The Power of the Podcast: Unlock Your Brand's Marketing Potential

PPC Advertising That Doesn't Waste Your Money!

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Tired of throwing money away on ineffective pay-per-click (PPC) advertising? Join Josh for a conversation with Christian Lovrecich, a PPC expert who helps businesses generate real results.

Discover how to:

  • Avoid costly mistakes by understanding your target audience and crafting targeted ads.
  • Create compelling ad copy that resonates with specific customer demographics.
  • Master the art of A/B testing to optimize your campaigns and maximize your ROI.
  • Leverage AI tools to streamline your workflow and boost efficiency.
  • Develop a sustainable PPC strategy that delivers consistent results.

Plus, learn valuable insights on choosing the right marketing channels, measuring your success, and the importance of a mobile-first approach.

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Nothing feels like tossing your money down a garbage disposal quite like pay per click advertising. If you don't do it correctly with some guidance, maybe some some of the right people involved, you can avoid that. And that's why this week I have Christian love for work on the podcast. He does a great job of helping you keep your wallet and your garbage disposal very separate. That being said, you're going to want to stay tuned. Christian, thanks for coming on. You focus on pay per click advertising. And what I got to ask first is the question that everyone's just dying to know. What is the biggest mistake that you see businesses make right out of the gate, not knowing their audience and not doing the research before launching an ad? Oh, so they're just launching an ad to everyone? Yes. So what happens is the biggest mistake that I see is that people rely on algorithms. They want to rely on the algorithm to do all the heavy lifting for them. And while the algorithms do so, you still got to know who you're talking to. You still got to craft that message towards your audience. Are you sending an ad to someone who who has never heard of your brand? Are you sending that ad who knows your brand? Who's visited your website? And that's a warm audience already know who you are, what angle are you're using? You know, what's your offer? What's the product? You know, how are you speaking to them? Just throwing an ad with a random picture or random headline. It's not going to get you the results that you're expecting. And I see a lot of people doing that. That's why I specialize with brands, you know that that already. You know, at the eight figure level and going beyond that because they already figured it out. And let's face it, when we're all starting and I've been there when I have my own, it's it's, you know, you don't know what you're doing and you're trying to figure out who your customer is and you just throwing stuff at the wall and see what sticks. And a lot of people waste a lot of money doing doing that. And I did. I did it the beginning, over a decade ago when I started. And that's how I learned. I spent a lot of money that I shouldn't have spent, but it worked out in the end. So if I can save you that money, just listen to me. Do your research. Know who your audience is before you throw that that first ad, before you put money behind it. It's interesting you say that. So it is. I mean, how niche down should people be? Is, is a is a wide swath effective, or is it like knowing the exact person that they are talking to? Like if someone's advertising to me, should they be like, hey, look, I want a 46 year old guy that likes motorcycles, or can they be broader than that? It depends. It depends what your goal is, right? For example, in e-commerce, if you if you're selling a certain product, right, let's say you're selling, motorcycle, you know, it could be that customer could be a doctor, a customer could be a lawyer. That guy could be a welder. That could be a guy who just wants a motorcycle as a hobby. So I could send an ad that says, hey, buy this motorcycle with a generic copy and a generic message behind it. It'll probably work, but I know if instead of one ad I create 4 or 5 that speak directly to that person, tired of being in the long nights at the office, doing all the paperwork and litigation, getting out of court, why don't you let friend write that bike into the sunset? Now I'm speaking directly to you. One of the best examples that a colleague gave me one time is, we're talking about our needs. You know, I did a lot of damage to my knees growing up, so I still hurt. And he told me so. Like, somebody told me that long copy doesn't work. You know, I'm sure some of you have seen it when you land on a page and the copy just goes on forever, you scroll and scroll and scroll and we call those, long sales letters. And, yeah, you can sit here and tell me I will never read all of that. But guess what? If it's 1 a.m. in the morning and you woke up and you're in pain and your knees throbbing and you're bored and you can't go back to sleep, and you open your phone and that page comes up and that hook gets you right at the beginning. You're going to read every single paragraph, and you're probably going to click that five button at the end. And I've done it so I know it works. And not only am I a client, I'm more or not only am I the the designer, I'm also a client. Yeah, that. Yeah, exactly. And I can agree with the the knee pain. My running joke is, is I have spent 46 years treating my body like a rental car, and, that's all that is. Paid the price for it. Yeah. So with that, the, the one I was going to ask one tip, but I think the one that I just uncovered is that don't necessarily think you're going to, like, do it all in one ad spreads. Correct. Do a couple of smaller ones instead of one big one. To, to really target people. Yeah, absolutely. And I always tell people, you know, if you're starting out, you know, do little by little first and figure out who your audience is, and you probably going to launch a generic ad, but, you know, I always tell people don't hire outside agencies or experts or any of that until you you figure out yourself and you know who your audience is and kind of have an idea of what works or are not or doesn't work. I'm not I'm not telling you to go out there and learn Facebook Inside Out or Google ads inside out, but spend a hundred bucks. Just flip the levers yourself and see what happens, and then you'll have an idea of what works, what does that? And then when you hire somebody, you already have a foundational knowledge of how it works. And then you can pass on the torch when it's the right time to somebody who knows what they're doing. That makes sense. That's that's another one that's really big. It's it's funny because we talked a little bit before I hit the record button about making sure that you're educate and going into it. If you're an educator, whether it's buying a car, buying marketing, if you a little bit more educated going into that transaction, it's going to be better for both you as the buyer and the marketing firm and whoever else is involved 100%. Absolutely. That that perfectly makes sense to me. You had something as I was diving through the you you talked about marketing is a vital function. And this is a quote that's why I'm reading this here, a vital function interlinked with all aspects of a business. And when I saw that, I absolutely loved it. I mean, I totally agree with that. Where do you see that a lot of businesses, especially anything from a small to mid-sized business, where do you see they missed the boat on this? Is this a communication thing? Is this just a hey, marketing does one thing and everyone else is doing something else? Where is that disconnect? How does that get disconnected? There's a few things, and these are mistakes that I made myself in the beginning, way back 20 years ago when I was starting a business, is one thing a lot of people like myself suffer from what we call shiny object syndrome, that you think the next thing that pops up, the newest platform or the newest hack is going to save you, is going to take you to the next level, and at the end of the day, what works is the foundation of marketing and sales. And without sales, you're nothing sells first, everything second. So unless you're out knocking on doors on a daily basis or you have a army of salespeople that are doing call calling all day and knocking on doors and doing the same for you, or you're sitting there yourself doing the sales, guess what? Without marketing, you're not going to get sales. So then the second one that goes behind that, it's attribution, right? Just because you put an ad out there or a commercial, let's say like a radio or a spot on a podcast, you might not see the results on the same day, but it's brand, you know, it's it's brand recall. You know, you run it for seven days. People are going to remember your brand. So it's it's about setting the, the budgets from the beginning and say, if you're small business, you know, even if it's five bucks a day, that's a budget, that's marketing. You know, we have Facebook, we have Google, we have TikTok. I mean, people will see it, especially a local business. I'll give you an a perfect example. And for Lauderdale, I remember a pizza shop stood open, a pizza shop, young guy, and there's like a million pizza shops. And for you, even if for Lauderdale, you can throw a stone. You hit a pizza shop, right? It's it's insane. And this guy, that's what he did. He just started shooting an ad with a pitcher. The pizza. Nothing special, nothing fancy. And you start running at five bucks a day in downtown Fort Lauderdale. Guess what? After a couple weeks after he opened the doors, the place was packed 24 seven. Like talking to him when I talk to him. When I went in the I finally went to check it out because I was because I never saw it. People doing that, you know, and he's like, yeah, it's insane. Like, yes. Like I just throw five hours a day. I mean, this is like, I don't know, 2017 or something like that. It's been a while, but, you know, five bucks a day and he's still there, man packed all the time because he never turned it off. He just let it run and set it up. Forget it. Five bucks a day. I'm sure he does like ten bucks or 20 bucks a day now. But that's how we start it. Just random people think they have to get fancy. You don't. So that's the message. Is there. And you know, put a picture picture of it for local business. You get people through the door. I mean now that we have ChatGPT. Are you kidding me? Yeah. What ChatGPT all this stuff, you can literally go and ChatGPT or Claude and just type in, act as a direct response copywriter. I need you to write a headline for X, or I need you to write a meta ad for me in this format hook story offer. And then it's going to ask, it's like, what do you want? What what's the offer, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'll give you the hook, the story they offer, and then you ask it for a headline, 25 characters or less. That way it fits in the headline Facebook and done. And so much easier. And throw five bucks a day at it. And yeah, for a local business. Sure, sure, sure, you're going to go into e-commerce and all that stuff. I mean, you're going to need at least a few hundred dollars a day as opposed to say, there's this guy, there's some basic data, it moves the disk, you get the numbers the same, just the decimal point is in a different spot. And so that's actually the difference between a new business and a business that that passed the 1 million mark is that they went through hell and back to figure out the 1 million. And now all the systems are in place. And it's just a matter of scaling. Sure. And that's when you got to hire all these employees and forecasting and all this inventory. And that's when it gets kind of tricky. But once you get past that point again and you hit that ten, 20 million a year, now you figure out the systems and processes. Now it's like, okay, let's grow like crazy. And that's when it gets hectic. Then, you know, it makes perfect sense, but you figure it out at that point. You've mentioned to that you, you, you attend conferences, you like to read. Yeah. What's 1 or 2 with, with those conferences? To me, I always see stuff that's, that's coming up. I always see that. I mean, I know AI is the big trend. We do a ton of stuff with it. There's so many things around it. What's a big trend that might be in paid media specific that you see that's coming up, that people should be keeping their eye on? There's not so much in pay media to be honest, with. Okay. As far as, you know, at the end of the day, meta meta TikTok, Google, Amazon ads, it's all an auction where you bid and you, you ask for that sell for that objective that you're shooting for. So that has not changed. It's changed. The algorithm has changed behind the scenes. Sure. You know that they're working on their AI and learning on first party data, which was blocked by, iOS 14 when Apple released iOS 14. I don't know if, you know, years ago it was a big privacy, you know, and they blocked all this data from falling through, even though Apple has access to it, they don't want to share it. And no one else can see it. But that's a whole different. So they they've been working really hard on containing first party data. And the way they do that, you know, like Facebook shops or TikTok shop or Amazon. Oh, all that data is inside. So now you can't block it. No one can block it. They have all the information again. So they've been working really hard with AI to predict the auction. Okay. You know who's most likely to purchase this front gathering all that data basically starting all over again? Sure. Gathering all that data, and learn a whole new algorithmic algorithm, for the AI to build on and, advance on it. So that's been a whole process that's been going on for years now, since then. And it keeps getting better and better. But at the end of the day, paid media, it's still it's still the same, you know, there's more little knobs here and there or you'll have like, AI options for copy and stuff like that. But at the end of the day, the strategy is the same. It's your your offer. You offer to match your audience. If your offer doesn't match your audience and you don't have a hero product, guess what? No results. And, the way the targeting is there, it's so good at targeting nowadays that it goes back to what I was speaking about earlier, creating different, multiple angles for your ads. Speak to that specific lawyer who wants the motorcyclist speak to the doctor who wants the motorcycle to speak to the guy who's a welder and he wants the motorcycle. It's a different messaging for each individual. And once you craft your ads to speak directly to those people, you know, platforms like Google, Facebook, they all read the copy that you're right. You know, they all watch the video. They know what you're saying on the video. They scanned the video to see what's in the video itself. You know, so it does the targeting for you at that point. So at the end of the day, what's really going to pull the lateral levers? You speaking directly to that audience? It's funny. So that kind of takes me back. There's two big things that I want to cover, and that is one is you said so that's the offer is a big piece of it. It's the audience. And then what was the third big piece that you said is to that? The offer. Yep. Yeah. What does it offer speaking directly to that to that audience demographic? Yep. And there was a story offer. There's three hook story offer. Oh the hook okay. So the hook, the story the offer the the three big pieces to that then correct the hook is what's going to grab their attention. Okay. The story is what's going to bring them in. And then the offer is what's going to create that conversion okay. So then the that makes perfect sense then. So it is it's that draw them in. It's them. Tell them why they need this. And then here's what they need. And here's here's why. It's a great deal. Yeah. Love that. You've mentioned already I mean numerous platforms like TikTok, YouTube. Is there, is it figuring out which audience is where. Because I've always personally had a premonition that certain audiences, are more prevalent in certain areas. Or can you find your audience anywhere? You can find your audience anywhere. You know, people think there's no older people on TikTok. There is. It's just not as big as matter. Right? Okay. I mean, I had Facebook in college, Oh, man. So it's my go to still to this day. But I love TikTok. I'll scroll on TikTok for hours to. Yeah, I'll probably I probably spend more time on TikTok now that I do on Facebook, but Facebook is the main place where all my friends are and the family pictures and all that stuff. So I'm in my 40s, my parents are there, you know, all their generations are still on Facebook. That's going to be your biggest demographic there. Even though I just saw the, the, the earnings report where like, the younger generation is moving over as well because real so Instagram so you know it's all one. Okay. And all that log in against TikTok now from Facebook. But, they're everywhere. It's just, how much of that audience is and, and each individual platform is the, you know, it's the 55 plus audience got to be as big on TikTok as it is on Facebook. No. Absolutely not. But for example, I was I was looking at some data the other day and found out, you know, our audience, the one of the biggest platforms that they're on, which I didn't see this one coming, was YouTube 85 plus women. It's like, what? YouTube, I don't know, like, that would have never. I would've never guessed that. I would've never guessed. And when I found that out, I was like, we need to triple down the ads for YouTube. It's and find, you know, and scale it, because something's not right here. If we're not scaling as hard as we should, something's the messaging is off somehow, or there's something we need to figure out here. So you'll be surprised where you'll find out. You know, when you run some surveys to your customers and look at the data, you'll find people where you it'll it'll shock you as a new platform app. Loving that it's ad placement on gaming networks. Once again. Women 55 or not, man, they love those games because it's crushing. Wow. Crazy. Yeah. It's crazy. It's like the new hot toy right now for everybody. Media that plays a big budget. It's insight. Interesting. So I mean I guess I would say it really is is it's be looking at I mean once again it's a sprinkle a little bit here there and try different things to really see where your audience is. It's the one thing that, that my mentor got in my head from day one is test, test test test test test. I remember asking questions like the test stuff like, no, you go test, test, test like never, never assume, never assume with an ad, never assume it. Never assume with a product, or get emotionally attached to products. I remember, you know, when I launched my first, you know, well, I was gonna say brand but store, it was on print on demand and I got emotionally attached to certain designs and I will keep putting money behind it because, like, if I like it, everybody else has to like it. Nope. And then you throw that one. What, you think it's gonna be a loser and just crushes and then proves you completely wrong? And that's that's the best. I love that, actually, believe it or not, because it's like, cool. Like I was wrong. See, they're assume and you learn something new. Sure. And it's so interesting because then that's the the test piece thing goes to, to me, it's at that point you're able to show that return on investment on your marketing dollars. Then, when when you see that actually because I, I always whenever I talk with people about marketing, it marketing is often a tough spend because so many people feel like they're throwing their money out into the ether and what happened? Well, we got a post out of it, but what did that do? Yeah. What's hard now? Etc., you know, attribution, you know, when you're running millions of dollars in Facebook, Google, Amazon, YouTube, TikTok and then on throw and then you throw TV on top of it, or radio or programmatic advertising. That's when it becomes a mess because, you know, you're getting results and you can track most of it, but it's, it's it's ad, you know, it's tough to to figure out the attribution that Celcom did that customer click on an ad on Facebook first and then convert it three weeks later through TikTok? Or did they watch the, the ad that we had on TV, you know, 32 days later and then they finally decided to pull the trigger. But now I'm looking at the data. It's like, well, TV's taking the credit for it, but Facebook's also taking the credit for it because they took the first click over there. So it's putting all that data together. Now we have what's called, you know, mem models and data analyst I have to look at this stuff on a daily basis and try to help us figure that out because it it's tough. It's hard. It's hard to track where that where where those results are coming from. But. And you'll never get it 100% right. It's impossible. You'll never get at 100% right. But, you know, again, I've seen it before. I remember when I was when I was starting out and when I worked with small businesses back in the day. It's that, you know, you will be running Facebook, Facebook ads. And I will tell them, like your ads are working. You said, yeah, but I don't see the exact, you know, cost per acquisition on the board. I was like, well, you know, I'm looking at your sales. I'm looking at our Aspen. This is our marker. This is our you know, this is where we're at. I'm telling you right now that dashboard is not accurate. This is before all the tools that we have now like triple well and all that stuff where you can see it, you know, this is when it was like you're relying on Facebook. That's what's just never accurate. I woke up, I was like, you turn those ads off, everything comes crumbling down and like, no, no, no, no, we'll get it from here. I'm like, all right, try it now. Turn off the ads. And sure enough, traffic. We'll we'll go from that and just crash right away. The next day it's you can see it right away. Now with digital, it's you can see it right away. So, the question with that, when it comes to ads, does it pay to be more consistent with them or does it or is in consistency like saying, hey, I'm going to do$2,500 this month, then we're going to take a break next month. Then I'm going to do $2,500 the following month. Is it better to to 1212 hundred and 1200? I'd rather you spend much less and do it consistently than do a big budget for a month. Stop for two months and then start back up. There's a few reasons for that. Again. Again, brand recall, you know, look at data all day. I see people that don't come back and they'll click on an ad and buy three months later without seeing another ad, you know, they just weren't ready to purchase that their first ad, but now they have the money or now they want to do it, or it was a birthday or something. You know, and when you, when you have consistency going, you're training the system, you're training your ad account. You know, all this other data stored in your ad account. So optimizes on that data. There's outside factors that affect your results on a daily basis to be the elections economy, you know, whatever it's going on in the world at time holidays. So when you keep feeding your ad account all of that data and it keeps optimizing on on all those signals, it'll learn, it'll keep learning. And the more data you have, the better you're going to do later down the road. If you go and start, guess what? As soon as you stop, seven days later, all that data is forgotten. And on that, on that specific campaign, at least a meta on a specific campaign. So after seven days, you don't turn it back on. All those learnings are gone. Now you're back to square one. So now has to relearn all over again. So again, it's an option. And you want the system to, to to bid on the, on that person who's most likely to give it the result that you're looking for. And to do so, it's better to have$10 going on a day than 300 for a week, and then turn it off for three months. That makes sense. Yeah. It's consistency, like anything else. You know, like exercising. You're not going to get ripped overnight. You know you gotta get you got to go to the gym every day and eventually you'll get there. Yeah. That that and that makes sense. So it like with the ads. So they're learning how to present the ad to to make sure that it's engaging. And so you're obviously going to be learning the same thing in that. Yes. That makes and once again, it's I mean, granted, I can get get on a bicycle and ride one without too much of an effort, but the first couple of pedal strokes are going to be a little awkward because I haven't done it in a while. Exactly, exactly. And there's so much information out there now that again, if you're small business or you do it for your personal brand, you know, you could just look up a few YouTube videos or read a couple blogs or, you know, I'm sure you'll see TikTok videos pop on your feet or something. You start with the basics. You start with the basics. Just flip a couple switches, see what happens. E-commerce. That's a whole different ad, especially nowadays. I mean, it's it's it's expensive. It's hard. I tell people I'm like, listen, I'm not here to crush anyone's dreams, but I really hope you're doing before you launch that whole store and ads. And if you don't, I hope you're like me. You become obsessed with it so you can figure it out. Awesome. Because it's not, you know, it's not 2010 anymore. So it's not 2010 anymore. We well, that was the golden era of Facebook ads. I mean, it was there was no competition. Yep. They were so cheap. I mean, if I give you some of the numbers from back then, people are shocked when I tell them it's like, yeah, you should throw like a few bucks a day and then make like three grand back to a nothing because there was no competition. Sure. Yeah, there's plenty of inventory now, you know, costs go up year over year over year. And that's what keeps acquiring you companies or you know, started threads so they can have more ad placements now. So now we have more ad inventory to keep those costs as low as we can, because it gets to a point where your customer acquisition is so high that if you're, you know, your average order value there, your lifetime value is not there, and you back end sequences and selling and all that, it's not there. You're never going to make it. Supply and demand. Supply and demand. Exactly. Absolutely. Love it. I have a big personal one for you that I found very interesting. You're fluent in both Spanish and Italian, if I read correctly. Yes. First off, I'll ask, how'd that happen? There's. There's some intentional with that. And then the other thing is, how is that helped through business? That's it's an interesting thing. I've got to think that's been a help. It's helpful. Yeah. It helps because, you know, I want shots in Spanish, right? It's so amazing. Italian. Not so much, because Italian doesn't really. I mean, there's only one country in the world that speaks Italian, so. Sure. My dad's actually Italian. I'm Italian. So. And a I grew up in Venezuela. My mom's from Venezuela, so I grew up in my house. I grew up both places. I grew up speaking both. I went to school in both. And then I moved to the States when I was 13. And that's when I learned English. So, yeah. So that's just it's there in my head since I was a kid, you know? So it's pretty lucky. It's lucky. I tell you what, Italian is useless. So there's only one place in the world that speaks, right? It is a it's also. It sounds pretty, but it's it's useless unless you speak. You're over there. You're speaking to family and friends, right? Unless you're helping pay per click with Ferrari, Ducati or. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, they don't advertise when there are. No, no, they think about they've done enough with their brand that they've done enough. Yeah. I think Ducati does the Lamborghini for sure does. And Ferrari unless it's like you know F1 or something like right. They just don't need to I that all being said, I really appreciate you coming on today. Especially we, we did this kind of short notice and we were connected via a mutual friend of ours, Elisa. B Bennett. Yes. This has been absolutely awesome. I know I have learned a ton. I'm pretty sure everyone in the audience has also. I really hope so. Yeah. And, thank you again for having me. And anytime you want to have you on, just let me know. Wondering. Yeah. I'll be more than happy to jump on. Wonderful for everyone out there. Once again, this to me is a great base and a great starting point to learn a lot of things. Go out there, do some research and go out there and do some great things. That being said, do me a favor, take care of yourself, and if you can, take care of someone else too, I will see you soon.

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Josh Troche

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