In this episode, Richie asks Jesse for advice on advertising strategies for small business owners, and they walk through the three basic advertising methods:
- Search
- Display
- Remarketing
They also discuss the various tools to achieve those methods:
- Platforms
- Pixels
- Feeds
- Automation or DIY
Then they go deeper and mention which platforms to focus on for each objective and which work together well.
Transcript
Jesse: Happy Friday, Richie! How are you?
Richard: I’m doing great. How about yourself?
Jesse: Excellent, excellent. Excited about today. This is going to be a little bit of a different show; it’s going to be more educational. So if you’re in your car right now listening and you’re like “I don’t want education,” this one’s not for you. (laughing) But if you’re looking to learn, today we’re going to have really useful nuggets for people that are just getting started. This is going to be an introduction to
Richard: I love it, but I’m going to clarify something. All the shows are educational.
Jesse: Okay. Right.
Richard: I think this is going to be actually entertaining too because I get to put you on the spot today.
Jesse: OK. I like it.
Richard: A lot of people could know if they’d been listening for a while, but just for those who just started listening, I just want to remind everybody and let everybody know why Jessie is highly qualified for me to put him on the spot today. Jessie’s spent millions and millions of dollars on advertising. He started out working in an agency, and he has his own side businesses that he runs advertising towards, and he runs all the advertising for Ecwid. So he has done in every capacity from being a store owner like yourselves, running it for other store owners, and now he runs it for a business that has a bunch of store owners. I think you pretty much have it covered on many levels. I think what our hardest challenge — between us because we’ve been in this game for a while — is going to be reminding ourselves that this show is about momentum for these people. They’re just getting started. Some of them have been going on for a while, but they may not have advertised even yet. And we want to make sure that they’re ready for the holidays and they’re not just waiting to start right for the holidays. And although we mentioned this is holidays, this is going to be able to be evergreen. We’re going to state this in such a way for everyone that they’re listening. Next June, next April, next January. If you’re hearing this for the first time, it still applies for sure.
Jesse: The idea here is to get people started, start building their store. We all had to start somewhere, so I’ve spent a lot of money with Google and Facebook, made a lot of mistakes. Seen a lot of where other people make mistakes. I’m hoping to give that
Richard: To break down where I think you’re going with that. You’re talking specifically about people creating content trying to go the SEO route. Correct me if I’m wrong, I think you believe they should be doing both, but it takes a while.
Jesse: Yes.
Richard: And it’s harder because there’s a lot of moving variables, but you can actually see results pretty darn quick with advertising.
Jesse: For sure you should always do both, and free traffic is great, but it is becoming harder. Google and Facebook control the Internet. Let’s just be honest about it. They are the gatekeepers, and they don’t really want to send you free traffic. They don’t get paid for that video.
Richard: Because by the way, listeners, they make their money from selling advertising. That is their business model. There are little things here and there they’re doing on the side. They got Oculus and Facebook. Yeah. But their main focus on revenue is advertising.
Jesse: Yes. So if you’re in the
Richard: I don’t know what it was and what we just said that sparked this, and I do not have hard stats on this, but it would not surprise me at all, based on things we’ve both seen. Your organic stuff is going to get seen more too. It’s not written in anything, but if this person starts advertising a lot more, probably, you’re helping people stay on their platforms. I don’t know the exact percentages. I’m not claiming any hard stats but wouldn’t be remotely surprised if your organic content gets seen more too when you’re priming the pump with advertising.
Jesse: Yeah, those are some real
Richard: Bring it up.
Jesse: The best way to get traffic to your site is to have traffic to your site. So once you start getting traffic, very likely you’re going to get more traffic. And how do you get traffic today? You pay for it. I just want to be real about it, and I’m not being real to try to make money for Google and Facebook. Just trying to be real to help you, the listener, because as we’ve talked about in other podcasts when people downgrade, all the reasons that people put when they leave, we see them, and we see a lot of them. Sometimes it’s very helpful for us. If you give good reasons, we will eventually change what we do. We build new features to fix that. But I see a lot of the things are like “Oh, I didn’t get any sales, I don’t want to advertise, and so I didn’t get any sales.” I’m like, what did you do to try to get traffic? You don’t just open up a store and get traffic; it doesn’t work that way. If somebody told you that, they were lying to you. I never said that. You’ll not see any ads that I say “Sign up, and you’ll get free traffic and free sales.” It just doesn’t work that way.
Richard: Right. And just to clarify for those of you who didn’t hear the sarcasm. By no means we’re saying there is a conspiracy theory or any of that. What we’re talking about is when you put your message in front of somebody with advertising dollars, they’re going to see it. Because if you don’t get results, you won’t give them more money. And if you don’t give them more money, they don’t make money as a business. So they want you to succeed. Now how much you pay and what your margins are like, I don’t know all that stuff. That’s what you’ll learn over time, whether it’s working or whether it’s not. But you’ll see it more and so let’s just say and then we’ll dive into it. Let’s just say you spent on advertising; you drove into your site. Well, more time on site, you potentially could actually show up in more search results, or it’s literally not even remotely conspiracy. That would joke with you a lot if you haven’t noticed, but it’s just the way we know for sure you can get people to your site, to your products is to spend money.
Jesse: Yep, I agree. And Rich, that was a bolded level there. If you want to make it and you want to make money by this holiday season, you should start advertising now. So you think that was enough tough love, Rich?
Richard: All right, let’s get started.
Jesse: We stirred the pot a little bit. All right. So let’s just talk
Richard: Totally, it did. I’ll mention something here, this is not to get worried about all the information that these companies know about us, but for the most part, most people stay signed into Google. And most people stay signed in to Facebook, and those are the two main companies. We’ll go over, we’ll be touching bases on some other people, but 80 percent of the stuff or more is coming from these two companies. And we group Facebook and Instagram together because they’re pretty much the same company, or they are the same company even though they do different things. But since you’re logged in and you know everyone hears about A.I. and all their stuff, they’re getting information. And so if you’ve been looking for other things, Jesse is going to get into how some of this stuff works. They have that information, and they’re going to know that this person’s probably trying to buy something right now and they’re going to know who to put that in front of. I just wanted to let people remember. You hear in the news, you don’t necessarily want this information to be out there, but we benefit from all these things. We benefit from being served up with the things we want. And we’re not going to get into the political side of stuff and the information, all that. What we’re really going to talk about today is how this stuff can benefit your business because these companies have information, and they know who to put these ads in front of. So let’s dive in, the first one you want to go into is a search?
Jesse: Yeah. Search. That just means that you typed in the words, you spoke the words. That’s the best intent signal that you have. If you sell products that are very easily searchable, this is probably a very good place for you to play. Really keep moving on though we’re going to come back to this obviously. All right. If you’re taking notes, number one is search. Number two is display. And by display I’m not just talking about banner ads. I’m talking about you’re letting the algorithms do the work. OK. That’s what Rich was talking about; maybe you searched for something a week ago, and all of a sudden, you start to see banner ads, or you see ads related to that a week later. It’s maybe because you searched, or maybe it’s because the algorithms have determined that you are a perfect target for that. So it’s not necessarily really a search. It might just be demographics, but it’s usually at a deeper level than just demographics. It’s not that I’m a
Richard: That’s fantastic. I love it, simple, to the point where we’re keeping it at those three basic ways to do your online advertising.
Jesse: And I didn’t mention any platforms there either, these are just concepts.
Richard: We’ll dive into each of those a little more here in a little bit. But we are trying to keep it at its basic level. Let’s say what are some of the platforms, and what are some of the tools? Again, at the basic level because they’re just getting started. We’d rather them use mostly free tools and things that are accessible for nominal or free. So leave that up to you, and what are those basic tools that they can do, and then we’ll dive in deeper.
Jesse: Yep. All right. So this is more like the definitions or the glossary here. Platforms are the advertising platforms. That’s Google, Facebook. Instagram, again I’m going to say, is the same as Facebook. Then it could be Pinterest; it could be Snapchat. It could be any of the different platforms where you’re going to put your credit card in to pay them advertising. So those are platforms. The next thing we want to talk about is pixels. For some reason, a pixel is a scary word for people. Pixels are just the mechanism that the platforms use to track. If you’re using Facebook, there’s a Facebook pixel, and that just means that there’s a little tiny piece of code that’s on your website. When somebody visits your site, your Facebook account knows it, and knows whether they purchased or what pages they visited. Same with Google, Pinterest, Snapchat. Everybody has a pixel, and they’re extremely easy to install. So that’s why I said people are scared about this word. “Oh my god, pixels, I don’t know what that is.” It’s just a tiny piece of code. It’s on your website that helps you track. And in Ecwid, generally speaking, you just click a button to say, “Install this pixel.” That doesn’t cover all the cases. But in general, if you want to work with these platforms, it’s very easy to install a pixel. Probably means clicking a button to say “Install” or placing a little bit of code.
Richard: In a
Jesse: Talk to the support and say: “How do I get this pixel? I heard a podcast where Jesse and Rich were talking about pixels. How do I install my Facebook pixel?” They’ll help you. It’s simple, don’t let this be a blocker for you. Go use chat, install the pixel. All right. The next tool is product feeds. This is a little bit harder, but again, I’m going to say pretty easy. Product feeds, it takes your product catalog, the picture, the price, the description, the name of your product, and puts it into essentially an Excel file. It’s not really an Excel file but puts it into a file that the platforms can then read. Then they can use this for just better advertising in general.
Richard: To your point, correct me if I’m wrong. This is the work you’ve already done. And now what you’re referring to when you say it’s going to take a little bit of work, it’s really just going to take a little bit of work in the beginning. Once you get these feeds working, it’s already in there; you’re done, and then it’s set it and forget it.
Richard: Yeah. Let’s say you use some other platform. They might be hard. With Ecwid, it’s going to be easy. I’m laughing here, the smiling one. But we’ve built all this stuff in, so you just look for the section, you click it, you say: “I want a Google product feed, I want a Facebook product feed.” And then you can even use those feeds for other platforms as well. Product feeds help the platforms know the exact products you have rather than your URL. URLs are always nice, but having the product feed is even better. Again, talk to support if you want a little bit of help. You don’t need this right away, but you’re going to need this eventually. Keep that in mind. That product feeds. It’s basically the list of all your products and information fed to the platforms. All right. So, the last tool. A lot of the things we’re going to talk about, there are automated options. We have automated Facebook advertising, automated Google advertising, automated Google Shopping. A lot of this stuff is automated, and it’s also available to DIY. You want to do it yourself, great. We have all the same tools there. So automated or DIY, just know there are probably both options, and depending on where you’re coming from, you may want to choose one or the other. All right. We have mentioned the platforms. Let’s get into it. The big one here is obviously Google. Google is the king of search. This is how they were built. They basically have monetized every single word in the world. When you go to Google and you type stuff in, that again shows the best intent. If you have a store where your products fit, where they could be easily be searched. This is probably the place where I would start. We can go to a couple of examples. Now, if you listened to a bunch of podcasts, we’ll bring up some previous topics. So pancake spatulas, we’ve been using that lately. If you have a pancake spatula, people are typing in the word “pancake spatula,” you’re going to spit out. Here’s an ad for pancake spatulas. They obviously want this. They’re probably not researching it. Similarly, you know some of the other products we’ve mentioned. Let’s see; we had CakeSafe on. This was quite a while back, but basically, it’s a box that helps you store a cake so you can ship it either in the mail or go on a plane or whatever.
Richard: A unique thing about that, literally at least monthly if not weekly, that one pops up, it still blows my mind that not only is that a business but it’s a flourishing business. And they’re doing quite well, and they use advertising too.
Jesse: Absolutely. Yes, if you’re listening, there’s a business out there with several employees, it sells a box that stores cakes. It’s awesome. Your niche is probably not as small as you think. Now when people search the term like “how do I safely ship my cake across the country,” what’s best for you to show up there? Do you want a text ad that is kind of traditional Google? Or is it better for there to be a picture with a price right below it? That’s Google Shopping. Depending on your product, you may want one or the other. So with CakeSafe, it’s a hard concept to understand. You probably want to show the picture. I see it’s a Plexiglas thing. It’s got a little rod through there. I can see how that would keep my cake safe, so perfect. You’re going to want to focus on the Google Shopping ads. If your product is maybe not as visual. So we had Kissed by a Bee on. What they make is
Richard: No, that’s fantastic. I think it is at the base level. What you’re saying is search is an active process where someone’s trying to go out and find something. And display is more passive. And having these product feeds that can get displayed in front of people, back to your comment with Google Shopping and or text ads, probably should be doing both there too. But overall, it is perfect on search. Again, we’re trying to keep this were things you could actually use and do and apply and get momentum for the holidays or any time you’re listening to this. But all of these will go a lot deeper on, but we’re not trying to paralyze you. We’re trying to get you to say: “Wow, this sounds pretty easy, and I should probably do this because it is pretty easy.”
Jesse: It is pretty easy.
Richard: And you should be doing this, especially with Ecwid. It’s easy.
Jesse: Yeah. So it’s super easy. If your products specifically fit in the search world where there’s a word that describes your product, it’s very specific. And people look for it on the Internet. You’re going to want to start here on Google and search. So we didn’t mention there are a couple of other platforms there you can use Bing as well. I would 100% start on Google, and then once you get it going in Google, there’s a function in Bing to import everything over from Google into Bing. So Bing can be easy. It just doesn’t have the market share; it’s maybe 10 or 15 percent of the size of Google. There’s also this big company called Amazon, which is also very important for search. Again if you’re starting out, I would be very cautious here. But if you’re getting going a little bit, a lot of time there’s great intent on Amazon. If people go and search on Amazon, they’re buyers; they’re ready to buy. As you get a little bit more advanced, there are advertising options on Amazon, as well. Anyway, that search there is both automated options, you can find them in the Control Panel. The Ecwid Control Panel, so we can automate search. We can automate the text ads. There are DIY options as well where you can set these up yourself. I will say Google’s done a pretty good job of their onboarding process. They walk you through it pretty well. And if you start spending money, you can call them now, and they will actually help you set this stuff up, and the reps are quite a bit better than it used to be. So anyway, if you’re doing it yourself, you’re not totally on it on your own. Google will help you out with that. That’s search. There are books written about it. We did that in about five minutes. Now we’re going to go on to the main display area, and this is Facebook and Instagram. Again we’re saying Facebook and Instagram essentially are the same thing because when you advertise on Facebook and Instagram, it’s the exact same place to advertise. It’s the Facebook Business Manager. So you do need a Facebook Business Manager account. It’s very easy to set that up. But in general, when we talk about display, this is again the algorithm is choosing who sees your ad. Rich, you were talking before, when you’re searching in Google, it’s an active process. Are you active on Facebook? Are you killing time?
Richard: Yeah. For the most part, luckily, I don’t do that too much and mostly try to do ads for something on there too. When you’re on Facebook at its base level and or Instagram. And there are exceptions to every rule we’re talking about here. But for the most part, you’re looking to do some research or find something or learn more about something on Google. You’re usually trying to find out what’s going on with your friends or your family, going on in the world, and it’s really a little more passive, and you’re discovering things on Facebook.
Jesse: When you’re thinking about advertising on Facebook and Instagram, realize that you’re probably interrupting somebody, so they’re looking at pictures of kids and dogs and the latest news things. You’re getting in the way of them. You don’t want to be as direct. “Buy now” is probably not the message you want to have on Facebook and Instagram. Think about the advertising you want to have is more like a post to a friend. You want to provide some information. And when you’re on Facebook, pictures and videos are way more important. This is not just a
Richard: No, I think that just comes back to a little couple of comments earlier that you want to put these pixels in. But to your point, with the data, if you don’t have these pixels and they can’t do this work, and also goes back to why they know so much and how you can take advantage of how much they know. To my comment earlier, most people aren’t signing out of these things. So when you’re signed into Google and you’re signed into Facebook and you’re going around, you’re doing all this stuff. When you have all those basic tools set up, they’re learning more about you. And again, this isn’t to be scary. This is what they’re doing with your customers, too. It’s a bit of network effect. The more data you have, the better decisions you have. You don’t have a lot of data. It’s hard to make a decision. So, yeah, I love watching where you’re going.
Jesse: I’ll add to that. Forgot about this part. We talked about getting the pixel installed. So Facebook knows that people have been to your site. But the most important data ever for an
Richard: It’s interesting you bring that up because I don’t want to go too deep on this. I don’t want to be like, “What what are you even talking about?” It started with “Hey, let’s super niche down and tell Facebook exactly who we want to target this into.” And I’ve heard multiple people, myself included, that are actually getting sometimes better results by not narrowing down too much and letting Facebook figure that out for you because they have all that data. And for us to think we can use our minds and crunch our numbers in our mind faster and better than they can. I don’t know. So try it a little bit both ways.
Jesse: Yes, very much so. So, yeah, there still is this very detailed target, and they can remove some because of the scandals, they got a little too creepy for people. So they’ve removed some of that. But the data is still there, and they still know. They know more than you do. Anyway, getting back to feed the data, feed the algorithm, they’re now getting back to who should be on Facebook. It’s probably everybody should be on Facebook at some level for advertising. But the better candidates are people that maybe search doesn’t work for you. We talked about if you have products that search is great for, then yes. You have a very specific product that there’re keywords that are associated with it, that’s obvious. That search is good for you. Facebook is better for people that they don’t know what they’re looking for your product. They don’t know that it exists, but it serves their particular needs, and they can be identified in that way. So, for example, going back to a previous guest, again, we had a Heroic Kid. We had Joe from Heroic Kid. He had very specific products for his son, who has type 1 diabetes. And it’s like the little patches and things for his toys. Right. So it’s very specific. But are you searching for that? No. You don’t really know that it exists. So you wouldn’t be searching for. “I want an insulin pack for a stuffed animal.” You would never search for that because you would think, why would this ever exist? But on Facebook, it’s a different story because there would be people that have interacted with groups, Facebook groups for type 1 diabetes or children with type 1 diabetes and how to parents. There are relatives that are looking for information related to that.
Richard: Plus, it’s probably a really good one for sharing because here it is. They have this, and you put it up as an ad, but then somebody in there that’s part of that group sees that also and shares it because they know someone in their family that lives in Kentucky and they have it. Whatever, I’m making the places and times, but you get it. It’s a highly potentially shareable one too because it’s a
Jesse: It’s very likely. It’s very likely you’re being remarketed to right now. Everybody, don’t creep out over that.
Richard: Just learn.
Jesse: Just learn. And yes. The reason we’re given those examples is you need to think about your product. Is it better for Facebook? Because there’s probably a certain group of people that would be interested in it. It can’t be like I sell toilet paper. That doesn’t work. That’s everybody. Or it has to be very specific and targeted in the Facebook world where even if you don’t know how to target, Facebook might know how. Google’s more again search. It can be both. Just knowing that maybe where you want to start depends on your products, which would they be better for. All right. Going back to number three on our little imaginary outline here is remarketing. Again, we talked about remarketing. That’s they’ve been to your site. They’ve interacted with you in some way. You’re now going to show them that ad again. How do you do remarketing? Well, Facebook and Google both have remarketing products. So, again, it depends. I would do remarketing on both because then you’re hitting them where they’re living. Maybe Google remarketing can be better wherever they are on the Internet. They’re going to be seeing your ads. Facebook is for people that are living mostly on Facebook and Instagram. They’re going to see your ads on Facebook and Instagram feed. Both are important. I don’t know which one is more important. It depends. Right. And then going back to that’s the concept of remarketing. But the actual medium of it is you can do general banners that are more descriptive of your whole website or a whole business. You want to cover a lot of bases. For example, Kissed by a Bee. You want to say this is a natural, organic cure for eczema. And they have other products. Actually, that’s a bad example. You want to just say: “Hey, we’re a natural products company. Here’s our story.” Same with Heroic Kid: “Hey, we’re here to help serve the children that have type 1 type diabetes.” And maybe there’s a picture of the product, picture of the kids smiling. You can do that by way of a video. Facebook, you can create a video that can be marketed. On the Google world, you’re gonna be creating the video, it’s going to get popped into YouTube, and that will be remarketed. So those are both remarketing. You can start with more of a general. “Hey, remember me? We’re awesome. Here’s our story.” That’s a general remarketing. Being more specific is dynamic remarketing. Going back to the top of the list here, we talked about product feeds. If you have sent your product feeds to Google and Facebook, which again is super easy, you can now remarket the exact product that they viewed, actually specifically if they did not buy it. They’re going to start seeing this exact product in price both on the Google side, which is basically the entire Internet. When you’re just looking at websites or in the
Richard: Yep. Well, it’s funny. I have no idea how this got to my mind, but we’re both parents. As parents, we don’t spend advertising dollars, but we need to remarket over and over every day. How many times have you told your children a particular thing, and they don’t buy the first time? Yes. And you got to say it again. And you got to say it again. Got to say it again. And eventually, they buy. Right. And so, again, I know that’s a strange analogy, but I’m sure you get the point. It’s not everybody gets it. Sometimes it’s just as simple as they’ve heard it again. Sometimes they didn’t buy because they were looking at work the first time. And the boss came in and they closed it down. Other times their significant other just came home, and they want to see their family, and they shut the computer. We don’t know all those reasons. So remarketing is really just about knowing that at some point in time, there was some form of interest, and they might just need to hear it again.
Jesse: Yeah. And by the way, if you’ve used the Internet, if you ever looked at your phone, you’re being remarketed to all the time. So when you like “I was looking at this last week, and I see it on my feed,” yeah, that’s remarketing. That’s the other companies they’re setting up. If you’re not using that tool, you’re not really giving yourself a good shot at making it on the store. And this is the whole goal why you’re listening to the podcast; you’re trying to get your store successful. So use remarketing.
Richard: Yeah, and not only that, just to keep adding on to this. I remember we’ve been doing this for a while. Gosh, I don’t even want count the years right now. But remember when it first started, it wasn’t necessarily creepy as much as it was fascinating. You literally thought this company must be huge. You’d go, and you’d look at something, and then you would see it over there, and you go to another site. You’d see it there, and you like, “What the heck, man?” And then it was like forced serendipity. Like you just think that it’s destined to buy this thing, but you don’t realize it’s following you. There are people for the first time having that feeling again right now.
Jesse: For sure. For sure. And I think that to your point of, it makes these companies look bigger. It will make your company look bigger, and it legitimizes you. I’ve been doing this for a long time. If I don’t get remarketed to, I’m a little worried; maybe this company is not worth it? Am I actually going to get the delivery of this product? This is a basic tool that you should be using. I don’t know. I guess I’m making this my soapbox here. But you could skip the other things we talked about and then do remarketing. Do remarketing. I thought I was convincing enough. (laughing) Yeah. Do remarketing. All of the options we talked about, they’re all great. They can all work independently. So yes, you can use remarketing alone. You can use search alone. You can use display. But they all work better when you do them all together. There’s like a multiplier effect here. If you are paying for a search and that 99% of the people are not going to buy, why wouldn’t you do remarketing? Or if you’re going to do a search. Now, this person is pixelled, not just by Google; they’re also pixelled by Facebook. So now, when they’re on Facebook, there’s another intent signal for display, so we’re trying it together to get to this intent. Now Facebook knows this person is more likely to buy this product, and they might show that whether it’s remarketing or not. Yeah. Then, of course, remarketing always plugs all the holes. So however they got to your site, they will probably get caught up in your remarketing funnel. That’s called remarketing funnel. It’s like a
Richard: Yeah. To add on to what you’re saying there too about this multiplier effect, it goes back to where we were joking conspiracy theory. If you spend more money, they’ll show up your other content. At its basic level, the reason why it will is perfectly stated in what Jesse’s talking about with remarketing. They might have come to your site because you have a blog about how to cook pancakes, and they read the blog, and now you can use advertising to remarket to that person and show them your pancake spatula. They may or may not buy it right then, but because you had that pixel in because you did this collective work, you can actually get that same multiplier effect. You can bring them back to your site and maybe they don’t buy that time again. But maybe now they go back to the blog, and they read some of that other stuff you’ve been doing. On past episodes where we’re talking about content creation and doing all these other things. But to keep it in context here, that remarketing pixel and your ability to remarket to those people is incredible for sure.
Jesse: And and to go a little bit deeper on that. The reason why we want to do these altogether is feeding the algorithms. The Facebook algorithm needs to know numbers. It doesn’t work when you just send five visitors to a page. It needs 50 visitors, 100, 500 visitors. So if you’re feeding a bunch of traffic to a page, Facebook starts to see: “Oh, okay, all these people are on this page.” Now I know who likes pancakes spatulas. I didn’t realize there was a thing. But if you keep feeding all this traffic to one page and a couple of people buy, the algorithm starts to figure out. “OK. Got it.” We know, and there’s this little hidden signal here that you won’t know. You don’t need to know it. You just need to know that Facebook will start delivering those visors. And Google has similar mechanisms. In the recent reason, I say they all work together. I don’t like to say, come on, do Google in October and then turn it off. And then I do Facebook in November and then turn it off and then do remarketing in December. No, do them all together because there’s a multiplier effect at work here. They all work. They don’t necessarily work together, but they work together. (laughing) I don’t know. Again, poor description from the professor here. All right. I’ll work on that.
Richard: It works. It’s worth we’re throwing a lot. We’re trying to remind them at its base level what it is. Just do this; take action. The more data they get, the better. The more you do this, the more data you’re going to get, and you’re going to get better at it. And again, this one we are titling it that it’s for the holidays, but it’s mostly a momentum play. We just want you to get started so that you can get that data, and this truly can be applied anytime, though. It’s one of those things. I don’t know why this is coming to mind. But what’s the best time to plant a tree? Twenty years ago. What’s the next best time? Today. You probably should have started doing advertising a while ago. Yeah, but no matter what, start doing advertising today.
Jesse: Yep. And the other reason why you start is you’re going to make some mistakes. You’re going to make a video that you think is awesome, and it’s going to describe your product perfectly, and it won’t work. Or you’re going to do an ad that you think has the best text in. It describes your unique selling proposition. And then you’re going to look at the stats, and you’ll be like, “Man, I spend like 300 hours in this. I have one sale, my products only $50.” You will make mistakes. And now you’ve learned from that. And then you try different, and you try different videos. I’ve decreased that cost per sale number. You can’t improve unless you make mistakes, and you can’t make mistakes unless you start. So you have to start. You just have to start. Don’t wait. Don’t listen as a podcast and say like, “Yeah, maybe in January.” No, just start now. Don’t spend more than you can. Don’t be dumb. Don’t be crazy here and spend all your money. Just spend what you can and learn from that and rinse, repeat, and try to improve each step along the way. All right, so talked about starting, talked about the insights, Richie. I mean, I hope I didn’t scare anybody here. What else do we got for them? Anything else?
Richard: No. I think this has been fantastic. I mean, for the most part, our goal of this episode is to get merchants started advertising and get ready for the holidays. I really want just to remind them. At this basic level, advertising is broken into three categories: search, display and remarketing. And they should be using that 80/20 rule we talked about, and we covered lots of different businesses, Pinterest, YouTube, all that stuff. But just use Google and Facebook to get those results, and you will see results.
Jesse: All right. Rich, what’s the best time to get started?
Richard: Right now.
Jesse: All right. I love it. All right, everybody, get out there. Make it happen!
