The MHW Mark Podcast
Welcome to the MHW podcast, bringing you conversations with experts and leaders in the alcoholic beverage industry. Covering topics ranging from selling alcohol online, creating a new brand from scratch, and what you need to know when you start doing business internationally. Hosted by Jimmy Moreland and a rotating cast of cohosts from the folks at MHW.
The MHW Mark Podcast
Making Sense of Google and Other Online Advertising - with Claire Jarrett
In this episode, we dive into a topic that may be scary for some brands - Google and other online advertising. To help us make sense of this complex, ever-changing part of your marketing strategy, we’ve brought in a true expert.
Claire Jarrett literally wrote the book on the subject, and she shares insights and stories with host Jimmy Moreland and MHW’s Brigid McCabe.
Check out the book Rapid Google Ads Success on Amazon or Audible
More about the Claire Jarrett Agency
Also mentioned in the show: SpyFu, an online marketing research tool
More info about MHW at https://www.mhwltd.com/
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Welcome to the MHW Mark podcast, where we take deep dives into various aspects of the alcohol industry. My name is Jimmy Moreland. Mhw is a US and EU beverage alcohol importer, distributor and service provider With me today we're happy to welcome back Bridget McCabe. Welcome back.
Speaker 2:Thank you, jimmy, good to be here.
Speaker 1:It's good to have you back. We took a couple weeks away from the Bridget show, but we're happy to have you back. Can you talk about what's been going on and what's coming up for MHW and the industry at large?
Speaker 2:Absolutely so. We just finished International Bulk Wine and Spirit Show and again BrandArc. I'm really marketing them hard lately. If you could tell, ian Perez was the keynote speaker for IBWSS so he just spoke yesterday about brand creation and how to come to market with your brand and then coming up here in August we have ECRM Beverage, which will be in the Palm Beach Gardens area, so we will have Misha Montecholo there meeting with lots of brands. She is on the buyer side, so investigating what new brands are coming to market and looking for importation and distribution.
Speaker 1:Sounds like maybe we need to get both of those folks back on the podcast soon.
Speaker 2:I agree.
Speaker 1:They're shaking in their boots right now. Well, we've got a really good conversation today with an author and with someone who represents an agency that doesn't work only with the beverage alcohol industry. We sort of got into a mode for the last few episodes with vendors or service providers who are really, really focused just on beverage alcohol. But this is an interesting guest because they service sort of cross industries, all different kinds of clients in their portfolio. Can you talk a little bit about their experience and how that multi-industry and multinational sort of reach is impactful for our listeners and for you at MHW?
Speaker 2:That's a great question. Most of our brands are international. If they're imported, so many times, when a brand comes to us, they've already been exporting to four or five other countries, whether that's within the European Union, maybe it's to the UK. If we have a South African brand or an Australian brand, for example, they might have opened up even another continent prior to North America. So it's really critical for them to be able to look into what they have in their toolkit for marketing and specify everything that they're doing to each specific market. So for MHW, for instance, we are looking for brands all across the world, and how that resonates with a brand searching in Germany is going to be different from a brand searching in New Zealand, for example. So we need to ensure that we are targeting them with the correct keyword, targeting copy and oftentimes too, because we are an all-inclusive platform, there are people that might specifically be looking for compliance or for logistics, and then they get opened up to this world of possibility, of all the other things that they can do with MHW. But for us to target them at the moment of impact, looking for specifically the one thing that they're searching for, it gives us an opportunity to work with the Claire Jarrett Agency, who is international and can really tailor that for us and understand. Here are the regulations in each specific country. Here's what's working and what's not. You know, there are environmental challenges that pop up in the day-to-day, like with tariffs and things like that, where we can provide additional education as to what's going on with rates coming into the US. We are a trusted resource around that. So there are opportunities for us to go live even same day with new Google ads that might be targeted to some folks that are looking for information for their brands.
Speaker 2:So just the ability to be able to work with an agency like Claire Jarrett that understands the international landscape is important and I think for listening beverage alcohol brands, it's really critical to understand what are all the audiences that you're looking at. Maybe all the service offerings. If you have a portfolio of many different SKUs, if you are a Bevalk brand and you're connected to e-commerce many times the e-commerce platforms I mean there's so many products listed on there so you can do special campaigns with them and we recommend that. But you also need to be driving your own consumers for the point of purchase. So there is a lot of opportunities. Of course, legal drinking age we'll get into that a little bit later in the podcast is really critical to think about, and what platforms enable you to do that. There's some that don't allow beverage alcohol marketing, so these are times in which paid search and online search it's really critical to work with an expert, like our upcoming guest here.
Speaker 1:And for listeners who are already feeling overwhelmed by this discussion. Hopefully this will either assuage those fears or will at least give your brain a framework for how to move forward and offload some of these responsibilities responsibly and in a way that makes sense for your business. But it's a good conversation and I think it will answer a lot of those questions that you may have, or at least get you thinking about things in a way that's useful and valuable for you. So we'll jump right into it. Our guest today is the author of the book Rapid Google Ads Success, and she is the founder of the Claire Jarrett Agency. Welcome to the show, Claire Jarrett.
Speaker 3:Thank you very much. Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here.
Speaker 1:Thank you for joining us, even working through the time zone differences, I'm sure that's a constant challenge, so we appreciate that. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, about the book and about the agency? Just give us a little bit more background high school teacher back in 2007.
Speaker 3:So actually I have a strong background in teaching and coaching and from there I launched a training company. So I used to teach IT to kids and it was a very natural next step to then start teaching IT to adults. I learned marketing using IT skills in terms of like. I learned SEO and Google AdWords, as it was then known, but very rapidly realized that there were many business owners out there that needed to learn Google AdWords because they didn't really know what they were doing and they didn't realize the power of it for their businesses. And that's where the idea for the book came from.
Speaker 3:I was actually on a flight to San Diego. I was actually about to flight to San Diego. I was actually about to attend a social media conference. I came up with the idea to create the book and spent the whole of the conference, hardly attended any of the conference. I just got so passionate about the idea of writing this really amazing book, and now it's in its fourth edition. We've had some really great reviews. People say it's really helped them, so I'd like to believe that I set out to achieve the objective that I set for it. That is very cool.
Speaker 2:I love the story that you didn't attend the conference because you were so busy writing it. Absolutely yeah, and I like to say so. Mhw utilizes the Claire Jarrett Agency and we found Claire through her skilled paid media and her team's paid media, so that was how it came to be. We've had really wonderful results working with the team, so I just want to thank you for being a fantastic guide to us and kick it off with a why? Question. Why exactly do beverage alcohol brands need to be utilizing paid media to stand out to their consumers in search, and what are a few things they can achieve if they allocate resources and time and investment to Google AdWords?
Speaker 3:Yes, to begin with, thank you, bridget, for you know it has been a delight to work with you, so to begin with, let me just preface with that. Then, secondly, in terms of the alcohol brands, how it would make sense to be using Google Ads is. Google is very much used for intent. People are searching actively right now for, like, a Scottish whiskey or a 14-year-old whiskey, for example. I was researching some keywords that might make sense to drop in here and I came across a keyword that a number of different people were advertising on, that, woodford Bourbon, for example.
Speaker 3:I also found lots of advertisers bidding on things like whiskey glasses, even if they actually wanted to sell the whiskey and cocktail recipes, even if they wanted to sell the content within it. So there is very much. That is where I would suggest that advertising would start for alcohol brands is start to think about where would, what type of keywords would your audience use? And remember that google's where they're going to go when they're actively looking to buy a product right now, but then, of course, also if they're thinking about drinking, as in you know, they're building out a, they're looking for a cocktail recipe or they're buying glasses for their whiskey, for example.
Speaker 2:That's a great point, and do you find that most of your clients are aware of paid media and Google advertising, or do you find that there is some initial upfront education that has to happen there?
Speaker 3:It depends on the type of client, so we do tend to come across all types, typically. I do love it when people come to me that have already read my book. I will be honest, because they will have done lots of the initial work. They will already know my methodology, they will understand the I don't want to say damage that Google's own consultants do, but they are actually quite damaging if you follow their recommendations, which many new advertisers will do.
Speaker 3:Then my book talks about the importance of making sure you don't follow Google's own recommendations or those of its sales advisors, for example. So those are key, and purchasing a book or getting familiar with Google Ads is absolutely essential. I'm a firm believer that the more qualified or the more you know about Google or the purpose of it, you don't have to understand how to do it. You absolutely don't have to understand how to do it, but you will then know how to pick a qualified Google Ads consultant to actually manage it for you, because you understand the objectives, you understand the ultimate aim and you also understand what they're going to need access to and you also know the right questions to ask as well. That's very important.
Speaker 1:When I got my MBA, there was lots of accounting classes and it wasn't designed to turn us into accountants. It was designed to make us able to communicate with accountants, so that we could all be on the same page, absolutely. There's the old saying what gets measured gets improved, so I guess, what metrics should brand marketers have in mind? Hopefully they've been tracking these things for a long time, or what should they be tracking from the get-go before they start this journey of AdWords and other online advertising?
Speaker 3:It's essential to know your numbers. You're absolutely right, and so to begin with, you would establish which numbers you actually need to record. So, in terms of Google Ads, they will be like how many leads, how many sales? It might be that you're asking people to sign up to a newsletter, or it might be that you're asking people to actually submit a contact form. It might be any type of lead request where they're actually going to become a lead. You might also want to then track other things as well.
Speaker 3:So tracking click-through rate, which ideally should be going up over time, even if only incrementally, by small amounts, for example, and of course, the return on ad spend, is very important. So ideally and this happens a lot when I initially interview a client a lot of the time when they come and book a call with me, they don't realise I'm interviewing them as much as they're interviewing me, because I'm actually checking what is their level of knowledge, because I do like it when people have a certain level of knowledge to begin with. They don't have to have all the answers. But the type of questions that I like to ask are how much are you currently spending per lead at the moment? So, if you're spending $3,000 a month. Are you spending $100 per lead and what is your aim in hiring a new consultant? Are you aiming to get it down from $100 per lead, down to $50 per lead, for example? I really like to check that they know the numbers. And at this point it's absolutely okay if people say to me I don't have the best of ideas and I can then talk through with them. Okay, could you just go look at your CRM, how many inquiries did you have? And so we can at least have a baseline figure. But you do need a starting point and then you need to monitor that month by month and then, ideally, the return on ad spend. Need to monitor that month by month and then, ideally, the return on ad spend.
Speaker 3:It's surprising how many businesses aren't comfortable giving or allowing you, helping you to understand a return on ad spend. But at the end of the day, many advertisers give this full information to Google and its optimisation is using it. This is an element of the automation that you can use. So, for example, if you tell Google that a lead is worth $100 and typically, because like one in a hundred of those converts to a lead which is worth like a hundred times a hundred, for example, something like that and or you basically give Google some estimates, so some e-commerce sites you might actually be able to establish a real return on ad spend. So for every $2 spent, you return $10, for example.
Speaker 3:The key that I'm saying here is the fact that if you can give Google this information which many of your competitors will be giving them, then Google will be able to help you achieve those metrics.
Speaker 3:So if you tell Google I want to achieve a target return on ad spend of 10 to 1, then it will set out to achieve that for you and that's what you can do with Google's optimisation. But if you're not happy or you don't have which is probably the more common, to be honest, is, people don't have that information. There's quite often an issue with joined up marketing and sales teams, for example. Quite often the information isn't being shared between the different departments People you do need to know. So, of the five great leads, two closed and we now have a client with a lifetime value of $50,000 and you can put that back in and you know the figures. So I appreciate I'm checking a lot of numbers around here, but you can start to see these are the type of numbers that people need to start having a handle on or thinking about to be able to run a successful campaign.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I resonate with that so much because in our business, the ultimate goal is to have the closed wins, as we call them, and so tracking along the funnel is so important and I would imagine some of our beverage alcohol brands listening to this podcast as well resonate in terms of consumer purchases and everything is so deeply plugged in now with e-commerce and the ability to order and get it within a couple of hours to your home or when to do shipping business days if it's not an on-demand platform. So I think that's critical for people to know their cost per action, their cost per lead and their cost per conversion Very important.
Speaker 1:So you like folks to read the book. I will note for especially people who enjoy listening to podcasts. You might also be an audio book listener. I'll note that the book is available on audio book. You've got a lovely Scottish narrator. I checked out the little sample there. It sounds great. So for folks who are audio primary book readers, that's available. So once they've read that and maybe they've started applying the principles in your book to their business strategy, at what point is there a size of business? Is there a total dollar ad spend per month? What is the sort of tipping point where one of these businesses should go? I need to stop doing this for myself and I need to hire Claire or someone else, or just Claire.
Speaker 3:Well, claire and her team, of course. Yeah, okay, that's a really good question and we have worked with people that straight away know. Okay, I've got a really good understanding of it. Now I want somebody that's going to do this right from the beginning, because I don't want to spend my time learning it. That's absolutely fine.
Speaker 3:We more often take on people once they've got a proof of concept, as in. The website has been making sales or inquiries at least a number of them, and it might be that they've proved the concept, whether via. It might be through instagram or meta ads, or it might, as in you know, might not necessarily be google ads, but ideally the website should already be proven that the website itself can actually handle the sales as in is there a need for the product? Can people figure out how to purchase it? Is the landing page optimized enough that people can actually make a purchase? Our specialism isn't in getting you to market right with the very beginning, helping with the website landing page. You ideally do need some sales to begin with, whether from that through or another, but typically we work best for those that have got a marketing budget to invest with the google ads. A minimum of three thousand per month is ideal.
Speaker 2:That makes sense and it takes some time, when you first kick off a Google Ads campaign or flight, to understand and A-B test what keywords are working and you know what maybe geographic targeting is resonating with audiences and really start to hone it.
Speaker 2:So that's been my experience with Claire's team is, you know, every month we get together and we go through performance and really narrow it down and start to understand what's working and what's not, and it's allowed us to get a very low cost per conversion rate and get to a spot where we feel really happy with the quality of the leads coming in, and so I think it's sort of a good transition to this question. But how do you recommend balancing Google Ads with the rest of the marketing ecosystem? Recommend balancing Google Ads with the rest of the marketing ecosystem, understanding a lot of times marketing and sales teams can have other priorities, whether it be events or traditional marketing things that they're looking to bake paid media and paid search into the larger plan. But they're trying to understand what to put against it. And so I think the 3,000 is a really great start, but how would you recommend, as people start to scale up with that, to think about allocation of budget and funds?
Speaker 3:So I suppose it would be through testing to see what is delivering the cheapest cost per conversion, the best conversion type as well. So if you've got access to the return on ad spend and that's what we would use to adjust the budget so, for example, if you're running meta ads or TikTok ads, then looking to see and whether that's through GA4 reports, something like that, so that you can see where are you getting the most conversions, where is the cheapest cost per conversion, and just checking through there. Really, it would only be through testing. There's probably no other way that I can think of to do it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, I mean, and speaking to the point of people coming to you maybe sometimes not knowing what their cost per conversions are at that point in time. I think I find that applies a lot of times to other areas of marketing, Like sometimes people put a lot of budget into events, particularly in the beverage alcohol space. I think the listener here can really relate to that. But being able to hone that down to what are the actual results coming out of this? But being able to hone that down to what are the actual results coming out of this and it's a lot more challenging when it comes to a more traditional form than it is for something like getting a GA report or being able to look at paid media results so that is definitely a recommendation too is to look and see what are your other avenues resulting in, Because a lot of times paid search actually has like a really great return on investment. You know, sometimes people hear $50 per conversion or $100 and that can be a little jolting.
Speaker 2:But, if you think about what you might invest into a tasting, for example, you might spend $6,000, $7,000 on a booth. How many retail orders are you getting out of that? And then, once the retailer orders, it is the end consumer. Really even you know understanding the brand resonance and placing an order from there. So it's such a long tail game with some of the traditional modes. So that's why I think you'd agree Google Ads is definitely a really great way to go to get some immediate results right away, Absolutely.
Speaker 3:Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1:Claire, we've heard you mention several times specific platforms. You know Meta, which covers Facebook and Instagram, tiktok. Is this something that? Do you need to have separate sort of parallel processes in order to get your ads to show up on Facebook, instagram, tiktok, et cetera? Or is this something where there's like a one mega dashboard where you can fire off and set up campaigns on all of these platforms? How does that work?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's very much. You need people with different specialisms. It's a completely different skill set, completely different type of advertising campaign. There is no one place to go, unfortunately. So, yes, they are much more complex to manage in terms of the fact that Google is very much about instant. People are looking for it right now in Google, tiktok, and Meta is very much about interruption marketing. You're trying to get their attention when they're doing something else. You're actually almost like waving a hand at them and saying hello, come and look at this. So it's very different than Google search.
Speaker 1:So if there was one place to go, maybe it's someone like you Offload the entire, offload everything I wanted to ask, given the international nature of what so many of our listeners are engaged in, whether they're importing to the US or vice versa, and even within the United States. It's you know I'm an outsider to this industry, but every time I talk to a brand, they talk about how it's like dealing with 50 different countries working within the US. What legal considerations come into play when it comes to advertising? I know that there are special protections in the United States about how certain things can be advertised, especially to certain age groups, for example. Does the EU have things like that? Like? How does that work in a truly international space like online advertising?
Speaker 3:Well, I mean, it's essential to stay up to date with Google's policy guidelines, because they change a lot. They change constantly. So, yeah, you need to be aware of whether's not seen to be promoting alcohol usage, for example. The best advice is to either get very familiar with the google ads policy center or, of course, hire somebody that is able to do that for you, because it is possible, if you do repeatedly redo your ads and you get lots of disapprovals and you can't figure out why, google will just close down your account. So it is safer a lot of the time to just hire somebody that knows. So, yeah, we do get a lot of people contact us who've had their account completely suspended by Google.
Speaker 1:This follow-up question. Listeners shouldn't they shouldn't view your response as legal advice, but is it relatively generally sort of vibes-based safe to say that if you're complying with the Google ads policy, that you're probably safe within your individual territories, like legally, with whatever ads that you're putting together.
Speaker 3:Yes, yes, yes, you should be Okay.
Speaker 1:You can hide behind the like. Oh, Google said it was okay, so I'm probably okay. That's kind of okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, even even MHW has come and run into times where all of a sudden they say you cannot advertise beverage alcohol and so we have to tweak our copy or our you know our subhead to it, and so it seems somewhat random at times, I'll be honest with you. But I think Claire's right, I think they update their policy quite a bit and I think the team has been very helpful in appeals as well to just, you know, try and understand what we can and cannot say. So definitely, within the world of beverage alcohol, I think that that's critical to have someone that understands sort of all of the working elements that go into it and what's approved and what's not. Absolutely yes. And one question out of curiosity that I've always had is is there ever one or two things that every person whom you've consulted with or who have read your book, one thing that you find that they're consistently surprised by or that sticks out to them in any way?
Speaker 3:So it definitely is how fast it can work once you get things right. Right, because so many people have been told that google ads takes months to work, and sometimes that can be the belief with. I think this perhaps comes from the fact that seo takes months to work, so of course, you can be waiting months or years for your seo to work. Google Ads absolutely is not the same. If you get it right, you can be getting leads, getting the phone ringing that same afternoon, and if you're not getting leads within the first week, then there's something wrong. Really, it's such a fast platform to test on. So that is the number one thing. That and when I used to teach face-to-face courses, there were times when in the morning we'd set some ads up and then in the afternoon I'd have people that had inquiries already. So when it was a full day course, that was very exciting to get people to get live proof of concept then and there, by the time they walked out of the course. That is exciting, absolutely.
Speaker 1:I have to ask, perhaps only for the sake of boosting our podcast in some algorithm how does AI come into play in all this? Like for the listeners who are looking to run their Google ads and other campaigns, is there some way that they should be harnessing AI you know, any of the products that are available out there for their own use or maybe just to make themselves look good to their bosses, Because everyone seems to want to have an excuse to say like oh, we've used AI to make this more efficient. Is that all buzzwords, or is there a genuine use case here?
Speaker 3:There is a genuine use case, especially when it comes to writing ad copy or coming up with keyword ideas, for example.
Speaker 2:I've heard a marketing manager, claire actually put in their brand deck so their brand guidelines, who they are about. Them just copied everything from it and said create, within the character limit, 10 sets of ad copy. I'm not saying to do this, by the way, dear listeners, it's important to do it. Please don't do this. Yeah, I am not doing a third person marketing manager description. I work with claire's team on on our ads very specifically.
Speaker 2:But, uh, I mean, if you're going to do it with ai content, I think having a live person really proof and go through and tailor it even further to do a second or third edit round, I think is really really key.
Speaker 2:But you know, there's also, I think, opportunities and tell me how you feel if you come across full deck kits, like we see this sometimes when we speak with a new brand. If they have a long deck about their brand, I mean there's opportunity to kind of pull out the four or five resonant things and their largest brand values to understand that we're really hitting the mark when we chat with them. So I think there's use cases like that, but I think it can be can be challenging to rely on that solely. Yes, absolutely Out of curiosity. Has anyone ever come to you with a scenario where they like want to maybe bid against a competitor and it ends up being like a really high CPA where you're like this is not worth it, like this is just an ego thing or something like that, where you're like you can do this, but you have to reframe the way you're thinking about it?
Speaker 3:I am very much. I tell people and I tell people this in the book as well that you need to go to Google and search for some keywords that you think your perfect target market will be using. If you can't think of any, then we have a problem and you shouldn't really be using Google Ads. And secondly, I tell people to go and use a competitor research tool called SpyFu and see if you can find in there people that are repeatedly bidding on your keywords, and ideally you should find a number of people that are bidding on those keywords. There is no such thing as you suddenly thinking you've come up with this amazing idea that nobody else has ever thought of.
Speaker 3:If you can't find competitors, it's not worth advertising on Google ads, and it's as simple as that. And so, to answer your question, if people came to me, what would I advise them? If I can't help them find competitors, then I'm not going to be able to create the demand, and that's the difference between Google and meta ads and TikTok ads, of course is Google and meta can be used to create the demand, and the influencer marketing can be used to create the demand and get people searching for your brand particularly. That's the only way that that would work. However, if you are selling for example, I was very surprised to find the keyword 14-year-old whiskey I was surprised that there were a number of advertisers bidding on it, so that would be a good keyword that if you fell into and you sold 14-year-old whiskey, then that would be a perfect one. We can find competitors. We can reverse engineer what they're doing and then add in a number of other keywords as well. That makes sense.
Speaker 1:And for listeners wanting to follow up and look up that spy-fu, imagine the word kung fu. It's spy-fu, that's it. Yes, you're being so clever with that. Yeah, but that's how you find it there. Finally, claire, this is the fun question that we like to ask every new guest at the end of the show what is your favorite adult beverage?
Speaker 3:So I am very much a fan of vodka, probably vodka, lime and soda vodka, lemonade vodka and pretty much anything Vodka, preferably in cosmopolitans as well. I do like cosmopolitans, so, yes, it's definitely vodka. I'm a vodka gal myself. Fantastic, a nice, simple, straightforward vodka.
Speaker 1:I'm a vodka gal myself. Fantastic, a nice, simple, straightforward answer. We love it. Claire Jarrett, thank you so much for joining us. We will put links in the show notes for listeners who want to follow up with Claire or to check out the book or the audio book. Once again, the title is Rapid Google Ads Success. Claire Jarrett, thank you so much again for stopping by and chatting with us.
Speaker 3:It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1:And thank you listeners for joining us on the MHW Mark podcast and thanks again to Bridget McCabe for joining me in hosting.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:This podcast is produced by me, Jimmy Moreland, with booking and planning support by Cassidy Poe and Bridget McCabe. It's presented by MHW. Find out more at mhwltdcom or connect with MHW on LinkedIn. Lend us a hand by subscribing, rating and reviewing this podcast wherever you listen. We'll be back in your feed in two weeks. We'll see you then, Cheers.