through Google AdWords or whether you're ranking for that in search engine optimization to get people to your site to buy the product. If you're solving a problem that people have and the solution doesn't exist yet or they don't know that the solution exists yet, then you want to use social like LinkedIn, Facebook, Insta. And I know that Facebook and Instagram are not typically-- people don't think of them as business platforms, but people that are in our age demographic spend an inordinate amount of time on Facebook. So sometimes it it's a good test to do that. LinkedIn does work very well if you want to be very business oriented. Also display advertising allows you to to target based on search behavior. So if people are continuously having a problem, and your product will solve that problem, then you would either do display advertising, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, right? So you're you're helping people become aware of that those programs are going to be more expensive and they're not going to convert as quickly, because you're teaching people that you can solve a problem that they have. If people are instantly looking for a problem like emergency plumbing, don't waste your time on social media. It's Google AdWords or SEO. So that that's that's the thing that you have to define before you start to do an investment in digital advertising.

Cal Wilder:

If we're trying to decide between AdWords and SEO, you know, I've heard pros and cons of each approach, how would you advise your clients on choosing between the two of them?

Kevin Roy:

So that's a great question, if you if you know the keyword phrases that you want to rank for. So I think one of the mistakes that will people will come to us and say, Hey, we want SEO. And the first thing I'll ask them is, why do you want SEO? And more often than not, their answers are, because we need SEO because our SEO is not that great. And I said, Why is your SEO not that great? So what I'm trying to do is to get them to identify the keyword phrases that they're not ranking for. So the only reason you need search engine optimization is because you want people to come to your site that are searching for a product or a service that you offer, and they can find it. If you don't know what that is, that SEO is a waste of money. You're gonna end up selling you an SEO company that's gonna say we're gonna do blogging and get you more traffic, more traffic for what right you want to have the right people searching for the right phrase, getting to your site that you know that's going to help you convert. Search Engine Optimization over time is more cost effective, because you're not going to have to pay for the click every time someone comes to your site. Google AdWords, there's there's a lot of benefits to Google AdWords. Number one, it ranks faster. So you can rank, and as soon as you get your campaign up, you're going to be ranking for whatever phrases that you want to rank for in Google AdWords. If you don't know-- like we'll have clients come to us and say, Hey, we think we know what keywords we want in our SEO campaign, but we're not entirely sure. Rather, rather than having them commit to a search engine optimization campaign that's going to take months to rank, I'll say to them, let's try a Google ads campaign, because we'll definitively know if that keyword phrase that you're thinking about is not only going to get you traffic, but it's going to get you conversions. So sometimes traffic and conversions are two different things. At the end of the day, I think businesses want phone calls and form fills, and that you can track through Google Analytics and can find out if a keyword phrase that you're trying to rank for in Google ads will actually lead to business. So once you have those, that's great fodder for your search engine optimization campaign. The other thing that everyone's probably noticed is that your Google ads appear on the first two thumb scrolls of your phone. So even if you're ranking really well organically, a lot of our clients do both because mobile searches are super high, even B to B, they're usually 40 to 50%. B to C they're way higher, they're like mobile is usually 70 to 90%. But Google Ads take up a lot of real estate. So if you want to be on the top of the page, and then there's Google ads, opportunity, organic is never gonna outrank that.

Cal Wilder:

Okay. And then let's talk about on the social and display side. How do you decide? You know you've go to do a little evangelizing because your product or service is a little bit new to the marketplace. And so people aren't looking for it as much, like you said. So you've got to push it out there a little bit more. How do you go about decidin?

Kevin Roy:

If it's a pure business to business play, then sometimes LinkedIn is better. If it has a little bit of a consumer opportunity, then, like the fun social channels like Facebook and Instagram and Twitter are better. I think the the important thing about advertising in any of those channels is to be really, really clear on your message, to be really clear on your offer and really clear on your audience.

Cal Wilder:

Right. So I'd imagine, business owners could So the more that you can narrow your audience down, the less money you're going to waste. So if you, if you try to advertise on, let's say Facebook, for instance, there, they're going to make it really easy for you to advertise, advertise towards all men in Texas, but you might have a product that only 40 to 60 year old men that are searching for a specific solution want this right so you really want to try to narrow it down as as much as possible, unless you have an unlimited budget, which only the government does. You also want to look at your your creative. All of those mediums allow you to test the effectiveness of your creative, and so you watch that carefully, because some messages you have might perform better than others. And Facebook, LinkedIn and Insta are going to show all of them. So it's your job to go and say, you know, this one's getting a better conversion rate, so I'm going to get rid of the other two. do some of this themselves, or they could hire experts like you to help them. When's the right time for them to really seriously consider bringing in outside specialist help?

Kevin Roy:

I would say it depends on their size. So if you have a small budget, try it on your own, because an agency and their fee is going to make it a little bit cost prohibitive. I would caution you on starting your own Google ads campaign. Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, Twitter, LinkedIn are fairly-- there's, there's not a lot of levers to pull. There are levers to pull to get the ads to be effective, but there's not as many as Google AdWords. Google AdWords is super complex. We get lots of lots of clients that come to us because they've either tried Google ads themselves and it hasn't worked at all, or they've tried other agencies that really haven't put the effort into into hyper-focusing on conversion. And it's also very important when you're running campaigns like that, to look at the quality of the leads. I think that as an agency, I think that's one of the reasons we've been successful, and what makes us unique when we're running paid campaigns. Anytime you're running a digital campaign, you're driving towards, or you should be if you set your campaigns up properly, you're driving towards a conversion: a form fill or a phone call. So your job as a digital agency, is to try to get as many of those for as little money as possible, right? So you can take your client's budget and maximize conversions based on their spend. However, especially in B to B, a good lead and a bad lead, look exactly the same in Google Analytics. So what I think is really important, it's one of the things that we really stress, we talk to the clients on a very consistent basis. Depending on their budget it's weekly, biweekly or monthly. And we're saying, we saw a bunch of leads come in, how were they? Did you talk to your salespeople? Were they high quality leads, or were they low quality leads? Are they the right people that are filling these things out? Did any of them lead to really big opportunities? And if so, which ones so we can try to go get more of those. That I think is one of the most critical things to managing an effective paid campaign? I'll give you an example. We have a automotive finance company, and we found a specific combination of keywords, so it was a specific make and model of a car, that was getting us a lot of leads for almost 50% of what a normal lead would cost them. So we were super excited about it, and one of the account executives that was running it mentioned on the call, Hey, we're seeing a bunch of leads come in for this Japanese import car. Can you ask your sales people how they are? Because we think we found a diamond in the rough. The next week, they came back and said, We're really glad you asked, almost everybody that that wants that make a model of a car that has a 500 or below credit score, so we can't finance them. So that's important. So think about it. We find something great that we're driving more leads to them that they can't fulfill. That data we're never going to see inside Google analytics, data. That's the stuff that you really have to go to the next level to figure out the quality of the leads, not just quantity of leads.

Cal Wilder:

We're starting to get into a bit of an accounting

Kevin Roy:

Rather than just coming up with a generic, like you should be spending eight or 10% of your budget on makreting, right? One of the things that I like to ask people, this is a much easier question when they're when they have a specific product or service that we know that we can sell on Google ads or SEO, a good conversion rate on a website is 15%, so just follow my logic here. So let's say an average conversion rate is 10% just to make the math easier, if they're spending $100 a day, and they have a 10% conversion rate, then the cost per lead is going to be$10 so when Google Ads gives us the ability to figure out what the average cost per click is for almost every single keyword phrase, and you can back the napkin so you can say to them, Hey is $10 a lead worth it to you if you have a 50% close rate. If it's a really expensive cost per click is $400 a lead, is it worth it for you if you have a 50% close rate. So one of the things that we take them through that exercise to say, hey, is this even working for you in the first place? What's your close rate? If you have Google Analytics on your site, I can see what their conversion rate is automatically. So they may have a higher than 10% conversion rate, or they may have a low cost, you can give them really accurate number. So that's a great way to go and determine if you can afford to spend anything. Are you gonna be losing money, or are you gonna be making money?

Cal Wilder:

Right. If we use the simple example of selling a widget on your website, and it costs $100 to buy the widget, and you've got a 40% gross margin for every widget you sell. You make $40 of gross profit. You do the math, you're probably willing to spend $10 to make a $40 gross profit, because you got $30 left over to cover the rest of your SG&A overhead and have some profit. So the numbers kind of work, but it's really important for the business to understand what the value of that customer, or the value of a sale is.

Kevin Roy:

This assumes a 100% conversion rate, their close the sale rate. So they have to look at that number too. Not only how many leads can we can get for the money, but how many they can close?

Cal Wilder:

Yeah. Say I want to sign up and start a real digital marketing program run by a professional farm like Green Banana. What does that timeline look like, approximately from when deciding, all right, let's start this campaign, to actually having good deal flow with data to analyze?

Kevin Roy:

It typically takes us about a month to get a campaign launched because we do a deep dive into the client's competitors. So we we do a competitive analysis. We spend a lot of time on making sure that we're crafting the right question too here. But how should a company go about messaging, that we know the right audience, so we're coming determining their digital marketing budget? Because on one in with as refined of a strategy as possible, knowing that things hand, it's an expense and you can only afford to spend so much money. On the other hand, it's an investment in lead flow that are going to be refining along the way. So it will take about could be really valuable, and you might want to make a big 30 days to launch, and then it takes about 90 days for the investment if you can get a return on investment. So how do you go about what navigating that questions? campaigns to start that have enough collective data to start

Cal Wilder:

How should a small business owner go about to hone in and decrease the cost per acquisition. So especially, let's say, if you're running a Google AdWords campaign, 100 keyword phrases and five different target audiences and 25 different ad groups, you have to think about like these ads are going to be cycling consistently, depending on the budget, and it takes a lot of time to figure out what's the perfect mix of data variables that enable you to get the lowest cost priority position, and then you continue to refine that. The other thing too, that's important too, is that digital campaigns are never set and forget it. So digital campaigns are never set itand forget it. So one of our clients that we've had for 10 years, we still have weekly calls. We're still working on the same campaign, looking at things because things change, keywords change, competitors change. You know, if we could have set that 10 years ago, that would be great, but it's something that you continue to look at. Whatever agency you pick, make sure that you're in consistent contact with them. And also, I think that you're giving them as much information about what you're seeing and about your customers and your market as they are giving you, because the whole is almost always greater thann the sum of its parts. evaluating which digital marketing agencies is best for them?

Kevin Roy:

I think there's a lot of good agencies out there. I think there's a lot of agencies that think they're good and they're just, you know, they're not. But I think the most important thing, because in the digital, like what we do, most of our clients don't understand how we do what we do. And we have some amazingly intelligent clients. We have rocket scientists as clients. They're super intelligent in their field. They don't know anything about what you know what we're doing. So the trust factor is super, super important. If a prospective client comes in to us and they're spending so much time saying, I've been burned by this agency, I want to make sure you guys don't do this to us. If I'm just getting that vibe that they just don't trust anybody, I don't take them on as a client because I don't want to spend the first 45 days of our engagement convincing them that, that they that they did the right thing by signing up. So it's really important to make sure that you really are too comfortable and confident with an agency, and they're accessible, that you can call them if you're nervous about something or or if something doesn't make sense to you, you're comfortable saying, I don't understand what CTR is. Why does that matter?

Cal Wilder:

Right. And then, what are some pitfalls to avoid that you've seen over the years?

Kevin Roy:

Changing things too quickly is a huge piece. I know that I talked earlier about how campaigns have a lot of data that they're consistently trying to refine. Typically it takes 90 days for a campaign to start hitting hitting its stride, or having enough data to start really capitalizing on the wins. If you're panicking early and changing every week, you're starting over every day. And it's really important, whatever agency you use, they're going to tell you that. They're not making it up. It really happens. So if you you're almost starting from zero, the cost per click is going to shoot back up in or the cost per call acquisition is going to shoot back up, and then it's going to try to get back down to to to refining. So changing too early is really important, not being comfortable with the fact that you're not going to probably get any great return for the first 90 days, not understanding your target market, not listening to the feedback that you're getting. So that's super important. I've run campaigns before where the client says, I know my target audience. They're 18 to 22 year old men and women that like to party, for example. And we see the people that are actually buying the product, 40 to 60 year old men, right? And we'll say to them, Hey, these are the people that are buying you may want to shift some of your messaging to attract more of them, because the you know, the young kids aren't buying anything, the older people are buying something. You might want to consider that it's important to listen to your to the data and the feedback and say, Maybe we should put more old people in the images, or maybe tailor our strategy so we can cut the cost of our marketing down if we're shown to the wrong audience. I've seen this, I've seen a lot of things, reading the data that have surprised me, and I cannot tell you how many times I've been surprised by that. I used to run a big health insurance campaign in Massachusetts and in Florida. In Massachusetts,"health insurance" was the best-converting term. "Medical insurance" was the worst. In Florida, same exact website, same exact message, same exact offer, "medical insurance" was the highest-converting term."Health insurance" was the worst. No idea why. So it's important to look at the data and adapt to that not think that you know your audience better than the data shows you. I think it depends on your market. Excuse me. It depends on your market. Do you want to just advertise in New York, or do you want to advertise all the United States? That's kind of a loaded question. We typically see success on people that are spending $10,000 a month almost almost across the board. People that have that budget, they almost always outperform, or they get to the data, the conversion point a lot faster. Also, the clients are larger clients, so they have a little more tolerance for that kind of budget. Smaller budgets are difficult, especially if it's a high cost per click click. But I think it's important to know your market first. For example,"emergency plumbing in Massachusetts", for example, is almost $100 a click. Emergency Plumbing super, super, super competitive. You know, billboard advertising is like $22 per.

Cal Wilder:

Kevin, I can tell you're really into the data and the analytics to help tune these campaigns for clients. I would assume that different agencies have different strengths and focus areas. So if you think you need campaigns based around SEO and AdWords, or you think you need super creative display ads, how do you figure out which agencies are best at what you think you need?

Kevin Roy:

A lot of the best creative agencies use us. We're data geeks. Our job is to get campaigns to work and to spend as much time reading the positives and negatives of the data to increase the client's acquisition rate. But if someone comes to us and says, we need you to do the most beautiful, shocking brand ever, we're not the right people for you. You know, we need you to make the most beautiful website on the planet. We're not the right people for you. We do websites, but you know, it's it's not our mainstay. So if you're looking for a new brand or new creative you should look for an agency that does branding, and a lot of those agencies will use people like us. I would say a third of our clients are agencies that are branding agencies and creative agencies that don't want to spend the time in the weeds like we do. And we don't want to spend the time trying to craft the perfect brand image.

Cal Wilder:

What else small business owners know about

Kevin Roy:

Before getting into search engine optimization or digital marketing? Google ads, look at what you do and where you do it in Google yourself first. So if you're a local service business, especially, Google what you do and where you do it. If you're ranking great. If you're not ranking, you might need to, you need help to get more of your audience to your website. I've had clients call me and say, We really need SEO. And I Google everything I could possibly think of, and they're ranking for everything, and I'm like, No, you might want to try some other marketing. Some you might want to move into branding to raise your awareness of your company if you're doing well organically. And blow out your Google maps business page. Go to your Google business page, log in and fill out every single option that you could possibly that is relevant to you. A lot of people don't bother. It sounds silly, but filling out the hours, filling out the directions, filling out the areas of business that apply to you. They have the ability to do daily, weekly or monthly posting in your Google business. I don't think anyone reads it, but Google reads it, and it helps your search market business. So little things like that can really help.

Cal Wilder:

And then Kevin, your primary job is running Green Banana. So what's your target client there, if people are listening to this podcast and maybe want to talk to you. So what should they know about the kind of engagements that you really focus on?

Kevin Roy:

We have some B to C projects that we're running, but it's really all over the map. I mean, we have biotech and fintech and services. We have lawyers and plastic surgeons. I always say juggling, it's everything but adult content, because it really is, like we have refractories. That's my favorite part of this business, I get to learn about all these random things that I never knew they generated revenue for people.

Cal Wilder:

I think that's been a really helpful overview of what to think about when it comes to being a business owner thinking about how to do digital marketing more effectively. I think your point about trying to figure out if people are searching for what you have, then make it more of an add or SEO driven strategy. If you've got to go out there and evangelize and introduce something new to the marketplace that's innovative, then it may be more display or branding driven strategy, at least initially. So I think that was very, very interesting to hear. Any other takeaways that you would recommend people think about.

Kevin Roy:

So everyone knows, most people in SEO know that link building is really important. If you have a social channel, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter instead and you link back to the page that you're trying to rank like if you put an article or link back to your site, that's a really strong article back to your site.

Cal Wilder:

Good to know.

Kevin Roy:

Yeah, this is great.

Cal Wilder:

All right. Kevin, thank you so much for joining me on this episode. If people want to reach you directly, what's the what's the best way for them to get in touch with you.

Kevin Roy: https:

//www.linkedin.com/in/kevincharlesroy/ or go to GreenBananaSEO.com

Cal Wilder:

Reference show notes and find other episodes on EmpoweringHealthyBusiness.com. If you would like to have a one-on-one discussion with me, or possibly engage SmartBooks to help with your business, you can reach me at Cal@EmpoweringHealthyBusiness.com or message me on LinkedIn where I am easy to find. Until next time, this is Empowering Healthy Business, the podcast for small business owners, signing off.

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Kevin Roy

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