Paid Search Or Paid Social For Local Businesses in 2023 W/ Cesar Gil

Gabe Harris:

Welcome, everybody! Today we have Cesar on the podcast whose specialty is local ads. But Cesar, we would love to hear a little bit more background about you and what your specialties are.

Sure. So thanks for having me on, Gabe! I’m Cesar, I run Symphony Advertising out of Houston, Texas. We primarily work with local service based businesses in the Houston area.

We also do a lot of websites, funny enough. A lot of people come and they say, “Hey, we want more customers.” And then you look at their site and it’s not going to hold. It’s not going to get what you want because it’s like having a party and then people get to your home and it’s a mess. There’s windows missing, the sink’s leaky. So that’s really what we do.

It’s mainly local services and it’s mainly Google Ads, but we do have some social media accounts and we do some paid social.

But overall, I’ve been in the space for eight years and I’ve at least tasted the Facebook, the Instagram, the email marketing, the re-marketing, the Google Ads, SEO, the whole gambit, I believe. If there’s something out there that I haven’t tried, I’d be surprised. So thanks for having me on!

Yeah, definitely. Excited to be able to chat. Just the different platforms, it feels like every two years there is a new latest and greatest that you have to be able to try. So glad that you’ve had a full spectrum of advertising for the past eight years.And that’s really cool what you said about websites as well because if you’re advertising and your website is not optimal to be able to handle that traffic, you are just throwing money away.

Yeah, I totally agree. It’s not just the ads, it’s not just the website. It’s also when they call, does somebody pick up? Are they rude? Do they know what they’re talking about? Do you have your service pricing right? It’s a ton of different things. So it takes a village to close a new customer online. So, definitely agree.

Yeah. So if you think it’s a turnkey solution that if you have a paid ad campaign and tomorrow you’re going to be making money without any preparation, I have some bad news for you. You have to refine not only what your cost per lead is, but like you said, your communication speed to lead.If a lead comes in and you don’t talk to them for a month, they’re going to forget who you are and they’re already going to be moving along.

So speed to lead, I imagine that’s something that you speak to your clients as well. That you need to contact them quick and contact them with an offer that they actually care about.

Yeah. Sometimes we run across where people set up the email so when we build the website they’re like, “Hey, I want to have xyz@gmail.com.” So we’ll put xyz@gmail.com and then three months go by like, “Hey, we haven’t gotten any leads. We get calls but we haven’t got anything from the website.” And I’m like, “Have you guys checked the email?” And they’re like, “Oh my goodness. We opened up a new email so that all the leads could go there, we haven’t even looked at it.” They look at it, there’s 12 leads on there that they just completely missed or more. There’s just a bunch of things that you can miss.

So doing double, triple checking, and that’s on our side too. We should be checking with the client like, “Hey, are you getting leads? Are you not getting them?” So there’s a lot of places where you can miss the follow up.

Is your website up? Sometimes people don’t pay for their domain renewal. Website goes down and they don’t notice. So there’s a lot that goes into it.

Cool. So when you guys do have a new client coming on, I know that your focus, you said, is mainly for paid search. But you do have a little bit of mix with paid social and you obviously have a lot of experience.It’s always a case by case basis, but how do you do recommendations for paid search?

When do you see the advantage like, “You should go more into paid search or paid social,” how do you think about that?

Great question. So for us, our number one recommendation is Google Ads because we are in local service based business.What that means, it’s either dental, it’s auto detailing, it’s a lawyer that services community. It’s a roofing company, it’s home services, it’s HVAC, it’s all where people either need to come to the location or the business goes to the person. And because of that it’s usually a “near me.”

“If somebody’s making that search, that’s just somebody raising their hands saying ‘I need this service.'”

So, dentist near me, lawyer near me, auto detail near me, roofer near me. And when we have that ad group or that campaign paired with what we call a service based campaign, so if somebody looks up roof repair in Houston, roof replacement in Houston, those are separate campaigns that we build.

But we cover pretty much, as much as we can that if somebody’s making that search, that’s just somebody raising their hands saying “I need this service.” And so we put our clients on hopefully a top position so that they have a good chance of getting that lead.

When it doesn’t work out is if the budget doesn’t work out. So for instance, we have some lawyers that have come through and out because they are personal injury lawyers. And what ends up happening is the personal injury space is so competitive that if you just want a personal injury attorney near me, a personal injury attorney in Houston, that click alone is going to cost you $40 to $50.

And if a client only has a thousand dollars a month, which is actually not bad to start off with if they’re new, so for the ones that do good, 7,000 and up I would say is what I’ve seen. But even for the client that came and left, they probably spent 14 grand per month for three months.

“The reason why people are willing to pay a hundred dollars for a click is because if they do close a lawyer, a car accident, truck accident, that’s a $400,000 win for them.”

And we targeted personal injury near me, an 18-wheeler accident, those type of keywords. And just the cost was a hundred dollars a click.

Because you need frequency and you need volume, you run through that budget really fast. What ends up happening, or the reason why people are willing to pay a hundred dollars for a click is because if they do close a lawyer, a car accident, truck accident, that’s a $400,000 win for them.

But some people don’t have that much time. And so when we look at that, we’re like, “There’s no way we can win this game.” Just because it’s too competitive or there’s not enough search volume.

If the budget doesn’t fit in Google ads or if the potential customer doesn’t go to Google to search for it because they don’t know it’s a problem, then we take it to paid social.

Let’s say for instance if we have this company that does municipal repair, which is kind of weird, people don’t know how to search for that. For instance, your backup, your home septic tank is messed up and it’s just weird stuff that you wouldn’t know without being in the industry.

If the budget doesn’t fit in Google ads or if the potential customer doesn’t go to Google to search for it because they don’t know it’s a problem, then we take it to paid social.

And the reason we take it to paid social is because we at the very least know that we can get our ad in front of people. We don’t know how interested they’re going to be. We don’t know if they’re in the mood for buying, but with the very least we can say, “Hey, we are a dental office, we are located in Cleveland, Texas and we accept these insurances.” And we can put that in a 10 mile radius in that area and we can see what happens.

So I think we have a phone number, send us a message, and the website. So that’s when we go to paid social is when we’ve tried Google Ads and it’s just not working or the budget doesn’t fit.

“There are some customers that prefer going the Facebook route because they know it works. That’s kind of how we decide between do we go Google or do we go paid social?”

There are times when people directly want Facebook. An example of that is product. So as I mentioned before you got started, there is a clothing brand, it’s a gym but they sell clothing. That’s a good way to get their stuff out.

There’s another one that did circuit breaker sales. Nobody does this on Google. So they did it on Facebook and it actually works.

There are some customers that prefer going the Facebook route because they know it works. That’s kind of how we decide between do we go Google or do we go paid social?

Yeah. That’s interesting you said about lawyers because that could be challenging where you actually could have a really good campaign but you’re just not getting the volume in order to make that determination.

And that’s what happens most of the time. It’s a bad place to be in when we’ve set up a campaign where there’s nothing else we can do. We’re targeting the right keywords, we’re targeting the right area. We have a decent budget, at least from our side, we don’t know what else to do.So it’s like, “Well this is the best we can do and it doesn’t provide results.” It’s like, “Okay well then maybe at that point Google ads isn’t for that specific client.”

And so that is why it is good in my opinion, to have alternatives because then you can say “Okay look, we can take that budget and we can go to paid social.”

We could take that budget and I don’t really ever recommend this, but I would rather move the budget away if it’s not working to even traditional like, “Fine, let’s run some TV, let’s do some…” I don’t know, I’ve tried Spotify Ads, they don’t really work.

We’ll try something else because if Google’s not working, something has to work, it just has to. And so, that’s the path we take whenever it doesn’t work.

That is interesting that you will do traditional media as well.

We’ve never done it. We’ve never done it but we would recommend it. So we basically lose clients like that. We had this client that had a decent budget, paid very well and they ran with us for six months maybe. And it just wasn’t converting.I take that back, it was converting the lower end services but it wasn’t converting what they wanted. And what they wanted were high ticket items that again, it was just this municipal stuff. They clean, what’s an example? Whenever things overflow for a neighborhood, they go and fix it.

And so they weren’t getting any of that. What they were getting was grease trap cleanings, car wash grease trap, kitchen grease trap cleanings.

So it’s these smaller businesses, those services that cost 200 bucks a pop. But what they were looking for was something that paid a hundred thousand and over. And so we went to them and we would tell them, “Hey, you aren’t getting what you want and we don’t want to take your money if we’re not delivering on what you guys intend because we can give you this stuff all day long but that’s not what you want.”

So we literally told him maybe do golf events, maybe try banners, maybe try billboards. So we don’t personally do the traditional, we just say look, maybe we’re not the right fit. Hopefully that works because something’s bound to work. It’s just what is it, you know?

That’s an interesting twist. That’s probably long tail keywords that may be more ideal for them. But it’s going to take a long time in order for those long tail keywords to get volume to make any determination like are we doing what we should be doing?

And that’s exactly where you’re at an imbalance, if that’s the right word. We have the keyword in there. It just doesn’t get searched up.This keyword by the research we’ve done, by the pivot they’ve given, if somebody looks this up, this would pay a lot of money. But it doesn’t even get impressions. It doesn’t get searched and they’re in three locations or they were three locations so they were in three big cities. It’s just, people aren’t looking it up and there wasn’t even competition for it. Nobody looks for it.

So in that case, as I mentioned earlier, we couldn’t even try Facebook and Instagram and just show it to people in the area. Maybe somebody understands what we’re trying to sell. And so that’s when you’re stuck between a rock and a hard place, it’s like, “Well what do we do? What can we do?”

Yeah. If you do shift to Facebook or just paid social in general, you are going to get typically, actually I think it’s really easy to fail at Facebook if you don’t do it right. But you’re going to get a good amount of volume of leads.But the disparity or the spectrum of where those leads are is going to be more difficult to be able to determine because you’re targeting broad on Facebook.

Actually, a little bit of insight for your lead quality, the best way you can actually be able to improve your lead quality. Because you’re targeting pretty broad on Facebook, if you’re targeting in the United States for a lookalike of 1%, that’s 2.1 million people. That’s f***ing huge. That’s big.

Yeah. A lot of people.

Your lead equality is essentially a reflection of your creative.

So it’s important.

The better that you’re able to call out whatever that pain is, the more likely that people are going to engage, who actually care about whatever you’re offering, whatever you’re storytelling on that particular video. So you are going to be able to target people who would have interest.However, that’s still going to be a wide spectrum. So speaking to the audience, if you do Google Ads, I imagine, “Hey, we’re doing it right. But we’re not getting the volumes because people aren’t searching for what you need or they’re not searching for the volumes that you would like.”

Right.

On the opposite side of the coin, you can make them really happy on Facebook and you can do a good job of calling out that audience with your creative.But after about a month or two of them going through those leads, there’s a chance that they’re going to say, “Well all these leads are crap because they didn’t purchase right away. You’re giving me a ton of leads.”

So it’s really about filtering those leads and actually making sure that the client is working on those leads, especially from Facebook.

If they don’t, then on Facebook, it’s just going to be a waste of time — if they’re not filtering and combining through those leads at an efficient rate.

And to your point about the creative, that’s what makes it hard for us sometimes too. For instance, some of these dental practices, they don’t take pictures, they don’t have a nice photo of the outside of their building. They don’t have good photos of the inside of their building.So I’m like, “Hey, it would really be beneficial if we had a picture of the dentist, of the doctor, of the front of the building, of the inside of the building. Just somewhat quality photos for us to use so that when people see the ad, they’re not like “This is a robot or this is clearly a stock photo.”

“It might be that Facebook is the right place, but like you said, if the creative isn’t right, it’s going to reflect on the leads.”

But sometimes we don’t get that. And so when we use a stock photo, you could write the best copy for it, but clearly it’s a stock photo of some random person that we got from Unsplash or Canva.

It might be that Facebook is the right place, but like you said, if the creative isn’t right, it’s going to reflect on the leads. And I agree a hundred percent on that because they haven’t had good results then it’s not great.

I literally expected it to go that way. Not because it’s on Facebook but because it’s a stock photo. They have nothing to differentiate themselves from other dentists aside their Facebook page at that point.

I throw up in my mouth a little bit every time I see a stock photo.

Yeah, it’s awful. I never thought of this, but I think now, the audiences out there that see these ads, are more accustomed to it. Because they’ve seen so many different ads and they can tell, “Oh this is clearly a stock photo.”And maybe they don’t think consciously, “I’m not going to click on that because it’s a stock photo.” But I think subconsciously “Get that away from me, I don’t want a fake ad.”

People don’t want ads in general and if they see a fake ad, a fake person, it’s like, “Eeven if my tooth hurts, I don’t want to deal with that.” So my opinion, who knows.

No, I totally think you’re right. And actually to push that a little bit further just on using stock images or just using images in general. So video anchors your performance.You hear people having success on Facebook, predominantly that’s because they have a good video, not a good image because the better story you tell, the more likely people are going to engage. And you’re limited on the story that you can be able to do with images.

The pictures are worth a thousand words? Well, video is worth 10 billion because you can explain a lot more.

You can visually show — if we had a cool dental commercial — that commercial video. “Here’s what we do, here’s us working on some people, here’s some testimonials.”

And even do separate ads for the three testimonial ones. Two just of the outside of the building and an explainer video. And we make them all work together and the touch points you see, you hit them, you don’t hit them, you get to them in different areas. Now I think that is a much more well rounded campaign versus a stock photo of a guy getting their fake braces done. So agreed wholeheartedly.

If you’re in the decision right now, do I do Google or do I do social? Or do I do search or do I do social? And if you are just starting out and you don’t have any of that creative, I would just go with Google.

That’s another advantage. Yeah, that’s another advantage is that it’s two folded because you’re right, if you don’t want to show any photos, any creatives and you’re just text on a screen, Google is the route to go.The idea is that people clicking on it are going to be people with intent to buy or to get the service. But what you do lose out on is any branding, you don’t brand it all.

People don’t know your story, people don’t know what you look like. People don’t get a feel for what your company is. Whereas Facebook and Instagram, you do that all day long. It’s the reverse.

You may not get the intent but if you build that brand, you can build that brand there. You can’t do that on Google, you really can’t. Until that person comes in and experiences your product or service, it’s all just transactional.

“I believe it’s better for branding on paid social, and even organic of course. But if it’s just transactional and you want to get straight to the point, I think it’s Google Ads.”

Whereas Facebook, Instagram is definitely more, because I buy fitness clothes and there are some brands out there that I never bought. They’ve been showing up on my feed for six months and I might buy it.

It’s taken a while but you know what, I might buy it just because I’ve seen it. I’m in the market for clothes, I have the brand I like, but I want to try other brands.

So definitely works. Again, I believe it’s better for branding on paid social, and even organic of course. But if it’s just transactional and you want to get straight to the point, I think it’s Google Ads.

Yeah, yeah. If you can’t describe what your product is and maybe you need to be able to better story tell that for the audience so they can actually understand what the heck is this, then Facebook may be a better way to go.If you are entering in the market and there’s no competition, I have a client, Autio, where they’re an app that, say if you’re driving through Texas and then there’s a landmark, you can click on it and Kevin Costner will tell you a story of what you’re driving through.

Nice.

It’s pretty cool. But people aren’t going to know that, people aren’t going to be searching for that because they have no idea that it exists. If people don’t know your service exists, Facebook may be a good way.

Yeah. No, I agree.

However, if you’re a dentist and you’re just starting out and you don’t have the time to invest, I would totally recommend to start with Google, with paid search.

Those are good points, that’s a good strategy of where to go initially.

“The ultimate answer I think is, just do both. If you have enough budget, run both. See how they go.”

Some people are in business for 10 years and they’ve never run ads, bless them. They use word of mouth or they’re just good in their community, that’s awesome. But if they want to accelerate their growth per se, that’s a good way to decide.

And then the ultimate answer I think is, just do both. If you have enough budget, run both. See how they go. And I even think, let’s say you get 10 from Google and you get 30 from Facebook, I don’t think you should stop either.

I think, “Okay, you got a total of 23, keep it going, what’s the problem?”

“Are you making more than you spent and are you making more than you were before marketing? And if the answer is yes, then don’t worry about it. Keep going.”

And that’s something I’ve learned over time or I’ve mentioned to clients over time. They’ll ask all the analytical, what’s our ROI? And it’s hard to track. They might click and leave and come back organically. It’s hard to track sometimes.

Whenever I get to that point I simply say, “Are you making more than you spent and are you making more than you were before marketing? And if the answer is yes, then don’t worry about it. Keep going.”

We’ll do our best tracking and if it’s the opposite, if it’s like, “We’ve actually lost a bunch of money and haven’t had any new clients since we started marketing.” Then it’s like, “Okay, well clearly,” assuming they gave it enough time, which if you say enough time, I think that should be like five years.

But whatever, you’re probably going to get six months and that’d be a good run. I’ve gotten a client on Friday and they cancelled on Monday. It’s insane. Yeah, weird. That’s actually an anomaly but it happens. And so… Yeah.

It is the game you play. Getting somebody onboard on Friday and then unfortunately cancel on Monday.But it does take time and going back to your attribution, how you prove ROAS. I think on Facebook we left the peak. In Google, it’s still a couple years away, but we’re leaving the golden age possibly, of attribution.

Oh yeah. Do tell.

Oh yeah. And this is more on Facebook — well, paid social — just with the iOS update, how you’re getting-

Oh yes, yes, yes.

… You’re getting less data come in to where if that trend continues, removing cookies and all those rumors that you also hear with Google. That you are only going to be able to see bumps. It’s going to be like traditional media.Say if you’re running a commercial, you have no clue what that performance is going to do. You basically have to localize your traditional media.

Say you blast Houston and then you hopefully are doing a post and then you’re doing a post analysis. How many more sales have we got in Houston? Does this work? We really don’t know.

Yeah, yeah. It’d be a nice world to live in where we knew every dollar we spent, this is what we got back. And to a degree we can do that. Hopefully, it can continue. But definitely, I do see that with more and more restrictions on privacy, it is getting harder.

“We can only do what we can now, provide results now and then adjust as things evolve or get taken down.”

Although I’ve read on Google, they’re doing something weird where they are getting rid of the cookies but they have a new version of it that’s going to be even better or worse depending on what side of the fence you sit on. But we’ll see, we can only do what we can now, provide results now and then adjust as things evolve or get taken down.

If you look at TikTok, that’s definitely another place people can go. So it’s interesting. Then who knows what the whole VR and all that, Oculus and virtual worlds, and NFTs? Yeah, it’ll be a fun ride, I think.

Yeah, in seven years we’re going to be selling billboards in VR world.

And that’d be the funniest thing. To your point, I just read an article that cable is now more affordable than what most people have as monthly subscriptions.So if we just go back in time, what the advantage was for having Netflix and HBO Max and Amazon Prime. They just became what we ran away from. So maybe we’re going to build virtual worlds and just go back to billboards in the virtual world and it just repeats itself. So it is just funny.

Oh that definitely has a deep pain, because I’m looking at my monthly subscriptions, you get an email like, “Oh man, I’m subscribed to way too many things right now.”

Yeah. So it’s funny. You might want to go back to cable, that’s apparently more affordable now.

Actually, so what you said about Google with the cookies, I think that pressure might actually be a good thing and it might be advantageous for advertisers.So an example would be on the Facebook side, do you remember three years ago with Cambridge Analytica where they said you can’t have this data?

What Facebook did is, well they still have the data, they just can’t use it. And then they have their targeting and they no longer have that bridge but they knew that both existed.

So what they did is they heavily invested in the engineering and they were able to find new connections, new behaviors, deeper behaviors that were not utilized before.

Because they were not allowed to use Cambridge Analytica, they got much deeper into it and their algorithms are massively more intelligent now and more creepy targeting now than they have ever been before. And that may not have been the case if pressure was not put on to it.

Yeah. Well, there’s a will, there’s a way. Their whole business is built on that or now it’s more Metaverse. They’re trying to not just be a platform for social. But where there’s a will, there’s a way. They’re going to keep doing what they’re doing.

I see searches doing the same thing. I see Google memes fairly frequently where it’s about max ROAS, increase your budgets, go broad targeting. They’re really trying to leverage that machine learning as best as you possibly can.

They are, and I keep testing it.

“From the ones I’ve tested, I would say nine out of 10 don’t do well.”

Every couple months I hear broad, go broad. It’s learning, it’s better, you can let it do its thing and I’ll test it. I believe it’ll get there one day for sure, it has to. At some point they’ll figure it out. But from the ones I’ve tested, I would say nine out of 10 don’t do well.

They’re too off, they’re too irrelevant. They’re converting but they’re things you don’t want to convert. But I have seen that some do work, I have seen that some have worked.

I guess the simpler businesses maybe where if they do just a couple services but where it gets a little bit more niche, it’s a bit hard. I haven’t seen them do as well.

But we’ll keep testing because that’s our job. If it works, we’ll do it. If at some point it’s just putting your credit card and saying dental leads, then fine. That’s what we’ll do. And who knows what we can charge for that? But as of now it’s a little bit more complicated than that and so we’ll figure that out.

Do you think possibly that it works more if your budgets are much higher? So you’re able to throw in a hundred, 200, 300,000 plus into the system and then the algorithm is able to work. But if you’re a local business you may not have given enough juice?

It’s possible. It’s possible just because I haven’t ran $300,000 at all. But some of our budgets are good, they spend thousand dollars a day and it’s a local area.There’s some accounts that spend, what I would deem, pretty good budgets and they haven’t been the best. But I think for services, what I’ve seen is the more simple the service is, the more close it can stay. If there’s more to it, it just gets weird. It just starts bringing in keywords that you’re like, “I definitely don’t want that.”

And you can do the whole negative keyword thing so you can add it as a negative keyword so it won’t come up again. But you end up having an endless amount of other alternatives or variations rather, that it’s just more work.

I’d rather just make an exact match or a phrase match so that I already know, “Okay, at most I’m going to get just these.” But who knows? If anyone out there is spending $300,000 a day, let us know if broad match keyword is working for you. Because then we’d implement it as well.

Yeah, I’ve seen more complaints than compliments on…

I have nothing but complaints. Yeah. And the problem too is that, I don’t know exactly how this works, and I don’t know if you’ve experienced this, but when you run a Google Ads account and you create it either within your account or it’s a client’s account and you’re added to it, there is some Google rep that calls you and their intention is to help you out.

Kind of help you out.

I don’t know, I run from them. But you have to do the call or else, they do some stuff. And so, they always mention the same stuff. They always want you to go automated bidding, do max conversions, and go more broad and up your budget. It’s that every single time.There is a side of me that’s like, “I know that doesn’t work because I’ve tried it.” I’ll try it. I don’t mind trying stuff and every single one counts for every single account like, “I know your pitch and I tried it.”

So I get a little bit like, “Can you guys leave us alone and let us run our ads for our clients?” And I think Facebook has, it’s called Facebook Experts where they’ll call and they’ll give you, I don’t know how they are.

I’ve actually heard that they’re much more helpful than the Google Ads one, but I’ve only heard that from one person. I don’t know.

I avoid calls. There’s some equation out there where Facebook and Google have that, if an account has a rep, then that account is more likely to spend money. To me that’s the raw data that they see. Account reps mean clients spend more money, which means more money for us.

I see.

But on the Facebook side, man this is bad. The only thing that they’re good for is if your ads get rejected or your account gets rejected and then they’re able to manage that.But from an ad spend, I have a buddy who had a Facebook rep call and they just told me, if you 3x your budget you will get a better ROAS. His cost per acquisition doubled.

Oh so they actually did it. They actually three times their budget. Wow.

Yeah.

How did they know? It’s weird. You want to listen to them because they’re from Facebook, which I actually don’t think they are. I don’t think the Google Ads people are from Google Ads. They’re third party contractors for Google Ads acting on behalf of Google Ads. It’s weird.I don’t know. I don’t know if their intention is good or bad, but it just doesn’t work. And that’s the only thing I’m worried about. If it worked I would do it, but it doesn’t. So I don’t.

And they have their own case studies that they see when they’re being pitched to, like XYZ company did this. So that must be applicable for everybody. However, for you, you’ve done a lot of micro testing, you’re like, “I know this does not.”

And the thing too is, we have a client that has many locations. And we run ads for every location and each has its own separate website.So if that were true then the same strategy should work across all 10 locations, let’s say. But they don’t. Some areas perform different. Some areas have more people searching for it, some areas like the brand is really strong. So it’s easy. It’s super easy, people just buy.

“I wish it was a blanket strategy for everybody, but it’s not.”

Some areas, they just got there and people know nothing about them. So those are doing poor, they’re not doing well. And so I wish it was a blanket strategy for everybody, but it’s not. And so like you said, I’ve tested, I’ve seen it, it doesn’t work. Every account, it’s generally the same, but they have their nuances.

So if you’re looking to be able to start your Google Ads, that’s one of the reasons I a hundred percent recommend to reaching out to Symphony Advertising because you actually know, nobody knows everything. But you have a better idea of what-

Educated guess.

… You have an educated guess of what works, what doesn’t. And if it does flop, you have a plan B, plan C, plan D in order to be able to best allocate your advertising dollars. Instead of just the blanket, spend more and it’ll work.

If it wasn’t working with a hundred dollars, why is it going to work with a thousand? That’s how I look at it like, “Okay, we’re just going to waste more money.”Obviously in my head I’m like, “It’s not working with a hundred, why would it work with a thousand?” So yes, thank you for the recommendation.

Yeah, definitely 100%.

Ad Review: Home Appliance Brands

By the way, do you know what they were advertising?

So I did take a look prior to that and I had to watch it three times to understand what they were. And then I was like, “Oh okay, they’re probably kitchen customized people. They’ll come and build your kitchen.”That’s definitely one that’s awareness, high ticket item. You’re going to have to see that a hundred times before you even know what it is.

Yeah, I would say that’s actually a terrible first touch point for the audience because they’re watching the video, they have no idea what the heck am I being sold? Why should I even care about it? It looks pretty. It looks pretty but they’re not even-

Yeah, it does look good. And the logos at the end even make it more confusing because they’re not that recognizable. I have no idea who these people are.And maybe if they had the logo or just a logo and said, “Bringing your dream kitchen home,” something that like, “Oh okay. I get it.” It wraps it up nicely for me. With that, I’m like, “Okay next. I don’t know what that is.”

Yeah, I saw that was-

Poor rating.

… I have to put that one near the bottom. But most likely that one’s burning cash on Facebook if you’re trying to get acquisition.

Yes.

All right. And then now we have KitchenAid.

KitchenAid Ad

That is good. That is actually really good because there are clients I have that you don’t know what to look for. So if you tie in what the search is, you nudge them the right way like, “What is that search?” It might help nudge or push that search and it’ll bring people to Google. That’s an excellent one. Let me take this note down real quick.

Yeah, you just gave me a little bit of light too because it gives great context into what the actual person should care about.

I agree.

We are live with Cesar getting inspired, as you can hear with his keyboard quite away.

The ad has the search bar and then runs the ad on paid social. That’s good. I really like that. And it doesn’t hurt. It’s like a split, half a second.So the dental ones that we’re talking about that are struggling, even if it’s a stock photo, put “Dentists in Cleveland, Texas” because you’re letting that person know “We are located in Cleveland, Texas.”

And that is the biggest problem. They’re like, “Nobody knows they’re there.” They are one of the only dentist offices in there, but people don’t know they’re there. So that is good, that’s a good one.

Or even a children’s dentist in Cleveland, Ohio. That lets them know it’s not just any dentist. This is for your little ones too.

And then we can make a variation. So family dentist, dentist near me, dental office that accepts PPO, Medicaid because they accept that stuff. Yeah, great ideas.

Actually the great thing about this too, if they forget who they saw on the ad, they’re more likely to remember what the keyword search is. The whole conversation is what’s better, Paid search or paid social, what’s better how they integrate? Dude that’s a perfect blend.

Yeah, you get both. That is just a good ad by the way because you give them the action. You’re showing them to find us, do this.In that case, they weren’t saying “Find KitchenAid,” they were saying, “If you’re looking to bake, you can use our product to do that.”

Whereas for local services, which I’m a big part of, it’s like, “Oh.” We can remind them or let them know you can also search for this on Google.

Now the product or the service, you go to Google and look for that search. Of course, your website’s not going to come up. If it’s a dentist in Cleveland, it’s going to be all the dentists in Cleveland.

So there’s still work to be done there. But it gives you another shot or you can do a branding one like office dentist, whatever it’s called. And we can put it as one of the search terms, so very cool. I’m glad you shared that one.

Yeah, or if you realize that there is a keyword search with not a lot of competition, you could put that keyword there. And then put yourself towards the top because you know that ain’t nobody else hanging around with those keywords.

That’s crazy. Because then you could also do, this is super creative. I don’t know how good it would work, but you could do something like Facebook Ad: Dental special or something and it’s 20% off your first order or something.You could get really like, couponing like, “Oh you saw it here, look at this search.” And you could tell Google to make you pop up like that. I don’t know when we could use that, but that is a move. That is a move that you could do.

Oh, one of my favorite things about marketing is just running weird tests or unique tests. We’ll not say weird. And that is a very fun, unique test.By the way, I feel very bad for the third one. It’s going to be really hard to beat that. But let’s get into it from Electrolux, and there’s no sound.

Electrolux Ad

Did it just not have sound or it didn’t import?

It doesn’t have sound.

Oh, okay. Well, this is just not putting effort into it. It might be last, I know the other one, we don’t know what they’re talking about but this one is like, “At least show up.” At least do the little things.Put the sound, put the captions. It looks good and it’s a little easier to understand but it’s like someone didn’t do their job fully. You forgot the audio part and it’s just one little file. So that’s how I would rank them.

And then, it isn’t fair because the second one really got me amped, so now I see a really stale ad with no sound. It’s like, “Oh, I don’t want to see that.”

There you go. It’d be the KitchenAid, the whatever three logo kitchen design and then, I don’t know, was that a detergent or something?

It was a washing machine.

Okay. Washing machine.

Oh no. Was it a washing machine? “Stains don’t stand a chance.” Let’s see if we can figure this out. It could be a detergent. I don’t-

That’s more of a reason that it’s not good.

I don’t know if that is a washer. Also, if you’re making any video ads or just any ads in general, make sure to call attention to why audiences should care about what makes you different or what you are.

That’s a good point. I think maybe because you’re the person making the ads, sometimes if it’s internal especially, you’re so in the world of your business that you assume people know what you do, how you do it, how it works.

“When you’re advertising, you’ve really got to think a person’s five years old. What is the simplest way to tell them what we do, where we do it, how we do it in as little, as least complicated as possible?”

Where, when you’re advertising, you’ve really got to think a person’s five years old. What is the simplest way to tell them what we do, where we do it, how we do it in as little, as least complicated as possible? Because you also don’t want to do like a seven minute, “This is how we built the machine” thing. But yes, it should be easy to understand.

Yeah, I think that’s one of the challenges. You want to prove to people how smart you are. And then it’s overly complex or it just gets derailed and then it’s just, what the heck are they? What is this?

Yeah, you lose interest. The viewer, the potential customer is like, “It’s too much.”

Jamming, dude. Well, really excited. I loved today’s conversation. Definitely learned a couple new things and thank you for having that light bulb moment.That may be something that we can be able to test out. Or if any listeners test that idea, if you did not see the visual, jump onto YouTube and you’ll be able to.

We’re probably going to make that into a little bit of a short, but go ahead and use it and let us know, is that a good strategy for video? Excited to hear any comments if people run those tests.

Yeah, please let us know. The more people we have experimenting, the faster we can see what works.

Awesome. Well, Cesar, thank you so much for joining the chat today. And if people are looking to be able to find out more, where can they be able to find you?

Symphonyadvertising.com, just to learn more about what we do and then our Instagram. So I do a lot of reels, I do a lot of organic, believe it or not. So testing that out, because I know there’s room to grow there. Our Instagram, symphonyadvertising.com.

Awesome.

Sorry, instagram.com/symphonyadvertising. That’s the correct one. But thank you so much for having me on.

Cool man. Thankful for the chat and thank you so much.

Yep. Later.

Thanks for listening to our Paid Search Or Paid Social podcast with Cesar Gil!