Selling More Online With Google And Shopify (VIDEO)

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Enjoy as we dive into some of the channels of Google Ads to help you sell more online with Google.

 

Video Transcript

Cassandra:

So I’m just going to get this recording, so if you’re here and you need to duck out early, don’t worry about it, we will be sending out a followup email with the recording so you can keep an eye on it. And Christian has also offered to send out the slides as a PDF, so you can take a look at it later on. So don’t worry about that. I see we’re going to get started. People may continue to pop in, but I think we should get going.

Cassandra:
So with further ado, I just wanted to introduce everyone that is here. So my name is Cassandra, I am the Shopify local community manager in Vancouver, as well as up to Sea-to-Sky Corridor, all the way up to Whistler. Typically, we run in-person events, however, we’ve shifted and we’re doing more virtual, which is really exciting because then coworkers like myself, Nicki and Kray, get to work together on larger events. So I’ll let Nikki and Kray introduce themselves and then we’ll get going.

Nicki:
Hey, friends, I’m Nicki, I work with Katherine and Gray on our Shopify local team. I am the community manager here in Victoria, British Columbia, and it’s really great to see all of you.

Kray:
I will echo that. Thank you so much for coming out. I am Kray, and I am the community manager in Kelowna in the Okanogan. So if you’re in the area, feel free to hit me up and let’s chat. Otherwise, enjoy the session.

Cassandra:
Thank you. So today we have a presentation that Christian is facilitating from Marwick Marketing. He’s located in Squamish, which is really nice for me. Hopefully, we get to go for a beer one day when we can actually hang out together. But without further ado, I’m going to pass it off to Christian. Again, we will be going through a question and answer period at the end, so feel free to pop them into the chat, otherwise, keep them for the end, and then we can go through them all together.

Christian:
Great. Thank you, Cassandra. And thank you for having us at Marwick Marketing, and it’s been fun putting this presentation together. So the purpose of this workshop is to look at different ways that we can use the Google Ads platform to sell more, whether you are in the process of opening your own store online, if you already have a store, or if you are pretty so quite far down the line, and you’re just looking at new ways to increase your sales, this is that workshop for you. It’s going to be about half an hour, 30 minutes to 40 minutes. And as Cassandra mentioned, we’ll do a Q&A at the end as well.

Christian:
So, e-commerce sales in 2020 are expected to reach $4.2 Trillion by the end of this year. So that the shift in online purchasing and online sales is massive and it’s snowballing. So it counts for about 26% of the global population are regular online shoppers. So the shift has definitely happened and it’s continuing to happen. And so, we’re looking at ways that we can be there when our customers are looking to buy or research products online. And for today’s presentation, we’re focused on the Google Ad platform. So let’s take a look at those areas.

Christian:
So, actually, e-commerce is quite a broad area of many different channels, and we’re going to cover five of those today, five of the most recognized and most used channels. The first one is Google Search, the second one is using the Google Display network to target people that are in the market for something that you sell. We’re going to look at Google Remarketing or Retargeting, and we’re going to look at YouTube advertising, and finally Google Shopping. So, a lot of Googling going on there, but hopefully by end of this, you’ll have a clear idea of which one might be the best option for you, add some clarity behind the differences between all of them.

Christian:
And again, as I mentioned, there will be time at the end for some Q&A towards the end of that. So as I mentioned, $4.2 Trillion, we’re spending every year, there’s two billion active online shoppers in the world, which is 26% of the entire global population. So if there was ever a good time to start selling online, it’s right now. And we look at Google Search, this is the most commonly recognized platform within the Google Ad program, no doubt everyone’s seen it. When you go to Google and you type in a keyword or a search phrase, or you ask Google a question, the first four placements are ads that show up above the organic listings there.

Christian:
So the nice thing about the Google Search ads is that it’s very instant. As long as your bid and campaign has been built well, and depending on your competition, and it’s very simple to get to the top of Google, or even first on Google. Again, that depends on how much you prepared to bid on the same keywords, and I’ll come back to that one in a minute. And it depends on how well the campaign has been optimized, and obviously the competition in that market. You can see on the right-hand side of the screen there, I’ve given you an example of a winemaking kit, and you have the first out there is the winery [inaudible 00:05:43], which is on the Island, and how they’ve matched there ad up based on that search term.

Christian:
So it’s fantastic for targeting people in a certain location. So you can be as specific as a postcode area, a couple of cities, it could be a provincial, national or international. So it’s very targeted in terms of where that person is searching, if they’re on their cell phone or desktop. It’s instant, once the campaign is live and you’ve added all your details and you go live, the ads are pretty instant to appear on Google there, which is great compared to maybe like organic SEO that takes time for a website to appear higher up on the Google search results. And you can pay for what you want. You set the budget, you are in control of the budget there. I’m going to talk about budget in the next slide.

Christian:
Some downsides to the search ads. It can be mismanaged. If you’re looking to do this yourself, I highly recommend educating yourself on the different types or different categories of the keywords, broad match, exact match, and phrase match keywords. So one keyword like winemaking kit can have three different variations, and that will trigger your ad depending on the variations you’ve picked. So again, that’s something to be aware of around dive inside. That’s a whole another subject. But definitely take the time to educate yourself on the different types of keywords that when you are bidding on them, that you’re bidding on ones that are very specific to what you’re selling. Otherwise, it can get expensive and you could end up paying for a lot of clicks that you don’t necessarily need or want.

Christian:
And the final one there on the cons list is that, can be competitive. Depending on what you’re selling, obviously, if you’re selling diamond necklaces for Yorkshire Terriers, that’s probably pretty lucrative, and you might be the only one doing it, so it’s going to be cheap. If you’re selling cameras, then that’s probably going to be pretty competitive as well.

Christian:
So again, the Google search one is the most recognized one. It’s something we use probably knowingly or unknowingly every single day. It’s the one that’s very visual, you can see it when you type in your own company name or what you sell, your ad is there, so it’s very visual. And that’s the first one that we’re going to start with there. So before I go into the other ways you can advertise on Google, one question we always get at Marwick Marketing here in Canada is, “What should my budget be?”

Christian:
And obviously, it’s an advertising platform, and unlike traditional advertising or some of the platforms where you set a budget, and then you forget about it, you are in complete control of this. I don’t know who’s scribbled on my presentation, that’s probably me. The nice thing about Google is that you can set the budget. So there’s a few questions you have to ask yourself here is, how far do you want to reach? You can target a small town with a small budget, and you can target the whole world for a much bigger budget. So your budget will definitely have to scout in non-geographic areas you want to target. You also want to look at how much is going to cost when somebody clicks on the ad. So the whole Google Ad platform is a cost per click advertising platform. So you don’t pay for anything until somebody clicks on your ad, at that point, you get billed whatever the cost per click is.

Christian:
So again, taking the example of those diamond studded necklaces for Yorkshire Terriers, is probably known as bidding against you. So your cost per click could be as little as 10 cents. If you’re selling cameras, the example here is a camera, Nixon D750, the average cost per click is just under a dollar. So it gives you an idea that cost per click is going to scale. So something to figure out.

Christian:
The third one around what your budget should be is, how many clicks or how many businesses do your website does it take to sell something? So that’s referred to as conversion rate. If you’re selling something that doesn’t require a lot of shopping around, for example, bedding, something quite boring like fitted sheets, if you find one that’s in your budget and you like, there’s probably a higher probability you’re going to buy it. If you’re selling something that takes a little bit more research, that’s more of a full tout process, then you’re going to need more people coming to your website, because the conversion or the likelihood of them making an instant purchase can be much lower. So being aware of what your conversion rate would be.

Christian:
So if you had 100 people visit the website, out of those 100 people, how many people are going to take that instant purchase and buy something? The [inaudible 00:10:47] is what can you afford? Let’s be realistic here, the world is upside down and back to front at the moment. There’s no point setting a budget that you can’t afford and sustain, it’s better to set a smaller budget and run it on an ongoing basis, so that you can improve the campaign rather than going all out for 10 days.

Christian:
Another way of looking at it is reverse engineering that and saying, “What is my glass ceiling?” How many people in the world are looking for diamond necklaces for Yorkshire Terriers? Or in this case, a better example is how many people are looking for a Nixon D750 digital camera? And the answer in Canada, anyway, is done on impressions. How many people have searched come off. And in Canada, it’s on average, 5,200 people look every single month this specific camera. The average cost per click is left as about a dollar. Which means if you were to pay for every single click or every single time someone’s searched for this camera, your glass ceiling would be just on the $5,000 a month. That’s highly unlikely, you’re not going to have 100% click through. If 5,000 people are looking for your product, it’s very unlikely that 100% of those people are going to come see your ad and go straight to your website.

Christian:
So what we refer to as a click free rate. So if 100 people are searching for your product, on this product in particular, the click-through rate is just under 4%. So every 100 people that are looking for this camera, about four of those people will actually see the ad and then click free, which is the click free rate. From there, we know what the cost would be, and we know how many businesses will come to the website. So these 197 visitors that come from the website, and now on your website, looking at the product that they were searching for, so they are already highly qualified shoppers. They’re now on the website, and assuming your website then takes those 100 people and puts them through the whole process of researching the product through the shopping cart to actually buying something is probably around 2%. So it’s looking at about four sours at the value of two and a half thousand dollars.

Christian:
So you can use these numbers. It’s very easy to log into Google Ads, you don’t need to sign up for anything, you don’t need to pay anything, I’m going to give you details at the end of this presentation, how to do that. Within Google Ads, you have a keyword, full cost section that you can use to do this exact kind of thing. So you’ll be able to look at what keywords are linked to your products, see how many people are looking every month, figure out what the click-through rate is, and what the cost is. You can actually reverse engineer, “What is the most I could physically spend to get every single person that’s interested in buying my product?” And then look at “What’s more affordable, and where do I want to target locally?” So you can see there’s no straight, easy answer on, “How should I spend on Google?” You just got to make sure that you’ll get in that return on whatever you’re spending.

Christian:
… you go. You just got to make sure that you’re getting that return on whatever you’re spending. And once you understand that you’re getting a return, it doesn’t really matter how much you spend because you know for every dollar you put in at the beginning, you’re going to get 10, 25 times, X, back on that.

Christian:
So covering budgets, it’s quite a big chunk of it. But I just wanted to touch base on that while we were talking about the search apps. In terms of how it works, Google allows you to set a daily budget. So, if it’s $10 a day or $50 a day or a $5,000 day, once to use up that budget from people clicking on the ad, your ads come offline until the next day. So you never go over budget.

Christian:
Google also has an algorithm that will recognize if maybe one of your competitors is sat clicking on your ad, and it will actually block them and refund the account. So the days of other people being able to just click on your ad and use up your budget have long gone. And that’s Google Search. That’s the big one. But it’s the most recognized, the most commonly used, Google platform, in terms of Google apps.

Christian:
So moving along, not as in-depth, the next few, but I just wanted to give you an overview of the other ones that work really well for selling more online with Google, and that’s the display campaigns. So Google Display, you can see here I was checking the surf forecast for Vancouver Islands, Magic Seaweed, which is a website that hosts Google Ads. On the right-hand side, I was in the market for mosquito spray. So they understand, or Google, through multiple touchpoints, can build up audiences based on a number of things. One of them is the subjects of being in market for something.

Christian:
So with or without knowing it, we give signals to Google via the way that we use the internet. That signals to Google that we might be in the market to purchase something. So in this case, it’s mosquito spray. The reason that ad was delivered to me as my screenshot is I’m aware that for last kind of like 10 days, I’ve been looking at booking in campsites. I’ve been looking at just accessories for camping and all that kind of stuff. So that could be because I’m researching products online. It could be that I’m looking at videos could be that I’m on visiting camping websites. So these kind of little micro moments, these signals, give Google, and it’s not somebody sat at Google with my picture on the wall, building my profile up, it’s the algorithm and the AI is building up an audience in the knowledge that I’m potentially in market to buy mosquito spray. So it’s pretty smart how it does that.

Christian:
So by targeting people in market, and that could be in market for a camera, could be in market for a haircut, could be in markets to find a family lawyer, we can target people based on, and you can by logging into Google Ads, you’re able to connect with the customers while they’re going through that process of potentially taking action to buy something more high if you’re a service provider.

Christian:
It’s really good for brand awareness. Your ads are placed not specifically on a website. They’re placed specifically because of the user. So sometimes the ads will show on big publications like New York Times or Time Out, or these kinds of channels that may be unaffordable for you to approach that publication directly and advertise. So it’s great brands align with brand awareness there for your product. It’s very cost effective. Again, you set the budget for every thousand views. You set the budget. If you want us to spend $30 to get 1000 people seeing your ad, you’re pretty much guaranteed to get that. The only downsides to this is that it’s usually mismanaged. Even at quite a high level of management, the ads can, these campaigns can be a bit mismanaged, and I’ll give you an example of what I’m talking about.

Christian:
If I’m in the market for going camping and I’m being delivered these products, that’s great. I’m on now driving to the camping shop and the kids screaming in the back so I give them my phone to shut them up. And the YouTube video comes on, Peppa Pig or something, and then there’s an ad delivered to me from mosquitoes. And of course, kids with their sticky fingers instead of pressing clear, click the ad and then the advertiser’s incurring costs. So by mismanaged, we’ve really dialed in a negative placement list. So you kind of want to make sure that while the ads are talking to me as a user, that we also want to exclude places where the ads are too easily pressed by people that it was not intended to. You’ll see a lot of ads in free mobile or cell phone games. And that’s a real money drain as well.

Christian:
Some of the other kind of mistakes that people make is that the ads lack creativity and then get lost in the website as well. There are other ways to target based on display. One is the actual topic of the website. Another is as keyword placements and then intent, which is not spelled right, but it’s kind of funny that it’s camping-related, the intent of someone as well. So there’s lots of different ways to target through display advertising. For selling products online, in-market is the best. And again, I’ll show you how you’ll be able to log into Google Ads and set up a Google Display campaign based on the audience being in market for something. And that something is, there’s a big list that you can choose from. So that’s Google Display. At least one of the Google Displays anyway.

Christian:
Google Display remarketing. This is a really powerful one and is probably the second most commonly used one. You can see here that I was on Daily Hive, which is a local news, or a national news website now. They offer up advertisement space to Google, with Marwick is advertising to me because about 10 minutes before I was making this presentation, I was on our own website. So it recognizes that I had previously visited the website, and now it’s delivering ads to me to remind me to go back. So this is really good for selling products online because 70% of people will go all the way through the website. They will look at all the products, do all the research, they’ll get to the car, and for whatever reason they never pressed buy. So 70% of the people that you spent all that time and money, and then as you get into the website, 7 out of 10 of those people are just going to leave, with taking no action.

Christian:
Now, what this does is we’re able then to advertise to those people for a set period of time after their instruction of our websites. This is really good for brand lift, great for brand awareness and is super cost effective. And if it’s something that’s of a higher value, like a camera or a piece of real estate or something that we understand the customers are going to go off and research elsewhere, this just keeps your products and your store top of mind while they’re going through that buying process of looking at where they should buy it.

Christian:
Remarketing works well in the fact that it’s cost effective because you’re not paying until somebody actually clicks on the ad and returns back to the website. And if you get really smart at it, what you can do is you can actually make the ad show the product that was left in the cart as a reminder, that this is the specific product that’s still waiting for you in the cart. And if you can hook in a special offer, that always drives up the success of those campaigns.

Christian:
So a really good one to do. Works on the same Google Display channel as the previous one. But this one you’re targeting based on the fact that they had previously been on your website. So again, mismatch for the same reasons as the one prior. And sometimes they get set up too broad. So if you’re a shop with many, many products, let’s say you sell candy and somebody who was there and never specifically wanting two kilos of chocolate, and then you deliver them an app that Skittles, that’s not connecting the dots. So if you have lots of products, it’s great to set up more dynamic remarking so that you’re advertising back the product that they were actually interested in. When it’s too broad, the the people don’t put the two and two together. So that’s Google Display remarketing. And again, like I said, it’s probably the second most common one after the search.

Christian:
The third one here, YouTube advertising. This isn’t use as much as it could be mostly because sometimes it can be hard to find where or how to build out the actual video. But when you do figure that out, the video advertising can work in all the same ways the display can, so we can target people based on their intent, based on them being in market to buy something. We can target people based on whether they’ve visited the website before. And it works really well because it increases the brand lift and awareness. You have the option to have longer, skippable ads, which I’m sure everyone’s seen, and very short, 15 second, non-skippable ads.

Christian:
A good example of this is the camera that we were talking about at the beginning. It’s obviously a more considered purchase. So people are going to be looking to do it a lot of research. YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world, so that’s the most obvious place. They’re going to be watching reviews about this camera, how to use it, maybe unboxing videos that seem to be all the rage now. But having your ad placed before that is going to be super powerful in terms of brand alignment.

Christian:
Again, it gets mismanaged for exactly the same reasons as all the others, just the wrong time, wrong place. The other con is, well, you’ve got to produce the video. It doesn’t have to be Hollywood, but there is an additional cost whenever you hire someone to do something in person, or if you’re hiring someone to make an explainer video, there’s that initial cost of building out the video there. Banner blindness, when we do too much, when we advertise too much to someone that they start ignoring it, that’s called banner blindness and that can happen sometimes too. Super powerful though, and a great way to be aligned with a lot of the reviews or the research section of the buying process.

Christian:
So we have the final one here is Google shopping. This is works in the same way as paid per click. The only difference is instead of the search ads, it’s actually pulling imagery and it’s pulling the stock from your website. So if you have inventory listed on your website, it pulls that inventory feed into Google. And the nice thing about this, it does cost a little bit more than the search ads, but it’s a lot more visual. So if somebody sees something that they don’t want, in this case, I probably don’t want the one in the middle, I’m not going to click on it. So I’m not wasting clicks, so I’m not wasting budgets because I can already see what it is. So that’s great.

Christian:
Another good thing is it links to online reviews. If you’re using Trust Pilot or some of the other platforms there to build up your customer reviews, to instill trust on your website, you can actually link those your ads as well. The downside to this is it can be a little tricky to set up, configuring the inventory feeds and making sure it’s all synced. And it can be competitive. But once it’s up and running, it’s a very powerful tool in a very visual and a great way to get your product out there. And you can see with the shopping ads that the shop name or the brand name is listed underneath the actual product as well.

Christian:
So they’re the main channels we found a lot of our clients that have stores have found a lot of success with. The varying degree of difficulty setting up. Search ads are very easy. Shopping ads, YouTube ads, a little bit trickier. My suggestion would be to start in one, start in one area and focus on that.

Christian:
So how to get it set up. You have a couple of ways of doing it. The obvious ways is to visit ads.google.com. My suggestion here is to maybe do some of the online Google ad courses first. Google has a lot of resources that if you can take the time out just to do a couple of the courses, you’re going to save a lot of money and a lot of time, rather than just going and trying to build up at campaigns and ad groups and all that kind of stuff. You can also connect with a Google representative online, and they will, depending on the volume of customer service, they can guide you through that process. Something to be aware about going through that process though, is that it’s not going to be as detailed or as optimized as maybe a competitor. But certainly it doesn’t cost anything to sign into Google Ads. You can use all those free tools that I had at the beginning of the presentation.

Christian:
Use all those free tools that I had at the beginning of the presentation. You can play around with that, start small and just see. You’ll be able to analyze the data as it comes in. Or you can’t don’t, don’t DIY, don’t DIY. Make sense? You can hire someone locally or you can hire a Google partner agency like [inaudible 00:28:20] and they will build the account for you. Then you can manage it or they will build it and manage it for you. So there’s a few ways to get started there. My last slide, it’s a little bonus slide. I got some free tools here while you’re playing and working out how to [inaudible 00:28:40] Google ads. It’s really important to make sure that your website functions well, there’s no point spending money and time pushing people to your website if your website sucks.

Christian:
So there’s a few ways to make sure that the website doesn’t suck. You can use, we have a free tool on our website that will actually test how optimized the website is for search engines. The second one here, the Google developers platform is a really fun, easy tool to use to decide or to see how fast your website loads on a cellphone, on a desktop. Anything that loads over a few seconds, you can pretty much kiss goodbye to anyone visiting your website because people get frustrated and are extremely impatient these days. So making sure that you’re able to see how fast your website loads and then what to improve the speed time, will increase the number of sales that come through on your website. Then the third and final one is making full use of Google Trends and that’s the website trends.google.com. This is a great place to look for how products or potentially new products are trending either by country or globally over a period of time.

Christian:
Maybe you’re looking to add a new category to your website of new products. Using Google Trends will tell you if that category is increasing in demand or dropping in demand. So it’s a great resource to have bookmarked and use a lot there. So we covered a lot. We’ve covered the five or six different kind of Google ad channels there and each one would deservedly normally take an entire day to go through in depth. But hopefully that’s given you a good insight into what’s out there and what can be done. You can easily log into Google Ads and start working through your own campaigns and building them out. So I encourage you to do so, but that’s it from me. I’m going to pass it back to Cassandra.

Cassandra:
Amazing. Well, thank you so much. So for everyone that’s here. If you have questions, pop them in the chat. If you do want to come up and turn your video on and ask them, go by all means. In the meantime, I have two questions. So for people who are just starting, budget can be quite a big question. So when we’re first getting started, do you have any suggestions in terms of budgets that you could start out with? Just in terms of, do I have to spend $100 to get this up and running? Or could it be as little as a hundred, or like $5? What are your suggested budgets for just starting out?

Christian:
So Google works on daily budgets. Again, it’s better to think about it the other way around. So you have, let’s say a cost per click or a cost. What is the cost of someone that’s looking for what you do, to come to your website is a dollar? Say, that’s the cost per click. If your budget is $10 a day, then you’re going to get a maximum of 10 people a day come to your website. If it’s 50 cents, you’re going to get 20 people come to your website. So it’s like, well how many people do you need to come to the website in order to sell what you’re selling? The budget has to be, it has to be comfortable and you want to get it to a place that if you’re spending $10 a day, you’re making 40, $50 a day at least. Then you can increase that. As a starting point, again, it depends on the business, how far you want to reach and what you’re selling. So there’s no definitive answer, but that’s the best way to think about it, is how many people do I want to come to the website and what is the cost per click?

Cassandra:
Amazing. Thank you.

Male:
I have a question. So Christian, this is Ronald, in case you don’t know where the voice is coming from. Regarding keyword discovery, what tools do you suggest in addition to Google? Because I’ve seen a few other sites that have really great data for whatever keyword for a product, say the Nikon camera. You looked on Google, but then there’s other sites that will do maybe how popular a keyword is. Do you use any other ones? When selecting your keyword, are you using any Google tools for that as well?

Christian:
Again, it depends on the business and whatever company we’re working with, but there’s lots of really great tools out there. SCM [inaudible 00:33:25] Agency Analytics, [FRS 00:33:27] that will give you more insights as you dive into the keywords there. There’s some really good tools you can find online to look for longer tail keywords that work really well. If somebody doesn’t know specifically the product they’re looking for or they have a need, so they’re asking Google a question rather than searching for a particular product. But there’s definitely, we can send that list with this presentation as well, the ones that we use.

Male:
Great. Thanks.

Christian:
No problem.

Cassandra:
We’ll be sure to add those Christian. We can chat after and get some of those resources in the followup email as well.

Christian:
Yeah, that’d be awesome.

Male:
Another question then. Is Google shopping available for Canadians? It seems like it’s really on the US because now Shopify can link with it, but not in Canada yet. Or do you know?

Christian:
Yeah. It’s available in Canada for sure.

Male:
Just to speak towards that, for my business, Google Shopping Ads are my bread and butter and I am only in Canada.

Christian:
Nice.

Cassandra:
I was going to say, I feel like Kray has some really good insight because he does a lot of this with his store.

Christian:
Now I’m curious, what do you say online?

Male:
Magic, actual magic tricks. So if you want to be a magician, tricky fingers.ca. But after a bunch of testing and playing around, the Google Shopping Ads perform way better for me than any other type of Google Ad outside of retargeting. But right now I pretty much just run those because I played around with my bidding on it, started at like a $1.50. I’m now down. My max bid is 65 cents, though I rarely ever pay that and I usually get 80 to $100 orders. So the last time I got a conversion out of it, I paid 17 cents for the click for an $87 order.

Christian:
Awesome.

Cassandra:
That’s amazing. That’s super cool. It’s so funny that you bring up the bike short example too. I was like, “Did he take a photo of what I was Googling earlier?” Because that is exactly what was coming up earlier.

Christian:
That would be odd.

Male:
It’s really funny when we assume our technology is listening to us because of how ads will just start showing up. Yet it’s just they know so much about us and our behaviors, that they just know when the right time to display something is. It’s super creepy, but super effective from a marketing standpoint.

Christian:
That’s one thing we found, is people assuming that your devices are listening to you. But then you realize that Google Maps is tracking what stores you’re going to, it knows what you’re ordering online, what you’re researching and what you’re watching on your TV via YouTube. We forget all that and we just assume that our devices are listening to us. Google referred to them as micro moments. The fact that we live online, we no longer go online to use the internet, but we’re just constantly online just without even knowing it.

Male:
Speaking of YouTube though, have you done much in the way of YouTube marketing? How do you find that those … Because I know that if you pick a certain type of ad and somebody skips it, you don’t end up paying. So I know a lot of people have used that just to try and get a free five second ad out of it. What do you think about that tactic? What do you think about Google marketing or sorry, YouTube marketing before videos?

Christian:
I’m speaking from what we us specifically marked in ourselves, because our team will be delivering the [inaudible 00:37:30] for our clients. Personally, I find that anyone skipping the ad is probably disengaged anyway. So what I found is that the non skippable ones at best are re targeted non skippable ads. I know we’ve had that from the sales process where if somebody’s visited the [Malec 00:37:55] website, they’re interested to learn how we can grow their business. Then they book a discovery or a deep dive call two days later. During those two days, they’re on YouTube and whatever. These little ten second Malec adverts really resonate with them to the point where they mentioned it on the phone call. They’re like, “Hey, I can’t believe I saw you guys on YouTube. I want the same for my business.” So for us, just specifically from us, that’s one of the big ones for sure.

Male:
That’s really awesome. I’m involved in another company and I’m trying to put together a plan for YouTube marketing. That’s kind of exactly what I wanted to do was some kind of retargeting and try and get them to make a call to us.

Christian:
Yeah, it’s been good. I’ve been involved with some bigger campaigns with suspension seating for power boats across the US. We took that, like another level further. We split out all the demographics and had very specific, really cool ads that not only re targeted people, but spoke to that specific demographic as well. That was really cool to see how much better the demographic, the metrics got in terms of the engagement and how they resonated with them.

Male:
I’m actually going to share in the chat here, Think With Google did a little story on Ikea Canada and how they used YouTube marketing to specifically target beds to people that were watching YouTube videos late at night. So they were actually hitting them with sleepy time ads right when they were having problems. Like, you need a better bed, beautiful. This is perfect kind of targeting. If you know people aren’t usually up that late and you want to sell them a bed, perfect. Something’s not right. You’re not in bed.

Cassandra:
That is such a good example. I love that.

Speaker 1:
I do want to just call out again to our participants that if you do want to ask a question, you can pop that question in the chat or you can also unmute yourself and join the conversation.

Cassandra:
Use this time. It’s awesome. Cray has some really good insight in terms of the products that he’s selling. But if you have a specific product that you’re thinking about potentially using any of these marketing tactics for, let’s chat about it, because this is a perfect time to brainstorm some ideas as well.

Male:
100%. I actually find brainstorming with other people, particularly people that aren’t really necessarily in your industry, they will come at you with a perspective that you didn’t even think of. So involving people that are around you, that aren’t necessarily going to be interested in your product, just to get that whole other perspective can get you a whole other way down a whole other marketing path.

Male:
So I do have a product. First of all, if anyone else wants to jump in and ask. Anyone else? No, okay. So basically I have a product and because I do a lot of my work between here and China; photography and trade actually. One of my marketing clients, they’re a natural health product producer here in Canada. So they make vitamins and stuff like that. So we’ve been exporting it. Well because of what’s happened in the world now, I’m making a line of immune system boosting vitamins and other products. We’re starting with vitamins and basically, I predict that the immune system boosting health products and functional foods will become very popular in the next couple of years. I’m making the brand now, going to be selling on Shopify. Basically, it will be ready this summer. So thinking of what audiences, what communities and what other products around it would be good to add on. Christian, I understand that health products, supplements, they’re quite competitive online on Google.

Speaker 2:
… health products, supplements. They’re quite competitive online on Google, probably because everyone’s paying up the ad words because it’s so competitive. But at any rate, do you guys have any feedback or thoughts about that?

Christian:
Yeah, I’d be on competitiveness. It pays a lot to be specific. A crazy kind of example over the beds that night, really spending the time to figure out strategy of like what point does somebody turn to Google on their cell phone and look for a vitamin or a health supplement, and really honing in on very specific key words, and specific times that day, and specific demographics. You’ll always find that there’s always going to be the big players that spend tons of money, and I always think about that as the foundation, but there’s always cracks in the foundation. And when you find that crack, you don’t need… If you only need 1% or 2% of the market share, you just go look for those little cracks and then it becomes more cost-effective to get that one or two percent of a bigger, huge market. That’s my thought on that one, for sure.

Craig:
I agree with that. But for anything in the health-related industry, content marketing is going to be a huge thing. You’ll notice that a lot of the biggest players in supplements and that type of stuff tend to have a really in-depth blog and a quite engaged blog in social media. So really trying to find good content for that. And similar to the marketing ad side, look for those gaps, because you’ll always find… if you search anything doing the research yourself on something, you’ll find the same kind of content in 10 different articles, but they’re all talking about the same things just in slightly different ways. Find the gaps and answer the questions that they’re not answering and not hitting you. And then you’ll start to hit those other people that they’re not hitting as well. And that really helps longterm because you’re basically starting at the top of the chain and then people are going to start copying your articles.

Christian:
Yeah, that’s good. And then to further that point as well Craig, you can… By using that, going back to the display campaigns and times and people, we talked about in-market based on everyone’s opinion interactions with Google, but you can actually target people based on the topic of an article as well. So if you have a particular health product that somebody is going to be researching and it mentions a particular health problem, and you’re the solution, you can target… It’s like having very specific ad placements based on the topic of the blog, not just them being an in-market or the [inaudible 00:44:56] targeting as well. And again, it’s getting, like Craig said, it’s getting them much higher up the funnel. They may not even be at the point that they’re looking for a health product or a supplement. They just know they have a problem, and they’re trying to understand it and research it so that they’re up here. And then you’re beating your competition because they haven’t got to the point now where they’re on Google looking for supplements, and that’s where it gets more competitive.

Speaker 2:
I actually thought about… Well, what I’ve been doing is making a brand and community around… or the plan is to make a community around this and that starting off, actually it started with PPE, but that was just the start. It’s not my main product, actually. It’s going to be these health products, and other protection products like hand sanitizer dispensers, or disinfecting machines or whatever. So I figure these products are different enough that they’re not in the same category, but they fall under safety and protection. So I can build something around there to engage with the community. And then I realized that I have to figure out where is the community? Is it older people? Who’s going to be wanting this vitamin. Kids are probably only… Parents will buy for the kids. The kids may not even know.

Craig:
Well, the biggest thing, whether you’re doing paid marketing or any other type of marketing is understanding your target audience before you do any of that. Because otherwise, it’s really easy to spend a ton of money or a ton of time putting together either the actual ads, Google, Facebook, anywhere or the actual content for it to not hit the mark.

Speaker 2:
Right. Yeah. I’m on my fifth version of my business plan because of all that. I’m really exploring the target markets and then flipping it to the other target markets, and I’m just in the middle of it, that’s why. Figure it out later, thanks guys.

Cassandra:
There’s a question in the chat here from Stacy. Any ideas for selling small business social media workshops online? Example, new business starting on Facebook.

Christian:
I think it goes back to what Craig was just saying, understand who it is that would be willing to sign up for the workshops and who you’re targeting. And I would say if that still leaves you quite a broad group, focus in on a very specific group. So if you’re thinking that it’s going to attract young females, I would even go like much further than that. Say young females in a certain area that have an interest in… Something like that. Just get really drilled down to a much smaller segment. If you can segment it and then segment your group five more times, then you’re going to have a very specific persona or person that you want that you know would be a great fifth year courses, and then it becomes easy to talk to them via like your ad copy and messaging. And the content in your ads is going to resonate hard with those guys, and strong, and they’re more likely to convert.

Christian:
Whereas if you’re trying to target every young female with the same kind of messaging and language, it’s going to get lost on about 90% of them. So I’ve just really having a very, very clear idea of who that person will be that you want to engage. And then that applies for everything. Facebook ads, YouTube, blogging, but being too broad usually ends up being a waste of time.

Cassandra:
I picture that as basically throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks. If you know exactly where to throw it and what you’re throwing it to it’s more likely to stick than just throwing it everywhere.

Craig:
Yes. And another thing now, we can’t really do much of this right now, but in your local area, go and attend some events that people are putting on when events are back on that helps small businesses and see who is there. Who is there trying to learn? You can kind of do that now by attending online events, but because a lot of people have cameras off and stuff, you’re not necessarily getting the same kind of thing. But if you jump into like Facebook groups or Reddit groups that are talking about small business marketing and stuff, you can kind of get a better idea of the types of people that are working on this, and kind of figure out which part of that market that you want to target, because there’s going to be people at all stages, 18 to 25 year olds, 25 to 35 and all these different people.

Craig:
So finding out which one of those demographics you really want to talk to the most, or that resonates most with you will really help you try and figure that out. Because by far, the hardest thing that you can do is trying to figure out who you’re selling to. I’m working on three different customer profiles for that other business that I mentioned right now, and even though it’s been around for 17 years, they haven’t had that up until now. Nobody’s really done a customer avatar or multiple customer avatars. So I have a lot of data to go on, but still we’re trying to really narrow it down and really figure out the targets and how we want to advertise to each one.

Cassandra:
So we’re kind of getting to the end. So if you have any last minute questions, pop them in the chat or speak up, but just to kind of finish it off, I have two questions for you, Christian. So one, if somebody had tried and they decided this is not for me, I would like to just pay somebody. How could somebody who’s attending work with you? What’s the best way to get in touch with you? And second, if somebody is just starting out, wants to give it a try, what is… if you could give them three tips, what would they be?

Christian:
Yes. So the first one’s really easy. You just can Goggle us. That’s the easiest way. Or LinkedIn or Facebook or TikTok or Pigeon Carrier, or we’re pretty accessible.

Cassandra:
Pigeon Carrier I think is probably the best one.

Christian:
And then the other way, for sure, I would, like I mentioned earlier, I would invest time in just doing a couple of courses, because more so that the terminology is all really foreign when you first get started. And that can be like, what the hell, it’s like a second language. The actual process of doing it all, it’s actually pretty straightforward, but the terminology can put a lot of people off. So doing a couple of courses. Most of them, there’s a lot of them that are actually… they’re free to do. Google has some really great ones. And then the second tip is to not just set it and forget. You see that a lot. And just the nature of the platform, if it’s an auction. You’re bidding all the time. As Craig mentioned you have to go in and adjust.

Christian:
If you just set it up and forget about it, it’s going to run at about 10% efficiency. So just being aware that this is something you’re going to have to go in really on a daily basis, at least at the very minimum once a week, just to tweak your bidding and make sure it’s all working. And then the third one is to keep testing. There’s a ton of data you get from this. Change your ad copy. It’s very easy to change all the ad side of things once you’re set up. So swapping out, running similar ads to see which ones work better than others, all that kind of stuff. But I think the biggest one is just to get a good understanding of the terminology and how it works. And then you always have Google support there that you can do live chat with them. And their usually pretty good at kind of walking you through that process.

Craig:
Just as a quick note, I dropped in the chat there, the Google skill shop where they have their online training for pretty much all their free tools.

Christian:
That’s awesome.

Cassandra:
Amazing. Well, thank you so much, Christian. This was awesome. I know I learned a lot. A lot of insight that I didn’t know, so thank you. Craig, [Nikki 00:00:53:22], did you guys have any other questions or points or anything?

Nikki:
Yeah, so we have a wonderful Slack instance, which if you don’t know what Slack is, it is kind of like a communication tool, a messaging tool like MSN messenger, but better. And we have one for British Columbia. So if you are from British Columbia, I heard there was someone here from the UK. You could sneak in, but it’s British Columbia oriented. There’s a link in the chat. Feel free to join. We hang out in there, other businesses hang in there. We announce all of our events in there. Feel free to join.

Cassandra:
Yeah. And last but not least. So we’ve been busy getting some of our events set up for July, and we’ve got some pretty cool ones coming up. So we’ll send out a follow-up email with some of the resources that we went over today, the recording and the presentation deck, and just some links to some of the upcoming workshops. Keep an eye on them. I’m really excited for a few of them. I think it’s going to be really insightful.

Nikki:
Thank you so much, Christian. This is wonderful.

Christian:
Thank you.

Craig:
That was awesome.

Cassandra:
Amazing. Well, if there are no other questions I say we can get going, but feel free to reach out if you do have any questions, later on, we’re always here to support you. Pop into the Slack and we’re around.

Speaker 2:
Thank you.

Cassandra:
Amazing. Have a good day, everyone.

Craig:
By guys.