You can post like a man (or woman) possessed in social media. You can network like crazy, you can post videos on Tik Toc till you’re blue in the face.

You can run yourself ragged using all these ‘free’ platforms in an effort to generate leads and sales for your business. But if you’re really serious about marketing your business, then sooner or later you’re going to have to use PAID advertising.

And if you’re trying to attract new customers, there are really only TWO digital platforms worth spending a lot of energy on; Google, and Facebook/Instagram. 

You can post like a man (or woman) possessed in social media. You can network like crazy, you can post videos on Tik Toc till you’re blue in the face.

You can run yourself ragged using all these ‘free’ platforms in an effort to generate leads and sales for your business. But if you’re really serious about marketing your business, then sooner or later you’re going to have to use PAID advertising.

And if you’re trying to attract new customers, there are really only TWO digital platforms worth spending a lot of energy on; Google, and Facebook/Instagram. 

For the purposes of this exercise, I’m going to concentrate on Google.

Because Google is the default go-to platform when people are searching for a product or service in their area.

Unless you really know what you’re doing in the back end of the Google ads dashboard, you can waste a lot of money and time. Yes, it’s complicated, it’s easy to make mistakes, and mistakes can cost money.

But if you get it right, you can really knock it out of the park.

The first metric you want to pay attention to is something called the Click Through Rate, or CTR.

That’s the number of clicks the ad gets as a percentage of the number of times the ad is shown when people search.

Now, according to Google’s vast knowledge-base, the average CTR for all the billions of ads shown every day is somewhere between 4% and 6%.

So how would you like to get a CTR of twice or even three times that? 

Here’s an ad my team devised for a new gutter-cleaning business: 

In a little over 3 weeks since the ads started running, they’ve been shown just under 300 times, and 52 people have clicked on them and gone through to the business’s website. 

That’s a click through rate of nearly 18%, three times the Google average.  Each click has cost the business $7.68, which is fine, because each sale made is worth many hundreds of dollars.  

Here’s another example. This is a liquid waste management company. One of their main revenue sources is pumping out septic tank systems. 

Their average CTR for the past month is 10.66% – pretty good. But some of their keywords are producing huge CTRs, up to 44%:

Of course, there’s a LOT more to it that just click through rates. What you’ll pay for each click depends on many variables, for example how much compeititon you face in your target market.

Another crucial thing: 

Simply setting up a series of Google ads and sending clicks to the home page of your website and hoping for the best isn’t really going to cut it.

It’s usually best to have a dedicated landing page designed specifically to take traffic from the Google ads.

For example, the ads for the liquid waste management company above send people to a specific page on their website that ONLY talks about septic tanks. You can check it out here: https://shepvts.com/septic-tank-pump-out/

Need help with your digital advertising? Click the button below and book a FREE one-on-one Zoom call with Greg.

By now you would’ve seen the remarkable images of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic exploration ship Endurance at the bottom of the Weddell Sea.

hackletonIt was one of the most amaing stories of human survival ever. All 28 members of the crew lived to tell the tale, after months stranded in the frozen Antarctic before they were finally rescued.
News of the ship’s discovery, two miles down on the ocean floor, reminded me of Sir Ernest’s famous newspaper ad, calling for crew for an earlier expedition to the south pole.

Now, there’s no evidence that the ad you see at the top of this post ever actually ran in a newspaper. But he may have submitted it to the London Times for publication, only to have reporters see it first, sparking a flurry of (free) publicity in newspapers all over England.

Shackleton’s ad didn’t even mention a product or service. Far from trumpeting overblown benefits and features, it actually went the other way, in a deliberate, well-planned and brilliantly-executed dare to the manliness of every red-blooded adventurous male in England.

The point is, the ad appealed to emotion, not logic. 

Emotional adveritising is something I’ve been banging on about for years. Too many owners of businesses, large and small, waste time and energy trying to convince their prospective customers of the logic of buying your products or services.

But people buy on emotion first, and rationalize it later with logic. 

“I bought the Porsche because it’s built solid,” you’ll hear some guy say, when what he really means is “I bought the Porsche because it makes me feel young again.”

Creative Theft Department: I know what you’re already thinking…what has this got to do with my hair salon/day spa/nail bar/laser clinic yada yada yada.)
Here’s what: 
The University of Life surrounds you. Google is your best friend. There is NO excuse for saying “I don’t know where to look for ideas” any more. Truth is, the answer to anything is right at your fingertips. Claiming you can’t find answers is akin to insisting the world is flat.)
Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, emotion. The idea that you must offer a rational benefit in your marketing is nonsense.

There IS no rational, logical reason to buy a Porsche. Yet Porsche is THE most profitable car maker in the world. One of the most famous ads for Porsche cars featured nothing more than a picture of the car, and the following text:

Product benefits:
Too fast.
Doesn’t blend in.
People will talk.

In the beauty business, a rational benefit might be

Your skin will be 37% smoother.

But more powerful, and much more emotional:

Warning: Men will look at you.

Your target market is uneducated about the relative benefits of one hair stylist versus any of a thousand others. Has pretty much no idea of the difference between one hair removal clinic and a hundred competitors. Attempting to explain a rational, logical reason why they should choose you as against any and all of your competitors is considerably more difficult that pushing a peanut up the main street of town with your nose.

Faced with such a challenge, most businesses resort to the easiest, no-brainer path: discounting. The airlines are a classic example of this, undercutting each other because they can’t be bothered putting in the hard mental yards to come up with something better.
(Even here, there are examples of airlines actually striking an emotional note with their marketing.

Remember the Singapore Airlines ads featuring their emotional icon, the Singapore Girl? They backed it up with the rational proposition, ‘Inflight service even other airlines talk about…’)

Aside: the rebel in me can’t help wondering what would happen if an airline offered a guarantee: We’ll get you there alive, or your money back.
Most business owners, having come up with a compelling offer – which is the rational reason to buy – rest on their laurels and leave it there. But the smart ones keep working at it, chewing away until they come up with that hard-to-define emotional reason to buy. I often call it a Unique Selling Proposition. But it can equally be re-named an ESP or Emotional Selling Proposition.
Either way, these are salon marketing tools that work, and work for you.
The real difference between one hair salon and another, between one day spa and another, is at best small, and certainly difficult to convey to the uneducated. But an emotional difference is – while more difficult to find in the first place – much easier to get across, much easier for the prospect to feel, and therefore much more powerful.