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Eric's Podcast
Welcome to Eric's Podcast – a journey through faith, life, and the lessons that shape us. Join Eric as he shares personal stories, reflections, shares insights that inspire hope and encourages. Whether you're navigating life's challenges or seeking motivation this podcast offers a blend of authenticity, inspiration, and thought-provoking conversations.
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Eric's Podcast
S2 #9 Advertising Platform Picking Made Easy: A Guide to Targeted Advertising
Dive into the world of advertising with our latest podcast episode that unpacks the crucial steps to selecting the right advertising platform for your business goals. Are you struggling to reach your target audience effectively? This episode provides expert insights on defining your primary objectives, understanding your audience, and choosing the right platforms accordingly.
We explore various advertising channels, from traditional options to digital platforms, ensuring you know where your audience hangs out. Discover the nuances between social media advertising and search engines, empowering you to make educated decisions that lead to improved engagement and sales.
Eric shares personal experiences to illustrate how understanding the emotional connection with your audience can enhance your ad strategies, leading to better outcomes. By exploring persona-driven marketing, our conversation sheds light on how to tailor your ads for specific demographics, making them resonate on a deeper level.
Whether you're a newcomer to advertising or seeking to refine your approach, this episode offers valuable knowledge to help you create impactful campaigns. Listen now, optimize your advertising strategies, and transform how you reach your customers! Don’t forget to subscribe, share your thoughts, and let us know what topics you want us to cover next!
Eric's Podcast.
Hello, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome back to another episode of the Eric's Podcast. I'm your host, eric. Today, we're going to be talking about advertising platforms. How do you choose the right advertising platform? We're going to go through this. It's going to be great, it's going to be based off of my own experience in advertising and let's just jump right into it.
Speaker 1:So I think the first thing that you need to do when you're looking to choose, when you're ready to advertise your product or your service, your e-commerce store, an article, a video, whatever it is first thing you need to ask yourself is what is the primary objective? What do I want to spend money on? What's the purpose of this money that I'm spending on advertising? Most of the time I would say 90% of the time it's sales. I want more sales. I want someone to buy my service. I want someone to buy my product headphones, whatever it is, my product headphones, whatever it is. That is usually primarily what it is.
Speaker 1:If you're an app and you're trying to, your objective would be a little different. Your objective might be I want downloads, I want app installs. If you're trying to build your email list so you can then sell to them, well then the objective would be I want them to put in their email and give me their email. There's lots of different objectives on all these different platforms, and the process on how you reach them is pretty much the same. You can use these same sales tactics to get the same thing, but choosing the right platform this is a question that people kind of get stumped on, because or they make the wrong decision, because they might just be like oh yeah, I'm going to do Google AdWords. Well, google ads is a search search type thing. Or, if you're wanting to use Google AdWords to advertise on YouTube, well, that's a different type of ad to a different kind of audience. People on YouTube are here to watch whatever they're interested in watching, not necessarily to watch ads. People on search are looking for an answer for their search and so, therefore, you can give them an ad, but they're looking for an answer and it's also based on the prompt.
Speaker 1:People on social social they're not necessarily looking for an ad. You know, they're looking for their news feed, they're going down the thing. So what, you have to have it. You have to have it super engaging, super uh, eye-catching, and so it pulls their attention on what their interest and stuff is on facebook, tiktok's the same way, so social media is pretty much the same way. If it's Instagram, it's very similar too.
Speaker 1:And then you have I think it's called Tobler, which is essentially articles it's article advertising. So those ads that you see at the end of an article because you're scrolling through and you see these ads. That goes through a site called Tobolo and that's great, because most of the people reading an article are like how to's articles. They're looking to consume information. So if you're wanting to give them a short ad, that ad, the way that ads constructed, is for an audience that is looking to consume information and not necessarily looking to buy anything. So you have to structure it and that's a different type of audience too.
Speaker 1:So the landing page might be different than, let's say, if you advertise on AdWords using Google Merchant, which is basically people who are looking. They're expecting to land. When they click on this, they're expecting to be directed to the sales page or the product page and they're not looking to be directed to an article. Versus if you advertised on Tobler, where they're used to reading articles and they're used to the, the URL that the ad should be directing to should be an article, but it's a sales article, and it should be that, because that is what the user is looking for. Similarly, on social, let's say, if you click on an ad in social, the ad kind of should already tell you what the landing page is going to be about. If you're scrolling through and it's a news headline, then you're gonna click on that, thinking you're going to be about. If you're scrolling through and it's a news headline, then you're going to click on that, thinking you're going to see a news headline or a video. If it is a product, then you're going to click on it and you're going to expect to land on the product.
Speaker 1:So how do you choose the right platform? You have to define your primary objective and you have to figure out who is your audience. Who are you selling to? Let's say let's. Let's do an example, let's do e-commerce store. Um. So I did it. I did a headphones e-commerce brand for about three years, so let's use that example. So what I?
Speaker 1:When I first approached it, I went to social media, ads, facebook and I asked myself okay, these are cool, slick headphones. They have some features that are not currently available on the market, and then I have some that are. But what I'm going to do is like who? I asked myself this is what I, this is just how I normally do it. I asked myself who, who would buy these headphones, or what would it take for me to buy these. What would I need to be convinced of? And what I came up with is the majority, the persona, are health related, like they're healthy, they're running, like you know. You see those commercials of people running. So I was like, okay, it could be exercise people, so people interested in exercise. That could be one. What about health magazines and stuff? Maybe some people that are interested in those like exercise magazines? This is a tough target.
Speaker 1:On Facebook, I chose Facebook. Why did I do that? I chose Facebook because I'm going directly to the person's emotional state, versus AdWords, where you have to wait for that person to search into that box. Plus, it's a little bit more competitive, whereas on social it's basically I can zero it in, but they're not looking for it per se, so my ad can be a lot more driven to something that they're interested in. So what did I come up with? Who buys mid-range headphones and then who's likely to kind of jump on a new kind of headphone brand? It's going to be tech people, people who are interested in tech, the new technology, new things, but at the same time they want to exercise. So what kind of ad am I going to show them? I'm going to show them an ad, a 30-second it was less than 30 second ad of people running on the beach with my headphones, people diving in the water on a pool with my headphones, and all the while I'm going to put in big letters the emotional things that go along with that and maybe the maybe some of the features that go along with that, like 30-hour battery life, waterproof charges, two minutes charges, two hours of audio, stuff like that, and all within 30 seconds. And then in big letters, on the end of the thing I'm going to say 50% off, or get yours today, or something like that.
Speaker 1:How did I figure out the persona of the person? I had to take the time to ask and to kind of research. Okay, first of all, what are other headphone brands? Who are they targeting? That's a big one that tells you a lot. Who are the other ones? What are they targeting? What are their ads look like? Are they techie? Other ones what are they targeting? What do their ads look like? Are they techie? Are they like sport-like, what's similar to my product that I can go look and see how they're doing? Where is, where is these people? Where are the people? Where are they the most most likely?
Speaker 1:Well, facebook was an easy one, because, because you're dealing with a customer that most likely is scrolling through, looking at exercise people, following those types of people learning how to run, learning how to do the push-ups, learning how to work out, and so where are you going to find people who are trying to learn how to work out? Probably YouTube would be one, and then Facebook would be another, because people are on Instagram. At the time, tiktok wasn't super big yet, so a lot of people were still using Instagram, and so people would be on their reels learning the cool little things, and that's where I would put in my ad, and then they would do that. So I chose the platform based off of, after I figured out the persona when is that persona of people going to be? And then what platform are they most likely going to be on?
Speaker 1:So another example LinkedIn advertising. Who's on LinkedIn? Business owners and business people are on LinkedIn. They're ones scrolling through LinkedIn. It's business, it's B2B business owners. So if you have a service like a SaaS app or something like that, and you want to get businesses to sign up or you want to get in front of them, it makes sense to do it on LinkedIn, because that's where the group of people that you're targeting are. Now, linkedin is the same way.
Speaker 1:You have to figure out are you selling to an executive? Are you selling like who is the business? Who's the person? Who's going to make the decision to actually sign up for this? Is it a health manager? Is it a director of sales? If it's a sales type of thing, you have to figure that out. But you can scroll down and you can create your campaign to go into that.
Speaker 1:Let's say, older audience Maybe you have some kind of health-related thing that you need to sell. Where is the older audience going to be? Where is the older audience going to be? They're it's going to be another article that you wrote that sells what you're ultimately trying to sell. So that is how you choose a advertising platform. Now, I'll do a video someday going over all the different analytics and reporting and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:But at the end of the day, it's really just a matter of figuring out who your people are, who your persona people are. Write that out in a document. I have on my phone a big document of every project and I do the exact same thing. I'll go to the bar, I'll get a couple beers and I will just sit there and I'll think I'm not asking ChatGPT. You know why? Because in order to prompt ChatGPT and actually get well, you'll be able to get some ideas.
Speaker 1:Problem is is that you could get really overwhelmed and what you really need to do is you need to put yourself. You need to do that. You need to really try to put yourself in the mindset of your customer, because you're going to be able to feel what your customer is going to want. And that's very important Because we are not robots. We do not make our decisions like a robot. We make our decisions on logic, but combined with emotion. If you're a business to business and you're selling somebody, what you're actually selling is one. You're not going to have a headache anymore when trying to manage your customer list, so you're not going to be stressed out. This is so easy. It's an extra $30 a month. It's nothing compared to the amount of stress that you have to go through on a daily basis. You're selling emotion. You're not selling features. You're selling how the person's going to feel when they buy your product or they use their service. So that's very important. So you can use ChatGPT to help you come up with like ad hooks and other things, once you figure out that emotional part what your product is actually solving, what's the emotion that you want your users to feel when using your product and then convey that in the advertising and so on.
Speaker 1:Each platform it's a little bit different in how you do that. Okay, so let's see. There's other things like considering your budget and testing, optimizing stuff like that. But the whole budget thing at the end of the day, a lot of these platforms do not cost that much. You can get started with $40 less a day to get started. So I would not let a budget or anything like that take you away.
Speaker 1:And I'm talking online advertising guys, right now I'm not going to use the exact same question of where is your audience. You use that same question to choose any platform. So if you were going to advertise on newspapers, for example, it is the same question. Who is reading a newspaper these days? Who is reading a magazine these days? You know who's opening the mail and actually looking at those postcards? Who's doing that?
Speaker 1:You have to ask yourself, oh yeah, and then you have TV ads. Who's actually who's likely to actually pick up the phone and call in or scan the QR code on the ad likely to actually pick up the phone and call in or scan the QR code on the ad? Those are questions you have to ask and the way that you answer those questions is not necessarily going on ChatGPT, it's asking yourself. Put yourself in the mind of that person. Ask yourself if I was 60 years old, am I going to be dialing in on that TV over there to buy that thing? Maybe not. But then go, just observe what other people are doing. Are your grandparents doing that? What's your dad doing these days? Doing that? What's your dad doing these days? You know what?
Speaker 1:If you're selling to 20 year olds, going out with some 20 year olds, well you know, go just. You have to observe to get what that is, to try to feel the emotion that you're going to sell, and then you pick the platform and then you know how to basically do it and you can test multiple different platforms if you have the budget to do that, but you still want to approach everything with the same type of persona. Figure out the persona first. Figure out what type of person it is from an emotional standpoint. Not necessarily what's the average age group in this area Nobody cares, because you're going to figure out those factual information once you start testing the campaign out. You're going to figure out that, okay, between 40 and 60, they respond best to this ad. That respond best to this ad. You're going to find that information out. But maybe between 20 and 25, they respond to a whole different ad set. So if you had just guessed and been like, oh, I'm only going to target the 40 and 60-year-olds, you would have missed out on this other one down here. So you just you want to test on a broader scale and then slowly go down to what's working for your different ad sets that you're using. That's basically basic optimization of your ad campaign and we can do another video at some point covering that. But the real thing is is that you just have to figure out your persona. The real thing is is that you just have to figure out your persona. Figure out the person.
Speaker 1:Ask the questions like what emotionally like? Okay, what does this, what does this? What does my customer like? Meaning, do they like skiing? Do they like outdoor sports? Do they like driving around in a car? Do they like? What kind of magazines do they like? What things are they interested in? Do they buy a or do they not buy that much? What other questions it would be. What do they care about? Politically, maybe, what do they care about? Because that could change how you write your ad. Are they married? Are they not married? Ask those questions and they'll bring you to more of an emotional stance of where you could pretend that they could be.
Speaker 1:And then what you do is you create a bunch of ad campaigns based around each individual one. So an example would be going back to my headphones. You would say I had a different ad, a different ad. I had the same ad, I had the same three ads, but I targeted a different group of people. So I would have the same three ads but the actual advertising set would only be advertising to say, magazines in the health and fitness. So that ad set was called magazines.
Speaker 1:Then I would have another one called health and fitness and that would only have health and fitness in it, the category in Facebook. Then I would have another one that would just target health and fitness plus people who purchase things. So Facebook allows you to target people who have a high purchase frequency. So I would combine those two together and that would be another one. Everything has the same three ads in it, though, but you'd be targeting different groups. That way, you can sort which groups actually are working and which are not working.
Speaker 1:You just do that for every type of like category you can think of. That would match your persona of that person. I would advertise to people who had pets type of like category you can think of. That would match your persona of that person I would. I would advertise to people who had pets, because pets they're walking their pet out and so naturally, they're going to need headphones to do that. Um, there, there's. There would be people.
Speaker 1:And then, eventually, I learned that a certain ad group was only I, for some reason outperformed incredibly well than people who had Android. So what did I do? I copied that ad, set and turned off Android, so only iOS was being advertised to. So that's optimization, that's testing and optimization, but what I did first was I figured out the persona. It gave me a whole big list of what's the person, what's the type of person that is going to use these headphones Not.
Speaker 1:What's the type of person that would buy these headphones? What's the type of person that would use them? The buying is just. That's just a. That's just a. That's how you set up the actual ad. But before you even can sell the actual ad, you have to figure out who would use the product, because if they're not going to use it, then you're wasting your money on trying to sell to people that aren't even interested or are going to use it to begin with, who don't care about it. Anyway, guys, thank you for joining me for this little episode. Hope this was useful. Hope this was helpful. We'll do some more. We'll continue doing these and if you have any questions, have anything specific that you want me to cover or go over, message me, comment, ask, and I might do a whole episode on just that one thing.
