Podcasters building a business usually don’t have a strategy when followers start to pour in, while there are others who aren’t getting enough customers. A good funnel starts with good communication with followers that will help identify an ideal market. Instead of pushing sales faster, adding value to the campaign is a wiser move. Jean Ginzburg has been in the digital market for 11 years and the best-selling author of Win New Customers. She believes that identifying your customer avatar is the first step in good digital marketing strategies. Understand your audience’s pain points and work on those to build a relevant and valuable content. Learn more of her strategies in reading data and optimizing digital campaigns.

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We’ve got an interview with a digital marketing expert, Jean Ginzburg from Ginball Digital Marketing. She’s an expert in all kinds of things that we don’t really talk about as often here. Things like paid advertising, funnels, what do you with social media to get the message out there. We talk a lot about the content of things here, but we really don’t talk about how we it gets pushed out and things like retargeting. These are big hot topics and things that really can expand and be a critical part of a successful digital marketing strategy. Things that you should know about even if you’re not ready for them yet, those are critical things to think about, “Are you setting up your good framework already from the beginning to gather good data and do all of those things?” Jean Ginzburg is a best-selling author. She has been working in the digital marketing field for more than eleven years. She’s worked within companies and then been out on her own with her Ginball Digital Marketing group. She’s been doing that for four and a half years. It’s a broad range of experience she has both working with entrepreneurs and working with Fortune 500 companies. That really brings a unique perspective to things.

She also has a great book, Win New Customers: How to Attract, Connect, and Convert More Prospects into Customers in 60 Days Using Digital Marketing. This is a big problem. Getting customers from whatever it is that you’re going for in your digital strategy whether you’re working on podcasting, videos, whatever it is that you’re getting your message out there. Isn’t the goal to convert more prospects into customers? I think for the majority of our customers or the people interested in this podcast, it sure is or it should be. We need people with a unique digital marketing perspective like Jean Ginzburg who really can tell us the insider things as to what bigger brands are doing so that we can compete. Let’s dive in because there’s so much packed-in content here and a lot of it is going to be industry terms and other things.

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

Digital Marketing Strategies That Pulls In with Jean Ginzburg

Jean, thanks for joining us. We’re so excited to talk to you.

Thank you so much. I’m really excited to be here. I love doing these podcast and you have an amazing podcast. I’m really happy to talk about digital marketing.

I’m really excited because you bring an expertise that we don’t get to talk about often enough and it’s so critically important. Some podcasts, not every podcasts because there are some that are more exploratory, you’re testing out new ideas and other things like that, but for the most part, podcasts that are business-oriented. Podcasters that are trying to build a business need to have a vision and a strategy for what they’re going to do when they get all these listeners. You really picked up and helped companies and individuals build what to do with them and how to get new customers and how to put them in a funnel and how to manage them on Facebook and attract even more. I’m so excited to talk about that. Let’s dive into first your background just so we get a little bit to know how you got started in digital marketing.

I’ve been doing this for almost eleven years. It’s going to be eleven years in February of 2018. I started off in digital marketing back then just working as a specialist and worked up through the ranks in different companies doing all digital marketing. About four and a half years ago, I decided that it was time for me to do things on my own. I felt I had the skill set and I felt I wanted to move on and be really on my own business owner and help clients directly versus working through an employer to do that. I felt like I could be more beneficial to clients if we just have a direct relationship. Four and a half years ago I founded my agency, Ginball Digital Marketing. Since then I’ve been working with clients and helping them scale their businesses through digital marketing strategies.

You have a book, which I love the title, Win New Customers. Isn’t that why we are all doing this? I see the biggest problem in most entrepreneurial ventures and most business is they don’t have enough new customers. They don’t have enough customers and general leads. That’s what you’re talking about, how to attract more? What prompted you to write that?

I’ve been doing this for four and a half years on my own. The main issue that I get when people come to me, prospects, current clients is that they want more customers. That was really a light bulb that went in my head. I was like, “What if I write a book about that?” I’ve been doing this with my private clients for the last four and a half years. I feel I really wanted to give back because of all the successes I’ve had. I really felt so many people could benefit from what it is that I know if I actually put it out in a book, a course or something like that where I can provide it to people and they can see what it’s like to actually grow a business and what are the strategies that I’m using and how I’ve been doing it for the last four and a half years. I wanted to share my knowledge and not just keep it all in my head. That was the catalyst of wanting to write the book.

Because you have so much experience and you’ve been there and done that and you really talk both on your website and in your book about the fact that there has to be paid media marketing automation, content strategy, social media strategy, whatever you want to override digital strategy. It all ties in to having a really good brand and marketing strategy to begin with. That’s what we always like to make sure that people are starting from good place. It’s that’s paid media and the marketing automation where people fall apart. They think, “Social media is free so this should be easy.” That’s where I see a lot of it fall apart. What about you?

I feel that there are a lot of businesses out there that are putting together good content or great content. Everybody always thinks that, “If I create it, they will come.” That’s just not really how business and how digital marketing works. It’s a very crowded space. You can get your voice out there, but if you’re content is just sitting somewhere on a Facebook page and it doesn’t really see the light of day, then that’s really where I start seeing the problems. Unfortunately, that’s just how Facebook, the platform itself, has decided to create their platform and how they wanted to make money. Unfortunately, it’s not anything that I can control and that we can control. The only way that they feel that you can actually get your content out is if you pay for it. If we are playing in the same box of Facebook, unfortunately we have to follow the rules. In order to get your amazing content out there, you’re going to have to spend a little bit of time and a little bit of budget on it.

We see podcasters in our network who scales so much faster than everyone else and it’s because they pay. They also have though a good funnel. What in your experience makes a good funnel?

I would say communication. Anything when it comes to business, communication strategy I would say is really the top overarching point that you want to look out and content that you want to look out. From the communication strategy, that’s really how your funnel will be created as well. You want to first take a look at who’s your ideal target market. You create your brand strategy, create your communication strategy and use all of that within your funnels. First you want to have users opt-in to your funnel whether that’s through email. I’ve been using for example Facebook Messenger bots recently to also have users opt-in to my Facebook Messenger bot. Either way whichever one you use, then you want to just continuously add value. That would be the main issue or the main mistake that I see entrepreneurs and maybe up and coming businesses make is that they try to push the sale too quickly instead of adding value first.

We’ve had the same problem and over time is that you start to think, “It’s my free PDF I’m offering that must not be the problem.” The reality is that the funnels that are working are spending money on ads to get the visibility into the funnel. You have to get enough people to see it, to do that first step to even know if you have anything worth downloading. We give up too quickly on the ‘what it is,’ instead of ‘how we’re executing it.’

It is a numbers game. The more followers you have on your social media, the more people you have in your email list, the percentage is still the same but the more people will actually purchase and the more people will engage. If you have five followers on your Facebook page, then you’re not really going to get much of an engagement from your followers. If you pay a little bit more and maybe get 10,000 followers on your Facebook page, then you’re going to get a lot more results. It’s a numbers game.

Conversion rates are really low. That’s what scares me sometimes. I’ve looked at some of the Facebook numbers and it was like, “Social media has a 1.3% conversion rate and Google has a 13%.” You look at those numbers and you’re like, “If I want to get any moderate amount of business out of it, I really have to up those numbers to make it work.” Are you finding the same thing or are you finding there are other ways around that?

 

The numbers tend to vary. For example, for opt-ins on Facebook, driving traffic to an opt-in page which is a free piece of content that a user opt-in to with their email address, I’ve seen those to be 40% to 50% conversion rates. 40% to 50% of the traffic that goes to that page opts in. It’s not a sale, but this is an engaged user who is interested in what you have to say in the first stop in your funnel. It’s much easier to convert a warm user like that who has already expressed an interest in your content than it is to find a random person on Facebook and try to sell them something. That’s why it’s called a funnel because we are trying to funnel these users and get them to be warm and to engage with our valuable content.

That seems like a very high conversion rate from what our experience has been with others that we know that have serious funnels programs where they’re paying five-figure amounts of money every month in order to advertise on Facebook and get them into their funnel. The rates that we have experienced are still in double digits but it’s not up to 30’s and 40’s. It’s probably closer to fifteen to twenty at most. They are in crowded areas. I think that’s the other difference. The ones that we’re talking about run in real estate or in speaking training or investing and those are really crowded areas. There’s not anyone doing that in 3D printing if we were to do that in 3D printing. I think we probably dominate and maybe end up at 40% to 60% opt-in.

It’s also very true based on where you are and which vertical you’re in.

You have a blog post that you’ve done that I really like and would love to talk a little bit more and it’s How Not to Run a Paid Media Campaign. That’s where so many people fall apart. They’re like, “I tried it,” and I was like, “How much did you spend?” “$200” “Did that work for you?” Talk a little bit about why you wrote it and what some of the keys are?

I remember writing that article but it’s probably been over a year. I probably should have done a refresh on it. I have not updated it but I need a refresh. There was this ad that I kept seeing on LinkedIn that really was the catalyst for me writing that article. I kept seeing this ad. It was for something auto related. The issue was that the link kept going to a dead page and they kept running that ad. They were spending money and then that link that a user would then click on would go to a dead page. I even actually reached out to them via LinkedIn and via email, I found their website. I reached out to them and they didn’t even respond. I don’t know if they didn’t see it or if they even care. That was definitely the catalyst for providing that article. It was just a completely wasteful money.

I’ve experienced that was well. I had someone reach out to me through LinkedIn. It was definitely a promotion of some type. It came through LinkedIn Messenger. They were inviting me to go to a certain lead page to get something. It really was their first step in the funnel. I had the same thing happen where for whatever reason, the link they provided I wasn’t able to get what I was looking for and that should not happen. If you’re going to go and spend time and money on a campaign, you’ve got to go through and test everything. I know it’s hard to do because some of these funnels, and if you’re using Infusionsoft for all these email communication, there can be a lot of different pieces and components to it. You’ve got to go and test it all because you’re going to lose their attention if they can’t engage right then. That would be for me a first sign of, “Not doing business with them. They don’t have it all together.” That’s not a second chance.

It chars the reputation of the business pretty quickly if a user comes through their funnel and they’re going to dead pages or they’re going to irrelevant pages. I probably wouldn’t do business with them either.

How much of your business do you think is really more on this paid media strategy versus marketing automation? You even do affiliate marketing. Has that shifted over time and are you seeing one coming more predominant in 2018?

One of the things that I talked about in my book is that everything in digital marketing is interrelated and you can’t really run paid media unless you have a funnel on the backend of it. Unless you’re running it to an eCommerce shop where users are going to go directly to a sales page and purchase something. We do that sometimes. Typically, you have seen that. It doesn’t work very well because your conversion rates are pretty low. You really have to have a funnel on the backend of a paid media or a Facebook campaign. I would say that they have changed more again towards having a funnel at the end of a Facebook campaign or a new paid media campaign whether it’s Google AdWords, whether it’s any other paid media or paid social campaign, Instagram. I’d say that’s definitely been the change is that implementing those funnels is really part of our strategy now, a big part of it.

We’re seeing the same thing. It’s having a great content strategy. It’s not like, “I have a podcast strategy and a blog post strategy and an SEO strategy.” For us everything is interrelated, which is why we built our services to do them all at once. Everything is tied together and it’s the same thing here. If you have a business sale strategy of how you’re operating it, you’ve got to have paid media and funnels and social media strategy. You’ve got to have all that working together and it is interrelated.

That’s definitely how I see digital marketing. It’s related into a lot of things. Digital marketing is interrelated to other things and it levers on other points of your business. It’s an ecosystem. Your business is an ecosystem. Digital marketing is definitely an ecosystem. Leveraging or pulling levers at one point can definitely increase or decrease other points. It’s all interrelated for sure.

If someone is getting started and I know you have this on your own website, you have the discussion about the different types of social media. Having different strategies for Facebook and the keys to Instagram, the pros and cons. You have a lot of articles on pros and cons, which I love because I don’t recommend doing them all, at least not initially. When you’re trapped with by either cash or time, go for the one that’s going to make the most sense for you. Do you see that as people actually focusing or are they still trying to do everything at once?

I honestly feel everybody is trying to do everything at once and I call it the shiny object syndrome. I feel that entrepreneurs absolutely suffer from shiny object syndrome. The book is really short. It’s only 85 pages. The reason why I made it short is because I really wanted to just include the points in the book that really are going to make your business and improve your business and grow your business. I specifically left out a lot of things that I think potentially could be beneficial. I didn’t want to create a shiny object syndrome in my book because I didn’t want people to be like, “Maybe I should try Instagram ads or maybe I should try LinkedIn Ads or maybe I should try HubSpot.” I specifically didn’t want to include that because I feel so many times that’s the entrepreneur’s downfall. There are a couple of entrepreneurial downfalls and one of them is shiny object syndrome. The other one is trying something and then quitting right away.

 

It’s quitting too soon before you have enough information. I know that’s the thing like, “Should I try Snapchat?”

A lot of it is just people might not be familiar with these platforms. I think becoming educated on these platforms and really understanding, is it going help your business, then you can see, “Is it worth for me to try Snapchat or is it something that’s not going to really make an improvement or a difference in my business?” The rule of thumb here is, “Are your audiences hanging out on Snapchat? Are they hanging out on Instagram? Are they on Facebook?” It really depends on where your audiences are hanging out.

I have an advice here that I give and I say this all the time when I give talks on our Brandcasting process and everything. I say that basically, “You can go on Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter and all of these things and try them all and see where you’re starting to resonate and see what’s working for you. Or you can start with the one where you think that is the most relevant and then do what I call is keep your address on the other places.” For instance, I tried for a year to make Twitter work. It didn’t work for my audience. It wasn’t where they were. They wanted more information. They wanted more details. They don’t want 140 characters and pass it on. It didn’t work for them. I felt strongly that I had enough people there that might be looking for, “When is the next podcast posting or when is this?” I didn’t want to be out of business on Twitter. I set up an auto post for Twitter. I don’t ever think about it. It just automatically happens every time I post a podcast or a blog post. If you went to my Twitter page because that happens to interest you, you would still say, “They’re still on business.” I don’t work at it at all. Instead, I work on Facebook and LinkedIn and sometimes Instagram because a lot of our work is visual. What do you think of that strategy?

I absolutely agree with that. We only have 24 hours in a day and sometimes people sleep also. We really have only sixteen hours in a day. There are only so many things that we can do. Putting something in Twitter on autopilot or on automation, which is really where a lot of things are going in automation, I agree with that. It’s really the best way to do it. Keep your address, keep it there. If you can do something automated like every time a podcast comes out, it’s automatically posted to Twitter, absolutely keep it there. Then you’ll still have content there on a regular basis. If things are working on Facebook, then continue drilling and going after Facebook because that’s really the channel that seems to be working for you.

You’ve talked about these pros and cons of using the different social medias. What would be good for a lot of service companies? A lot of our podcasters are service businesses. What’s working really well and what do you look for as a pro in a particular platform?

Definitely the first thing I would say is, “Where is your audience hanging out?” For example, if you are looking for moms between the ages of 35 and 55, you’ll probably find them on Instagram or on Facebook. If your audiences are younger, maybe they’re 18 to 25, a lot of times you’ll probably find them on Snapchat because that generation is most likely not using Facebook at this point. They are still using Instagram but not Facebook anymore. I would say the first thing would be first figure out where your audience is hanging out. The pros and cons, I go through it more in my videos, but I can share some of the pros and cons. It also depends on the type of business that you have. If you have a service business, unless it’s very visual, it might be difficult to relay that message across on Instagram. For example I get the things that I do in my business; I’m not a creative agency, I do marketing strategy. It’s going to be hard for me to use Instagram for my audience. Even though they may be hanging out on there, it’s going to be hard for me to relay the message across because it’s not very visual.

It’s not native to you. That’s one of the things when it’s not native to you to be creating those photographs that are beautiful and what’s working in an editorial sense on Instagram, then it makes it so much more work for your core business. Which is why if you’re good in video, then stay in video. If you’re good in voice, then stay in podcasting. If you’re good in writing, then stay in blog posting and then find other people to do all the rest.

I do a lot of videos so I use Facebook and YouTube for my videos because that’s really my bread and butter and a format that I enjoy doing. It depends what you enjoy doing, where your audience is hanging out and what kind of business you have. It would really depend on what kind of platforms you’re using.

Jean, one of the things that surprise me is you’re really talking about a pay-to-play push marketing campaign of one kind or another. You mentioned Google AdWords or Facebook or all that. It seems like nothing that you’re doing or recommending would really be reaching people on Google unless they’re paying for it, if you’re paying for advertisement to show up in a Google search. Is that fair to say?

That’s just really my area of expertise. I think there are definitely ways to get viral; I guess basically free advertising. It is much more difficult. I’m not definitely an expert in viral marketing or viral videos or anything like that. From everything that I’ve seen, just getting typically an opt-in to your funnel is really the way to go and it does include pay-to-play. I’m sure there are other methods to do that. I just feel those methods can be very hard to miss.

When you’re talking about it it’s like, “If you build it, they will come.” We have that all the time. “These are great products.” We design great products and we help our clients and they have great ideas and great products. When they don’t pay to get the marketing out there, it doesn’t sell on Amazon. It doesn’t get picked up. It is the reality of how you market it can be more powerful than what it is. That’s an unfortunate thing but that is the way that it goes.

Unfortunately, that’s just how these platforms are set up. I wish they were different, but I’m sure that’s how Mark Zuckerberg makes all his money is through people like us and businesses like ours, businesses who want to advertise on Facebook. He has definitely found a good niche there. I wish it were different. Unfortunately, at this point maybe there’s going to be a new platform down the line that’s going to replace Facebook and it may be a whole different ballgame.

I don’t disagree with you that there’s a cost to everything. Even if you’re creating your own content, writing it or recording it as an audio show or recording it as a video, either you’re paying someone to help produce it and edit it or you’re just taking your own time, which there’s a cost to that to create those things. Having a content to be able to put out there is really key and you’re creating a lot of videos. I assume they’re on Facebook and YouTube. The reality is there’s another whole aspect like websites like WebMD are incredibly successful businesses. They make over $500 million a year and it’s just through content that they’re putting on their site on a regular basis. That’s how it was built, not through advertising. It’s because people are searching on Google for things that are on WebMD and people go and find them because of that. They make their money on ads that are placed on their site. There’s ad value in there. They’re not creating a funnel and push advertising for people to come and find them and get them into there.

You’re very knowledgeable, an expert in your field and what you do is incredibly valuable and companies need to do that at a certain level, have paid marketing campaigns. There’s a certain baseline level of organic Google search that’s also incredibly valuable for people to find you and can get people into your funnel that comes from converting this audio or video content into written content for your site. That seemed to be something you really don’t get into. You’re doing push marketing. There has to be a nice balance of both. We have 500 episodes plus on our podcast and they’re all blog posts and they rank really high on search. If somebody is not searching for it, if it’s not first and foremost in their mind, then how are you reaching them? Having a combination between great content and it’s the definition of an ad maybe that we’re differing here. Let’s talk a little bit about that, Jean. You’re not talking about an ad that says, “My company is here.” You’re talking about an ad that might be an informational ad, a boost out of a piece of content.

I’m definitely not an expert in organic marketing. I would never call myself that. I totally understand what you’re saying about WebMD. The thing is WebMD is a multi-conglomerate that has hundreds of millions of dollars. We’re working with small companies that don’t have that kind of presence online. I totally agree about people might have symptoms and they know what they’re searching for. If I have issues on my stomach or I have a sore on my leg or whatever, I’m searching that and WebMD comes up. It makes perfect sense. What if you don’t know what you’re even searching for? For example, I just started working with new client recently. They’re in the Internet of Things space and they have this shade thing that you put out in your patio. It’s electronically organized and electronically manipulated and manually synced through your phone. Those are the things that a person is not really going to specifically search on Google because they don’t even know that it exists. You have to push the content out there with paid media in order for people to even know that it exists.

Let’s talk about measurements. We give up too quick. You mentioned that. They try it and then they give up too fast. What are some good measurements or guides that you should do so that you say, “I’ve got to give it more time or I need to keep going.” What kind of guidelines do you have?

I would say the first thing is the data needs to be statistically significant in order to really use data to understand if the campaign is working or not. I know that statistically significant is a vague term, but what I’m saying is that if you get five people engaging with your post, that’s not statistically significant. Depending on what it is, for example for a post on Facebook, you probably need at least several hundred people engaging with your post. If it’s video you use on Facebook, then you probably need several thousand. It depends on the scale. It depends on what it is that people are engaging with. First is definitely statistically significant. To give you an example for Facebook, you want reactions to your post or your video on Facebook. That’s definitely engagement. You’re seeing that people are reacting to it and Facebook is seeing it too. They’re probably going to give you a break on your CPCs or your CPMs if they’re seeing that people are actually engaging with your posts or with your video.

I practice this. If I want to reward someone because they wrote something really great or they put a great video together, don’t just hit the like button for them. Hit love, laugh, whatever it might be. Hit one of those other buttons because those are the buttons are way heavier. You have to do a little more than just hit the like button. You have to scroll up and move across and click something. Because you do that, that has more value and Facebook weighs it heavier. If you really want to reward someone and help them, then have a greater reaction.

You can see is your content engaging or relevant to your audience? You’re going to see that they’re going to be engaging with your post or your video. For email marketing, I can provide some basic benchmarks. I talked a little bit about opt-in rates. For opt-in rates, I’ve seen in my industry and clients that I’ve worked with, 40% to 50% opt-in rates. This is a free piece of content that the user provides or email address. It’s not a sale or anything like that. I guess 50% is the top end of it. If you’re seeing really high, then your content is really relevant to your audience and people are really interested. I’d say 30% to 50% is usually a good benchmark for opt-in rates. Once they are in your email system or in your email database and you are sending them valuable content, typically a 20% open rate for your emails is a good benchmark. If you’re below that, there are probably good ways to update your subject lines or test out new subject lines. In terms of click-through rates for email, those are usually about 10%. These are all very generic because your industry might be different. I can’t exactly say specifically but I say those are going to be the benchmarks for example for paid media, for email.

If you’re going to pay money on it, it ought to have that good conversion rates. Thank you for sharing that because that’s really important to have an understanding of. You have a whole set of information about Facebook pixels. I think that people don’t understand the power of that and what that really means and can do. This idea of pixeling, retargeting, all of that is something that goes critically to having a good paid campaign at the end because you start to dial in and know who you want to talk to, knowing who is attracted to you already. Can you talk about how long and how deep you really need to get on that to really get some good valuable information on who is being attracted to you?

The Facebook pixel, it is also about who is attracted to you but it’s also about a lot of data points that you can pass back and forth between your website and Facebook and the Facebook ads platform. I would say it’s critical to have your Facebook pixel set up or any pixel. It’s not just Facebook. For example, if you’re doing Google AdWords campaigns, it’s very critical to set up a pixel for Google AdWords. Any platform typically will have a pixel for you to set up. Basically, it’s just a way for the two systems to talk to each other. If somebody is on your site and they convert and they purchase something in your site, it will just talk back to Facebook and say, “User X has converted on your site and here’s the conversion and this is the value of it.” It’s important to have that because then you can gather information, gather data and with data is really how you optimize your campaigns. Without a pixel, whether it’s on Facebook or any other platform, your data is not going to be there and you’re not going to know if your campaign is working. It’s absolutely critical.

What you can do with the pixels, there are a number of ways you can get really granular. The more data you have, the more you can learn about your campaign. You can pass back a number of conversions, how many people have engaged with a post on your website, how many people have purchased, what is the value? There are a ton of data points for Facebook. You can also do retargeting on Facebook using the Facebook pixel. What retargeting is bringing back users who have somehow engaged with you or with your brand. On Facebook, there are four ways you can retarget and there’s actually probably more than that but typically, I use these four methods. You can retarget users who have been to your website. You can put a Facebook pixel on your website and it will talk back to Facebook and let you know how many people have been on your site and you can retarget them. You can upload your email list to Facebook. It will match up any users with those specific email addresses and you can use that as a safe audience and retarget those users. Those are all warm audiences who have engaged with your brand in the past.

You can also retarget people who have engaged with your Facebook page. Anybody who has been to your Facebook page, clicked, liked anything on your Facebook page, you can retarget those users. Lastly, the way I do it is you can also retarget users who have engaged with your videos on Facebook. That’s really one of the reasons why I use Facebook also for a lot of my videos. Even if you post it on your site, it will still let Facebook know that somebody has engaged with your videos. You can retarget people who have watched a certain percentage of your videos. The reason why retargeting is so great is because it allows you to get the warm traffics of people of who’ve already engaged with your brand in the past and to take the next step of the funnel.

This is really important for podcasters and we have a lot of podcasters here because we don’t have a lot of information on our subscribers. They belong to iTunes and up to now they keep saying they’re going release the data but they don’t. We don’t have any demographic information. If you’re not doing things like this, pixeling and retargeting and understanding it, you don’t have a demographic makeup or the idea of who your audience really is. You don’t have any information. You just know that they used the IOS app or they used it on a computer. That’s about all the information you have. They hit this episode and that episode. You don’t have any details. If you’re headed to a podcast strategy like we have most of ours who are heading into advertisements, it’s critical to get to an understanding of who that audience is. These are some of those details, some of those mechanics of things you need to have in there because the information that it provides can make everything you do from that point forward more informed.

Knowing your audience is really half the battle. I always say, “No matter how great your ad might be, your video, your content, if you are targeting to the wrong audience, it’s just not going to make an impact.”

That’s the big question though, knowing your audience. A lot of the times, it’s a lot harder for some businesses to really identify who that audience is. Certain types of things are easy to search for, other things are not at all easy to search for. It takes a lot of trial and error in trying to mark to a certain audience in order to figure out really who the audience is. There’s a lot of guessing going on. Especially as you are pointing out with your client, Jean, that you have something new and innovative and we work in that world a lot. When you have something new and innovative, it’s really hard to tell who’s going to bite? Who’s going to be that early adaptors? Who’s going to find out? The faster you can get that information, the better off you’ll be. The more speed to market will happen for you.

I don’t know what your experience have been or if I have been to a similar space, but I feel that’s one of the things that a lot of businesses lack is they don’t know who their target market is. All the marketing from there, no matter what you’re doing, podcasting, content, paid media, if you don’t know who your target market is, it’s just going to be irrelevant. One of the main things that I work on just from the beginning when I engage with a client is we have to understand who your ideal customer avatar is.

Jean, what are the top five things you should have in your digital marketing strategy? Let’s leave them with it. They need to be thinking about these five things.

To summarize, your ideal target market. Definitely understanding who is your customer avatar and really understanding their pain points and frustrations. You can get the demographic data but really honing in on what are their challenges, what’s making them tick is really important as well. Then creating content around those pain points and frustrations that your customer avatar is having. That could be in many different formats. It could be in video. It could be blogs. It could be podcasts. It could be case studies.

I think I clearly heard that from you too is that it needs to be in service. You need to be giving them lots of value.

Valuable content that will resonate with your audience, with the point number one, your ideal target market. I think point number three is disseminating that content. Whether it’s on social media, whether it’s on paid media, there are many different ways of doing it. Understand where is your target market hanging out, on which platforms. It’s important to get it out there because otherwise, the content will not see the light of day. Retargeting, a really easy strategy and an amazingly lucrative strategy too. Very low cost and really gets your warm audiences back into the funnel. Number four would be retargeting and then number five is data. The more data you have, the more you can read that data and understand and optimize your campaigns.

I’m so glad we’ve got a chance to talk with you. I thank you so much for sharing all your wonderful knowledge with us.

It was a pleasure being a guest here. I absolutely love this podcast. Thank you so much. I would love to be back some time in the future.

We’ll definitely do that.

Thank you so much.

Digital Marketing Strategies That Pulls In – Final Thoughts

I really enjoyed that. I wanted to learn a bit from her and really understand it. Let me preface what I’m going to say with the fact that I completely respect Jean and what she is doing and there’s absolutely a need for it. I do think that key question that we talked about in the interview is that you have to know who your customer is, what they’re interested in or you have to understand that avatar so well in order to really engage in a paid digital marketing program. Many entrepreneurs and small businesses, even if they think they know who it is, in terms of all the data and details of a pixel on Facebook and things like these, they may think they know but I don’t think they really do know. My concern is if you’re going to engage in that kind of program, if you’re not sure exactly who it is you need to reach, you’re going to waste a lot of time and money in trial and error figuring that out.

That’s why you’d also want an expert in that case to help you out with that, “Are you really the best person?” and this is where I find it all often. We hear it so often that you’re like, “You think you know who your customers are and that’s not who they are at all.” We say, “We think we have on our 3D Print Podcast especially a lot of educators and students and they are in this younger age demographic and interested in technology.” That was the premise when we started out. We have a lot of retirees. We have a lot of engineers looking to pivot jobs. I’m always shocked when people walk up to me at a trade show and I’m like, “You’re that listener who keeps communicating with me and messaging? You’re ten years older than I thought or you’re a guy. I thought you were a woman.” It’s so surprising to me.

I think really dialing in and having a system by which you can tell that and there are techniques. She was talking about the retargeting where you take your email list, you take your subscriber list and you drop them in Facebook and you’d get a demographic view of them. Now, you have some more details. Now, you have some more information and you’re not just assuming based on the five or six people who constantly message you that that’s what your audience looks like. That’s really a critical factor. The more information the more we can hack the system from an organic standpoint, the more we can be really smart about what we make our next episode about. The more organic and viral opportunities you have if you can afford the paid model. We’re also missing the point and it is something that we have not paid for advertising. We’ve done tests just to try out people’s programs, but we’ve not paid for advertising on our podcast on purpose.

We wanted to see if we could do it organically but we also didn’t want to spend money because it wasn’t our core business. Why do we spend money on something that wasn’t core business for us? We are talking about the 3D Printing Podcast. The reality is it was an ingredient of our business and not the entire business. It was a model and a test and we were doing a bunch of things with it. It was not something we were willing to put an ad budget towards. We purposely didn’t and we’ve organically grown it to a 100,000 plays per month, all sorts of things like that. We recognize that there is value there but we also recognize if we don’t really make money from the engagement of the audience because we don’t have a funnel, we don’t have a business, we don’t send it into it. It’s not our purpose. It is more info-based than anything else.

We have a different purpose, but that’s not what every podcaster is about. Many, many of them have services and courses and other things that they’re promoting and they can’t wait that amount of time. They can’t wait until they get to 500 episodes and 100,000 plays. They can’t wait for that. They need an accelerator. That’s when you have to look at it and go, “Is this time and am I ripe to do some paid boost? Do I need a boost? Do I need a boost to launch? Do I need a boost along the way because I’m almost ready for advertisers and if I just got my listenership up this way or my engagement up or if I knew more about my demographics, maybe it’s time.” That’s really why I wanted to have Jean on the show is to really analyze that for yourself. This time and in this year, 2018, I think that’s where we are in our business where we’re saying, “We’ve done a lot. We’ve tested out our model. We’ve got a great business. We’ve got systems in place. We’ve got scalable growth, but what we don’t have is quite the boost that we would like and maybe it’s time just to go jump a level and not wait for months for it to organically grow for us. Let’s jump a level.” I’m talking about Feed Your Brand right now. I think it may be time on the 3D Print Podcast as well.

 

I phenomenally believe and I’m 100% confident that having the written content on your website is ultra critical to success. Especially if you are not completely certain who your customer is, believe me, they are out there on Google searching on their pain points. Even if they don’t really know what they want or need, they’re searching on their pain points. That’s really what we do and what this is all about. You’ve got to have that content, otherwise if you did a podcast and didn’t have the written content, you’re just leaving that content on the table. Google doesn’t index what is said within a podcast or what is said within a video. They will only index the name of the video and whatever it might be tagged with and that’s it. There is a huge amount of marketing that Google does for you by indexing that content. It’s platform. It’s great content. It’s reason for people to convert once they get there. If they never find you because they’re never typing that in or if they never see the social posts because your social posts are only going out to 13% of your page likes, then they’re not seeing it to get started. That’s where you have to boost up and have enough numbers for them to be able to see that.

On those social media platforms: Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, in order to get exposure, you’ve got to pay to get beyond whatever organically that platform is going to give you exposure for. There is a time and a place for that and it can be critical for business success. We saw that because we did this little minor test just to see what would happen. To try somebody who said, “You can get 10,000 likes on Facebook in 72 hours and a $100.” It was a bust. It did do it but they were useless 10,000 people. They weren’t valuable likes. They weren’t really your customers and they never would be at that level. We tested it out and that’s why the paid model works is that what we did see was that all the posts that we posted during that time, even though it wasn’t a part of the ad, all got boosted by Facebook. They gave us more value, gave us to a broader readership, a broader viewership whenever we posted during that time period that we had an ad campaign running.

It really is evidence of the pay-to-play situation. It’s an incentive program. I think about it like gambling. You’ve got to occasionally give them a win when they’re dropping their pennies or their quarters in the slot machine and that’s what Facebook is doing. They’re boosting it and going, “Look at how well you’re doing.” Even though it may not be the result of the actual ad, it’s because they’re boosting you overall to get you addicted to the ad model. It’s the reality. It does work because of that. Let me give you an example from the Brandcaster business. If you want to find somebody who would be a potential podcaster, they are all over the map, in every single industry, all walks of life. Some are big corporations. Some are individuals just starting out. Some are small established businesses. They’re doctors and they’re other kinds of entrepreneurs and business people. It is very hard to identify who that avatar is. There are some similar qualities but it’s very hard to do. In terms of a paid marketing strategy on social media, that would be very hard.

If we want to get existing podcasters to move over to our platform, there are a lot of commonalities there and it’s easier to search on. That’s what that issue of, “Who are they?” You have to know who they are is so ultra-critical. Then find more of them. That’s really where I think the ‘find more of them,’ to rely on the idea that they’re going to spread it to other people like them is just false. It doesn’t always work. If you really do have that dialed in and have that right and it is converting and working for you, then go spend some money and find even more. The foundation of the content on your site being on Google, people finding you because they have the pain point of they need to get their message out to the world, the true bigger audience, they need to find customers. Whatever those keyword terms are, they’re going to find your blog post on your site and then you can start to funnel them from there, learn who they are and you might identify, “There is a whole market of automobile service technicians that are out there that might be interested.” You might learn, “There’s a niche,” and now you could learn about that niche and then put some money into it and market it. To me, if you haven’t created that foundation and aren’t continuing to build that written content on your site, that you’re leaving so much money and opportunity on the table, you’ve got to be doing that no matter whether you’re in audio or video or however you’re getting your message out there. That to me was something I want to put out there. I agree that those five critical things that she shared with us that are key to digital marketing are 100% right on.

We like to talk about foundational things. Things that you should do early on because they’re good even if you’re not ready for these things yet. Putting in Facebook and Google pixels and those kinds of things are really smart strategies to do at the get-go and they don’t cost a lot of money. Jean has a free opt-in where it’s three or four-video parts that you can learn how to do it yourself. She also has a done-for-you program. It’s only $297. She will get your Facebook pixel up and running for you. Do you really need to know how to do that? My time is valuable, $250 an hour easily. To me, that’s a no-brainer. If it takes longer to watch the videos in an hour, then do it. I’d rather have it done for me and done right. Having that means you will have data later. These are critically important things to think about and that’s where you need to find an expert like Jean to help you with that and really go in and dive deep. The other thing is that she has offered us a free PDF of her book. Please be sure to go to our website and check us out on Facebook @FeedYourBrand.

Thanks for listening. We will be back with another great interview next time. This has been Tom and Tracy on Feed Your Brand.

Important Links

• Ginball Digital Marketing
• Win New Customers: How to Attract, Connect, and Convert More Prospects into Customers in 60 Days Using Digital Marketing
• How Not to Run a Paid Media Campaign
• Jean’s Facebook
• Jean’s YouTube
• 3D Print Podcast
• Infusionsoft

About Jean Ginzburg

Jean Ginzburg is a best-selling author, serial entrepreneur, digital marketing expert with more than 10 years of industry expertise helping companies scale revenue, optimize sales and marketing processes and improve productivity. Jean is also the CEO of Ginball. Ginball’s clients range from brand name Fortune 500 companies to innovative start-ups.

Jean launched her book “Win New Customers: How to Attract, Connect, and Convert More Prospects into Customers in 60 Days Using Digital Marketing”. The book is a #1 Amazon best-seller.

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