Paid Ads Pay Off
Leveraging the power of digital marketing to increase sales is every businesses goal, and many will invest hundreds of thousands before they really see a return. How do we know when an ad is working before the campaign has finished? This is the burning question on everyone's mind.
Recently, our CEO sat down with an expert in paid online advertising to discuss his experience in successful online marketing. In this blog, Hollywood Branded learns how to drive your business through digital marketing from the expertise of Orlando Rios of Dropkick Ads.
A Little More About Orlando
After serving five years as the Digital Marketing Manager for a health lifestyle brand Onnit, Orlando launched Dropkick Ads, a marketing company with a focus on helping businesses and online entrepreneurs create better performing Facebook and Google ads.
He's also the host of the Ultimate Marketer Podcast, author of The Podcast Book, as well as the creator of an annual listing guide to the top podcast by category. And here's a little something off the beaten path of most marketer and entrepreneurs norms. Orlando took his passion for music and he's also the founder of Rockabilly Magazine, and creator of The Revival Music Festival in Austin.
Interview Transcript Highlights
Question: Can you share with us kind of what that looked like for you and why you ended up creating Dropkick Ads and diving into online advertising?
Answer: The whole story is really crazy and it kind of goes back to just being like an 18 year old. So I'm 36 now, but when I was an 18 year old kid, I wasn't thinking about how can I get good grades in college or find myself a nice job to keep myself nice and steady. That was the last thing in my mind. The things that I always had in my mind were business.
How can I create my own things so I don't have to have a boss? Even at 18 years old. And that first started with, I was really in love with Rockabilly music at the time, the 50s nostalgia and there was no magazine at the time. So I was working at a newspaper then and decided to create my own magazine.
And that's kind of where I started to learn a little bit about online marketing and all that because I had a website, I was taking subscription orders online. Here I am, this 18, 19 year old and I've already started my business, and in college, technically, but not really in college, just doing enough to go by. And then of course, the experiences I had with that and creating a music festival out of that as well kind of just bled into where this is today, which is Dropkick Ads is a digital marketing company. And obviously, over the course of 10 years, I learned a little bit about how to promote and market online, do the websites, get sales, find new customers. And that's what I'm doing with this marketing agency today.
Question: What type of brand partnerships, brand clients do you have that are really excelling in this market right now?
Answer: Just like everybody else, depends when this podcast comes out. But a couple of weeks ago is when things started to change, and I think every single business owner, everybody that does, especially if you do business in person, you've been affected by far, and maybe it's more tough for you. But if you're an online business, you probably were a little bit nervous as well.
Depending on what your product or service is, you're seeing something here. You're seeing either the same, less sales and less customers, or you're seeing more and there's a lot of them that are seeing more right now depending on whatever that product or service is.
One thing that I will say with that as well, the ones that are seeing more are the brands and the businesses that didn't quit, that didn't get scared, that didn't pull all their advertising money away and say, "Oh, I'm going to hold onto what I have now because everything's too uncertain." The ones that have kept going or that have put more in are the ones that are now seeing the best return they may have seen all year.
I have clients that range from all types of things, from nutritional supplements to even services like ours, right? So the key feature here is if you quit, if you got scared and you let that affect your judgment, that's the difference so far that I'm seeing.
Question: So off of the subject of COVID-19, how can brands leverage and utilize digital marketing better? What are some of the ways that people are missing out, that you found are really, really good solutions, including obviously automation with Zapier?
Answer: First with Facebook ads, there's a lot of companies and brands that have pulled off their Facebook ad spends completely because they think that this is not an environment where people want to sign up for anything or buy anything. There's a couple of cool strategies that we use that, other brands have been using, to think about. Number one, since brands and companies are pulling back their ad spend, guess what happens? Facebook is an impression bid based platform. So that means that advertising is cheaper than ever. Facebook has been going up in ad costs. Now we're seeing the best cost per purchase, best cost per lead, that we've seen in the last two years because so many brands are pulled back. So the market is more open, you don't have to compete as much.
Second, people are online more now than ever. They're talking about, we don't know if the internet providers have enough bandwidth now to accommodate for how much people are using their phones and their computers and streaming services. So what that means is now you can be in front of more people now more than ever. And some great ideas that I've seen other people do is using things like Instagram Live. People are doing podcasts like we're doing right now on Instagram live, where you can invite in somebody else and showcase that way. And the other part is messaging, understanding what people might be going through and find a way to connect with them through comedy. Make it something funny.
Obviously, everybody's looking for toilet paper. Make an ad regarding that. We did that and that's one of our best performing ads right now for Dropkick. Providing hope, providing ideas, people want education right now. They want to better themselves. If they've lost their job, people want to find a way to better themselves so that they can reenter the job market or maybe create their own career. So if you can tackle those things, you're going to be in a better position. Just no doubt about it.
Question: So what is a typical digital platform that you utilize to help your clients price?
Answer: In regards to Facebook, organically of your brand and a page, it's kind of dead, it's kind of useless. Not a big secret there since they changed it a couple of years ago, you have to boost posts now to get things seen. But for Facebook ads, it works well. The newsfeed is still the most profitable ad placement there is in all of digital marketing. One thing that's still good at Facebook, organically, would be Facebook Live, doing live videos off of Facebook. That's great too because then again, that shows up in people's newsfeeds. So ads and organic stuff regarding Facebook newsfeeds is still alive and well.
Other than that, Instagram, that newsfeed organically does still do very well. So if you can post regular videos, nice looking images, Instagram stories, go live on Instagram. That's one of the best organic platforms. No secret, also, LinkedIn. LinkedIn is growing phenomenally. I'm starting to see LinkedIn like as a newsfeed, it's turning into kind of what Facebook used to be, but for business adults. So there's great platforms out there that are still worth being on and still worth being active on. So you just got to use them and use them effectively.
Question: So is there anything that markers really should be avoiding doing right now?
Answer: So it right now in the current climate, you definitely want to avoid, China hit things too hard. You don't want to be too aggressive with your pitches, with your sales, all that kind of stuff. You want to come from a place of wanting to serve and help.
You can't be doing any type of hard selling right now, it's just not the right climate for that. You need to come in from a place of wanting to serve, number one. And if you can do that, if you can actually provide some kind of education or some kind of help, and it doesn't have to be where you talk to somebody on the phone or something like that.
It can be as little as a blog post that helps people with something they may be facing, that you have knowledge on. So if you can come from a place of service, especially in this climate, you're going to see better results.
Check Out The Podcast!
Orlando had a LOT of great information from his experience in digital marketing, check out the podcast below to learn more about how to drive your business with digital marketing!
Every week we have a marketing professional on our show to share their tips, tricks and lessons learned from their professional experience. Check out some of our other podcast blogs from earlier this year:
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