3 Digital Marketing Trends You Need To Be Aware Of

Brandon Welch 0:00
Waiting for people to get the end of the finish line, just in every area of life, whether that’s who you’re gonna marry or date, or who you’re gonna do business with, or who you’re gonna try to get to buy your product. That’s just a more expensive and cantankerous way to do things. In an environment where Americans are stressed out and the world is stressed out anyway, that increases. So you have to be way more compromising on price, way more compromising on your speed or delivery, way more compromising on your quality, really, to deliver them like some cheap solution, whereas the people who’ve known you and been in the journey with you all along, they already love you, and so they’re primed to do business with you.

Welcome to the Maven Marketing Podcast. Today is Maven Monday. I’m your host, Brandon Welch, and I’m joined for the very first time by my pal, my new Frank and Maven teammate, and most importantly, the Missouri sports podcast founder, Kyle DeVries. This is not your first second or like 1,000th podcast, is it? It’s not but it’s still different enough that it feels, feels pretty new. It’s your first Marketing podcast. That’s true. Yeah.

Kyle co founded the Missouri sports podcast, which I believe is the longest standing Mizzou related sports podcast and definitely the most followed. He’s, like, a million times bigger and badder than our podcast, and he’s gracing us with his presence,

not just because he’s a team member here, but because he’s an expert. And Caleb was out sick today, so he got his he got his chance

Kyle DeVries 1:34
sooner than most you’re on day 18 at Frank Smith, Maven, yeah, exactly day 18. But happy to be here. It’s an honor. What’s been the highlight of your experience on the team so far? Probably the team itself, man, great group of people here. Everybody is so sharp, and

I love it all, man, everybody’s Great, yeah,

Brandon Welch 1:52
well, we’re so glad to have you. Kyle is on Kyle’s the new strategist of our home improvement marketing team, and he’s working with contractors across America, minding the strategies we’ve had in place for a while, but he’s taken them already to some new heights, and today, in that vein, just things that we’re seeing in the last two or three months, we’re going to talk about three marketing trends you need to know about if you are spending any money on advertising, or if you have aspirations, or if you even exist as a company in the digital age. So we’ll just jump right in here. Three we’re gonna talk about Google search, and all the crazy stuff going on with Google search right now, some trends with digital video, and how you can leverage those to get just better response than I think we’ve ever seen with online video and then some crazy stuff going on with social targeting. So whether you’re a business owner listening just trying to optimize your marketing team, or you are a marketer, or you don’t, you know, maybe you have an agency and you don’t know what the heck they’re doing behind the scenes, these are questions you’re going to want to ask about to make sure you’re not wasting money, because as a reminder, this is the place where we eliminate waste and advertising, grow your business and help you achieve the big dream, and that’s what it’s all about. So number one, today, of the three things you need to know, Google, CPCs, uh, year over year, literally, Google has taken, um, what was honestly a pretty good system. We’ve had a track record of making very, very profitable results with Google search, particularly with local and regional type companies that, you know, have a specific category of service. We’ve over the years, over the last 12 years, Caleb and I starting and now, like, just our entire team has done really, really well with Google, so we know a lot about it. I don’t know anybody who’s better than our team at doing it, but they just decided last fall somewhere about just to say, up, well, we’re gonna start charging double. And it’s gotten even worse than that. Like, literally across the board, 198% I think, is the average year over year, cost per click on Google that’s increasing. What does that do to the profitability of an ad campaign?

Kyle DeVries 4:07
Kyle makes a lot harder to make any profit on an ad campaign. Yeah, it’s like

Brandon Welch 4:11
saying, hey, you know what you did last year? We’re gonna double the price. We’re gonna give you the same or less, and then you know what? You’re gonna have to deal with it.

Kyle DeVries 4:18
We’re seeing clients with more clicks, more impressions, more conversions, yet the cost per click is also still going up, yeah. So, yeah, that makes sense. Prices. That’s

Brandon Welch 4:30
exactly right. So yeah, that cost per conversion just just some benchmarks like it would it would not have been out of sight this time last year, even to have, like, good quality appointments set for 150 bucks, 200 bucks, that same appointment just by search engine. Dollars, like, if we’re attributing the click to the search engine then tracking it to a lead or a phone call from the search engine, that same phone call is costing three to $400 now. I. Now, there are, there are, there’s still some margin sometimes. And are really good clients where it’s technically not in the red, but it’s really dang close. It’s really Dan close to break even for a lot of them. And really, like, when you’ve set your marketing expectations and you’ve set your budget based on what’s historically, I mean, last five years, like we could easily get a lead generation campaign to be eight to 10% of the of the revenue like so, if you, if you’re making 40, 50% margins on a service, you were golden, right? Pay $500 make five you know, sell something for 5000 and still have a couple $1,000 left in profit. But Google screwing that all up. Everybody knows it. This is not just a frank and Maven thing. All of my friends in the industry have been seeing this brew, and based on some of the things Google has already talking about doing, they’re just they’re speeding it up, and it’s really twofold. Kyle saw this week a client I think that they’re paying three times the cost per lead year over year. And guess what? We’re getting better at it. We’re getting better at it. And it’s it’s taking us getting like, twice as good to keep up with even twice as bad a result, right? But they’re doing this for two reasons. A quote from, like, last September, from one of the, literally, the Google executives. Hey, Google, one of the largest companies in the world, even being the prop, the profit monster that they are, they do not accept going backwards in revenue. Their shareholders do not say, Oh, well, there’s a market correction. And literally, every you know, industry that soared the last two years has just taken a correction. It’s just settling down. And Google’s like, Yeah, well, that’s cool. You guys can, all you know, go have a recession, but we’re, we’re not going to do that. We’re just going to crank up our prizes, because we’re Google and we can work. We’re the commodity, right? So they literally just raised the cost per click. But there was a Google executive that came out and said, Kyle’s going to read the quote. They actually found this quote. I was like, yeah,

Kyle DeVries 6:56
and Google’s not usually in the business of of even disclosing that they’ve raised prices in the past, right? But they have been forced to come out and be honest this time. But yeah, Google executive says that they had to, quote, shake the cushions to meet revenue targets, and that another stock price loss would not be great for morale.

Brandon Welch 7:15
We just don’t want to have less money, so we’re going to charge you more for the same stuff. Yeah, I hope you don’t mind, in a world where everything’s more expensive, right? So they’re trying to ride the inflation train, but dude, lots of things are up, but nothing’s up to 300% and combined with that, and they’re just kind of, there’s kind of coming out saying, Yep, we had to raise prices. Get over it. They’re doing a number of things that effectively raise the lower the effectiveness even more for the money being spent. We used to be able to take for a, for a, you know, a well established local company. We used to be able to take a couple few grand start our search budget and produce like enough profit that they’re like, oh my gosh, let’s do that more. And we would get up to 20, $30,000 a month in search budget really quickly, because every dollar you put in it would come, you know, we knew how to sort of manipulate it to where we could get a lead and a cost per acquisition that would come out. That would be a no brainer, right? Well, now what’s happening is all, all that competitive advantage that we had as a, I think, a really good Google agency. We still, we still have it comparatively. But everybody in the game, even the I’ve got, I’ve got friends that own agencies three, four times the size of ours, are seeing the exact same thing. They’re taking away options. And so where we used to be able to go say, hey, Google, we know this type of search works really well for us, and be really specific about these words, and which is called, like, exact match searching and phrase match searching. And those were relatively, actually cheaper terms Google’s like, No, you can kind of do that now, but we’re going to throw a bunch of stuff in it. We’re going to decide when we show your ads. You don’t get to decide. And so they’re, they’re showing ads effectively for a lot more junk? Yeah, from

Kyle DeVries 9:01
the from the consumer point of view, absolutely, when you it’s harder to find what you’re looking for. When you search something, there’s just a bunch of things that aren’t as relevant you might not find what you’re looking for. So people are taking their search elsewhere. A lot of times. They’re going to social media, they’re going to Reddit, they’re going to other places to find what they’re looking for, and that’s obviously not great for Google. Yeah,

Brandon Welch 9:22
the it’s kind of happening under their nose. So Google has 83% of the search market share. Like the last time a big study was done on that, and but, but it’s down 14% searches are down 14% since 2018 right? Didn’t, didn’t you pull that stat. Kyle’s really good with stats. I say crazy stuff. Kyle goes and confirms that it’s true, right? So think about that though, the biggest giant and for years and years and years, like literally two decades, it was every month Google got used more, and there was just all this increasing inventory and all this stuff that they said, Yeah, we. Got more to sell. So do you want to buy it? And then that kind of reached its tipping point. You throw up, you throw a pandemic where people were super internet heavy for like, two years, essentially. And then they went, oh gosh, I missed my brick and mortar experiences. So they’re taking more stuff away from Google. It’s just a perfect storm for them to get greedy. I don’t know. I’m not. I’m like, David over here trying to throw rocks at Goliath, but Right? I’ve seen some articles like predicting Google’s demise, right?

Kyle DeVries 10:28
It seems crazy to criticize who Google, who’s still very dominant in the search engine conversation, like, Don’t get us wrong, there’s, there’s still the dominant player there. But I think we really are starting to see those signals that it might be a slow decline, but it’s absolutely looking like the fortunes are shifting, and things could look very different in the in the three to five year view for them, there are some

Brandon Welch 10:49
people comparing them to, you know, the blockbusters and the Codex, who forgot who they were and why people use them. And so a I think consumer search is just changing Google to chase that revenue rather than say, Okay, let’s get this right, revenue and profit be damned for a minute. Let’s get it right. Let’s serve the customer, customer, customer, meaning the consumer and customer meeting the business owner, they’re saying, Nope, profits, profits, profits, the CEO is going to look good, right? So what do you do about that? There is a big observation we have been talking about tomorrow marketing forever, right? That’s That’s like what Frank and Maven is the best in the world at we make our clients famous in their market so that people know, like and trust them before the sale, and then, combined with really good search engine stuff and really good websites, we just make them really easy to find and take the next step with if you want the secret sauce, if you want to know how like our clients have grown and made millions of dollars, that’s it like it’s make them really known, liked and trusted. We create a personality using tomorrow marketing when people ever before the sale, and then when that sale time comes, we make them extremely easy to find the people who lean into that wholeheartedly with us two years ago and before that. So the last 10 to two years ago, if you will, are literally not feeling the effects of this, because their reputation and their ownership and their equity in the category, if they’re a local service provider or regional service provider, and I’m talking about my roofers, I’m talking about my home improvement companies, I’m talking about my attorneys, my medical companies, the ones that Have a brand that’s bigger than like, the finish line, they’re just like, they’re growing right now, for starters, and everybody at the finish line who’s just begging for that lead and that cheap click is shrinking, and their their sales, people are selling at better rates because confidence is high, and they’re just not experiencing the pains as people who have depended on search engine marketing. Engine Marketing. So my biggest advice to you is like, while yesterday was the best time to plant that tree, the next best time is today. That makes sense. So number one, start tomorrow. Marketing now. And I have some I have some friends and clients I know love and adore, and if they’ve been with me for the whole journey and they, they’re like, Yeah, we understand. We’ll do that tomorrow, marketing someday. But, you know, give us leads. They they’ve had a, they’ve had a, you know, 12 to 18 month experience where this has been really painful. Well, my ones who just kind of were like, Yeah, that’s a lot of lot of money to invest up front. Now they’re going, Holy smokes. They’re having their biggest months ever. And so start it now. There is they’re still saving grace in that. And two years from now, when this, this is not going to get better, the search equation is not going to get better, the economy is arguably not going to get better, right? So the headwinds are against you. So start winning customers ever before the sale. Know that everything’s going broad. Another big part of this Google thing is that it’s really, really hard to target on top of Google just being greedy and changing crap and like thinking that they understand the small business owner, and they don’t. They do not understand your business, and their every practice about them is just out of line with what small business America needs. The third thing is, there’s regulation. Government is essentially saying all the creepy stuff they used to be able to do your that’s why you’re seeing more cookie notifications on all your browsers and your devices are locking down your privacy. That makes it inherently harder to target and make the the engines win via technology. So you’re going to win with messaging, not technology. That’s a big takeaway. So start tomorrow marketing go. Just embrace that. Things are going broad and move money to Facebook. Probably we’re moving a lot of our Google money to Facebook because it is from an ROI perspective, it is winning right now. It’s an under valued advertising platform. So. Yeah,

Kyle DeVries 15:00
Facebook and Instagram, two leading ROI platforms for advertisers. The average American spends 30 minutes a day on Facebook, yes. So that’s, that’s where everybody’s at, yes.

Brandon Welch 15:09
And what’s interesting this is, this is kind of the difference if you’re a if you’re a Maven, marketer, follower, you know that today and tomorrow marketing characteristics. If you’re not, this is your first time listening, waiting for people to get the end of the finish line, just in every area of life, whether that’s who you’re going to marry or date, or who you’re going to do business with, or who you’re going to try to get to buy your product. That’s just a more expensive and cantankerous way to do things. In an environment where Americans are stressed out, and the world is stressed out anyway, that increases. So you have to be way more compromising on price, way more compromising on your speed of delivery, way more compromising on your quality, really, to deliver them like some cheap solution. Whereas the people who’ve known you and been in the journey with you all along, they already love you, and so they’re primed to do business with you. There’s a stack of research for that that we published in the Maven marketer three years ago. And there’s more coming. We’re doing. There’s some more stuff coming. We’re doing, releasing on that. But trust me, it’s that’s that’s the case. And so that is why, that’s partially why this next tip is social media short videos, because when they’re on that 30 minutes a day on Facebook, they’re not in this critical find the cheapest option, give it to me now mentality. They’re in a more joyous freelancing mentality, and they’ll listen in a different way. For

Kyle DeVries 16:41
sure, yeah, if you’re on Facebook, that’s that’s your leisure time. So it does have to be something that that kind of pulls them and grabs their attention and kind of pulls them out of whatever they’re doing. But absolutely, the number two, the another big trend in digital marketing, is short video, and really video in general, the algorithms love video. It’s great for conversions. There’s data that’s shown campaigns with vertical videos get 10 to 20% more conversions, and specifically with short videos, videos under 60 seconds, have a 50% average engagement rate, and videos over a minute long, it’s a 16% engagement rate. So

Brandon Welch 17:23
you just, you just dumped a ton of wisdom and just expertise on that, yeah, what I heard was short video is where it’s at. The short video is going to be in the social media platform so verticals like Facebook and Instagram, and then verticals get, what would you say? How much more conversion? 10 to 20% 10 to 20% Yeah. So pretty powerful. I’m taking my phone out and I’m holding it like this, right? And I’m shooting a video about, we’ll talk about what here in just a second. But like the format that’s winning, and the algorithms and in just consumer preference is vertical and short, yep, less than 60 seconds. Brandon, would

Kyle DeVries 18:01
you say you have a pretty good attention span? Attention span? No, of course, not. None of us, none of us have a good attention span. We need you to grab our attention right off the bat. So. But you know, I think short video is something that people think they might need to spend a lot of money on, and I don’t think that’s necessarily true. I think that even you as a business, if you’re a business owner, or just, you know, average Joe, you can make, can you can make engaging video that grabs people attention, grab grabs people’s attention, and especially if

Brandon Welch 18:34
people are your thing, yeah, you may not. You may get freaked out by video. You may think I don’t look good for video, or I’m not one of those goofballs that gets on and just starts making crazy content. But you don’t really have to do that. If you can flip the switch where you treat the camera lens as a as a set of eyeballs in front of you, and you can just kind of morph your mind into going, I’m talking to a person, or imagine your last customer and what you said to them. And if you can do that in short little bits, you’re taking one tiny thing, not not a big product overview. Please don’t get on and say, we’ve got this. We’ve got this. And for all your needs, it’s not that. It’s not an ad. It’s a if I’m an attorney, I’m going, Hey, I had a family today that came to me that was just utterly in pieces over their mom’s estate, and they they were crying, they were fighting, and I just don’t want that to happen to you. And so they didn’t know that they weren’t going to have their mom for the short amount of time. And unfortunately, you may not either. So please, let me take that pain away from you, and if you want a free consultation, click here. Like one little, tiny thing that was 30 seconds that I just made up on the fly, right? It was really dark, but powerful. I’m sorry. Well, hey, emotional, it’s great. That’s true story. So point being, I mean, don’t try to, don’t try to go into ad speak like you, just tell a true story. That happens in attorneys?

Kyle DeVries 20:01
Yeah, it’s a super easy way just to build trust with your audience, let them know who you are. Even get locally famous, maybe maybe nationally famous, but build your brand up. It’s really it might be easier to do than you think it would be. Yes,

Brandon Welch 20:17
if it’s a product that you’re selling, pick one feature and talk about how it’s going to change my life in 30 seconds, and then give a very quick you want to see more or get a price or get an easy consultation, and click with the form. So specifically, what we’re doing with short video. Don’t overthink it. You don’t need to spend big money or big time on the on the video. Pick one facet about your product or outcome that you provide, and then make a series of videos. Make a dozen videos for every little micro benefit that has to do with your thing, with your business, right? The camera is a set of eyes. Look into it and just talk to it like it was your last customer. And then when you’re going on Facebook and Instagram, and by the way, YouTube shorts is a thing as well, but I’d probably max out Facebook and Instagram. I think most markets have a lot, a lot of money you could spend there before you tap it out, you’re optimizing that video when you upload it, you’re making sure you’re cropping it to like the reels, and then the video feed sizes. And you can just go size it differently for all types of ads. That’s just an extra step when you’re making the ad, and then we’re going to talk about this next but target it to broad audiences. So short videos where it’s at, make them, use them, and probably take some of your search budget and start putting it there, pitching your product, because Facebook is pretty dang efficient, and Instagram with that. They’re the same platform. If you didn’t know, just click a button your Facebook ad also goes to Instagram. Third one. Read it to us,

Kyle DeVries 21:43
broad social is greater than targeted social.

Brandon Welch 21:48
Yes, it is bigger, better, more efficient, right? So I think the whole misleading myth, like the thing that needs to be busted about digital media right now. This wasn’t true five or even two years ago, but used to be, we would win even bad marketers could win with creepy targeting. We could go, say, Facebook, use third party data and use click these buttons, and you would your ad would just magically appear in front of somebody who just thought about that product five seconds ago, and the effect was, it was recency, and it was really, really good at that. Regulation is the number one thing killing that consumer. I guess just sensitivity. And I think we’re, we’re tired of being targeted to that creepy level, so conversion rates went down. Also was killing it a little bit. But the but the the news and the crystal ball of digital marketing is that targeting, in the way it’s been done, is getting less and less effective, because I see it every day, Google’s or Facebook’s taking more I used to be able to target, you know, 34 year old yoga moms with golden retrievers and two kids that live on this street, and now I might be able to target 34 year old females who like pet related pages, right? That makes sense? Yeah. So you can’t win the creepy way. Guess what? This is where the good marketers win. Find you a dang ad writer. Find you somebody who knows how to write and target well with copy and words and pulling people into the ad. These are the people that are winning all the I shouldn’t say all, but I’m not even kidding when I say this, probably eight out of 10 of the digital agencies that just popped up and were an overnight success because they knew how to run Facebook. I could literally probably name a dozen of them right now that have gone out of business, right because they weren’t great marketers. They were button clickers, and they watched a couple videos, and Facebook made it too easy. That’s going away because of the government, and what you need to know about that is if you just target broad audiences, so literally, 3030, year olds, plus, in this geography, in Tulsa, or in, you know, Raleigh, North Carolina, or whatever, and you write a good message, those are the Facebook ads that are getting the most delivery and the highest amount of conversion right now. And it’s very, very weird, because even, like I said, even two years ago, you would win you that that would be like the worst advice I could have given you on a social platform. Um, so tell us what to do. Specifically, Kyle,

Kyle DeVries 24:32
stop targeting with tech. Start targeting with messaging.

Brandon Welch 24:38
Yeah, tech isn’t going to do it for you anymore. It’s right drew relying on tech. It’s going away. Yeah, some categories still have a little bit of edge there, but just do it with better messaging. Yeah, call

Kyle DeVries 24:47
out your literal product and the ad copy.

Brandon Welch 24:50
So I don’t want to go too nerdy, but what was happening was you could take crap ad copy that wasn’t clear at all, and you could target it to the right part. Person, and because Facebook had all this offline data, they could see the websites you were looking at. They could see probably even things you were texting and using Siri for before iPhone just kind of shut that wall off. That’s how they were. That’s how it was winning. Now, the way they know it is Facebook does know what you’re paying attention to. On Facebook, it can still see that universe of data, which at 30 minutes a day or more, it has years and years and years of history about what you’re talking about, or what you’re typing, about what you’re liking, about what you’re stopping to look at. AI is advanced to where it knows what kind of pictures you’re even looking at on Facebook, and so it knows that, and their their data has gotten a lot better in that respect. And so if your ad is literally calling out, hey, yoga. Moms with golden retrievers, would you like to have a special day with your dog doing yoga? I don’t know what I’m what I’m making up, but, but literally something even that specific, if you’re just being very, very clear, you call out that copy in the top of that ad, Facebook is matching that much, much better than than they were even six months ago. So be really literal with a call out, yeah,

Kyle DeVries 26:10
and you’re still tailoring your message to that specific person.

Brandon Welch 26:13
Yes. Say, Have you been considering solar but haven’t been able to justify the cost? Like literal statements like that, which isn’t always the best advertising advice, but that is the way to kind of hack the targeting right now. So you’re targeting with messaging, yeah,

Kyle DeVries 26:27
broad, social and specific target, specific messaging, yes. And then the lat last part of that use age and location targeting only,

Brandon Welch 26:37
yeah, so age and the geography like we’ve almost removed all interest based targeting from our lead generation campaigns for any type of local, local or regional service companies. And so we’re a budget might have looked last. Last year, we might have been spending 15 grand a month on search, three to five on Facebook, and then, you know, depending on the market, 10 to 20 on tomorrow. Marketing now it looks like 20 to 30 and tomorrow. Marketing broadcast, if you’re in a medium sized market, more like 30 to 50 on a bigger in a bigger market, probably spending more like 10 grand on Facebook, and probably given five to 10 to Facebook, like, on some of our more that’s like a that’s like a $5 million company, right? It would go up from there for our larger clients, but like, the split has gone more broad. And I think, I think, I think consumers are just so tired of being beat over the head, that just the that personality, that authenticity, that take away the hype talk to like a real person. It’s always worked, folks. It’s always, always worked. Yeah,

Kyle DeVries 27:52
and when you’re successful with building that trust, you’re going to see more success in really, all areas of your business, all areas of sales or conversions and other platforms, it’s going to help you all around.

Brandon Welch 28:04
Man, I’m not saying this to pound our chest, but it does feel good to be right for our clients that 235, years ago, I’m talking to, you know, I’m talking to all the people we’ve talked about on here, Randy and D, our friends at Shine solar, Ozark, Zelda, law, vision clinic, just all these wonderful little businesses that had the courage to build up a bigger thing than demanding that sale today, man, are they? Are they winning? They’re stealing market share, and so the tomorrow customers where it’s at, and the digital side of things, you need to know. Google sucks right now. It doesn’t it’s not starting it’s not looking better. Short videos, winning, broad social targets, winning. There’s your three trends you needed to know about, and you learned them on the Maven Marketing podcast. We’ll be back here every Monday answering your real life marketing questions, because marketers who can’t teach you why just a fancy lie. Like and subscribe, send to somebody who needs to know it. Have a great week.