Transcript
Hi, everyone, and welcome back to another video. Today, we are doing marketing, and it’s all about choosing your marketing channel.
Now first things first, it doesn’t matter how strong a product or service you have.
If you are relying on only word-of-mouth, the customers simply aren’t going to flow in, and you’re not going to be able to sell your product. Word-of-mouth is simply not enough, and that’s simply because it takes too long to generate that kind of reputation in a market.
Even businesses as large as Facebook were not famous over a single night. In fact, I remember growing up Facebook was barely a thing for the first two or three years, and that tracks with small local businesses as well. It takes about maybe three years to build up enough reputation where clients just come in the door because they’ve heard about you from a friend.
The Importance of Client Acquisition Systems
So with that in mind, you need something more.
You need a better marketing and client acquisition system. And this is a huge part of your initial business plan, but it’s also something that you’ll need to constantly craft over time.
So, what’s the first step with a good client acquisition plan?
Generally, I would recommend for most businesses that they need to be thinking local.
Now this doesn’t necessarily mean thinking in their backyard, but they need to be picking some spot that they consider local, and they need to be focusing and tailoring their product to that market.
This local thinking will help them to adjust their marketing strategies, get more specific and get more personal. Now if you are a landed business, this literally means local and you have a pretty good idea of how far a customer will travel to get your product or how long they’re going to wait if it’s a mail out product or similar.
Generally speaking for landed businesses where the customers are coming to them, that local might be only three to four kilometers. Any more than that and the customer will just go somewhere else.
Exploring Marketing Methods
So with all of that in mind, what is the best marketing method?
Well, a lot of businesses, it is a local referral network.
That’s getting in touch with other similar businesses and suppliers up chain and down chain, and encouraging them through incentives to recommend people to your business.
This extremely local effect works very well because of the local reputation boost you get.
You see, when you’re working in your own market, your reputation is naturally boosted by the fact that you are a local hero.
Once you start marketing to people outside your local zone, you’re up against everyone else and your advantages do start to slip away.
But beyond the local referral network, how do we actually generate a large number of clients or product sales? Generally, it’s going to be Internet marketing. And really, it comes down to the big three choices. There’s going to be TikTok, there’s going to be Google, and there’s going to be Meta’s Facebook Instagram double combo. So let’s talk about these three and discuss which one might work for you, because I don’t recommend that you do all three, and we’ll come back to why in a little bit.
Understanding Google Marketing
So let’s start with Google first because Google is one of the most famous and it’s also one of the most simple systems out there.
Simply put, Google is all about high intent customers.
People going to Google are going there searching for something that they already want, and this means that every single Google click is a high intent click.
No one’s going to Google and searching random terms just because.
Now the thing about Google though is that they could be any age, the customers, and it’s a little bit culture specific.
Quite a few cultures locally in Melbourne simply won’t use Google because when they were growing up they used something else. Maybe they used Yahoo or Yandex or one of the other myriad of search engines that come from other cultures.
Google can be a little bit hyper focused on a specific cultural mix.
Now when it comes to using Google, obviously people are searching for the best option and they’re usually searching for a local option. And what that means is that your Google reviews are really going to matter and your Google Maps hits are going to really matter because Google Maps will immediately tell them is this business in range? Similarly having a dot com. Au website for an Australian business is a really big hit and important here because it immediately alerts the user that you’re going to be at least as local as Australia.
Very few customers want to click on a dot com if there’s a dot com.au available.
The problem with Google is that it looks very cheap on paper. You’re only paying a few cents per click, but the reason you’re only paying a few cents per click is because you’re doing all the work. Google’s getting people to do searches, they click on your ad, and then you actually have to spoon feed them all of the information afterwards on your website. Because Google is only a text based system for the most part, that means that they’re coming in cold. They have no idea what you look like, they have no idea what your vibe is, and that means that your landing page has to be absolutely chef’s kiss perfect or you’re going to lose them. And that’s what we see in reality a lot. Google clicks have a very, very low conversion rate, so you need to back it up with a great website and a really clear funnel to get people all the way through.
It’s very easy to click on a Google link, and then click on a different Google link and go there instead, and that’s what a lot of people are doing.
And lastly, the most difficult thing about Google is tracking. If you spend one thousand dollars on Google clicks, Google will tell you, yeah, two thousand people clicked on your ad, and you’ll be like, fantastic.
Where are my sales? The problem with Google is because it’s not an integrated messaging system, these leads will come at you from all sorts of different angles. Maybe someone will click the link and then call you. Maybe someone will click the link, find you on Facebook, and send you a Facebook Messenger. Maybe they’ll go to WhatsApp.
Maybe they’ll just walk in through your front door and you’ll have no idea that they had came from Google. And this is one of the biggest problems with the service, that really holds us back in knowing if it’s performing or if it’s not.
The Rise of TikTok as a Marketing Tool
So that’s Google. Let’s move on to TikTok because that’s the new kid on the block, although it’s starting to get a little bit older too.
Tiktok is all about low intent customers. The customers aren’t on there to look for your product or service. The customers are on there to look at spicy reels and funny dance videos.
So they’re extremely low intent. They’re not thinking about your product at the time, but they’re extremely visually focused customers and they’re very trend focused customers. So if you’re putting content on TikTok that is extremely trend focused and visually appealing, you will get a lot of clicks out of curiosity, and that’s a pretty good starting point. The thing about TikTok is it focuses on the younger generation.
I would say for the majority of users right now, they’re still under twenty five years of age, maybe creeping up to thirty in the next couple of years.
And so if your product is aimed at those very young people with, less spending power, but perhaps it’s a more trend focused product or service, then TikTok might be for you. But if you’re expecting to find more customers in the older age groups which have more spending power and more intent, then you may find that TikTok is not really a great fit.
One thing I will say is while Google is extremely difficult to track correctly, TikTok is also quite difficult to track, that’s because they’re not so likely to use TikTok’s, messaging systems. They’re more likely to jump on a what sap or or call you or come through some other channel.
And so you may not exactly know how your spend is turning into real sales, and that’s something to consider.
Leveraging Facebook and Instagram for Marketing
That’s TikTok. Now let’s go for the big, big daddy, which is Meta’s Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp integrated super system.
Now it’s been a long time since Facebook came on the scene and they were just a happy, innocent place to meet friends. Now it’s a giant marketing machine and ever since they took over Instagram they just keep getting bigger and bigger.
And I would say that Instagram is actually a more successful marketing platform than Facebook was originally.
So in many ways, Facebook is the oldest and the best. They have extremely low intent customers just like TikTok. The people scrolling Facebook, they’re not scrolling for your product or service. They’re scrolling for enjoyment and maybe addiction, to be honest.
But the difference is that Facebook has extremely accurate demographic targeting and that’s because they are a huge conglomerate of data stealers. They know everything about every single person on Facebook. They know their age, their gender, their interests, their family members. They know the proximity to other people who’ve purchased your product. And so if one person’s purchased the product, they know that the people linked to that person are also more likely to purchase.
And so this extremely accurate targeting does offset the extremely low intent of social media customer.
One downside of Facebook and Instagram is that younger people are starting to abandon the platform. So while a lot of young people still have Instagram, practically no young people have Facebooks anymore. And this does mean that you have to be a lot more careful in how you’re preparing and targeting your ads if you really want to get the right mix, if you’re targeting young people. But the good news is if you’re targeting people over twenty five, maybe over thirty, Facebook has the people still on there. They’re still using it. I still use Facebook and Instagram all the time. That’s how I communicate with my friends.
So what is the downside of Facebook?
Simply put, it is the incredibly high cost per click, and, this can be extreme. It is not uncommon to be up in the eight to ten dollar range for a successful sale. So spending a full ten dollars just to get a single sale. This may seem outrageous at first glance, but the wonderful thing about Facebook is the extremely high conversion rate. If you can get people coming into the funnel at the top, better marketing teams often see a greater than twenty five percent success rate, and in really good times you can see over a fifty percent success rate. But that really does come down to the perfect mix of economic climate and incredible marketing.
So this extremely high success rate does offset the extremely high cost per click.
And this means that if you’re selling a more high value product, say you’re selling something that costs fifty dollars or more, that initial marketing spend is actually very easily absorbed into the overall sales system.
On the other side, if you are selling extremely low value products and services (something less than ten dollars per item), you may find that you struggle to overcome your initial marketing costs, and you may want to be looking elsewhere, or you’ll need to tailor to a different system.
One of the wonderful things about Facebook compared to the other two systems is that it has Messenger built in, And it doesn’t just have one Messenger, it has three. It has Facebook Messenger, Instagram DMs, and WhatsApp. All three of these are owned by Meta Facebook superstar. So what this means is it’s very easy to understand if your marketing is working.
You put in the money, and suddenly you’re getting messages in Facebook Messenger.
Facebook is also on Instagram, so you’re getting Instagram messages.
And you can also choose to put everyone through to WhatsApp, in which case you’ll get a ton of WhatsApp messages.
And this means that it’s extremely easy to see where people are coming from.
There’s also more advanced versions such as, Facebook Instant Forms, but we’ll get into that in another video.
Choosing the Right Marketing Strategy
So let’s go on. It’s up to you which one you choose, but I suggest that you only choose one to start.
And this is all because it really doesn’t matter until you’re spending big bucks.
If you’re spending less than ten thousand dollars a month on marketing, you will never saturate one of these platforms with your ads.
Big companies like Coca Cola, they need to market everywhere doing something called omnichannel marketing.
And that’s because they have spent so much money on one platform that it’s saturated, so they need to find new customers somewhere else.
But you as a small business, you’re not going to have that problem.
So if you’re going to spend one thousand dollars a month on marketing, which is not unreasonable if you want to earn a good salary, if you put three hundred dollars in each, how do you know which one has worked?
The answer is it’s going to be extremely difficult to figure out which one worked and which one didn’t.
So you need to start with a trackable strategy And until you have advanced tracking pixels and other technologies that tell you exactly what happened, it’s just much easier to use one marketing strategy. Pick a platform, use it for at least one month, and count how many clicks you got, how many sales you got, how many calls you got, and turn that into a metric. Then you’ll know if you try another platform, did it change things? Was it cheaper for you?
Because at the end of the day, the number of clicks doesn’t matter. The number of sales matters and the quality of your client matters to you. So thanks for watching this video about which marketing channel to choose.
We’re also going to do a series of videos on how to use these channels in more depth and whether messages and calls are better. So stay tuned, and of course if you have any questions at all, about one on one coaching and leave comments so that we can improve the videos over time. Thanks.
Useful Links
Make sure you also check out: How to edit a simple marketing or website video.
And if you’re going with Meta Business Suite, head over here:
For Tiktok, you can go straight to the normal website.
For Youtube Studio, go here: