Natural Products Marketer Podcast
Expert Marketing Advice to Help you Grow Your Business, Reach More People & Change More Lives.
Natural Products Marketer Podcast
How Retailers Can Use Programmatic Ads with Dan Kraus
Search is slipping, social buries links, and great employees aren’t browsing job boards. That’s the new reality for natural products retailers, and it’s exactly why we’re leaning into programmatic ads and geofencing to reach both customers and potential hires where they actually are—on their phones, inside apps, and in connected TV.
Dan Kraus of Shift Advertising walks through how precise geofences around health fairs, yoga studios, natural grocers, and even training programs can build an anonymized audience of motivated people without creeping on identities. Then we get practical: dayparting to hit after‑hours crews, CPMs you can plan for, and why a two‑week display burst can move the needle when you stay narrow on one category your store already dominates. You’ll hear examples from staffing a clean‑room manufacturer to recruiting for stretch studios, plus the reporting that matters: actions, store visits inside conversion zones, and 60‑ to 90‑day lift instead of last‑click myths.
We also cover the conversion chain most teams miss. If ads perform but sales stall, check the landing page, train staff on the exact offers running, and make sure shelves and scripts match the message. Warm audiences win fastest, so upload your email list and loyalty members, retarget recent site visitors, and use ads to boost email opens with “check your inbox” creative. In a softer economy, highlight essentials customers still buy—coffee, toothpaste, shampoo—and keep your brand top of mind so paused routines don’t become lost customers.
Whether you need a pipeline of service‑minded floor staff or you want profitable store traffic without wasting spend, this playbook shows how to target smarter and measure what matters. Subscribe, share with a fellow retailer, and leave a quick review so we can bring more expert strategies to your feed.
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Email: info@naturalproductsmarketer.com
About Tina Maddock
Since 2014, Tina has worked with multiple natural products businesses, discovering how to market their CBD products online, without having their payment processor shut them down, to letting customers talk about their health issues those products have helped them solve. She knows first hand how experts like you offer the best products and a superior customer experience, that is why she is committed to helping you find an easy way to grow your natural product business.
Welcome to the Natural Product Marketer Podcast. I'm your host, Tina Matdock. On this podcast, you'll hear from manufacturers, retail owners and operators, and other business experts that will help you grow your business so you can serve more people and change more lives. Yeah, so let's back up. Obviously, you and I are in the middle of a discussion right now. And um Dean and I work together doing ads for natural products retailers plus other people that come and need some help. But let's talk about how you even got into the ad space.
Dan Kraus:Oh, I've had such a long journey into the ad space. How far back do you want me to roll it back? No. Um actually my very first job out of college, um, and I don't have enough gray hair to look at, but um we're going back to the 80s, um, was selling advertising when you could first do a local ad on something like CNN or ESPN or MTV when it was actually still music television, um, and and you could buy that local insertion. And um I really loved doing that and you know, kind of moved away from it for a lot of years. Um got to a point where I was running a marketing agency, did kind of everything. And what I watched happen about two and a half years ago when AI started really creating a lot of results in search, is I watched all the Google campaigns and a lot of the search campaigns that I run ran for people really lose a lot of their effectiveness. Because what was happening is somebody would do a search and then Google would give them a uh an answer with one of the AI-gener snippets that actually answered the question. So they've never actually left Google and went to the website or to the content that was providing the answer. And you know, in the three years since then, it's actually continued to go down that road, right? So now you have people who just go to Chat GPT on their phone and ask a question, or they go to Claude, right? So we're we're seeing more and more of what used to be um a monolithic experience where, hey, I need to ask a question and it's just gonna be Google and I'm gonna get the answer, um, get really fractured. So everybody's kind of doing it a little bit differently. And I don't know how deep you want to go on this, Tina, but I mean if you look at the if you just look at the marketing world overall, right? We used to be able to get traffic, get our message out, let people know we were there, and not have to spend a lot of money to do it because we could post on social, right? We put a blog post up and people would come and find it from search. Um, you know, we could post on you know Google Maps. There's lots of different ways to get our message out there and people would see it. And they're really not anymore. So it really feels like we've gone back to the future or back to the future to the past where we're really in a play-to-pay uh pay-to-play environment, right? If you want people to see your message, you've got to get it in front of them in some way, shape, or form.
Tina Maddock:I talking about search, I and even ads. So a lot of times we talk about Google ads because it's one of the first things that comes to mind for people or used to for how I'm gonna advertise and get on the board. And um one of the things I found with just general search, even if you have like keyword-relevant content that you can advertise with ads when people are searching that keyword, um, I find that you have to put a lot of pennies in the slot in order to get the algorithm to learn well enough to serve up the ad to the right audience at the right time that might be in your area. So I became disenchanted with Google Ads over the past few years. Um, not because they don't, they're not effective anymore. We we could talk about the nuances of that. I'm sure there are people that get it done well, but I think you have to spend three to five thousand dollars a month in order to really see results there. So when you first started talking to me about programmatic ads, that's when I sort of perked up and I was like, wait a minute, this sounds a lot more like we're getting in front of exactly the audience that we're looking for.
Dan Kraus:Yeah, and I mean, search works for people who are looking for you. Yeah. Or looking for what it is that you do. If they're not actively looking, and let's go back to your example of the yoga studio looking for employees, right? If those people aren't actively looking for a new job, they're not gonna find you, right? If somebody's not actively looking for your product or they don't know that your brand exists, and so they're never doing a brand a brand search, you're not gonna show up in a search. So what becomes a cost-effective way to put your brand, your message, your imagery in front of the right person? Um and the programmatic or what I call targeted direct, I mean, allows you to do that because if you can identify where your audience is hanging out, and that can be digitally or in real life, right? Then we can actually get your message in front of them. Um, I mean, the analogy I use for a lot of people is that you can drive by a billboard on the highway and see a message, or you can put the billboard in the car. Right. And with with the programmatic, we're putting the billboard in the car. So yeah.
Tina Maddock:So people ask me all the time, like, what is a programmatic ad? Like, what are you talking about? So help me explain.
Dan Kraus:Um, the easiest way to explain it is um generally practical experience. So if somebody opens a weather app on their phone, if you hacke weather or weather.com and you open the app on your phone, there's an ad in there, right? That ad is getting served through a programmatic process. Somebody has identified you as being part of a group that they want to serve an ad to, and you're getting that ad put into that app. Right? Um, that can show up as a browser-based ad. And if you've ever noticed, as you're now watching a streaming TV show, that the ad seems remarkably relevant to you, that's also another example of programmatic, right? That's ads are being served based off of who you are as opposed to what you're watching. Right?
Tina Maddock:Yeah, and so how do you get to the right people, the right audience?
Dan Kraus:Yeah, this is the creepy part for most people, right? And I've been accused of being a stalker for that reason. Um, but you know, if you you know, if you're into well, let's let's just say in the natural product space, right? You know, there's a health fair going on, um, and you know that the the people that you would want to expose your service or your brand to are going to be at that health fair. Um, we create the electronic fence around that health fair, whether it's indoors or outdoors. And when you and your phone walk through that fence, we're able to identify you, providing two things are happening. One, you have location services on on your phone, and almost everybody does, because we can't use weather or maps or a lot of things without it. Um and the second is that you have an ad-supported app running somewhere in the background. And most of us have a game or that weather app or something else running in the background because we didn't shut everything down on our phone. And as long as those two things are happening and you walk through that fence, we're gonna pick you up and make you part of an audience. So now we're gonna do that.
Tina Maddock:Yeah, so so one of the things, and the reason that we're talking about this today, of course, we can do this for customers. Um, and I think people are aware of running ads for customers. But where I find this very interesting is right now, it's so difficult to find good people to do customer service jobs on the floor at the place because everyone's gotten so digital. I can work from home, I can do whatever. They have so many options. And finding a good floor team who can who knows natural products, number one, but also can offer, you know, the best customer service, it's difficult to find those people. So one of the things that you have people are employed, they're not looking. Yeah, I know. I know. They're definitely not the best. The best people are not looking for jobs typically. And so you have to find creative ways to go find them. And especially if you know that there is um an alignment with a location near you that has alignment in like values and philosophy of how you deliver to customers, then that's a great place to geofence, like you were talking about, because you can teach people about products a lot of times. It's harder to teach people how to interact with people and treat people well.
Dan Kraus:Yeah, no, uh it's a great point. And the other thing to think about is the people that would be great employees for you may not necessarily be in a traditional place where you'd recruit from. So, you know, think about a, you know, a hospital that's trying to get, you know, nursing assistants. Well, you could go and actually geofence the nursing school to get people before they've got their degree for part-time help, right? Or if you run one of the assisted stretching labs, right? You can go and recruit people that are working for a PT office, right? That might be either looking for part-time or downsized work, right? There's a lot of different ways to think about who are the people that I want to get um working for me.
Tina Maddock:Yeah, I mean, even restaurants like great servers, um, especially if they're like a more healthy place. I think there's overlap there. And um just anywhere you walk in, you're like, wow, that's great customer service. Now, look, you can give them a card. That's great. You can post on indeed and and come up in a job search. But like you said, if they're not looking for a job, then they're not coming your way for that. So this is one way to get good people who are happy and maybe not looking for something, but recruit from that pool of candidates.
Dan Kraus:Absolutely. And you know, the the other thing is that good people tend to know other good people.
Tina Maddock:Oh, yeah.
Dan Kraus:Right. So a lot of times if you can find a location that works for finding one or two of those employees and you're advertising into that area, um, you're gonna find people that know each other and that have worked together, right? So you you're just creating an awareness that there's an opportunity to come work with you for you, whichever word you choose to use.
Tina Maddock:Yeah. So just think about like Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, places like that. Um, and I love that you can do the after hours crew.
Dan Kraus:Mm-hmm. Yeah, we can day part at how whatever timing you want to. Um, it's the the stuff isn't that expensive. That's the other thing is people like, okay, well, this is gonna cost a lot to do. And it's really not. I mean, if you want to do it just with basic display ads, um you're talking about $15 to $20 per every thousand ads that get served. How many people are you trying to hire? Right. So, you know, you can do a two-week flight for a couple of hundred bucks um and you know, get the attention of somebody that you're looking for if you're trying to hire one or two people. So pretty quick turnaround to get it all done. And it's not that expensive. You know, you look at the cost of posting on Indeed, you look at the cost of running Facebook ads to try and find people. Um it's pretty comparable and it's a different way to do it.
Tina Maddock:Yeah, totally. I love that. So give us, I love some stories like how where have you done this before? What kind of results have you seen?
Dan Kraus:Um, so the stretch lab, the stretch lab is actually one that I did we did do, right? We um we were trying to recruit for uh a stretch company that was trying to increase the number of people that they had because those locations have a lot of turnover, right? People tend to go in and out of those places about every four to five months. So they wanted to build a pipeline. And we've been able to help them get a list of people that are actually going through and and increasing their input, their their throughput through Indeed, right? So we're not trying to get them to walk in the door and apply, but we're trying to move from, you know, hey, we're getting five applications a week on Indeed to we're trying to get 15 a week on Indeed. So we're able to move that number up, um, which helps them out. And then we had uh a company up in New Hampshire that was trying to they're trying to staff a clean room. They they they manufacture in a clean room environment. And um it's an area in New Hampshire where there's a lot of factories, but it's not a lot of people working in each one. So you got a lot of factories with like 15 to 20 people. So um we actually geofenced, I think, 13 different locations for them to get kind of the employment ads out there. So it was a little uh hitting a lot of different places with a little bit of advertising to try and drive some some traffic. And um I don't know what the end results were because it was going through their own private um their own private system and they weren't sharing the results back. So they ran it for three months, so I think they got the employees they were looking for.
Tina Maddock:So yeah, I I hate that when we can't like look at results because it's hard for us to be like, hey, this worked or it didn't work. So it's a tough one. Um but still, you know, if people continue running the ads, they're probably effective in getting them what they need.
Dan Kraus:Yeah, and you know, just basic recruitment stuff, right? You always want to be looking for the next great employees because you never know when somebody's gonna leave, right? And you know they win they win the lottery, their spouse wins the lottery, they decide to move to Alaska, you know, all this stuff happens.
Tina Maddock:Yeah, you know, we talk about when you're when you're thinking about hiring, and even when you're not networking and making connections so that when you have the spot available, you have the ability to reach out to a network is always helpful. And if you have a pipeline, like who would have thought that recruiting employees would be another thing you have to market around?
Dan Kraus:Well, yeah, and I mean there's a lot of choices, especially when you when you start to get to okay, I can work from home, I can do reviews, I can do all these things. I don't have to go and stand in a retail environment or I don't have to work with people face to face, right? If if I don't want to. Well, some of the best people are hiding. So how do how do you get in front of them?
Tina Maddock:So yeah, really. Okay, so you mentioned like you could do ads to move people to Indeed, like a job description on Indeed. Can you just do that on your own website instead of going through Indeed?
Dan Kraus:Yeah, and actually what I'd encourage most people to do is you know, India gives you a widget that you can put on your site. So you actually want to put them onto a page on your site that's got that widget there. So you're driving them through that experience. You you want to let them experience your culture as much as you can within the website as they're going through that process.
Tina Maddock:Yeah, and I mean like values, philosophy, who we are, what we do, so that people can self-select out as much as self-select in. We always talk about that.
Dan Kraus:So and it's um, you know, it's it's difficult to convert people off of any type of advertisement, whether it's you know, whether we were talking about Google search earlier or programmatic or even off of advertising on LinkedIn or Facebook, right? So you're bringing people back multiple times, and we actually have the ability to see the people that have seen an ad and have come to your site or wherever you're directing them, either directly or they saw the ad and then they typed it in and came on their own. So we're actually able to track um what we call actions versus clicks and be able to see see how that works out for somebody.
Tina Maddock:Yeah, and I mean this is the again creepy part, but you can also see if someone came to their physical location. So these are brick and mortar stores that we're talking about. If someone thinks they might be interested in a position with you, they are coming to your store. And now we can see from the ad, like if they make it to the store.
Dan Kraus:Right. So the same way that we would send it set up a fence to capture somebody, we set up a fence as a conversion zone. So we can actually see somebody who's seen an ad and then walks into that zone. So yeah. Yes. Um, it if you have any any suspicion that you're being tracked, you are absolutely correct. You are being tracked, you're being tracked by everybody in this world at this point.
Tina Maddock:So true. Um I I know it's hard, it's very difficult to stay off the grid. Um, and for people who are worried about this, um most of the time, the more relevant the advertisement is for the person, the more that they are grateful. Because sometimes you get things served up to you and you're like, why?
Dan Kraus:Right. Yeah. If I have to watch an ad, I want to watch one that's relevant to me, right? That's that's absolutely key. Um, and the other thing I think, you know, you're being tracked, but you're not being tracked personally, right? A lot of this is being done with anonymized cookies. If people say, well, you know, you you captured this audience, can I see who it is? And I can't see who it is. None of us can see who it is. It's all it's all digital, it's a series of 64 hexadecimal digits that mean absolutely nothing except to the other computers that are talking to each other. So from a human being standpoint, we can't identify who you are.
Tina Maddock:Yeah, and also just um, you know, we're looking at that to say, hey, we can send ads back to them again and do higher frequency or um even create look-alike audiences that are like that, but again, it's not the person.
Speaker:Right.
Tina Maddock:We wouldn't know the person if they walked in your door, we wouldn't say, Hey, there they are.
Dan Kraus:The reality is I'm not capturing a person's information, I'm capturing a device information. And I use person as a shorthand for it, but the reality is what I'm capturing is a device.
unknown:Right.
Tina Maddock:Yeah, one of the coolest things that though, when we first started talking about this, I was like, oh my gosh, this is so cool that once the person or device is captured in whatever geofence, if they go back and they get on another Wi-Fi network, you can capture anyone who's on that Wi-Fi network as well.
Dan Kraus:Yeah, which works in your favor most of the time.
unknown:Right.
Dan Kraus:Sometimes it can be a little um overwhelming. So we had we had one instance where somebody went and got onto a university campus and all of a sudden it looks like every single ad was being served to this one particular university campus. So we made some changes to it. But um, you know, that's that's why you don't set it and forget it. You actually monitor it and you manage it.
Tina Maddock:Yeah, that was gonna bring me back to look, you know, I have dabbled over the years in ads. It's so complicated. And it is like watching, it's like day trading, honestly. Um watching like what's happening, and then you're like, whoa, that was weird. What's going on here? So I mean, the other day I was doing a meta ad. Um, and when I added more money, the frequency went down. And what I was trying to do was bump the frequency up, but it's because I did too much of an adding, you know, spend increase. And they were like, oh, we can't serve that to the same audience again. We have to redo the audience because they're, you know, the robots are making adjustments that they think are what you need. And sometimes you're like, no, no, no, I wanted to bump this up, not that. And so watching that is a little bit like day trading, where you're like, oh my gosh, don't spend that money there, stop.
Dan Kraus:Yeah. And there, you know, the thing is there's a especially with the the programmatic, there's a lot of levers, and I think programmatic sometimes gets a bad name because people think about, oh, I'm just gonna bunch of dump, dump a bunch of money in and it'll go figure it out. And it can absolutely do it that way. You can say, I want to buy, you know, quote unquote, a number of rating points, I want to buy a number of uh a number of impressions and just let it run. Um, I worked with somebody recently that um they were working with a a platform and they said, Hey, I want to geofence this show that's at the Seattle Convention Center. And whoever set up the campaign just put in the Seattle Convention Center as the location. Well, it did a geofence, but it did it as a radius, so it got all the streets as well as the convention center.
Speaker:Yeah.
Dan Kraus:So I ran a fence for the same show. They got 12,000 people for the show. I got 4,000 because I went in and hand drew the fence exactly on the direct the diameters of the building. So I mean, that's an example of just where one little thing can change your spend, the amount of waste that you have, etc. Um, you know, things like you were just talking about with frequency, right? Do I want to serve an ad to somebody four times a day or 40 times a day? Right? If it's four times a day, I need to make sure that my audience is big enough and it forces the computers to spread stuff out. So it's um, you know, you've got to pay attention to it. And the tools are really good, but the reason we only do programmatic ads as an agency now is because we want to be really good at one thing and not okay at a lot.
Tina Maddock:Yeah, so I think, you know, my the reason I talk about like, oh my gosh, this there, it's like day trading is because you really want a specialist who is gonna keep their eye on it. Um, rather than just dabbling. And you can dabble for small amounts of money, but once you start putting hundreds of dollars, especially for these smaller stores, into it, they need a return. So you need someone who's gonna know what they're doing, which levers they're pulling, and and will adjust as things go. So, you know, as an example, you and I work together, we look at reports weekly. And sometimes we're like, okay, this can be an anomaly, but next week, if it looks soft again, we got to adjust something. Right. Um, and you're advising on that. And I'm bringing the knowledge to the table of here's what's happening at the retailer, or you know, who's buying, what numbers are going up or or down in their point of sale system?
Dan Kraus:Yeah. Well, and you're hitting on something that's really important, Dean, is that a lot of people over the last 25 years have gotten trained to think about um last click attribution, right? What caused this to happen, right? What caused somebody to walk in the store? What caused somebody to buy this product? Um, but the reality is with all the different touch points that people are getting today, and it could be 15, 16 different ways that they're getting your message, right? We've got to look at the overall lift over a period of time, right? This is not, hey, what am I gonna do this week and did it have an impact next week? It's what do we do in these next two months and what's the impact for the two months after that, right? We've got to a lot of times look at a longer time horizon to be able to understand the impact.
Tina Maddock:You know, with ads, we always talk about give it 90 days to settle in. Because there are these levers, and if we watch and we figure it out, it gets drilled in over a period of 30, you know, 60 days, and then you get the results over the next few months. So if you are like, I I have a few hundred dollars to spend and I just want to do it for a month, it's probably not the best place to use that money. Like go support a local softball team instead.
Dan Kraus:Well, you know, that'll put your name on the back of the walls for you know, for a season, right? That's not a bad way to do it. Or, you know, if you're trying to hire and you don't have any money to really spend on that, then go print a few business cards that you go hand out to people to waiters, like you said, that that provide exceptional service, right? There's a lot of different ways that you can use that money. But yeah, it's um um I I really try to counsel people away from throwing what I think would be good money at a bad idea because I don't want them to use it once, right? This is really powerful stuff if you use it right. But if you get turned off from it, then you don't come back, and that doesn't do either of us any good.
Tina Maddock:Yeah, and if you are working with someone who has expertise on it, then they can tell you look because we can do good work with advertisement, but if something weird is happening at your store with a customer experience, you're not gonna see the level of conversions. So, you know, I like to walk back, and and I've done this with websites and everything, like, okay, where is the chain failing? Because it's a bunch of little links, and at each touch point for the consumer or someone who's looking for a position, they need to have the right experience to nudge them to the next place. So if you've got people who are super interested in the ads, so you know, a lot of times people are like impressions or frequency or whatever it is related to ads, like that's dead. We just want conversions. I agree that conversion is the in number that you that you look at, but I like to look at every link in that chain that gets them there to a conversion and be like, these are good numbers. And we've got benchmarks that we know work. So these are good numbers. It's been running for long enough, and this is happening. So I can see the number of people looking at it are great, the number of people clicking are great, and then there's no sale. So something else is happening in between. Is it a landing page? Is it they walk in the door and something weird is happening in your store? And so this can also give you some good feedback about what's really happening for a specific segment.
Dan Kraus:Yeah, and it it's hey, I solved this problem. What's the next problem that's gonna come up, right? Because there's always going to be a next problem.
Tina Maddock:Yeah.
Dan Kraus:So it's it's very rare that it's not. I mean, even even the big ones, like I mean, I ordered something on Amazon last night, and instead of getting an order confirmation, I got a oops, something didn't work right. Yeah. It was fixed two hours later, but you know, that was a feedback loop to them, right? So those feedback loops exist everywhere in your sales and marketing process, to your point, right?
Tina Maddock:Yeah. And uh just as an example, like it something that we uncovered during one of these ad campaigns was because we like to do very um targeted segments, it produces faster conversions from what we've seen. They're top, there's top of funnel. And what I mean by that is just exposure to your brand and who you are that you want to do. And you need for people to be like, oh, I'm aware that they exist. And now I understand what they do, and I'm kind of interested in that. And here's some options to start trying them out or um getting more familiar in my walk in the door. But what we like to narrow it down to, especially the lower amount of money that you have to spend, are people that are warm and moving them into a hey, I just purchased something. So we we did a sports nutrition related campaign. You know, you had geofenced some um gyms for us, and it turned out that people were interested in coming to the store, and we even could tell that some people were walking in, but there were no people buying. So that uncovered something at where it was very obvious: like, okay, um, the ads are doing their part. You've got a store problem. You are gonna need to talk to someone, either the display's off, or people are not connecting with your people, or there's not knowledge about the sports nutrition product line in the store when people come in because they're gonna have questions around that. So this is a great way to uncover like, hey, something's not working, whether it's digitally or in person.
Dan Kraus:Well, yeah, and I mean it it's it's a point that you know what I think as marketers we take for granted a lot, but it's one that's really worth pulling out, which is you need your staff to know what you're promoting, right? Because if you start a program but your staff doesn't know it, and people are coming in and asking about something, all of a sudden, right? Um and it's do they have the knowledge, are the pieces tied together? And I look at a lot of times I look at this from a marketing standpoint, which is are my ads and my emails tied together, right? Because um, you know, stores spend a lot of time and a lot of money building up loyalty programs, right? And they've got the email list and they've got the contact information. And then it's oh yeah, I you know, I drop in a blast every couple of weeks, right, to it, or I'm using it to to drive something through an app. But email tends to get ignored after a while too, right? We just become blind to the subject lines, et cetera. But you can actually use advertising to draw people back to an email, you can use advertising to draw people into the store, you can make your staff aware of what's going on so all those pieces tie together, right? And now they know how to react to it. And so it's really trying to make it all happen. I was actually just talking to somebody about, you know, they do a lot of emails and they don't get a lot of conversion off of it. And it was, well, let's advertise whatever's going out in the email with the comment line of check your email for more details, just in the ad. Right. So we're actually using advertising to get people to read the longer message.
Tina Maddock:Yeah.
Dan Kraus:Not a crazy, but it does actually work.
Tina Maddock:Oh, totally. Well, and you know. So even the best emails are getting open 30, 35% of them are getting open. So if you have a 10,000-person email list, you know, you're you're only getting to 3,500 of those people who are opening and reading the email. You stick that same email list in programmatic and you say read your email, that open rate's gonna go up, or they're just gonna come in.
Dan Kraus:Yeah, you know, we'll we'll we'll take it up a couple of percent each time that that we do it. And yeah, or they're just gonna come in, right? That's like, oh, I read it. Yeah, I saw I saw this, I came in. Um it's really interesting. If I go, if I go all the way back to where we started this conversation, how I got into this. So what was really cool when I was selling TV insertions is we knew that it worked because people would say to business owners, I saw you on TV or I saw your ad. Right. But we don't know a lot of times if people are seeing our digital stuff or our video ads that are running out there, because people don't equate, especially older people don't equate um a video piece that they saw on their computer the same as a video piece that comes across their smart TV, even streaming.
Speaker:Yeah.
Dan Kraus:Right. And the beautiful thing about programmatic is you can tell a really good story on TV in 15 or 30 seconds for like six cents an ad delivered. Right. So it's not really expensive to do, and you can you can get a really detailed story in front of folks. So it it it opens TV up again too, I think a lot of people who haven't ever thought about that, hey, you know, TV could do something for me here.
Tina Maddock:Yeah, and I think that the where we've seen the best performance with the programmatic ads for retailers specifically, it's something they're already doing well if you start there. Right. So, you know, if you're if you're not a great sports nutrition shop, then don't start there. Start in a a different category because there's something that um people come to you for a lot, right? So start where you're already blooming and grow that even more. And then you can start to talk about, and you were talking about like say it to the staff. In certain situations, you're so good at one thing. Um, it's great if you tell the staff, but you wouldn't even have to talk to the team about it because they're on it every single day, and you're just growing that, that they're gonna have more contact around that subject matter. Um, so starting where you're already strong is a high recommendation. We like warm audiences. So putting an email list into the programmatic, your loyalty rewards people into the programmatic system is gonna produce higher conversions. People that are visiting your website.
Dan Kraus:Yep.
Tina Maddock:Um, so retargeting, remarketing pixels, having those capture the people as they're coming and they see you again. Um, and then uh people who have already purchased. So those lists in a segmented way, offering them products or services that are around those topics, high conversion rates. And again, I do think you need top-of-funnel stuff. It's just not gonna be as high of a conversion rate. So if you're looking for something, the the quickest gains are gonna be like, all right, where are you already doing really well? And you talk to people about it every day.
Dan Kraus:Yeah, no, I it it's it's can you cross-sell to your existing customers? Can you reactivate a customer that hasn't bought from you in a while? Right? Those are people that already have a relationship with you. So they've already got some level of no-like and trust already. Yeah. Right. So those are the easiest ones to move through the purchase cycle. And then as you go further away from people who've ever interacted with you, those are the ones that require the more touches. So how do you do that cost effectively at the end of the day?
Tina Maddock:Well, the other thing that we've been talking about too is because the summer was a little bit soft. And I don't know if this is a trend or if it'll continue. You know, I mean, this business is cyclical, summer, summer's a little bit soft anyway, but this summer was way soft um for many of our retailers. And so um one of the things that um that we talk about doing is um I now I've totally lost my train of thought. Summer was soft. Oh, so what's happening in the economy right now is um that people are downsizing, like things that products that they don't think they need. They're like, oh, I can do without that for a month or a week, or maybe I can squeeze the last little bit of toothpaste out of this and instead of buying a new tube yet. Um, so they're making fewer purchases, especially for the non-essentials. And that's up to the consumer to decide like what's essential in their life and what isn't. So we've been talking to retailers about highlighting that they have essentials. And depending on the store, it's different, like what essentials are available there. But using programmatic ads as this, hey, did you know that we had toilet paper or coffee or toothpaste, xylitol gum, like things that are more people are not gonna do without um mouthwashes and those sorts of things, um, even lotions to some degree, shampoo for sure. People are not doing without shampoos and soap. If you highlight, hey, you can get that here, especially to people who purchased before, and say, hey, did you know that we have these essentials and you can just drop by and get those while you're here? I I think that's a great way right now to remind people that they don't need to take you off their list if they're downsizing.
Dan Kraus:Yeah, I I think and the other risk I think from downsizing is that and this happens to me, it may not happen to everybody. If I change my routine for a couple, three months, all of a sudden I've forgotten some of the products that were in that routine. And so, you know, advertising becomes a way to again cost-effectively keep yourself in somebody's mind, right? You want to keep that position, you want to keep that position filled even if it's not being bought right now, right? And top of mind. Yep.
Tina Maddock:Staying top of mind.
Dan Kraus:Remember where the phrase comes from. So yeah, you know, it's like, how do how do I stay there even though you're not buying it right now?
Tina Maddock:Yeah. So here's another thing because we always talk about doing customer reactivation campaigns. So someone who hasn't been in your store in 90 days, and 90 days, we like 90 days because you can get a 90-day supply of things while they're in there. Maybe 30, 60s, right, for certain products, but um, 90 days if they haven't come back, it's a good time to nudge them. We typically do that via email. Again, open rates are not high. So this is the perfect time to load that group up into an advertisement and be like, check your email.
Dan Kraus:Absolutely. You know, just to just to keep keep again, you know, it's we're more likely to open something when we recognize the center, when we recognize a subject line, right? And most of us go through and clean out, you know, the promotional tab or et cetera, but still we're generally still scanning what they are. And if it's something that that triggers a memory, we'll still pause on it and look and see what the subject line or what the preview text is.
Speaker:Yeah.
Dan Kraus:So, you know, it it top of mind does help you with everything else down the funnel.
Tina Maddock:Yeah, and the other thing that we've kind of been talking about is um because search is a little bit up in the air. And here's what I've been noticing. Um, and this changes every week, month, whatever. So don't if if this is aged a little bit, it could be wrong, by the way. But here's what I've been noticing right now is um for search, SEO still works. It works really well for people who've done no work on it. Like you start getting traffic, if you start doing content and you have a good hierarchy of content on your page, and if you have no idea what I'm talking about, because I'm I'm nerd speaking a little bit, listen to an episode that's just on SEO. I'll put a link in the in the chat here. But the the thing is like if you're starting from zero, you're gonna get some results and it's gonna be pretty quick. If you have content that hasn't been organized well, that helps. If you have had like really great SEO and you've worked on it, it's structured, you're probably seeing fewer clicks right now. Because of AI. That's how, and I'm not saying don't continue doing that because you nudged me the other day and were like, hey, advertise to your articles, advertise to your content, because that is it's one way that people get into your purchase funnel. And so um you can do that and get in front of people that you can't get in front of anymore via search.
Dan Kraus:Well, or social, right? Because social, I mean, you can't put a blog post or a snippet on social with a link to your blog post anymore and get any traffic.
Speaker:Yeah.
Dan Kraus:Right? The the the whether whether it's a meta platform, it's LinkedIn, it's TikTok, it's Snap, it doesn't matter. They all want you to stay on their platform. Yeah. So if you're linking off, your post is getting buried.
Tina Maddock:Yeah. Well, and I mean this industry is used to that because um their posts have been getting buried for a few years now in an effort to not have like the snake oil oil salesman type of transactions happening, which is um it's too bad because they have really great products to offer consumers that could be really helpful. But it's just it's been difficult to get visibility in this industry for a while. Changed a little bit with the new administration. I think things have opened up a bit um once that change happened, but it's still difficult, especially if you're taking people off the platform.
Dan Kraus:Yeah. Well, I think they they want to keep the traffic on the platform, they want to serve the ads on the platform, right? So they don't want to.
Tina Maddock:Which is why they're serving up AI. And they have this weird tension. It's the same with the platforms, they have this weird tension because what drives their business growth are people who are advertising on these platforms, and now they've got people mad at them about that. So it's so strange, but you're right. You they want people to stay put, just like we do. Like all the people that we're helping advertise for, we want them to stay on your platform.
Dan Kraus:Absolutely.
Tina Maddock:So yeah, it's it's interesting and it does change regularly. Those are a few of the changes I've seen from or from an organic standpoint.
Dan Kraus:Yeah, I mean, the the market, the whole marketing technology field, all of our different media choices, um, it's pretty crazy in terms of the sheer number of choices that we have to promote our business. And if you flip that around and you put yourself in your consumer role, think about all the different ways that people have to get a hold of you. Right. I mean, I get unsolicited text, I get unsolicited WhatsApp messages, I get things on Messenger, I get every single possible way so that somebody can hunt me down, they're going to hunt me down. Right. So it's And I hate it. But it it's unfortunately the world we live in because everybody's trying to figure out the best way to get a hold of you. Um they've got something to solve a problem for you. Um and um you know, it's not that advertising makes the world work go around, but it is probably the second oldest profession, right?
Tina Maddock:So yeah, anything else, tips or tricks um that you have discovered since we've been working on retail?
Dan Kraus:Um, I I think your your point that you made about picking a category, picking a specific product's really important, right? Because especially in programmatic, but in advertising in general, you have such little time to get somebody's attention. You have so few words, um, it's very hard to do that with a mushy message, right? You need to know exactly what it is you want to promote and why. Because a lot of times you've got 10 words or three seconds, right? Can you grab somebody's attention in that amount of time? And if you're trying to promote a brand that isn't really well defined, that doesn't work.
Speaker:Yeah.
Dan Kraus:So um being narrow, being specific, both are really beneficial.
Tina Maddock:Yeah, and I think um one of the things you mentioned to me the other day was uh can they call the store?
Speaker:Right.
Tina Maddock:Is this is this the right time to do a call to the store? So we're constantly like looking for ways to make these more effective um and testing them out and seeing like, does this work? Does this not work? Is it turning into money or is it just turning into more work for people?
Dan Kraus:Right, yeah. All of the above.
Tina Maddock:Yeah. And so we're asking a lot of those questions as we're putting these together, um, the campaigns and watching them. Um, and thankfully you've been a great partner to work with to like make suggestions, watch the ticker so that I don't have to or the store doesn't have to, but that I can correlate with different messages and um, you know, sales data to see like what are we doing, or even website data just to see are like coming to the content, are things happening. So um it's been a pleasure um work doing work like this. And I think that we have figured out some real things. Some of the examples that we gave today about getting niche, making sure it's something that's working in your store already, if if you want the quickest results and then layering in other things where you get more interest and you start to build relationships with people, but starting narrow, being very focused, pulling people in for something you're already really great at. Um, that I feel like that's a really great place to start.
Dan Kraus:Yeah, absolutely. So appreciate it. Thanks for the time.
Tina Maddock:Okay, so I just want to like circle back to the reason that we had this conversation because we definitely went down the find the consumer, pull them in and increase your sales um road. But really what we were talking about, and and this came up when I was at Soho with people um talking to me about like, gosh, it's been really difficult to find a good employee to come in and work on the floor that's good at customer service and can also help understand the product itself. And so I think it's a really unique way of getting in front of possible employees without spending a ton of money recruiting.
Dan Kraus:If you know, if you know where you want to recruit from, it's a great place to do it. And that can be, you know, it can be competitors, it can be people that are adjacent, it can be schools. Um, if we can isolate them, we can reach them. So that's that's the goal.
Tina Maddock:Yeah. So if you're having that trouble finding the right person for your team, or you want to try out some of these customer acquisition tools that we're talking about today, um, let us know. Info at naturalproductsmarketer.com. We can help coordinate with Dan. Obviously, we understand the natural products market. And um, Dan's the win whiz on the um the programmatic ads and helping get those set up correctly and watching them to make sure that they're performing well. So contact us, let us know. We can help you get set up. Even if you don't contact us, I feel like these are the right strategies for doing digital advertising today. So hopefully you learned something, if nothing else.
Dan Kraus:We're always learning. Always take.
Tina Maddock:All right. Thanks for coming, and we'll see you on the next episode. Thank you so much for joining us for the latest episode of the Natural Products Marketer podcast, where we're here to help you grow your business so you can serve more people and change more lives. If you have any questions that have come up during this episode or others, or there's just a retail challenge that you're facing today, I would love for you to reach out to us at info at naturalproductsmarketer.com. We're here to answer questions. But most of all, if you have a question, then another retailer probably also has that question. So we can bring experts onto the podcast to give you the information that you really need. And if you liked what you heard, give us a thumbs up or give us a review on uh YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening today. All right, it was great to see you.