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Insider Secrets for Digitial Marketing Success
00:02 - 00:08
Intro: This is Performance Delivered, Insider Secrets for Digital Marketing Success with Steffen Horst.
00:09 - 00:44
Steffen Horst: Welcome to part 3 of our three-part series on how small businesses can grow through digital advertising. In part 1 of the series, we discussed Google search, particularly PMAX, and how advertisers can use those solutions to grow their business. In part 2, we talked about additional Google products, such as the Managen and local service ads, looked at other advertising solutions for small businesses, such as Instagram and Facebook, Amazon's and Microsoft's solutions, and finally discussed the pitfalls they should avoid when running advertising. Today we're going to spend some time talking about the business operations side of advertising. Here
00:44 - 01:21
Steffen Horst: to speak to me again is Navah Hopkins, brand evangelist at Optimizer, an award-winning turnkey PPC management suite built on the foundation of barriers, machine AI, and machine learning power. Navah has over 15 years of digital marketing experience and has worked for companies such as WordStream, NSC Digital, and Atsuma. She has a passion for innovation fueled by a hybrid strategic partnership, data analysis, and consumer engagement. Navah is a serial entrepreneur, a SION SEM philosopher, blogger, content strategist, and Bounty Hunter on the business development dance floor. And as we learned during the last 2 episodes, she's also a
01:21 - 01:25
Steffen Horst: huge Star Wars fan and a mother to 3 dogs. Navah, welcome to the show.
01:25 - 01:36
Navah Hopkins: Thank you for having me and thank you for letting this be a three-part series So we can gradually peel the onion on all of the things from marketing to the various stories.
01:36 - 02:03
Steffen Horst: I know it would have been hard to squeeze it all into 1 episode. You know, I mean, even for the first 2 episodes, I think we could have gone much, much further than we did. I think the half an hour that we recorded for each, but you know, if you haven't had a chance to listen to part 1 and 2, make sure to head over to, you know, your solution that you use to listen to podcasts and listen to part 1 and 2. It's definitely worth it. Okay. Now today we talk about business operations. So now
02:03 - 02:19
Steffen Horst: about platforms like Google and Matter make it relatively easy for businesses to set up and launch advertising campaigns. Why is diving straight into setting up campaigns not a good idea? What are the core questions you need to answer before you start spending money?
02:19 - 02:53
Navah Hopkins: So I don't know if that little is going to make it into the final cut, but 1 of the reasons why it's truly a mistake to jump right into campaign management, as opposed to taking a step back and looking at your business metrics, is you need a source of truth. You need kind of grounding force of what does success mean and what does failure mean. And if you don't know what success and failure looks like, you're never going to be able to set up a meaningful, scalable campaign. So what do I mean by success? Part of
02:53 - 03:26
Navah Hopkins: this is what is the value of the customer? Part of this is conversion rates and do different devices, different markets have different conversion rates, i.e. If someone speaks to me on the phone, are they more likely to become a customer than through form fill? But then we also want to think about the value of the customer. So I shared on LinkedIn, there was actually a great story of a non-alcoholic spirit where the whole point is this kind of herbal tincture, and it looks delicious, that has been following me for, I don't know, a month, month and
03:26 - 04:08
Navah Hopkins: a half. And I kept getting sticker shock at the $45 a bottle with this price. But for whatever reason, I got a different ad on a different day talking about gut health and actual health benefits. And suddenly that $45 didn't seem so expensive. Suddenly it was perfect. I'm like, oh, this is great. And then I actually ended up handing over $153 when I was taking it back by 45 and all it took was that simple pivoting of this is kind of a fun trend or go alcohol-free to, here's gut health and here's like, go be healthy.
04:09 - 04:45
Navah Hopkins: So part of what that brand understood very well is that they know what are the points of consideration that are going to push a customer to buy and At what price point did they come in for each of those different considerations? So they represented absolutely an alcohol-free kind of trend like let's go alcohol-free And they're priced in my opinion on the more expensive side, but when you start getting into health, suddenly if you're comparing the price of $45 a bottle of something compared to the healthcare system and how expensive that can be, $45 is nothing. And
04:45 - 05:20
Navah Hopkins: In this case, it ended up being even cheaper than $45 a bottle because I bought so many. So part of that business metric is thinking about who are your customers and at what price point can you get them for each of the reasons they might want to engage with you. But then also understanding when is someone a fit, but they're not a fit yet. So I should let them go into the ether and kind of explore versus when is someone truly important. Because when you're building your campaigns, you're ultimately building campaigns for cold leads and warm
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Navah Hopkins: leads and budgeting inappropriately is going to be a big waste of money. There's a whole bunch of other considerations we can get into, but I think that's a good place to start.
05:28 - 05:41
Steffen Horst: Yeah. So then let's talk about what other minimum KPIs that someone should have. Just to start, you know, as you said, there are a number of KPIs that we can pull, right? But what's the minimum a business owner that wants to advertise should have it?
05:41 - 06:16
Navah Hopkins: So bare minimum, the absolute, do not even do advertising unless you have this. What is your customer worth and how many customers are you currently getting and where could that number grow to without any operational change? Those 2 questions should be the guiding force behind every single thing you do. If you're in marketing, it can be very tempting to just get more leads, get more leads, get more customers. But if those customers are coming in at a value that you don't make enough money to pay for the advertising, or if you don't have the support system
06:16 - 06:46
Navah Hopkins: in place to actually service the leads, you're going to burn insurance. You might get 1 month of monthly recurring revenue or MRR, or you might get a one-time purchase, but then you get a whole bunch of angry reviews because you didn't service the customer or you didn't ship it out on time or it was out of stock or whatever. So just bear in mind that you need to really be honest with yourself of what is my customer worth and that'll influence what auction prices or cost per clicks you can go after. It'll influence how much of
06:46 - 07:21
Navah Hopkins: what type of lead you'll go after. But then you also want to consider on the volume of lead question, do you need leads coming in to all of the parts of your business or to only some parts? So a very common local question is I might have 10 locations. 1 location is crushing it. They're doing great. I have another location that's in the middle of nowhere and needs all the leads. And I have another location that's close to them and they're doing okay, but they're not doing perfect. You might want to actually combine the 2 and
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Navah Hopkins: just know that you can't get perfectly guarantee that the location getting no leads will definitively get budget, but they'll at least get the halo effect of the volume coming from the location doing kind of medium. And then the location that is crushing it, you might decide that you wanna borrow a little bit of budget from them because they can withstand that loss of leads to support the parts of your business that can't. So just being mindful of kind of thinking about the parts of your business as children. You love all of your children. Every part of
07:50 - 08:05
Navah Hopkins: your family is worthy of love. But sometimes if someone is sick, you give a little bit more TLC to the sick child, i.e. The part of your business that needs more leads, more volume, and you trust that the others are okay, like they'll make do.
08:05 - 08:38
Steffen Horst: Yeah. What you just said, the same applies to if you look at it from a product perspective or service perspective. If you have a product that might not be as expensive, so advertising might not be worth doing just because you can't hit the point. So to be positive, you might not advertising on that product or you give it a little bit just to kind of get it started and then book the volume. In the long run, it might actually be more efficient basically. So you talked about monthly reoccurring revenue. For the calculation of what's the value
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Steffen Horst: of a customer, are you someone that goes more with the one-time revenue generated, or are you looking at the lifetime value when it comes to kind of establishing the cost per.
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Navah Hopkins: So it truly depends on the state of the business and the maturity of the numbers. So for example, optimizer, we are a software subscription. People are going to pay a monthly price for us or they'll pay an annual price, but there's a built-in assumption that there's a lifetime value. There are other purchases or there are other maybe loss leaders where I might think of it as I get my foot in the door and then maybe I can come back. So it really does depend on the business. I think it's really important to be mindful that if
09:20 - 09:53
Navah Hopkins: you are going for the one-time purchase, you have to be a lot stricter about your cost of acquisitions and your ROAS. Whereas when you have the luxury of being able to track that customer and follow their months or years long journey with you, you can absolutely be a little bit more forgiving of the individual cost acquisition or ROAS because the lifetime value is so great. I think 1 of the things that's really powerful that app platforms have done is they've made it much easier to share that information. Now a real big concern, and it's a valid
09:53 - 10:27
Navah Hopkins: concern that some businesses have is I don't necessarily want to share all my profit margin information with app platforms that control the prices that I pay per click or they control my advertising spend. So for that I say it is a totally valid concern. This is where some of the concepts we discussed in our earlier sessions around bid caps and bid floors can be really helpful because you can force the issue that a bid is not allowed to exceed a certain amount, but you can still take advantage of those really powerful profit over ad spend, return
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Navah Hopkins: on ad spend, factoring in that lifetime value. All ad platforms are moving towards that. It's just that you A, have to know it, you have to be able to track it and that requires a healthy CRM, that requires just a healthy spreadsheet that you're able to track that information, but it also requires trust and actually sharing that information with the ad platform. And it is totally fair if you don't, just acknowledge that that means that you're not going to have as many bidding tools at your disposal.
10:53 - 11:12
Steffen Horst: If a business just starts out, some of these numbers that we usually would ask of a client to give us might not be available. They don't know how often someone will rebuy, for example. How do you approach those situations with clients when they don't have a full picture of the core KBI's that we ideally would love to have?
11:12 - 11:44
Navah Hopkins: So it's funny. The start of my career, I was actually called a drill sergeant or like a PPC drill sergeant because I was very famous or infamous for breaking people down. I mean, like you have to have this information. We're not even going to do any marketing. Like you're not getting it until you have this information. We're going to go find it. And like, you need to come up with some number. And it's funny because I would do it nicely. Like it was not rude, but everyone really appreciated kind of getting that. No, you're going to
11:44 - 12:16
Navah Hopkins: hurt yourself. Like a protective mama bear, like, no, don't touch the fire. Like, let's step back. Let's make sure that we're prepared, we're safe. We have our numbers to go into the PPC piece. But I do think it's really important that we get comfortable telling clients and stakeholders no on marketing when they don't have the information. Just like it's really important that we get them comfortable with the idea that they won't have the amount of tracking information and reporting information that they might have been used to. So 1 of the reasons I think the operations conversation
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Navah Hopkins: is so important is that this is 1 of the areas where the business owner should know everything. And if they don't know everything, that's a sign of either they aren't very good at business and so they likely aren't going to be very good client. And so we likely are not going to want to do business with them anyway, or it's a sign that they haven't thought about it from a marketing standpoint, that they just haven't put 2 and 2 together, that they're important. And there's an opportunity to build a really meaningful, kind of scalable partnership between
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Navah Hopkins: the operations and the marketing. And when those 2 are talking to each other, you have boundless opportunity. The moment that finance doesn't understand why the marketing bill went up or that customer leads are dwindling, like if there's, the moment there's unknowns, that's when you have friction. So as much transparency as possible is good.
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Steffen Horst: Yeah. And I have to say, I mean, we're talking about local and small businesses. I have conversations with mid-sized enterprise companies sometimes and they don't have the numbers, you know, and it's shocking when I then ask, so how do you operate? How do you determine, you know, whether a dollar spent in addition makes sense for your business? So there's nothing to be scared of. And if you're in business, only work with an agency, see how your agency can help you with identifying that information. Now Let's take it to the next step. When you launch your campaign,
13:32 - 13:47
Steffen Horst: obviously, have different targets that you can go after. You could just drive traffic. You could sell products. If you sell products, you could offer services. So you generate leads. What is required to measure the success, especially of the lead generation and the sales part?
13:47 - 14:17
Navah Hopkins: For measuring, it's tricky because on the 1 hand, it's really tempting to just measure things off of, did person become a customer or did person not? But you also wanna make sure that you're auditing your sales and your customer success team and hearing how they're responding. I actually had a great conversation with a client who was letting me know that they were concerned about the lack of lead flow. So we listened to a call together and their own intake person actually said that they don't take the case that they would have taken. And it was like,
14:17 - 14:52
Navah Hopkins: this is crazy. Like what's going on? And so I think 1 of the most important action items every business owner needs to put on their checklist is to do random quality control for calls that come in for your intake team, for your customer success team, your sales team, and just see how are your people answering. Now, if it's you that's answering and you're kind of auditing yourself, I would be kind of honest with yourself of, are you answering the person if they email within 90 seconds? The answer is no, probably need to look at that. And
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Navah Hopkins: that answer could be an automatic reply saying, we have received your email, we are very excited to learn more about your project. Here's a calendar to book a time with me or you can let me know if you have any initial questions. It can be something as simple as that. But there is no connect right away. You risk the chance of losing that sale. On a phone call, there's a general rule that if you do not connect within 20 seconds of the phone starting to ring, you have probably lost the person because they're not gonna wait
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Navah Hopkins: for infinite rings. And you also wanna be mindful of how much wait time do you subject the person to once they have connected with a person. I've done a lot of work in legal and 1 of the biggest issues with lead quality actually can be answered by how good does the intake team respond to the customer. And if you don't have a good intake team, it doesn't matter how good the marketing account is, it doesn't matter how good your SEO is, your PPC, all of that, you're going to fail. So you want to make sure that
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Navah Hopkins: you're auditing that. Now, talking about things like software or other products, services, less on the local side, it's a little bit more important that you're really reading the notes of your sales team and that your sales team is being held accountable for honest and transparent notes. If they are fudging the numbers a little bit or if they're not quite correct, then yes, you need to make those adjustments. I know this seems very labor-intensive, but this is 1 of those few moments that AI is not going to be able to replace this. Your accountability for your business
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Navah Hopkins: is critical.
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Steffen Horst: Yeah. Yeah. I want to add to that. I've seen what you just said multiple times. We used to have a workspace in San Francisco and a month in we were like, wow, we're really killing it. There are leads going through. And then the next call, the plan was like, well, I haven't signed any new contacts. What happened to all the leads? So we went into the call tracking system that we have and 90% of the leads ended up in a voice brain. And then we said, so when did you call them back? Well, most of them
17:00 - 17:32
Steffen Horst: 2, 3 days later, like, well, you know what, point they've forgotten about you. I mean, you're not the only coworking space in San Francisco. This literally money wasted, you know, if you use a phone number to kind of send your calls from ads to make sure that someone that actually is able to pick up. And that person also needs to be able to have a proper conversation and route the call in the right direction or intake, as you said, information so that the next step can be set up. If that's not happening, you're wasting money and
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Steffen Horst: it's better to stop what you're doing and kind of reassess the situation.
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Navah Hopkins: And that's where that question of how many leads are you currently getting and where can that number grow to without any operational change comes from. If you don't know how many leads you're getting in and where that number can grow to without you hiring more people. You should not be doing paid media. What you should be doing is spending a month auditing your processes. I know that might seem like a really frustrating thing to hear and you just need more business, you need more business. Invest the time now when you probably have a little bit of
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Navah Hopkins: leeway so that you can really rock it out in Q4.
18:09 - 18:36
Steffen Horst: Yeah. Yeah. Last point to add on to this is also make sure that you look at when you're driving leads, what does the sales fund look like? And then not just from lead to sale, but there are steps in between, right? You get a lead that needs to be marketing qualified, sales qualified, becomes an opportunity at some point, hopefully it becomes a new client or whatever steps your company has, but make sure you understand what the conversion rates are between each of those steps, because if any of these points are off the conversion rates, there might
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Steffen Horst: be something not working. And you might not see it if you just look at the first touch point in the last kind of conversion point that the system is off basically. Now, 1 thing that obviously is also important is conversion tracking. As I said earlier, when you run traffic campaigns, which means you just want to get people to your site to grow your brand or the awareness of your brand. It might not necessarily be needed, But when you do sales and lead gen, it is more important. And can you dive a little bit deeper
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Navah Hopkins: in that? On the value of conversion tracking?
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Steffen Horst: What do they get with that?
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Navah Hopkins: So it's interesting. Conversion tracking is as important and useful as you will make it useful. So conversion tracking has the potential to be the most powerful tool in your arsenal. It is how you speak to the algorithms, it's how you know what's working, it's everything on transparency of what your campaigns are doing. But on the flip side, if you're not going to be accountable for correct implementation of conversion tracking, or if you're going to track everything under the sun and you're basically tracking every action, so no action is really special, it becomes a little bit less
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Navah Hopkins: valuable. So you want to think about a does your business generate enough volume with the leads that you're getting to hit a minimum of 50 conversions in a 30 day period. If the answer is no, you may want to consider some more smaller actions just on the path to profit and victory. With that said though, conversions, just as a refresher, are actions that you have said are useful that are tracked by placing a pixel on your site, usually through a Google tag manager, which kind of holds all the tags. So if you know that you're not
20:19 - 20:49
Navah Hopkins: going to hit the 50, set additional actions. If you know that you'll hit the 50 just fine, make sure that your only tracking one's useful. But you also want to make sure that you're connecting your CRM systems into the ad platforms because that's going to be a way to shore up the conversion tracking. In today's world, we cannot have perfect conversion tracking. I think it's roughly 70% is considered accurate and then the rest is modeled out. So you just want to be mindful that in this world where we don't have perfect conversion tracking or we don't
20:49 - 21:24
Navah Hopkins: have perfect reporting, use it as much as you can trust and use but also know that the business you're seeing is your source of truth and it is always worth asking your customers how did they find you because it's also useful to understand even if you know via UTM or that little parameter that gets put onto the URL at the end that someone came from Google Ads but they say they saw a billboard That's just useful for you to know that there was an assist from the billboard that got you that lead and vice versa. Like
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Navah Hopkins: you might have a call tracking number on a billboard and they might say, well, they saw you on Google. And so they called that number.
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Steffen Horst: Yeah. And that obviously is important because you want to get a full visibility of if you run multiple channels, what do all of these channels do to basically contribute to your bottom line to your end goal, right? Whether it's sale, lead, or whatever you define. The last point I have here on my list to talk about is many States these days, and in Europe, there's GDPR and kind of regulates what data can be captured in what way and used, you name it, but many States in the U S have kind of started to implement state laws
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Steffen Horst: to manage that. Here in California, I think we have 1 of the stricter laws in place. What do advertisers need to do to comply with privacy policies and don't get into trouble basically?
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Navah Hopkins: Yeah. The number 1 thing is having a transparent and functional cookie consent banner at the bottom or the top or wherever you want to put it before the user engages. Having a little snippet of text that says by clicking agree by accessing this site you agree to our terms that's not gonna cut it that will get you fine that will absolutely get you in trouble you need to give the option to reject cookies you need to give the option to accept cookies in the most ideal state you give the option to see all of the cookies
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Navah Hopkins: possible, and then you would pick and choose what you want. I think another thing that's really important to factoring for form fills is we kind of have gotten lazy that you have a form fill and it may or may not include a little checkbox saying I consent to you using my email for marketing. That is what's needed to use the email for marketing. If you don't actually get the consent, you can't use it. They only consented to get in touch with you. They didn't consent for you to market. Now, it is worth explaining to your customers
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Navah Hopkins: why you might need that information. So for example, a lot of people will take the emails of their existing customers, put them into a list, and then exclude them from their marketing efforts because they don't want to talk to people that they've already sold. So it's really important that you're communicating with your customers why you want certain bits of information and how you're going to use that information. The final thing that's really, really, really important is usability. Not enough people talk about accessibility and usability in websites. And in order for a website to truly pass as
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Navah Hopkins: accessible, you need to have decent contrast. You need to acknowledge that colorblindness is a thing. Like, don't set yourself up for failure. Acknowledge that serif fonts are harder to read than sans serif and so when you're designing your site, when you're picking your fonts, just bear that in mind that serif fonts can work as accents but setting your whole page as a serif is setting yourself up to have a tough time to read. And then finally, just bear in mind that video and audio isn't always desired the moment the screen loads. So videos can be great.
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Navah Hopkins: They can be super engaging. You may want to be careful having things auto play when someone enters the site.
24:34 - 24:41
Steffen Horst: Perfect. Now that was my last question. Is there anything that we haven't talked about from a business operations perspective, but should?
24:41 - 25:02
Navah Hopkins: I think it's really, and I would love to hear your perspective on this. It's really important to consider when do you have to do serious auditing of your operations? What are your thresholds for, okay, stop all marketing, let's just work on business? Or does that point ever exist? What do you think?
25:03 - 25:32
Steffen Horst: You know what, we, I want to believe, do a really good job to not even start spending money until certain information are available. When we work with a lot of technology companies and SaaS companies, where lead gen is kind of the goal. So I want to have these information we talked about earlier, the KPIs is like, what's your lifetime value? You know, what's the return investment you're looking for to do a waterfall calculation of what's the cost per se, what's the cost per lead, and then looking at other information on the sales funnel side for each
25:32 - 26:02
Steffen Horst: step available? If not, you know, what is there? And then we also look at quite often what the quality of the leads are. Because what I see a lot is like agencies coming and saying, I can give you more leads, but more leads and you said that earlier, right? More leads is not necessarily the solution. It might be the quality of leads that is the, you know, forget about the fact that they might not handle the lead properly. So we always work through the process of what we think is ideal and sets them up for success
26:02 - 26:33
Steffen Horst: in the first place, we look at have they implemented their analytic system correctly? I mean, many of the companies we work with have familiarities in place. Is it set up properly? Is it collecting data correctly? Is it displaying data correctly? So kind of the basic that business decisions are made on the right data collected, but also from marketing perspective, you want to be able to collect the right information and make decisions on that. So those are just some simple things. And then as we get started and help our clients to implement things, there will be checkpoints
26:33 - 27:01
Steffen Horst: to make sure that we look at other points of conversions or other conversions that we assume for each of these steps, are they consistent with what we assumed they would be? Are there outliers there? And then if there are outliers, Why are there outliers? And then we dive a little bit deeper into it. Luckily, we haven't had a situation where we had to say, well, let's step back and stop completely. I think because we do a lot of upfront work to set the campaign up from a business operations perspective for success. And if we don't have
27:01 - 27:16
Steffen Horst: that, we don't really like to engage with clients because what it leads to is very short engagement cycles and the client usually is unhappy with the results because it's not clear whether it's a success or not or we don't have all the right information.
27:16 - 27:39
Navah Hopkins: And It goes back to what I mentioned at the beginning. It's what is success and what is failure? If you don't know what success and failure are, you're never going to be happy. Who wants to work with someone who's never going to be happy? There has to be a point where we achieve success and we throw a party because we did so great, or that we acknowledge that we didn't do great. So we pivot and we moved to something else. We don't just keep going with the same thing that it's failing.
27:39 - 28:06
Steffen Horst: Exactly. Exactly. Now that has been a pleasure having you be a guest here on the last 3 episodes, I really enjoyed our conversation, starting with Google search and PMAX and then going over all the other advertising solution available for local and small businesses to advertise, to grow their business. And obviously today had a conversation about the business operations side of things. If people want to find out more about you, want to find out about Optimizer, how can you get in touch?
28:06 - 28:35
Navah Hopkins: Well, of course, you can come check out optimizer.com. We also have our ppctownhall.com, although we're reimagining PPC Town Hall, so stay tuned for that. I'm on LinkedIn quite a bit. I'm also on TikTok and threads. You can check out optimizer on X as well as LinkedIn and TikTok. We also do quite a number of blogging and speaking. I'm the ask the PPC for SCJ and of course out and about just come say hi. If you have questions, happy to help.
28:35 - 28:56
Steffen Horst: There are many people to catch you basically and have a conversation with you. Perfect. Well, thanks everyone for listening. If you like to form a podcast, please subscribe to us and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast application. To find out more about Symphonic Digital, please visit us at symphonicdigital.com or follow us on X at Symphonic HQ. Thanks again and see you next time.
28:57 - 29:07
Outro: Performance Delivered is sponsored by Symphonic Digital. Discover audience-focused and data-driven digital marketing solutions for small and medium businesses at SymphonicDigital.com.