Day 2 Panel Discussion – Social Advertising

Unknown Speaker 0:13
Thank you, Andrea, coming back. And at this point, I’d like to invite all the other speakers today up for our panel discussion. And so while we, Kirk,

Unknown Speaker 0:30
and

Unknown Speaker 0:32
his name is Dwayne and Lisa, there’s Dwayne.

Unknown Speaker 0:38
There’s Lisa. All right, great.

Unknown Speaker 0:40
Well, thank you, everyone. That was really fantastic. I want to first talk about the question of scale. And,

Unknown Speaker 0:52
you know, certainly there’s, I came up across everyone’s presentations. And there’s the question of scale for smart shopping versus traditional shopping,

Unknown Speaker 1:06
relating to Kirk’s presentation, and then with all of the kind of smaller

Unknown Speaker 1:14
platforms, and how do I know Dwayne had a good comment on thinking about scale, in terms of

Unknown Speaker 1:24
business outcome, rather than

Unknown Speaker 1:28
being, you know, smaller than, say, Google and Facebook? So how do you think about scale? How do you talk about that?

Unknown Speaker 1:37
with clients and or internally? And how do you kind of start to get buy in or understand when something’s really worth

Unknown Speaker 1:49
digging into putting more effort into it? Because it’s one thing to put a budget, right. But it’s, it’s the effort that is also part of, and budget cost and time cost money? So how do you really think about scale when you’re starting to test or double down in any of these kind of these platforms?

Unknown Speaker 2:11
Unless you go first?

Unknown Speaker 2:14
I mean, I guess for our clients, the way we think about it is basically like, are we gonna make more money? I mean, that’s what it comes down to, like we sell outcomes, you don’t sell ours, I tell this to like a prospect on Tuesday, you can you can buy ours, you just can’t buy ours from us. And so we’re like, if I can get another 50, sales, 100 sales, 1000 cells, whatever it is, on, on whether it’s you know, Andrea talked about Korra, or there’s Pinterest, and we saw or like, snapper, tick tock, I’m gonna go out and get those customers, right, assuming that like, it’s not a duplication of what efforts are already doing on another platform. I think the thing we always forget as well is that like, Instagram wasn’t a billion people when they started, right, they started out with these platforms as well. And when Facebook bought them in 2012, they’re what half a billion or something like that. And so I think for us to compare where these platforms are today to where Facebook is right now is a disingenuous comparison, because they’re not the same. And so if I can make my clients more money, and they’re happy with the customer that comes in, I’m going to do it. And we’re not even going to talk about ours, because ours is a stupid thing to sell. And anyone who wants to buy ours is not going to buy ours for me. No, I understand that. But you still are spending time, so is your time worth doing. So even if you’re not charging by the hour, you still have to think about where your hours are best spent efficiently, right? Or

Unknown Speaker 3:35
think about time at all. But don’t think about time at all. It’s about Okay, it’s either we’re making you money or not making you money. It’s what it boils down to my clients are not paying me for hours and hours, and I want to sell it. So I don’t I don’t think about hours and think about like what two or three things I need to do in the next two weeks to help a client reach their, you know, $5 million goal this year, or $3 million, or whatever the goal is, and then I work towards that I’ve removed hours out of the equation because clients don’t care if it took me two hours to make them a million dollars or took me 12 hours to make them a million dollars. So why should I care how long it takes as long as I can, like, execute on what we want to do as a team and know what our team is burnt out. And we work really hard to make sure people are burnt out like I told somebody the other day, it’s a holding Canada’s you should probably take it off because we don’t have Easter for seven more weeks. And so like I love that you want to work but like, we don’t have a holiday for seven more weeks. So like take it off and watch like TV or whatever. We don’t think about hours. Okay, I just I just hate our discussion. Sorry. I’m just really passionate about that.

Unknown Speaker 4:31
Anyone else?

Unknown Speaker 4:35
Yeah, I think I think those are those are very good points. What I would what I would add to that is, you know, in in Dwayne scenario, he’s talking about millions of dollars. If you’re working for small or medium sized businesses, you’re not going to see numbers like that, and the time and effort and the human resources that go into some of these campaigns. I think that’s what

Unknown Speaker 5:00
Sort of what you’re getting to Jenny is like, that’s part of the cost. So whereas on paper, you may see, okay, this is this is making this has the proper rural ROI.

Unknown Speaker 5:13
This is hitting all the numbers, but there are these other costs that are involved. And definitely, when I’m working on campaigns that are, you know, a high level of manual work, that’s something that the client is going to, because it’s not just work for me, it’s also for their team.

Unknown Speaker 5:33
So that’s my two cents.

Unknown Speaker 5:36
Yeah, Andrea, Kirk, you have any thoughts on scale and effort? Yeah. Um, I am an advocate of a start with the big guys first, if you have never done it, or make sure that you have something that it’s working, whatever that might be. And once you figure something out, then you should dedicate some of your time to exploring new options, because you might be missing out as joins, you shouldn’t put all your eggs into one basket, and you have to diversify. But don’t do it until you find something that already works. And if nothing is working, then scale down. Think about which one is the one that actually where your audience is present, when intent and audience are actually in one place. Once that’s working, then go to the next level.

Unknown Speaker 6:25
Have a couple thoughts,

Unknown Speaker 6:27
to piggyback on on the great things that have been said. So some of the questions I saw through specifically the smart shopping were actually almost the opposite, right? Of Hey, we’re trying to scale and we want to scale and we can’t.

Unknown Speaker 6:40
And so that’s that’s even a different, you know, that’s even a different category, then, like timing and knowing when to scale and how to do that well. So in that category, some of the thoughts with that, especially in a more automated type setting with with shopping, as that we’ve seen, as communicating with someone on this is, is definitely,

Unknown Speaker 7:01
definitely pushing for overall traffic volume. And usually, you’re going to do that by both bumping up that daily budget as well as lowering your row as target. But then over time, what we’ve seen is you kind of kind of push Google into these new plateaus, if you will. And then we like to kind of inch up row as as well on that. So as they’ve kind of re learned with hey, here’s here’s more of this audience, then now we’re trying to get them to train in Okay, let’s make that profitable. So kind of doing those. The, the right, it’s like a, it’s like a seesaw that’s going back and forth between revenue and ROI. But it’s a seesaw. That’s like rising. All right. So I think that’s one way to think about scaling. And at least one thing, there are other things as well, specifically with that. But one other thought in terms of the the bigger picture with scaling, especially with timing, is I think it’s really crucial no matter what channel you’re managing, to be less obsessed with tract revenue,

Unknown Speaker 8:00
with with whatever is showing us track revenue in that channel. Because what we’ve seen happen is a client who is extremely performance minded in terms of that track revenue, they’re, they’re limiting themselves by what they can scale, because they’re, they’re, they’re scared, I think there’s fear there. And and we definitely find pulling back and in some ways, accepting the fact that

Unknown Speaker 8:27
that tracking has limitations, that as as things more and more get into privacy issues, iOS, 14 updates, all that stuff, we’re gonna work in some ways, we’re going to be able to trust those numbers even less in terms of really what’s directly tracked, and in some ways, like that’s okay. So what we try to communicate with our clients more and more is to be focused on on overall on your top line. And and, and try to maintain more of an ad revenue an ad as ad spend to revenue ratio, rather than a directly tracked entity. And I think that allows you to be less concerned, so that you actually can scale because you’re less concerned about really tracking every single dollar to the channel, and you’re more treating it like, hey, a rising tide lifts all boats, and like what we’re doing is working. So let’s just keep growing that and that way. Yeah, I’m so glad you said that in brought that up. Because I think that that’s really, really important and becoming more and more important. Certainly the issue of tracking challenges we’re all going to be facing

Unknown Speaker 9:35
and are already facing, but that’s just going to continue to be a challenge. And, and I also really think that it’s particularly as automation becomes more and more enrolling, certainly Google but across all these platforms, that over optimization, really be

Unknown Speaker 10:00
becomes a liability.

Unknown Speaker 10:03
And so I think if you’re really trying to hone in on direct track performance, it can lead to trying to over optimize your campaigns and essentially hampering them, rather than letting the automation do their work and kind of inform the automation with your business data and your insights and your strategic knowledge. So I’d love to hear more thoughts on that, because I really do feel like we’re in this sort of transition period. You know, we’ve all been talking about automation for now, a couple of years. But I feel like we’re really kind of on this precipice of

Unknown Speaker 10:45
where automation really is actually finally working in new ways. I mean, any of us who hadn’t used you know, target CPA when it first came out, it was right, and we all knew it was like, not great. We were guinea pigs

Unknown Speaker 11:02
and smart shopping to Kirk’s

Unknown Speaker 11:06
Kirk’s point in his presentation now becoming often more performing better than traditional shopping. So how are you all thinking about automation, thinking about how that informs how you’re optimizing? And and I guess, also, in terms of what channels you’re adopting? Is that having any impact on where you’re thinking about advertising? nextra, where, where an advertiser might fit?

Unknown Speaker 11:35
And how you’re thinking about audiences?

Unknown Speaker 11:41
Anyone drain you want to go? Sure, yeah, I was waiting. I didn’t want to just jump. I know. I know. I will call now because I realize no one wants to jump in. Yeah, I mean, for us, I mean,

Unknown Speaker 11:53
so like, our internal discussion as a team is I’ve told everyone, I assume, in 24 to 36 months that we will not have jobs in the sense that like, Google and Facebook will do everything they can to remove us has as an option between like us and the client. And whether that happens or not, is irrelevant. So for us as a business, you know, two paths we’ve had down is like, take on more consulting clients and like worry less about execution. And then when it comes to like automation, we automate as much as we can we find that balance between like, you know, automations, working over here, great. Let’s keep it automation is not working over here. Okay, let’s go back to manual CPC or, or what was caused on Facebook or whatever the non automation thing is, we’re going to do so we try to do as much automation as we can. I think if we look back to like, when Google launched annek search ads, like six years ago, seven years ago, a year ago, whatever it was like that was not a great automation product back then it was like really bad.

Unknown Speaker 12:49
Anyone who’s like old enough to know what DSA was back then you will call like DSA. Now, in the last three to four years, it’s a great product. And so we assume that even if we hate automation, because it’s like, does an awful job, even on low spending accounts, we know that in two to three years, it will be better, and Google will just do their job to get rid of us as well as Facebook and any ad platform. So I think our goal with clients is just figure out where it’s going to work or where it makes sense, remove, you know, the manual work for us, you know, we automate as much as we can with like scripts and rules and other tech like optimizer, and just embrace it as much as we can. We’re not, we’re not against it, it just depends on like, which clients it makes sense for, and which ones it doesn’t and, and just do the best we can because you know, we are,

Unknown Speaker 13:34
we are renting time, and every ad platform is the best way to put it right. Like we don’t own the time, and everyone wants to bitch about every change Google makes, but let’s just be honest, they’re gonna make more changes that we hate. And we’re only renting time though. So it’s embrace as much as you can fight as little as you can, because they’re gonna do something tomorrow to piss us off, which probably means that eta is are gonna go away at some point in the next six months. And so if eta goes away, what are you going to do then complain, some more queens are going to get us anywhere. So it’s like, embrace automation, do it, much of it as you can. And then think about what you’re going to do in three to five years, because we may not have jobs if Google and Facebook has their way.

Unknown Speaker 14:10
Andrew, do you have that? Yeah, well, I thought about the question differently on IE, I don’t know if you guys would agree. But generally lately, people talk about the cookie, cookie last whirling all down and people say, Oh, you need to look at the whole picture. If you’re putting money here, everything should rise and you should be happy. Um, that sounds in theory, very nice. Um, the way I like to see it or tell people about it is you at least in this goes back to marketing 101 you really need to figure it out. What are those micro conversions? If you send someone to a page? Is there any signal that you can capture that says, once somebody does this, statistically speaking, they might take the next step? That’s how I like to think about

Unknown Speaker 15:00
expansion and how the world digital marketing is changing, rather than just putting money and hope that sometimes I see a rise because I put more money into it.

Unknown Speaker 15:13
And that’s the way I try to profess it to clients and to other marketers as well. Well,

Unknown Speaker 15:22
I just shared a link, I was joking that Dwayne is like a prophet, because literally today, Google just made RSS default. Right?

Unknown Speaker 15:31
So you can definitely come, um, ya know, just to kind of piggyback on what others have said again, that’s, that’s what you do. Right? You find smart people. And then you say that there’s, their ideas are smart.

Unknown Speaker 15:44
No, I mean, it’s part of the automation thing, too. Like if someone’s listening, and especially Google ads, and they tried stuff a few years back, which I’m always amazed how quickly the years go by in this industry.

Unknown Speaker 15:56
But But if you’ve tried it, like there’s even just basic principles of how machine learning grows and learns on itself. And so if you’ve tried something, and it didn’t work a few years ago, that’s probably because it didn’t. And there’s a good chance that actually, because of science, like it is better than it was now. So I think that’s a big part of that evolution and transition. It’s not, it’s not that we’re just all giving up and saying, Yeah, let’s, I give up. I’m lazy. Let’s use DSA. It’s that like, note that as exactly as doing said, The DSA product is a better product and you speak Great, let’s let’s figure it out. Since I think that’s not to interrupt, Kurt. But do you think that we should take it doesn’t work out of our vocabulary?

Unknown Speaker 16:41
And think differently?

Unknown Speaker 16:44
I don’t know. Because there might be, or it doesn’t work yet. Or it doesn’t work. Maybe it doesn’t work for my account, and this client in this rate specific moment, in this moment, because yeah, there are times where you do test something and you determine man, that was not a great fit for whatever reason like that, that didn’t work. That doesn’t mean that that’s necessarily an industry best practice, it doesn’t mean that it won’t work for another account. And that’s why even in some ways, that’s a benefit of agencies, right? Because it’s not, they’re not just seeing one account and kind of looking at that they’re seeing multiple things and making multiple changes and seeing what does work in multiple industries and accounts and that sort of thing to that one last thing, I would say, if you are interested in learning more about marketing automation, a guy named Patrick Gilbert just put out a book called join or die. And it is really a phenomenal book. It’s it’s really been kind of influencing how our team even thinks about automation. And I think it does a good job of not necessarily like that he does a great job of not just being

Unknown Speaker 17:48
he’s not just talking like for Google. And yet he is going kind of deep into here, here’s some things that are actually happening in the algorithms and why it’s so complex and why it’s changed and gotten better. And it’s been really helpful one for us.

Unknown Speaker 18:02
Great.

Unknown Speaker 18:04
And Lisa, how are you thinking about?

Unknown Speaker 18:07
All this?

Unknown Speaker 18:10
I think I think a lot has has been said by the other panelists, the you know, the only thing that

Unknown Speaker 18:19
they that I think about for automation is some of the creative that is automated and some of those some of the campaign elements that take a human eye and to look at and that sometimes go go wrong or aren’t really meeting the goals of the campaign’s

Unknown Speaker 18:41
justice. Yeah. And and talking about

Unknown Speaker 18:45
creative, incorrect, I thought was really interesting thinking about smart shopping as as social. So in terms of how you all are thinking about creative, particularly when you’re testing out, either you’re running new, a new product line, or you’re trying a new channel, or you’re trying smart shopping for

Unknown Speaker 19:11
product line for the first time. How are you thinking about,

Unknown Speaker 19:16
about creative and has that evolved? Are you thinking about that differently? Probably going into this coming year than you were even last year or? You know, any thoughts on Creative I’d love to hear

Unknown Speaker 19:30
when we start with Andrea?

Unknown Speaker 19:36
Sure. Um, I have to start this conversation by saying I am not the best person at judging creative,

Unknown Speaker 19:45
full honesty.

Unknown Speaker 19:48
I mean, it has changed so much as well.

Unknown Speaker 19:51
Because what used to work 578 years ago, 10 years ago for some of us that have been doing digital marketing for

Unknown Speaker 20:00
So long, the things we were showing people back there has changed significantly to what we are showing them today.

Unknown Speaker 20:07
I just have this constant argument about is my creative one telling the user what they need to see very quickly. One in two, is there anything I should be thinking? How can I think outside of the box instead of your showing the same thing everybody shows a product and say, Get it? Or a white paper and say that read the white paper, get it now learn more? How can we actually show user something that it’s different? I think that’s something I like about Cora along.

Unknown Speaker 20:41
Creative, it’s more about how you can actually post questions and provide answers that are effective.

Unknown Speaker 20:49
Joining talk about Snapchat and tik tok, and that really revolutionize the type of creatives we use for those platforms. So I tell him that it’s constantly evolving, really, always look at what your competitors are doing. are you beating different? Are you seeking when they’re saying and going from there?

Unknown Speaker 21:10
Right. Incorrect when you’re talking about Okay, at least to go ahead.

Unknown Speaker 21:15
I was I was thinking, thinking about the creative. I mean, it’s going to vary wildly per platform, right. And I was thinking about this a lot when I was working on updating this this Pinterest presentation. Because the you can take the skills that you know, in doing Google ads, and Microsoft ads from every platform, but it’s just, it just is a little bit different. So if you can’t duplicate, all creative from one platform to the other in its exact form, which is I think, a big mistake that people do.

Unknown Speaker 21:56
Because I can just see some, you know, someone who’s really hardcore into, you know, keywords going into Pinterest and using their keyword list. And it would be kind of a disaster. Same thing with the creative. It’s just it’s going to be different from platform to platform. I don’t think that the creative on Facebook would be suitable for Pinterest or Google. So I think

Unknown Speaker 22:18
not only differentiating,

Unknown Speaker 22:23
trend wise the creativity from the competition, but also per platform, I think it’s really critical to test how those workout.

Unknown Speaker 22:32
Yeah,

Unknown Speaker 22:34
incur, carry you thinking about, I guess I’d love to hear more about how you’re thinking about smart shopping as as the social channel from a creative standpoint, and things that you’re taking into consideration from a creative standpoint.

Unknown Speaker 22:51
Yeah, so it’s funny. So after I talked, and I and I threw that line out, I was talking to someone here on our team. And, and he was he was challenging it. And he’s like, I don’t I don’t really know if it’s a social platform itself. But I think the way that we see it, and the way it targets is more social now. So it’s still it’s more audience based and user base. And then there’s that important creative, right. But the platform itself is like the creative is showing in more of like a display type entity and not on a social platform. So that’s kind of interesting to kind of think through even in the short time since I said that.

Unknown Speaker 23:29
Right? Even display those. Yeah, yeah, no, yeah. So that. And some of that is stuff that we’re still kind of thinking through. because traditionally, I mean, we’ve been like a paid search agency. And traditionally, there’s not been a ton of creative involved with that, other than getting into things like display in YouTube. And oftentimes, we’ll work with the creative side of the client team in that right. But as I think through kind of a bigger picture, where the industry is and where it’s going,

Unknown Speaker 23:58
going back to some of that automation, plus tracking vulnerabilities that sometimes I think have always been there. And now we’re just we’re seeing that more and more that I was referring to before, I think that we will begin to see creative as more and more of an essential role but tied into in a healthy way, kind of the old school style of marketing, which is more about developing this big picture. This is who our brand is, here’s what we’re communicating.

Unknown Speaker 24:29
This is the focus and then implementing that and not being as worried of like, okay, let’s let’s check those display ads and like which one has the higher conversion rate right. But more like carrying again, that that big picture, that brand growth carrying that along and and some of that is even somewhat of just my my, like ponderings even even now on it, but I do see that as where we are and are heading, which ironically, again, is a little bit more back to maybe that traditional marquee moment.

Unknown Speaker 25:00
marketing has been like, and I think that we’re starting to exit that ultra performance focused phase and get get into that. And so that’s kind of how I see creative fitting in there. Yeah, I agree. I agree, I think that the merging or convergence of a brand and performance is

Unknown Speaker 25:20
a big thing we’ve been seeing over the last year two years and and kind of ties into the the measurement challenges, right, like having a strong brand is going to be more and more important it is it is going to help you connect faster and more cheaply with your audiences and and make your efforts across all of these channels.

Unknown Speaker 25:49
More powerful, using them together. And as Kurt was talking about earlier, with smart shopping, being on your user targeting on, you know, whether you’re reaching somebody cheaply on

Unknown Speaker 26:01
Gmail, and then they see your brand again on on Pinterest, and then they see your brand again and snap, and that brand resonance and that brand messaging

Unknown Speaker 26:14
is going to hopefully, thread thread across those those channels.

Unknown Speaker 26:22
Dwayne I know you are obviously with in snap is obviously heavily creative focused, has that is your work in snap in particular,

Unknown Speaker 26:37
impacted your or changed the way that you think about creative or is it really just it’s just another platform that you think the creative has to be tailored for.

Unknown Speaker 26:49
Both I mean, it is it is a different platform than Facebook as is Tick Tock is a different platform than has snap has working in snap made you think more critically about creative and other platforms.

Unknown Speaker 27:06
No one ever gets made us think of it differently, you know, our goal. And the way we’ve like pitched it to clients, the last, you know, two and a half three years is we basically want to try to like collapse the distance between like selling scenar ad and taking the action, whatever it is, it’s kind of like Andrew said, like a micro conversion. So in our case of like, we need to add to a cart and we’d like you know, 10 people to add to cart to get five people to checkout to get two people to confirm whatever the numbers are. Because we know if we can get like enough people at each stage of the funnel, we can hit whatever was goal is 2345. So it’s fine to not add that like clients are happy with from like a brand perspective, but also drives performance, which isn’t easy. Some of our clients are super passionate about that brand. What I mean by that is they basically want this ad and only this ad and they won’t listen to me. And so I’ve got to find a way to like, take that creative and find an audience that will work for them. And sometimes our clients Well, it doesn’t work we need to like make new creative or different creative because like, I like that you like this, but the people don’t like this. I don’t think it’s made us change how we think about it as much as we just need to find out like what creative works for like what platform. You know, a good example is, you know, back in the summer we work with a PJ’s client, who’s done obviously phenomenally well, during the pandemic, we found your video was doing really well for them on Facebook back in like July where people were saying videos, dad, and we can’t do video on Facebook and yada yada yada. Whereas other clients, you know, they were finding static images were doing really well in Facebook. And some clients find that like a story Pohlad does really well where some clients find

Unknown Speaker 28:43
a story ad or a snap ad does better on snap. And so it’s just finding like, what ad unit for what client works, and what ad format works. And then and then trying to just double down and just putting more money into it. It’s challenging clients. clients make the creative. So like, half our clients make the creative because they have like a designer in house and very passionate, get their half from like, do what you want. Send it to me make sure it’s on brand and like just run what you think is going to work. And so that’s great. We can like test things like we’re going to target yoga people or petawatt, or whatever that bike thing is called people and like we make creative that goes after those people and then see if it works out if it doesn’t work, we test something out. So it hasn’t changed as much as we’ve we’ve spent more time trying to like just collapse the distance between an ad being seen and the action we need taken. Whether that’s like a purchase on ecommerce site a demo sign up on a SAS or tech client or purchase of like some sort of sass product.

Unknown Speaker 29:39
All right. And for those in the audience, if you want to use the chat or q&a, feel free to keep those questions coming up. We have a fun one from an anonymous attendee is directed at Kirk, but I will put this out to the whole panel. Because I do think it’s sort of an interest

Unknown Speaker 30:00
thought exercise. So Kirk, if you were to start your agency all over again today, what client niche would you target and I guess I’d also so client niche and or

Unknown Speaker 30:14
I’m will amend this a little bit. So if there’s a client niche or particular like channel or type of marketing that you would target, so we’ll start with Kirk.

Unknown Speaker 30:27
Okay, so client or channel, so client niche, I, I fall into the camp of not wanting to target specific, specific niche. And so probably, I would not do that again.

Unknown Speaker 30:41
And kind of my reasoning for that. And I do know, I mean, I have friends who target a very specific like, they they target dentists, and that’s what they do right there. They’re the dentist PPC person. And it really does help them because there’ll be referrals and things like that, which is great. One of the biggest reasons that I don’t want to do that, and I haven’t is I am a little bit concerned of becoming overleveraged in a niche that, you know, something could change on that at any day. And so that actually happened to agencies with COVID, unfortunately, right? So you had you would have agencies who were, who were who are over leveraged and targeting specifically, maybe events, or some sort of travel, and really kind of decimated them. And so and understandably, that’s somewhat of a rare thing that happened, but also, it can happen. So that that’s one of the reasons why I’m, I’m just a little bit of a bigger fan of not going directly into into one niche. Also, I think sometimes there’s learnings that we’ve discovered just from managing and handling different stuff that helps us in thinking through those channels specific, I think that I would stick to what I’m doing now as well. But some of that is not. Like that’s not for everyone. You know, like I know, you know, Dwayne has an agency, right, where he’s doing more channels, and he’s got this team, it’s awesome. They’re focusing on some of the social stuff and all that. So some of that is just even my own, like personality and skill expertise, and just wanting to wanting to remain focused on Google ads and Google Shopping. So like, that’s what we do. That’s what we’re known for in that way. So I think some of that is even just a choice with what you’re able to do, the opportunities you have. And like, how you take those steps as they’re occurring, as well. So, yeah, hope that helps. Yeah, that’s great. Anyone else want to comment on that? Dwayne, are you are you happy with where you are?

Unknown Speaker 32:43
Yeah, I’m happy where we are. we’ve, we’ve, we’ve had a crazy last year, I work six or seven days a week last year, I’m not gonna lie, I worked way more than I should.

Unknown Speaker 32:55
But actually, when we started the agency, like I targeted anyone like I quit my job, I had a couple clients, I was willing to do work for anyone and, and I realized it wasn’t the best idea because sometimes we get clients who don’t want to work on sometimes it just didn’t make sense from business. And we also used to sell ours back in 2017. And to the changes I made in place in 2017 2018, has basically stopped zone hours because it doesn’t make any sense of the people who genuinely want to buy ours, all things being equal are just really cheap clients who don’t really respect what we do. And then the other switch I made is just like, only focus on like Econ, ddcs, SAS and tech, those are kind of like, what my background is professionally for the last 1415 years. It’s what I’m really good at. It’s what I’m interested in.

Unknown Speaker 33:39
So I’d say I’ve already liked that evolution, if I was to start the agency today, or do what I’m doing now I’m really happy where I am. I like working across you know, various channels, the team likes working across various channels, having the ability to like, you know, mentally make that switch from like, I’m doing Google ads and shopping and Microsoft like Facebook and snap and having that ability to think like cross channel is really helpful even if we’re not

Unknown Speaker 34:02
run the channel for client like we talked to a boss but the other day and someone on our team comes in affiliate background cause like, hey, do you guys want to like manage your phone on my phone that we don’t want to manage your affiliate, but will like consultant affiliate for you to help you understand how that affiliate affects like what we do and everything else in the business? because our goal is to basically like, double their businesses, sir, which I don’t know if that’s gonna happen, but we’ll see. So let’s say that I am doing what I do. I am doing what I want to do now. And and what I’m doing now is what I would do if I was to start things today, especially because obviously, e commerce and DTC of just like grown in the last year and so everyone’s trying to, like get in that space. And it’s, it’s Yes, challenging. Yeah, yeah.

Unknown Speaker 34:39
Andrea or Lisa, either within your own roles or within your own your agencies, how are you thinking about sort of where you are now and where you’re thinking about going? Well, I’m, on my end, I only work with b2b clients. And when we think about which we people think it’s only like, one time

Unknown Speaker 35:00
up, but there’s so much inside of between, you can focus on things that are high priced items or low price delivery items, you can focus on healthcare or SAS, technology, there’s so much breath. So b2b is that fun place where you can still find a vertical that it’s weak enough and not just be dentist, like Kirk says, because I know a lot of people that had a really rough time last year, because they only focus on travel, or hotels or destinations, it was raw thing. If it happened once it could happen again, or could come one disrupter that change how that’s done. So if you try to find a niche price, something that has wiggle room or space or touches a few different industries within them, I think that would be the safest, the safest place. And in terms of platforms. The reality is, and this goes back to your first question, Jeannie about time, managing different platforms, and having the time to understand how those different platforms work, and how to make them successful, requires a lot of time and expertise. And so try to find, not just one because again, you don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket and try to find two or three, those are going to be your core. And then you can consult on anything else that might affect you directly or indirectly as tweens and I think that’s how I would approach him.

Unknown Speaker 36:25
Okay, you, Lisa,

Unknown Speaker 36:28
I feel like what I do now is

Unknown Speaker 36:32
how I’ve started over because when I started in marketing, I was doing more more calm, and more of a generalist. And, um, you know, as an online advertising came online, and I started to learn about I’m like, this is what I need to do. I love this. This is neat. It’s complicated. I don’t understand it, but I want to understand it.

Unknown Speaker 36:55
So I feel like, you know, there was a point at which I already started over. I think in terms of the client niche, I think I like to have a diverse portfolio. I think everybody touched on that. It’s, it’s great. Even with within focusing on b2b, you have such you know, a variety of different types of experience, even if you even if you do the same type of vertical, if you even if you are the dentist’s PPC person, they’re still going to have they’re all totally different. They all have different personalities. Right. So

Unknown Speaker 37:31
all right. Great. Question for you. Lisa has come in

Unknown Speaker 37:36
any recommendations for a restaurant trying to build a following on Pinterest? through advertising? Aside from recipes?

Unknown Speaker 37:46
Any thoughts on that? Or and we can open it up to to others as well. But these if you have any thoughts? Besides recipes? Yeah, aside from recipes, so I get not not promoting? recipes, how to think about building a following?

Unknown Speaker 38:03
Um, yeah, that’s, I heard, you know, I don’t have it. That’s a good question. I heard something on. I think it might have been on on

Unknown Speaker 38:15
NPR this morning, or the other morning about a restaurant that was promoting itself by giving away gift gift cards to other restaurants.

Unknown Speaker 38:26
And it was right. So it got them attention. It

Unknown Speaker 38:31
promoted eating out and the local community. So I thought that was really a neat idea.

Unknown Speaker 38:39
That is cool. Very interesting. Um, any other thoughts on building a following? I don’t know if that answers your question. It gives you some thoughts. But I think kind of to your point, Lisa’s think outside the box. And I guess I mean, it could be so Pinterest is so visually oriented. So what is it that you’re going to kind of visually inspire your

Unknown Speaker 39:09
customer base to to be interacting with the web? And if you I guess I also would say, if they’re if you’re seeing things work on Instagram,

Unknown Speaker 39:19
you might be able to transfer some of those learnings over to Pinterest, right? Instead of instead of recipes, why not showcase the dishes that they have? Because people might be if they’re searching for recipes, they could see the what not a recipe but that particular dish because you can geo target it. Yeah. Or if you do cool things with plating. Like that. Showing how your dishes get plated if you have, you know, creative

Unknown Speaker 39:51
creative ways of displaying the food, things like that could be could be cool. Yeah. And people are people are looking for things to do.

Unknown Speaker 40:00
Yeah, I want to know what the restrictions are for those particular restaurants if, depending on the area that they live in.

Unknown Speaker 40:09
Great. Um, All right, any other thoughts? Anyone else want to throw out since that’s okay, she says thank you. That’s gonna say like, you could try to promote like, depend on what kind of restaurant it is, I guess like where the food comes from like what farms and whatever it comes from. So try to turn like the food itself. And maybe they’re like chef or chefs into into like, famous people because people research like,

Unknown Speaker 40:32
Oh, yeah, the kinds of mushrooms are different kinds of this and where it comes from and people who are trying to eat healthy, especially on Pinterest where it’s high, we a lot of like parents, that’s one of the high high Borge groups on Pinterest, and they’re into like healthy eating for their kids and stuff. So I think trying to promote where you get your food from could be really good if you’re in that whole like, nose to tail. Pipi good food stuff.

Unknown Speaker 40:56
All right.

Unknown Speaker 40:59
I guess I will just bring it back to final thoughts on. And I’m I do want to bring it back to scale in terms of I guess, and let me kind of rephrase the scale question. Because I think one of the things is that fear of

Unknown Speaker 41:15
there isn’t going to be scale. So why bother? I already have enough going on with the channels that I’m already managing. Or, you know, if it’s smart shopping, I’ve already got, you know, things that are happening in my traditional shopping campaigns are doing just fine. I tried smart shopping, it didn’t work. Right. The it didn’t work. And so I’m done doing that.

Unknown Speaker 41:41
I guess. So. How, in this year ahead, we’ve got, you know, 2021, how are you are advising your clients to be thinking about trying new things.

Unknown Speaker 41:55
So you want to start by ken starr. And I think this is just a summary of everything we’ve talked about in this in this section.

Unknown Speaker 42:05
Really, it’s about not trying something new, unless you have something that it’s already working.

Unknown Speaker 42:12
Don’t go everywhere, start small. Don’t put all your eggs into one basket, you don’t know if one platform will crash and learn government regulation, it’s probably coming or it’s or it already came to a lot of countries. So think about how that might impact your different campaigns and where you are getting revenue today. Don’t focus too much on that final sale, because that’s not the only thing people are doing to be able to get to the final part of your buyers journey. And always think about, there’s also an opportunity and there’s value on really on re engaging the person who already chop and make then the people who are going to share with their family and friends, how often your product or your service is. So try to leverage everything and think a little bit outside of the box. It’s okay to take risk and try a new platform just don’t go insane. Start small five to $1,000, whatever that might translate to your business and go from there. The star small if something didn’t work two years ago, everybody in this panel made excellent point about how automation is changing. And the cellphone you had 10 years ago. It’s not the cell phone you have today. It’s pretty smart. And the same thing is happening with platforms. And I think the other thing that people tend to very tend to emphasize a lot is about Korra and tik tok, and they don’t have the same capabilities. And I cannot see all this thing that I can see on Google. But Google and Facebook have been around for years at this point. So this smaller platforms, they are catching up, but they are doing it very quickly, every two, six months, you will get something major that it’s coming. So it’s one thing to think about as well.

Unknown Speaker 43:58
Right? How about you, Kirk?

Unknown Speaker 44:01
I’m finding that that conversation is beginning sooner and sooner for us with our clients. And I mean, even before their clients. And I think that started to really help us. So as we try to talk through, here’s how we should look at, at what we should expect with experimentation and budget and performance. And then what that will look like, we’re trying to even do that before we land them so we can really make sure that we’re on the same page. So that we’re not just kind of landing them as a client and then trying to make help try to reframe their mind on performance marketing versus kind of the bigger picture brand awareness as well as, you know, like I talked about with like, spend a revenue and gross ratio and things like that. So I think that’s, that’s a piece of the puzzle. In terms of something like that. We’ll we’ll definitely we’ve definitely tried to be more

Unknown Speaker 45:00
more communicative on, let’s say experimentation as just being an expected part of the budget, and we’re still even working on that even with current clients of trying to continually transition to that mentality. And so some of that sometimes it’s just patience, being willing to utilize data as well as conversation and, and, and just communication on that, to try to help them understand and communicate on that, but also not pushing them more than needs to be because at times, there might be a level of, yeah, we have a channel that’s working. So honestly, if you want to scale, let’s just keep utilizing this that’s already working and then expand in the future. I think there’s just so many different aspects of that, and probably making sure that you and the client are on the same page and unable to think through that together is really a key to good, long, long relationship. Great. All right. And and quickly, Dwayne, and I want to have one quick note that, Dwayne, if you could speak up just a touch, that’d be great. Sure, yeah. Thank you.

Unknown Speaker 46:06
See, I mean, base with clients. I mean, most of them trust us to like, throw where to spend the money, they just like, give us a budget per year, per month, whatever it is, and we spend it how we want to think for new platforms, we just look at it as if we’re starting to max out on Google or Facebook, whatever the platform is, you know, where else can we spend the money? We don’t want to put all our eggs in one basket and we test it and see if it works. If it does, we keep it if we don’t we move on.

Unknown Speaker 46:29
You know, we clients hire us, because we’re the experts. So they expect us to do like, basically take the charge and not so much tell them what to do but but guide them in the direction we want to go

Unknown Speaker 46:39
based on just their experience, because they’re the expert in what they do, and we wouldn’t tell them how to run their business. Yeah. Great. And how about you, Lisa, Final Thoughts? I wish john Lee was on this panel, because it’s it, you know, Microsoft ads for so long was the not enough scale. So why bother? Right? Yes, yes. Immediately. I’m like, oh, man, I wish john was on here. I mean, I think that would that with that attitude? Maybe they’re not doing it right? Or have you have the proper expectations?

Unknown Speaker 47:12
So I think, you know, looking at complimentary channels to the ones that are working, and then making sure that those are customized, you know, as it seems like I’m going through this in my head a lot today just not duplicating the same things. Yeah. And I say, you know, kind of, I guess, final thought is, is something you’re doing not directly attributable, attributable to that channel. But maybe you’re seeing lift in brand search. Where’s that coming from, you know, that that you might see correlations and relationships that you wouldn’t necessarily have intuitively thought. So all right, we are at at time and so thank you, all for have you. Thank you so much. This has been really wonderful. Thank you to the audience for all the fantastic questions. And tomorrow. We’ve got another great lineup with Nancy mcglothlin talking about amazon shopping. Brooke Asmussen is going to be talking about tracking reporting for e commerce sales. Frederick valets is going to be talking about PPC bidding and smart bidding. So kind of continuing on the money of the things we’ve been talking about today. And then Brad Geddes is going to take it home with a discussion on ad testing in PPC. So thank you again and David alternate over to you. Okay. Thank you, Jenny did a great job.

Unknown Speaker 48:40
Also, thank you to Andrea

Unknown Speaker 48:44
Kirk, Dwayne, Lisa, y’all, y’all did a really good job. Appreciate it.

Unknown Speaker 48:50
I’m just the attendees will be getting started tomorrow at 11am Eastern Time, which is GMT minus five. And also there will be a another networking opportunity which is a happy hour at 1:30pm.

Unknown Speaker 49:11
Eastern time, so

Unknown Speaker 49:14
that those are those are a lot of fun. And I encourage you to join us then. Other than that, thank you, attendees. We really appreciate your participation and hope

Unknown Speaker 49:26
we pass the audition. Take care.

Unknown Speaker 49:30
Thanks, David. Thanks, everyone. Bye

Transcribed by https://otter.ai