Revenue Roadmap: Unlocking the Power of Paid Media

In this episode of Revenue Roadmap, Anthony Karls and JP VanderLinden of Rocket Clicks, dive into the world of paid media. They discuss the differences between digital and offline media, the importance of targeted advertising, and how small business owners can optimize their advertising strategy to drive revenue and gather valuable customer insights.

00:00 Introduction to Revenue Roadmap
00:21 Understanding Paid Media
01:26 Digital vs. Offline Media
02:57 The Value of Buying Media
04:51 Learning from Paid Media
07:18 Empowering Small Business Owners
09:50 Key Metrics and Business Impact
11:57 Conclusion and Next Steps

Check out our blog here!

#DigitalMarketing #Sales #BusinessGrowth

Curious to discover your personalized roadmap to scaling a law firm, no matter where you are in the business?

Follow these steps:

1. BOOK A FREE 30-MINUTE AUDIT WITH US: https://rocketclicks.com/schedule-a-family-law-quick-audit/

2. CONNECT WITH US:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthonykarls/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/rocket-clicks

Facebook: http://facebook.com/2311.karls.anthony

http://facebook.com/RocketClicks

Instagram: http://instagram.com/karls.anthony

https://www.instagram.com/rocketclicks/

3. TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT:

Tell me in the comments if you liked this podcast and what other kinds of topics you would like to see.

Transcript

Anthony Karls: 0:01

All right. Welcome. Welcome. So this is Revenue Roadmap where we talk about sales and marketing for local entrepreneurs. So I'm Anthony Carls, president here at RocketClicks. Today I am with our head of paid media. He's also number two of client service overall here at RocketClicks. JP. So thank you for being here with us today, JP. So today we are going to talk at a pretty high level about paid media. And just get a better understanding of it. What's the difference between digital and offline. We're going to talk like we do in every episode here. We're going to talk about why this is important to driving revenue for you as a small business and how you can be more empowered. To hold the people that you either have internally or the agency you're working with, hold them more accountable in this specific area. So, so JP, what is, paid media overall? Like, how

JP VanderLinden: 0:50

Newspapers, billboards, things of that nature. And then more currently we're talking about digital paid media. So this is anytime you're buying media placing your ads on the internet. So this can show up on you know, your favorite sites where you're reading articles. And there are like ads in the middle of it. There's little banner ads. These can show up in search. Search results, paid search ads, as well as on your favorite social platform. So you may have seen these on LinkedIn, or if you've been on Facebook or Instagram, they'll show up there. So a lot of different ways this shows up but all functionally the same opportunity of paying to put your message in front of potential users.

Anthony Karls: 1:25

Nice. So, what is the, what's the biggest difference between and offline from your perspective? Like, What are, what does that look like, you know, billboard compared to a Facebook ad? Like, Just tell me what's

JP VanderLinden: 1:38

Yeah. So the biggest difference is if you're going to, if you're going to buy your media offline you're going to have limited ability to target who your ad is going to be seen by. So if you buy through a local media station or you buy a billboard or something of that nature, you're going to show it to everybody who's, you know, watching Channel 5 at 7 PM or is driving down the 405 which some percentage of them are going to be your potential customers. But a big percentage are not. And so there's a lot of waste in doing that. Digital media is very targeted. So when you buy an online ad, you get to pick who it serves to. That's a huge advantage because you can know that, you know, 50, 60, 80 percent of who you're going to show your ad to is the right person. Who's can potentially buy your service, whether that's a geographic limit within miles of your store, whether that's a certain job title or interest demographics, something to say this is the right person to see my ad. That specific targeting is a huge superpower of buying your ads online versus offline.

Anthony Karls: 2:35

So offline traditional buys are. There's a lot more waste in in those buys because you're not very specific online. You need to be way more specific and the percentage of the audience that is relevant to your product is likely. Way higher, kind of the overall,

JP VanderLinden: 2:53

Absolutely.

Anthony Karls: 2:54

What do you, what buying when we're talking about media? Like, what does that actually mean?

JP VanderLinden: 2:56

Yeah. So unfortunately the way this has been marketed for a long time is like a weird vending machine where you're going to put in a dollar and you're going to get a certain number of dollars back out of it. And as long as that math still works, you should keep doing it. So it's very like bottom line and revenue focus. And that's the only reason that you would buy ads is basically to buy revenue dollars. Now, not to say that revenue isn't an outcome and a byproduct of what you're doing, but what you're actually buying when you buy ads, really of any type, but especially if digital is you're buying attention and you're buying data. So, you're paying to get in front of somebody. And then they're going to do something and unlike that billboard or that radio ad we talked about, you're going to, you're going to see data on what they actually did, how many people clicked, how many went to your website, how many pages they looked at how many people watched your video to 25, 50, 75%, whatever the engagement looks like, you're going to get some really interesting data back. And so, what this does is it allows you to. Essentially run market research about your customer because remember, we're only showing up to the people who we think are going to be good prospects. Now we're saying I'm in front of this prospect. How do they respond to the red image versus the blue image or the long copy versus the short copy? And you get this data back. It teaches you It really teaches you about your customer, what they like, what they don't like. And you don't have to spend a lot of money to do this. Like you can put a few hundred dollars behind a test and get something back. Super fast. You didn't have to schedule a focus group. You didn't have to call a bunch of people. It's just instant market data, which is. hugely valuable to the entirety of your marketing engine and your business as a whole. So it's a little bit different than I think most people think about it from like revenue versus attention and data. But it's been what we've learned over, like you said, you know, I've been doing this for around 15 years as well. And that's been the constant takeaway is when you view it that way it can be way more powerful for growing your business.

Anthony Karls: 4:51

So how does revenue fit in then? Cause it's obviously it's important, but like if you're primarily purchasing data, like we talk about it is, revenue fit into that because obviously revenue is part of it.

JP VanderLinden: 5:02

Yeah. So, again, let's go through the scenario of we're running tests. Every time you're launching ads or campaigns or like you should be intentionally trying to learn something from what you're running when you run the red versus the blue image, you want to know, do my customers tend to prefer red versus blue. So you get that data back in the next test. You're going to run, you're not going to retest red versus blue. Nope. Hey, they preferred the blue image. Guess what I'm gonna do? I'm going to say light blue versus dark blue, and you're going to get more and more refined. The more you refine your message, the better it's going to perform. And so a natural outcome of this constant buying of data and learning is that you're going to get better results because you're going to be putting in front of your potential buyer What they need at the right time that just perfectly resonates like if you've ever if you've ever had a moment where an ad just showed up in front of you and you're like that's exactly the pain I'm experiencing. And you click and you follow that's because they tested to figure that out. And they earned the opportunity to get your business. And so if you do this the right way, Okay. You're going to get revenue as almost a byproduct of being better with your messaging. The other thing I'd say though, is that's, I consider that direct revenue, right? Direct revenue impact from the ads that you're buying. The other benefit is, This data should feed back into the other marketing that you're doing. So when you learn that your customers prefer blue versus red, well, you know, that should affect what you're doing with the uniforms that you buy for your staff. That should affect how you, you know, what you put on your print media your flyers that you're sending out, your direct mail. It should affect the signage that you're going to put in your store, because this is like a universal, thing you're learning about your customer. So not only does directly drive revenue, but it should impact the conversion rate of an in store experience or another offline marketing campaign. So it's a really a virtuous cycle of like self fulfilling and self feeding benefit across the board when you do this well.

Anthony Karls: 6:56

So when you, when you're purchasing the data through paid media, a by product of that is revenue as, and revenue opportunities and optimization opportunities throughout your whole business.

JP VanderLinden: 7:08

Yeah, exactly. You're speaking your customer's language, the right message at the right time. The only possible outcome of doing that better over time is your whole business is going to benefit.

Anthony Karls: 7:18

So why is understanding this really important for a small business owner

JP VanderLinden: 7:21

Yeah. So at the end of the day, when you buy media, when you do these kinds of things, like it has to be directly impactful on your business. It has to move the needle on revenue. And so like thinking about this in the wrong way is a great way to waste a bunch of money. And there's a lot of companies out there that will run ads for you. A lot of people out there who run ads for you waste your money and not get you these learnings and findings. So when you think about you know, what you're looking for as a result of this, the first thing you're looking for is insights. And improvements in the strategy and optimization. And so, what this means for you as a small business owner, who's, you know, maybe working with freelancers, maybe working with agencies maybe even working with in house team members who are doing this type of work is you should be expecting them to feed you back, not just data. Hey, here's how many sales we got. Here's how many leads we got. But more than that, what did we learn? And as a result of learning that, what are we going to do? What is the bigger strategy takeaway from this? What are we going to keep doing? What are we going to stop doing? And what are we going to start doing you know, in the next 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, as a result of this learning that I just paid for this data that I just purchased.

Anthony Karls: 8:31

So the very beginning, it sounds like if you don't have around something that you're trying to learn, probably starting off in the wrong spot

JP VanderLinden: 8:39

Exactly. You're almost operating in a science mindset of going in with a hypothesis and knowing what you're going to learn before you come out. I'm either going to be right or wrong, but I know what I'm going to know at the end. And having that expectation really helps you say I know what I should be getting back from these efforts.

Anthony Karls: 8:53

how can you empower me as a small business owner? keep it simple for me. what should I be looking for?

JP VanderLinden: 8:58

Yep. So, we kind of started to talk about this a little bit a moment ago, but just the idea of okay. Whoever's running your paid media should be able to tell you what they're trying to learn before they do it. So there should be a backwards component of what we did learn and then what we want to learn next, a forward looking component. So every time you're meeting with them in you know, two minutes, You should be able to get a super fast download of here's what we learned, here's what we're doing because of it. That should be the most important thing to talk about, and then the data will support that. You probably don't want to go through, you know, pages and pages of screenshots and reports and graphs and charts and things like that. Just really quick, what did we learn? What are we going to do as a result of it? Like, where are we going next? So that's probably the easiest and most important thing to look for in, in all of your reporting. And all your strategy conversations like that should be the core of what you're trying to accomplish. The 2nd piece, I would say you mentioned revenue. there needs to be alignment on what the impact is to revenue. And so again, it's it's really easy to get buried in the weeds of there's so much data available. And so much of it is not helpful to the conversation for you as a small business owner, you don't care about click through rates or CPCs or impression rates. That's just a lot of extra time and space that you don't need to dedicate to it instead. It's about, okay, what's the impact to revenue. So those things are telling you what we learned and what we're going to do next. There should be a connection between, because we learned this, here's how we can. Impact revenue, which means they should be looking at revenue. They should be looking at leads. They should be looking at sales. They should be looking at appointments booked. There should be some connection, not just for digital KPIs, but those actual business KPIs. If this, if the conversation doesn't center around those learnings and the connection to those business KPIs, that's a huge red flag. I'd be really digging in there. Okay. So if I'm, if all I'm hearing about is like platform metrics and all the things you rattled off there, I should probably be concerned because. not talking about a, what did I learn? And B because of what I learned, this is how we can continue on and how this impacts revenue directly. And the preference is like, how does this really feed into like what we call here at Rocketflix a business waterfall? How does our efforts impact leads? How do those leads flow down into appointments? How do those appointments turn into actual sales? Are those sales worth, worth the investment of what we're paying for? Yeah, a good sign that this is being done well is your paid media folks, whoever's running that, your agents, whoever is pushing you for access to your business data. They're pushing for sales data. They're pushing for lead quality data. They want to understand what's working and not working, not just from getting website traffic or clicks, but What is actually impacting that business waterfall that you talked about? If they're not asking those questions then they're not thinking about it. And so then it becomes incumbent on you to kind of challenge whether they're focused on the right things.

Anthony Karls: 11:56

Awesome. Well, it's been super helpful, JP. Appreciate you being willing to share with us some high level thoughts on paid search and kind of how you, you can empower small business owners that are engaged with the paid media person generally. And we'll get into channel specific stuff later. So I think it's been super helpful. So I appreciate, appreciate your time here today.

JP VanderLinden: 12:12

Thanks so much. Had a blast.