(vibrant rock music)
-: Hello and welcome to "The Sharpest Tool,"
My name is Josh Smith, I'll be your host today.
And this is the place where we take the sting
out of marketing with everything that we bring to the table.
And I'm excited because we have our Chief Operating Officer
here in the booth with us.
Dan Bedell, welcome to "The Sharpest Tool."
-: Hello and thank you, I appreciate you having me here.
-: Awesome, well we're going to talk about something
that's really, kind of an interesting thing,
an interesting topic.
I think that a lot of people might be a little confused
when we throw this word out of, omni-channel marketing.
-: Yep
-: So we're gonna talk about that in a minute,
but why don't you give our listeners just a short insight
into what you do day-in and day-out after Scorpion.
-: Sure, so as the Chief Operating Officer,
I spend the majority of my time
working with our marketing managers
and our enterprise marketing team
to help our clients have quality marketing plans
that we execute for them so they can grow.
-: At the end of the day, grow, hit all their goals,
do all the good things that they wanna do in life, right?
-: Bingo (Josh laughs)
100%.
-: Awesome, and Dan, so we're talking about something
that I think is really paramount,
and tantamount to a really successful marketing strategy,
and overall, a campaign,
and that's the idea of omni-channel marketing.
We've seen a lot of shifts happening
in the marketing space over the past couple of years,
-: Oh yeah.
-: even in the past six months.
And so, why don't you describe
what omni-channel marketing is,
so our listeners get a good understanding
what that looks like.
-: Absolutely, I might go the long way,
but we're gonna answer this -: Do it.
-: In thorough way.
So omnichannel, to start the question directly,
simply refers to the multiple different ways there are
to get in front of the ideal client for our clients,
our client's ideal client.
If we take a look at the things that have worked
in digital marketing over the last, say ten years,
if we wanna go back a little bit, SEO was the thing.
So if you wanted to be found online in Google,
and say you're a plumber or an attorney,
and prospective clients are looking
for attorney, client, plumber, you know,
they're looking for the terms, these keywords.
You could rank your way into getting all the business
that you wanted to by simply being organically number one.
What started happening is Google figured out,
didn't take 'em terribly long, they don't get paid
(Josh laughs)
when people find an organic result
when they're looking to make a purchase.
-: Sure.
-: So if someone wants to know how deep
the Marianna Trench is or something like that,
then yeah, that's a fine, organic result
in the eyes of Google.
But if they're looking to hire a plumber,
or if they're looking to hire an attorney,
is it much better from their perspective
that someone is playing top be found there.
And not just because they're greedy,
but because the logic, which I happen to agree with,
is that someone that's willing to pay
to get into that position, is probably a good search result.
-: Sure.
-: So what we've been seeing is that
the organic results over time and Google,
which I know you're well aware of, Josh,
have been sliding further and further down the page,
and the paid results are taking up
more real estate at the top.
So when you talking about omni-channel marketing,
I'm not simply talking about running a PPC campaign
in conjunction with a display campaign,
which of course we wanna do.
-: Sure.
-: I'm talking about taking into account
the organic component, the map component, the paid,
the PPC component, the display component,
the video component, content marketing
and all the social aspects required
to get our brands in front of the people
who are actively looking for them,
ideally before they're ready to make a purchasing decision.
Because the mantra that we wanna live by around here is,
we do not want our brands discovered via PPC search.
-: That's really interesting that I wanna dive
into a little bit more.
You mentioned a lot of different aspects
that you would recommend that businesses run.
What is so vitally important about running
marketing channels that are hitting people
at these different stages of their journey?
-: That is exactly the question.
So, again, it used to be that people spent
the majority of their time online looking for things.
These days, people actually spend
a little bit less time searching than they did in the past.
And it's my personal opinion,
well look at the data that suggests that,
around 15 minutes per day looks like right now,
people spend searching for things.
That's down from the past
and I think that one of the reasons why
is that people tend to discover things
before they're looking for things.
And if we think about our own search behaviors,
our own online behavior,
what we see is that as we're scrolling through Facebook,
as you're looking at Twitter or whatever,
we're discovering brands,
either directly because they're advertising to us,
or in many cases because our friends
are enjoying these brands in some way.
They're checking in to a new restaurant,
"Oh, I didn't know that existed. That's interesting,
"I may have to check them out later."
-: Sure.
-: As opposed to simply going to Google
and looking for restaurant near me.
I personally find myself doing that
less often these days
because I find that I'm discovering brands via my
social activity without having to do a search
for the kinda thing that I'm looking for.
I'm not necessarily searching for brand new Nikes on Amazon,
I've discovered that there's a new Nike
because I saw something somewhere else,
and then I'm winding up looking directly
for the thing I wanna purchase.
So our brands are getting discovered
prior to the point of Search,
which is where omni-channel starts to play in here.
We cannot simply assume, like we used to be able to,
that people are going to be looking
in the moment for what they want,
and then making a purchasing decision
based exclusively then.
That purchasing decision starts further back up the funnel,
which is what we have to be incredibly aware of.
-: What's so fascinating, too, about the marketing technology
that is out there right now too is
the technology itself is making it easier than ever
to have brands get in earlier stages of the buying journey.
You think about if you've ever have ads,
I'm sure you've had this experience, Dan,
you have the ads that randomly start showing up
on your Facebook of Instagram, you're like,
"I literally have never, ever performed
"a search for that, how did they know?"
But you remember that you had this conversation
with a buddy of yours that you were talking
about this very thing,
all of the sudden that business
in that industry is relaying that.
I had this information with a company called Turo.
It's like the Airbnb of exotic cars.
-: Oh, yeah.
-: And my buddy just randomly told me about it
and within 30 minutes to an hour,
I had Turo ads sitting on my Instagram feed.
And I had never run a search for it before.
And so its interesting to see how that plays into it,
just the technology aspect.
From a marketing funnel standpoint,
what does that journey look like?
Give our viewers some insight to what
the journey looks like for a specific consumer.
-: That's the question, I'm glad you asked that.
And the example that you gave with Turo is a great example,
because I personally had the exact
same situation happen to me,
and they were showing up on my feed, too,
which is interesting.
And a lot of people find that to be a bit creepy,
"Oh, is Siri or someone listening to my conversations?
"Is Amazon listening all the time?"
I think that one of the things that we tend to forget about,
is that the distribution channels
for the media that we consume,
you know, Google and Amazon and Facebook,
have gotten very, very complex in their algorithms
and very sophisticated in the way
that they're able to monitor our behavior,
and monitor what we do online, and start being predictive
in the kind of things that we're looking for.
So we can talk about audience and like audiences,
and that's what these big marketing conglomerates
have been able to figure out very successfully,
that Josh is very likely to be a consumer
of Turo based on the other behavior
that he's performed online.
Just like I might be a very good consumer
because I see that my social feeds
are filled with things like craft beer all the time.
-: Yeah.
-: I'm performing behaviors that suggest,
not only do I like that, but I like the other things
that people who like craft beer like.
And it's predictive advertising,
they're starting to show me the kinds of brands
that are likely to appeal to me
before I'm ready to make the purchasing decision.
And this is the thing that people tend to find
a little bit creepy on some occasions.
But it's a thing that if it's done effectively,
is actually seen as effective.
The kind of advertising that we consume effectively
are in ourselves is not the kind
that we find to be annoying.
When advertisers get in front of us at the right time,
with the right product,
we're actually pretty happy about that.
If you're thinking about planning a vacation
and your Facebook feed has information about,
you know, you're thinking about going to Belize,
and you see that on your Facebook feed,
you are more likely to consume it
than if it shows up on the middle of, you know, a YouTube,
and all the sudden you're being interrupted
in what you're trying to consume,
yeah, that's a little more annoying.
So the predictive advertising that tends to be effective,
that we're working with the advertising channels
to put in front of people,
that's the beginning of the omni-channel component
that we have historically called more upper funnel,
but that's, I think has become a bit of a misnomer,
and we'll get into this, I think, Josh.
But there's the idea of, in the old world of branding,
which is great, we wanna do branding,
and it's a very effective method
for any mature brand to do some degree of branding,
but there's also the concept that's emerging
in my mind of pre-conversion,
which we can talk about soon,
but getting in front of the right consumer
at the right time is becoming a tricker and tricker thing
because we have the capability to get in front of them
sooner than we did in the past.
So that's what's fascinating
about this omni-channel approach.
-: You know what's interesting, too,
is we look at it,
and everybody freaks out about privacy, right?
-: Oh, yeah.
-: It's the big thing,
the big hot topic on everybody's mind,
that's all the legal stuff that's going on
with Facebook right now about privacy.
But at the end of the day,
when you look at the actual intention behind it,
it makes a lot of sense.
They're tying to save us time.
-: Bingo.
-: They're trying to bring us what we need
before we even are fully sure exactly what we need.
And so that's where these prediction models come into play.
In a lot of cases they are really beneficial, actually.
You know, I think some areas as that goes
and fine tunes the algorithms,
fine tune themselves it will get a lot better at that.
But I think at the end of the day the intention
is really a powerful and positive thing.
So a lot of us focus PPC though, right?
-: Yes.
-: You know, and we look at that and a lot of I know
my business business owners that are out there,
businesses that we work with, PPC is the thing.
That's the thing you pour all your money into PPC, why?
Because it generates calls.
That's exactly what we need, it's conversions.
All right, that's what matters
at the end of the day is conversions.
-: Yep.
-: Give us a little insight about PPC,
just kind of a top level what PPC is
and why the shift might be going away
a little bit from PPC.
-: Right, you're you're hitting the nail on the head.
Yeah, PPC being the Pay Per Click component
of the advertising space where any advertiser can buy
the ability to show their product or their service
or their company to a consumer who's looking
for the appropriate set of keywords.
So this has been around for a long time.
It's an incredibly effective conversion tool.
PPC is an ad unit that really sits at the very bottom
of the purchasing funnel.
So it's most effective when someone knows
the kind of thing they want to buy,
and they're trying to decide
from whom they're going to buy it.
And that's what we refer to as the very bottom
of the funnel, the conversion piece.
And PPC, like I said,
is an incredibly effective conversion tool.
Now, as we talk about the the conversion funnel,
this is where it gets really interesting,
because, as you just alluded to, the advertising channels
like Facebook, and even Google
and the rest of the Google network and YouTube
are more and more effective at getting brands
and products in front of people,
prior to the exact moment they're ready to buy.
So what Google refers to is the zero moment of truth
is the time that we're logging on and saying,
"Darn it, the sink is broken.
"I need a plumber right now."
But there's a point prior to that with a lot
of purchases that are not necessarily
occurring instantly in the moment.
So we talked about if there's a
we're sitting here in the Santa Clarita Valley,
and at this moment,
there's a finite number of people who are actively
in the market for buying plumbing services.
But there are people right now who are doing that search
and our advertisers, we want them in front of those people
that's where PPC is incredibly effective.
What about all the other people in the Santa Clarita Valley
right now who are not in need of plumbing services
right this second, but who might be next week?
Or in two weeks or in a month?
What about the guy who actually is in need
of plumbing services, but it's not emergency,
he knows that his bathtub upstairs is all jacked up
and somebody has to take care of it.
Well, that's what I referred to as pre conversion.
Because if we're really smart with the way
that we advertise, we can be targeting someone who's showing
online behavior that suggests that he or she
is going to be in the buying funnel in the near future.
If someone's been searching around lows for plungers,
and has been looking at Facebook videos or YouTube videos
about how to unclog and now they're not
they haven't search for a plumber near me yet,
but they've put themselves somewhere
in the conversion funnel.
And if we're smart with the way that we advertise,
we're getting in front of them with our brands
before they're ready to make that PPC search.
And like I said before, we do not want our brands discovered
via PPC search, right?
-: No question.
I love that. I love that.
And you know, there's something,
I had this interesting thought the other day
about the conversion funnel.
We have to look at it and we're like
we need to tackle The bottom of the funnel,
we need to tackle the bottom of the funnel
as if everybody else doesn't exist.
As if like there's nobody else in the funnel except...
but the thing that we have to recognize too is
people are always in the funnel, they never leave.
It just depends on what stage they're in.
And when you talk about when we get into like things like
seasonality, where search trends,
it's not that they're gone, or they don't need,
they're just in a different part of the funnel.
And so you have to provide the value at a different part.
So let's talk about the correlation between value
and this pre-conversion advertising.
I love that word, by the way, pre conversion advertising.
How do you run an effective
pre-conversion advertising strategy?
-: Thank you.
That's that is the question.
So what we want to be able to do for our advertisers
is all of them need to be running a sufficient amount
of budget to capture the people who are actively
looking right now.
Meaning those who are in the zero moment of truth.
The actual conversion, there's a very small population
of them at any given time, but they're out there.
So we want our advertisers to run a sufficient budget
so they're maximizing that group.
Don't leave the low hanging fruit sitting in the tree,
capture those.
That's what PPC is really good at, right?
Now, the pre-conversion component, think of it like this,
all of us are going to be buying presents
at the holiday time.
And all of us have loved ones who were considering not yet,
but we will be considering what we're going
to be buying for them.
That means that all of us are in the conversion funnel
somewhere for holiday gifts.
And the question is, I haven't decided what I'm gonna
get anybody yet, but I might see things online
in my social feeds or as I'm searching on Amazon
for something else, they give me ideas
about what I might want to buy later.
I probably am not going to be buying now.
Now if I happen to see something that really catches my eye,
that's a perfect thing for my wife,
I might buy that now even though not thinking about it.
Therefore, I'm not in the zero moment of truth.
But if the perfect product shows up for me right now,
and somewhere in my social environment,
I might actually convert on that
or I might simply go a little bit further down the funnel
thinking, "That is kind of a nice robe.
"I wonder if she needs a robe this year for Christmas."
I'll just let put that in the back of my mind.
So I'm now pre-conversion on that robe.
But later on when it's time when it reminds me
because it's December 23rd and haven't shopped yet,
(Josh laughing)
Now I need to go on Amazon and find that rope.
So hopefully, now I'm really zero moment of truth.
But if an effective advertiser has captured the fact
that I'm behaving like I might buy a robe in a couple weeks,
they can start advertising to me
and capture me prior to me doing the PPC search.
So this is the thing that you said that I want to make sure
our advertisers understand is that they need to run PPC,
but more of the savvy advertisers are getting in front
of their prospective customer prior to that PPC search.
So if our advertisers are not smart,
if we don't advise them well, what's going to happen,
they're gonna start losing market share to people
who are advertising in front of them in the funnel.
So if someone's capturing their audience prior
to them high up the funnel,
that's the pre conversion tool I'm talking about.
Get me to buy the road prior to me doing the PPC search,
and you'll have me as a customer.
-: Absolutely.
You mentioned something early on in the show,
just about SEO.
How SEO has changed, it used to be king, that was the thing.
Everybody was like, "I want to get free leads."
And there's a lot of misnomers when it comes to SEO
because it's not really free, right?
So when it comes to organic buying traffic to a website
versus this idea of earning organic traffic,
what's the primary difference there?.
-: Yeah. So you know, an organic lead or as you said,
it's earned versus paid, maybe it's one way to look at it.
And a lot of advertisers think of SEO
as a free way to buy leads.
And what they mean by that typically is,
"I'm not paying a fixed amount of money specifically."
There's not a cost per click associate with SEO.
And there's a direct, measurable cost per click
associate with any PPC ad.
So, a lot of advertisers view that is free advertising.
Well, the simple truth of the matter
is that SEO is not free.
In fact, in most cases, it's more expensive to generate
a ranking increase than it is to simply purchase a PPC ad.
So we view that.
SEO is a very technical specialty.
We've got a floor people here who are SEO experts,
and they spend a lot of time with complicated strategies,
of back linking and technical SEO on the website
to make sure that our clients are optimized,
but it is not cheap.
These are expensive people that have a very specific
skill set that takes a lot of time to stay current with
and there's no cheap way to do SEO.
So we always want our clients to rank organically.
-: Yeah.
-: Because as you know, a lot of people told you,
"I never look at the ads.
"I don't click the ads or anything like that.
"I go all the way down to the organic."
That's great.
We wanna make sure that we're putting clients
as far up the organic chain as we can
when their services are being looked for.
However, it's not cheap, it's not free.
And like I said before, if you're selling a product,
Google has continued to push the organic
further and further down the page.
And more and more people are consuming the results
prior to the organic.
I saw stat just last week, it's something like
90% of people never get to page two of Google.
That means, you know, if you look at your phone,
there's no organic on "page one."
there's a map, yeah, and that's no organic results.
I don't mean to be mincing words here.
But the traditional organic result of that, you know,
the first line, that's an organic result,
that's far down the page these days.
And using that old tactic which was very effective
in say, 2008, 2010.
If that your tactics still, you're not going to get anywhere
near as much traffic as it used to.
-: Absolutely.
And you know, there was an article that came out recently
about Facebook being one of the top three search engines.
-: Yeah.
-: So they're increasing their market share in terms
of the number of searches are being performed on it.
How is Facebook changing the game here
in being a go to Search Engine?
-: Bingo.
And the way they're changing that game
is because people are discovering on Facebook
before they're looking.
So that particular article, which I also read
was suggesting that people are doing searching,
they're treating Facebook, like a portal to the internet.
You can consume news on Facebook,
you can look for products on Facebook,
you can find recommendations on Facebook.
So people are consuming that is a primary portal
into the rest of the internet,
as opposed to starting on Google,
which is very important because now
PPC is taken out of the picture.
Facebook does do advertising, of course,
I mean we help a lot of our brands do Facebook advertising,
but what it's doing is it's sort of siphoning off
some component of the people that used to search for things
they wanted to buy first.
So like I said before,
if you're discovering things on Facebook,
prior to yourself doing
a search that could result in a PPC result,
in the zero moment of truth,
it simply moved the zero moment of truth
further up the purchasing funnel,
and it changes the dynamic of the way
that traditional PPC has worked.
-: Absolutely.
So Facebook is essential moving forward.
I mean, right now.
-: Yes, it is.
-: I mean you're not on social
then you're not moving with the times here.
-: Correct.
-: Another thing that I want to touch on, you know,
as we wrap up here is the local service ads.
How do those fit into the buying cycle
in your omni-channel marketing strategy?
How important are they and where do they fit?
-: Yeah, that's that's a good question too.
So local service ads,
this newish ad unit that has been rolled out by Google.
And you may have seen them
because they sit at the top of the page, if you do a search,
they came out originally as home service ads.
But Google expanded the scope of them
to be called local service ads,
which paves the way for more kinds of businesses
to be featured in the local service ad.
So unlike cost per click model,
the local service ad is a cost per lead model.
So it changes the dynamic a little bit for the advertiser,
you only pay for a leads when who calls you
or fills out a form.
Now, the interesting thing about these is A,
they sit at the top of the page above the PPC ad,
so a prime real estate on Google.
And the second thing that's interesting about it
is that if you're a local business,
you can't necessarily decide how often you show up there.
You can do the the tactics that Google recommends
because they have their own algorithm,
which is a secret algorithm,
but we do know that it includes in search signals
as a number of Google rankings that you've got,
so these five star rankings on Google
are critically important for determining
how often you show up for your local service ads.
And then in conjunction with how often you answer your phone
and how quickly,
in conjunction with where you're physically located.
So Google takes those kinds of signals into account
and then decide which local service ads are going to show.
So as we know, if you do a search in Valencia,
for plumber near me,
you're going to be served some local service ads
for plumbers who are in this physical area
who meet those other criteria.
They have good Google reviews,
and they tend to answer their phone.
And if there's a plumber,
who would love to be serving the Valencia area,
but happens to be office at Burbank
their chances of showing up here far less
and if there's a local plumber in Valencia
who's got really bad reviews
and or doesn't answer his or her phone,
not likely going to show up in the local service ads.
So this is not an ad unit, you can simply buy your way into
like PPC historically has been.
-: Wow, Dan, there's so many, so many good nuggets
that we are just have in here.
I just want to wrap it up with a nice little bow here.
What's the last piece or the one thing the piece of advice
you would give our advertisers listening right now
when it comes to omni-channel marketing,
and whether or not they should
incorporate it into their marketing mix.
-: Okay, so the short answer is
they absolutely have to.
-: Yeah, just do it.
That's one thing.
-: The one thing is do it or you're gonna get beaten.
Like I said, if they come away with two things out of this,
it'd be one,
I do not want our brands discovered via a search
that has results in a PPC ad.
You can't do any branding, really, on a PPC ad,
you've got, you know, 140 or so characters
of text available to you.
No pictures, no video,
you can't control your brand via the PPC ad,
you control a little bit of messaging.
So we don't want them discovered that way.
Second, the purchasing decisions are being pushed
further and further up the funnel
by the way that technology is working.
So that zero moment of truth,
which is still absolutely critical
is not the only purchasing decision anymore.
There is too much opportunity to get
in front of the ideal customer sooner in the buying cycle.
So we tell our advertisers as we need them to be doing
an omni-channel approach as they capture business
so that that business is not getting poached
by their competitors prior to their PPC search.
That's what I want them to remember more than anything else.
-: Awesome.
Well, this has been awesome, Dan.
Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule
to be on "The Sharpest Tool"
we really appreciate it.
-: Of course, Josh, I appreciate it.
It was a good conversation.
-: Definitely was.
And for all of you listening, if you found a lot of value
in this episode, definitely hit that subscribe button
wherever you might be.
We're pumping these guys out and to give you all the latest
and greatest marketing information.
That way you can sharpen your tool set
and your skill set when it comes to your marketing campaign.
No matter where you're at in your business journey.
From all of us here at "The Sharpest Tool"
my name is Josh, will catch you next time.
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