48: Important Social Media Marketing Concepts You Should Understand: Part 2, Paid Social

Kimberly Beer 0:00
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Jaz 0:20
Welcome to The Business Animal podcast. Saddle up for a gallop to the top of the animal industry, where you’ll learn how to tame your wild business feast with tips, techniques, and tools that will take overwhelm to obedience school, and have you wagging your tail with joy. And now your hosts, Kim Beer, and Cara Taylor Swift.

Kimberly Beer 0:41
Hey there business animals, it’s Kim with Be More Business

Cara Taylor Swift 0:45
and Cara with Fast Horse Photography,

Kimberly Beer 0:47
and welcome to The Business Animal podcast. So today we’re bringing you part two of our social media metrics and analytics conversation. And we talked last week about organic social media. And we hope you got a lot out of that episode, and that you’re applying some of those principles and understandings to your social media marketing organically. And today, we want to start talking about paid social. Now paid social is an incredibly large conversation. And it’s not going to be contained within this one episode, what we want to do is bring you a really good base of knowledge in this episode, and then we have a guest coming on in the near future, that will be a little bit more detailed about some tactics that you can use and some steps that you can take to really make your paid advertising work with social media or to understand it in a way that you can intelligently have a conversation about it with someone else who would do your paid social media. So let’s dive in Cara, let’s first talk about the benefits of paid social media. What do you think those are?

Cara Taylor Swift 1:54
Well, we’re all using organic social media for animal based businesses already, right, and lots of folks are out there, there’s a lot of competition in that you’re probably not being seen by everyone that you want to be seen by in your animal business. And with organic social, your reach is never guaranteed. So even though you have an audience of a certain number, there’s no guarantee that those people are actually going to see what you’re putting out there. Right paid social media actually ensures that your posts get seen, and that they support those organic efforts that you’re already putting out there. And the reason that works is because you’re literally paying for your audience’s attention. It’s that simple, you’re paying to get the word out, you’re paying to reach a very targeted audience. And then that takes me to my second part is the targeting, you actually have the power as you know, small animal based businesses to actually set that campaign and target the audience potential consumers out there that are really most likely to take action on your offer. So you can get super detailed, I was looking at it and they’ve even updated it a little more, but you can target by interests. So for me, I go in and I look for things that are horse related equine related, I’m looking for those people, you can target by income, by location, by relationship status, for crying out loud. So if you’re someone that’s looking to reach maybe a newly engaged market, or someone who’s planning a wedding, you know, that’s a you can be reaching that or someone who’s working on I don’t know, maybe you are wanting to target by interest. So you’ve got people that are out there actively showing horses or they are really into a particular breed of dog, you can target specifically to those people, you can target based on their work, the behaviors, the things they like to do the live it really goes on and on and on. And then having paid social out there provides a lot more in depth information about your audience, you are going to learn a lot about the people that you think you are targeting, versus how they’re interacting with your ads. And I’ve always found that really interesting because you get better analytics when you are doing paid social. So you can pull those analytics up. And you actually can learn a lot from that. So we talked a lot about analytics on our last episode. Sorry, all my dogs are chiming in this morning. Yes, they they’re, they’re all paid social media marketing. They are they’re like clapping in the background. Okay. And then one of the other things just to consider is that social media ads are among the top five ways that consumers are out there right now learning about new brands. So the top one of the top five ways brand awareness is huge. Like that’s one of the hardest things when you’re especially if you’re a small, animal based business owner with a smaller audience already. How do you push yourself out there is I can imagine how frustrating it it is. I mean, I am a manager for multiple social media accounts in terms of putting stuff out there. And I’m used to a little bit spoiled by the Fast Horse account, who has a pretty decent sized audience versus a couple other social media accounts that we have that have a much smaller audience and I’m always shocked when I put stuff out there and the actions that are taken on it. or one or two or three actions. And I’m like, where’s everybody at? You know, this is a really great way to push that brand awareness out there. Because once again, you’re literally paying for people to see it to see your information, and you’re targeting it to people that will care about it.

Kimberly Beer 5:16
yeah, that’s the whole goal. At least that’s what you hope happens, I do want people to understand one thing about like paying for exposure, even though you’re paying for exposure, you still are at the mercy of the algorithm for social media. And your ads fall into the same sort of qualifications even that your other organic posts do. So for example, engagement and, and stuff like that Facebook, and Instagram. And while all of the social networks, we always talk about Facebook, and Instagram, because they’re the big dogs on the block, but this works for all of them. They do keep a lot of records, so to speak, on people’s behavior. And that’s how they get the information that allows you to be able to target ads more specifically. So they have a better concept like the algorithm, not humans, but the algorithm knows who the who the active people are, and who like are the better qualified people. And if your ad is not sometimes performing well, like it’s not getting engagement, it’s not bringing something to the platform, or people are hiding it or saying they don’t want to see ads from you. Again, it does affect the ability for you to penetrate the audience that you want to penetrate. And we’ll mention that again during the day when we get into the further into the big three. And I think it’s now it’s time to kind of announce our big three for this episode. Now that we understand a little bit more about why social media marketing is important. The Big Three starts with knowing your paid metrics, understanding the terminology that goes around it, and how that’s going to impact your decisions as a add buyer. And then second, to be realistic about what this is and what it can do for your business and what part of it is inside of your overall marketing plan. And then finally, some considerations around hiring somebody to help you with it. Because I’m a big advocate for really understanding something well enough that you know, that the person who’s doing that job for you is doing a good job or being able to ascertain if they’re doing a bad job. But this is something that a lot of small businesses, and a lot of bigger businesses believe in farming out to another person or a tool. So we definitely want to talk about being able to access those things. Okay, so let’s get started with talking about metrics. So the first thing I want to do is to clarify, when we’re talking about these metrics, I have included metrics that are appropriate for both search and social. So when we’re talking about those things, let’s clarify that first search is the things that you will type into a search engine and will lead people back to your website or a landing page or something like that, that’s many, you’re probably going to be shifting off to Google. There’s other search engines out there. There’s other things to pay for in search. But that’s for our conversation today. That’s who we’re talking about. Then there’s social media. So that’s Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, whatever it is that you’re buying advertising on that social network. So these metrics work for both of those things. But for most small businesses, they’re separate marketing budgets, although many of the tactics are are very similar in both avenues. Alright, so when when we talked about organic last week, we talked about impressions and reach. And those are factors here as well. But here, they may determine how much you’re paying. Because you pay differently for impressions versus conversions versus there, there are some extra extras added into this conversation. So they’re, they’re really important metrics to understand and go back if you haven’t listened to that episode, because we talk a lot about those. You’re also going to add awareness, consideration and conversion here. And these used to be terms that Facebook specifically used for their ads like you would go into ad manager and say, Do you want the your ad to build awareness get consideration or conversion now since so many lay people now are buying advertising, Facebook in particular, that means Instagram as well have really moved this into something that feels more tactile to all humanity. Like do you want to get more clips on your website? Do you want to raise awareness around your brand? Do you want to gather leads so

Cara Taylor Swift 9:50
they’re trying to make it stupid simple. Yeah, they are all of us out there that aren’t you know, yeah. And and bless them aren’t savvy with that marketing language.

Kimberly Beer 9:58
Yes and bless them for that. Because the old way of doing ads was so confusing. And I used to joke when I would go to teach a class around how to use the ad manager in Facebook and be like, you know, I’m going to do this today. And I can guarantee you that one, they’ve changed something in before I taught this class, and I’m not going to know what the heck it was, I’m not able to find something, which was always in constantly embarrassing. And then the second thing is, is when you go home, it’s probably moved. So just be diligent in poking around. So they’ve done a lot of improvement. And they keep improving, they keep making ad purchasing more assessable. But in that process, terms have shifted and moved. But marketing professionals use these terms. And that’s what I really want to try to get this episode set up for today is you can go dabble with paying for ads. But when you really want to get some skin in this game, you’re probably going to want to have help from some aspect. And I want you to understand what these things mean. So awareness is linked to impressions, you want to use it as a goal when you want to get your brand in front of more people. And awareness leads to consideration. So it’s the next step after awarenesses consideration, consideration is linked to two clicks and engagement. So you want to use it as a goal when you want to get leads into your business. So consideration leads to conversion and conversion is linked to sales, you want to use it when you make a direct sale. Now, depending upon the type of business that you have, you’re going to use these in different measures. So if you’re a national brand that has retail distributors, you’re going to be more interested in running ads that build awareness, because that’s going to get more people into your retail locations and get more exposure for your product if you are a lead based business. So let’s say you’re doing courses or training where people have to invest in it and come in person, they often have questions about things, my coaches who work with retreats or that kind of stuff fall into this category, you are looking really for consideration, you’re looking for people that want to fill out a form or do something to get into your leads. Now filling out a form is considered a form of conversion. So for those lead based businesses, a lot of times the social paid social people are going to consider that an actual conversion when somebody fills out a form have made a sale yet. But when they fill out the form that took a lot of action on that individual’s part. So it’s considered a conversion. And then finally, in this group, the group that kind of wants to skip that consideration phase and go straight from awareness to conversion, our retail oriented businesses that have an E commerce presence, so the ad is going to go directly to their e commerce page, and to be able to have that person checkout and make a sale. Now all of this is super important, because it’s based upon how these businesses, the marketing businesses of Facebook, Instagram, all of the social networks, how they tally what your success rate is. So you get into something called attribution here. So let’s say you purchase an ad on Facebook, and somebody sees that ad on Facebook, and then they forget about you for a minute, maybe they were in the line at Starbucks and the coffee came up. And then later on that afternoon, they remember Oh, I saw Cara, I saw Fast Horse Photography pop up in my newsfeed, I think that I will go take a look at their website. And rather than go back to Facebook and try to find the ad that they saw, they’re going to go in and type you into search. That’s why search and social media paid advertising is so linked together, they’re going to type your name into search or what they remember of your name, and Google is going to take it and if you’ve have a paid search ad, it’s going to pop up at the top, and they’re going to be able to click on it and go to your business. Well, now technically, technically, Facebook created the awareness and Google created the consideration that lead to the conversion for the sale. So when they’re charging people, there’s a lot of attribution tracking. So understanding these three terms, reports back into you being able to understand where to place the pixel code that determines to the algorithm what success is. So for awareness, they’re going to do that internally inside the app right so if for Facebook, you seeing that ad, it being served in your newsfeed you hesitating over it, are commenting on it or liking or engaging with it. That means that ad was a success, right that was successful. When it comes to consideration and conversion. There has to be some type of action on the user’s behalf. In order to fulfill those goals, so where you, the user are responsible for that is you have to place whatever that particular wherever you’re advertisings terminology, we’re just going to call it a pixel, because that’s what Facebook calls it. Wherever you place that conversion indicator, that’s where the algorithm is going to say, yes, that was successful. somebody clicked on this and went to the website. And they’re able to track that, because your website has a pixel on it, that basically downloads to the user’s computer and says that that transaction took place. Now to muddy the waters even deeper. And I hope I haven’t lost anybody at this point. But to muddy the waters even more because of privacy. And especially because Apple has really like tightened down on some of the reporting that it sends back based upon what you visit on their devices and some of the browser’s and then Facebook’s desire to help users be happier about what data is shared, you as the user have a lot of control over what stays and goes in that conversation and what is tracked for your specific account. And that is shifting and moving at a very rapid pace right now. So it’s all over the board. So I want you to also understand that in the metrics that you choose.

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Some of these metrics are a little bit misleading. Conversion Tracking can be difficult for the reasons that I said. Also, if your business doesn’t leave a clear digital trail, it can be hard for you to assess what is working and what isn’t working. It’s really important, like we mentioned last time to institute something into your business that helps you be able to understand where your sales are coming from, and where people are finding you whether that’s online or in print media. And to make sure you ask those questions and then ask follow up questions if you need to, to further clarify it without encouraging you to interrogate your client. Which, which as a marketer, sometimes I want to do it say I have to interrogate you, because I need to know we didn’t buy that ad in western horseman. So where did you really see it? So, yeah, Cara, do you have anything to add to this little section of the conversation?

Cara Taylor Swift 18:01
No, that’s I’m looking forward to digging in deeper into some of that with our guests that we have coming on soon to kind of fill in some of the holes but because that’s a lot of that’s a lot of stuff that you just covered in number one, and I could see it being a little confusing for some folks. So I love the idea that we’re gonna have kind of a guest expert in this subject,

Kimberly Beer 18:20
And someone who is going to deal with it day to day on different sized businesses, I primarily work with very small businesses in my business. So it’s a different tactic, just as you mentioned, marketing to smaller audience is different than marketing to a bigger audience. And then when you get into the really big audiences, there’s a lot of things that really play into this that are very, very important. And another thing, it is a moving target. So the game is constantly changing when it comes to this, even in how these these social networks are search how Google is handling the advertising, I do recommend that if this is something you are very serious about doing in your business, that you subscribe to some podcasts that really address this as a deep down issue. My favorite is social media marketing talk show and the Social Media Examiner. I really think that the guy who runs that his name is Michael Stelzner. I think that he is one of the best interviewers that gets some great information out of some of the best minds in this game. That said, Let me caveat that by going when you’re listening to that show, you are listening to people who are playing with those bigger audiences. And most of our listeners have smaller audiences on social media. And some of those tactics are not financially feasible or feasible because you don’t have the number of followers that you need to have to execute the tactic. So you can’t hold yourselves to the standard that those results are the people that are on those shows are talking about. So you have to assess when they’re talking about the businesses that they’re talking about. Does that business compare to the way that you’re doing business? Or is it unrealistic for you to expect that goal, and you also, and I have to remember that some of the numbers that people put up for their social media marketing are not, they’re realistic, and they really happened, but they’re very misleading. I see a lot of times, and it’s less now than it was but a few years ago is a really bad habit for social media marketers to place ads on social media that said, I can help your business turn six figure profit using Facebook ads? Well, the thing is, is that you have to spend six figures to make six figures and the formula can actually work. Like if you have the money to gamble. To me, it feels a whole lot, like, I don’t know, like betting on a horse race, you know, if you really know your horses, and you know what you’re doing, you have a relatively good opportunity. But horse racing is horse racing. So the lead horse could have a bad day, and the the one that’s 1000 to one odds, could swing right across the line. So you’re still kind of gambling a little bit even with those things. Just to put that in concrete terms. I’ve heard people say I’ve made $150,000. By putting ads on Facebook, what they don’t tell you behind the scenes is they spent 149,000 In order to do that, so they still made a profit. But it wasn’t what it looked like.

Cara Taylor Swift 21:36
So I think that takes us to big three, number two pretty clearly just being, you know, be realistic about your ad buys and buying ads. So and part of that is just knowing when you’re ready, you know, I think a basic place to start is you need to have a social platform in mind. So that means that you should already have a social media account that you’re planning on running an ad from, and you should have a following of some sort. And you need to already have been active on the social platform. So you don’t want to have a social media platform that you have maybe for your business, and you’re not ever posting anything and it’s got really old content on it. And then think that you’re going to get on and run an ad, you definitely want to be active on there organically already showing that you have this organic presence can really ensure to your audience that you’re a legitimate business off the bat. So if you’re going to be pulling people there, or from there to a website or something, you really need to have that stuff up to date, looking sharp, be ready to interact when some of that stuff starts coming in. And one of the things I keep seeing and that I I feel right about as you start small, you don’t have to jump in and do it on every platform. Even just choose one of your favorite social media platforms, maybe the one you’re most comfortable on right now some of the top platforms for paid social are Facebook’s the big dog, for sure, followed by Youtube, Instagram, you know, with Instagram, you can now do paid reels advertising. And that’s really big because video content so huge Twitter, Pinterest, tick tock and then Snapchat is probably at the lower end of that these days. But those are probably the biggest platforms right now that you can do paid social targeting through, I think the next step is you got to have some kind of plan.

Kimberly Beer 23:20
Yeah, don’t shy away from YouTube, people often don’t think of YouTube as a good place to place paid advertising. But it’s actually one of the easiest places to buy ads. And it’s also one of the best places to get seen.

Cara Taylor Swift 23:32
And it’s I think it’s the number two most visited social media platform like it’s huge right now. It is it’s more it is huge. I think it’s more so than even Instagram in terms of visitors and Instagram is is big. So definitely I never think about YouTube, because I’m not super active on there, unless I’m looking to learn something or to watch funny videos. But you know, we only good cat video every now and then.

Kimberly Beer 23:54
And you don’t have to be active on YouTube to take advantage of YouTube advertising. And what I really want to impart is that it’s easy to advertise on YouTube. And people are kind of a captive audience in the front of videos because they have to sit there and listen to at least a few seconds of your spiel before they can press skip ad. Now they may sit there with their finger hovering over the skip ad button. But it’s an easier place to do. And if you want to dabble in this and Facebook doesn’t seem to be kicking out the results that you want, I would recommend taking a look at YouTube. So sorry, Cara, I interrupted you in the middle of that in the middle of you moving on to your next point, but I wanted to get that in.

Cara Taylor Swift 24:33
That’s okay. The next piece is that you really just need to have a plan, like think about who you want to target and what is your reason to run like he should have a reason. You know, do you have something coming up that you know some kind of promotion or do you have a new product coming out? Or are you moving to a new location? I mean, there could be so many different things that you’re you know, is there holiday advertising? Are you offering something new any of that just you want to have a reason? The big thing is is that you don’t want to run paid ads Just because you want to have some reasoning behind it, you know, I’ve done just because ads just to get some action on the page and stuff and it never results in paid conversions. I might get more likes, I might get more follows I might get more shares, but it’s kind of like just throwing money out there unless you have a reason behind using that new audience at some point. So don’t do it just because have a plan in place.

Cara Taylor Swift 25:27
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Cara Taylor Swift 26:31
Okay so then the next piece of that is you want to have a budget in mind. So Kim has already talked a little bit about the money side of things. But you want to have a budget in mind and you want to be ready to commit to that paid campaign. So and know that other published results are misleading. So Kim’s talked about that as well. I think it’s like what did you say Kim, the marketing budget formulas like eight to 15% of your gross desired revenue. And that social media should only be a portion of that,

Kimberly Beer 27:01
yes. And here’s where I really want to inject into the conversation that another thing you need to understand besides your marketing budget, which let me just address that for a minute. So eight to 15% is typical product oriented businesses and service oriented businesses are going to approach this a little differently. product oriented businesses usually have to pay a little bit more of the percentage of their gross desired revenue than service businesses do just because of the discrepancy in the in the profit margin there. But eight to 15%. That is your overall marketing budget. So for my program, and my four by four program, there are 16 points that I talk about, that you need to invest in, in your business, and only one of those 16 contains all of this paid marketing, plus all of your print marketing and all the other stuff. So marketing is a very, very big conversation and your social media paid advertising and your search paid advertising needs to be in relation to the rest of your budget. If you are a strictly online business, of course, your digital marketing budget for things like social media and search are going to be higher than another business. What I don’t like is when people think I have to spend 15% of my gross desired revenue on Facebook ads, that’s not the case at all. That should be a small portion. And it should be in proportion to what digital means to your business. There’s a ton of other things to invest your time and money on in marketing that may be far more impactful than social media. And social media is just simply a support mechanism for those things, in which case, your paid advertising budget for social media is going to be really, really small. The other thing I want to talk about here is that it’s very important for you to do a little bit of pre research before you start buying ads around what is a customer worth to you. So what is a sale worth to you and what is a customer worth to you and what is a customer’s lifetime value for your business. Now the way that you take a look at that the sale is pretty obvious, right? If you sell a product that is 12.95, you pay 8.95 to have it manufactured, then your profit is pretty plain and and a customer coming to you has that value. Now let’s say that that product is something that those that your customer is going to purchase over and over and over again, like maybe a supplement or a vitamin or something or, or dog grooming or something that’s repeated over and over that smaller amount of money starts to get really big when you look at the lifetime value of what that customer brings to your business. And then also you have to look at what is a lead value to you. So if you have a $20,000 course that you’re selling, you can spend a lot of money on a lead in order to To get that course sold, but if you’re doing a $100 shoe job on I don’t even know probably a $200 Shoe job, I haven’t had horses shot in ages, what is a typical farrier Bill these days? We do just trimming around here. So it’s a lot, but it’s not a lot to horse people, right? So, but you have to look at what is that? What is that one piece going to be? And then if you’re coming back to that person every eight weeks, what is their lifetime value for you to make that client and to make that exposure, and you as the business owner have to come up with the calculations for those, because that’s going to figure in to when you start paying for advertising, what are you willing to put out there to be able to get the consideration and conversion that you need in order to convert people into sales. So that’s, it’s a very important metric to go over with your social media marketing person that you may want to work with in the future, because it really sets their expectations as to what they can spend on your ad buy and create a successful scenario for you. There’s no doubt that social media ads and search ads work or that they can bring money into your business. But understanding how that piece of the puzzle fits together in your business is critical. And that’s where you need to start being really realistic when you’re stepping into this avenue of buying advertising is you have to do your homework and know those figures for yourself.

Cara Taylor Swift 31:38
Well, and another part of that homework is, you know, what are your What are your competitor businesses doing? You know, what’s your competition doing out there? In terms of advertising? You know, have you researched that already? Definitely that should be part of, you know, knowing when you’re ready. And when you’re being realistic about ad buys, you know, look for look for things like what type of language they’re using, what their ads look like, what kind of imagery they’re using, but also look at the successes of those campaigns, you can see the sponsored ads and look at you know, are they getting action from that, you’re not going to be able to see everything, but you can get an idea of it’s getting a lot of action. And you can also look for those ad campaigns that don’t seem to be successful at all for your competitors. And learn from that Facebook has this really cool feature called the ads library, the ad library is a place where you can go in search for ads that are running across Facebook apps, so includes Instagram, so it’s running across their different apps, and you can use it to get information about the ads that you’re seeing. You can also get examples of ads that are out there right now, if you go into that Facebook ads feature, you can target the location in terms of country. And then you can also click through the categories so that right now they provide all ads, you can look at issues, elections, politics, housing, employment and credit. If you click on the All ads, then there’s a search feature. And you can actually get really detailed an example that I did a little while ago is as an equine photographer, I just put in equine photography, and several current ads that have been launched in December pop up and they’re all geared towards equine photographers. So it’s really interesting for me to see what other equine photographers are currently advertising, what kind of promotions that they’re running, the language that they’re using around that the images that they’re using around that. And this is a cool way to kind of get educated on what other folks are doing out there. And then there’s even an option to click through to see the ad details. So definitely spend a little time playing with this if you’re thinking about doing some running some campaigns on especially on Facebook or Instagram, but I would think that some of this would be useful across other platforms as well. It’s just a really interesting feature.

Kimberly Beer 33:49
It is an interesting feature. And I am so going to get lost in this later today on some things that I want to research around it. I love this tool. I love that Facebook is providing it. And I love that insight for business research just overall. I mean, even if you’re not considering doing paid ads coming in here and taking a look at keywords and taking a look at how those are showing up in paid advertising across Facebook’s real estate. It’s impactful. I I’ve already done a couple of searches while we’ve been kind of talking this morning, and I’ve gone oh wow, that’s really fascinating. So I think this is a wonderful tool.

Cara Taylor Swift 34:29
It shows you everything from the hashtags that they’re using. It shows their their followers, it shows a lot and I thought it was pretty neat. And then just be careful. You might get sucked in like some of these are really compelling ads. Anyway, I just think that it’s I just saw one and I was like ooh, I need to know more about that. But anyway, I just think this is an interesting tool and it comes down to I mean, I say this with like quotation marks but Facebook trying to be more transparent. That’s what it comes down to. But I I think it’s a cool tool for especially the small business owner, and maybe someone who’s not able to hire someone to really help them. Like they kind of want to start dabbling on their own. I think this is a way to kind of learn what else is out there and see what other businesses are doing. That could be considered in your same line of work and your same, you know, that they’re your competitors, potentially.

Kimberly Beer 35:22
yeah, and you have to anybody that use social media for a hot minute knows that once you express an interest in a certain topic, you start getting bombarded with ads around that particular product or topic. So this lets you know what else is showing up in the newsfeeds of the people that have expressed an interest in what you’re doing. And that’s really important, because if you want to insert yourself in that conversation, like I’ve said, your ad, just because you pay for the exposure does not guarantee that exposure is going to get into the right hands, you have stacked the deck in your favor, but you still have to create good and compelling advertising in order to do that, it doesn’t mean you can drop off on that, that responsibility to provide value to the end user. And this tells you what the end users seeing. So that you can make your ad even better. So I think this ups the game for a lot of people out there to step up and be better. So Cara, I think that finally brings us to the the last of our big three, which we have mentioned numerous times throughout the other two of the big three. And that’s go ahead and get help when you need it. Here. You are in the game with some skin now. And so it’s time to invest in help if you need that help. And guess what it comes out of that eight to 15% of your marketing budget. So this area is just it’s so rapidly moving, there’s so many moving pieces, so much changes. And staying ahead of the curve does take a lot of research and expertise. There are people out there who have made it their sole mission and in their business to be able to know the answers to look ahead and see what’s coming up and help you with it. That said, I want to give you a shark warning. Because these waters are so rich with people that don’t always know what’s going on or are always ahead of the curve when it comes to understanding social media and paid social media and paid search advertising. There are a lot of sharks out there waiting to eat you. So make sure you do some good research before you hire a company or a person. Do not hire the people who drop notes into your blog posts or fill out your forms on your website and tell you that you need to get higher rankings in Google be careful of the people who email you searching for things and telling you they can up your ranking or get you more business on paid social media. Just be really wary of that. I would recommend that when you want to find someone to work with that you look for referrals. So remember back in the episode when we talked about the sustainability squad and we talked about, you know looking at for mentors and and people who support you in your business, this is a good time to turn to those mentors and ask questions about who do you know that would be good at this. Ask other businesses that are complementary in your industry who’s handling their paid advertising and paid marketing programs and just really do your research, ask for references. This is a place where I feel like that is absolutely positively not only expected, but it should be a absolute must is asked for references, talk to the references, don’t just ask for them, call the people and actually talk to them. And make sure that the person that you’re hiring really is invested in making an impact for your business because this is a place where people have lost a lot of money and it’s not turned out well for them. So there’s your shark warning on the beach of social media, paid social media and paid search. So yeah, I think that we have given you so much information you’re probably suffering from overload right now. And I want you to know that that’s okay too

Cara Taylor Swift 39:20
between this episode and our last episode. So like Kim said, we’ve got kind of a guest expert coming on this topic and we just want to have them like really go into some details and give you guys some more concrete tips. We hope that both of these last two episodes have given you guys something to think about have kind of got you prepped as like a one on one into organic and paid social media marketing. We look forward to having a guest on soon for you guys. And we hope that you enjoyed this episode and that you know you guys are out there kicking butt in your animal based businesses right now. So if you enjoy our episodes, please hop over and see us on social media. We’re on Facebook, Instagram You know and visit our website. We’d love to chat with you guys.

Kimberly Beer 40:02
Absolutely. And if you have a specific question around paid social media or paid search that you would like our guest expert to answer there’s plenty of time between this when this episode is coming out in in your hands and when we will have that person on. So when you hear it, go over to our social networks, or email us or head to the website where you can fill out a contact form, but let us know what your questions are. Because we will most certainly ask them for you and help you find the answers to those or you know, not just questions but challenges or concerns around paying for social media marketing or paying for search marketing.

Jaz 40:39
Thanks for listening to this episode of The Business Animal. Be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you learned something today, leave us a review. To learn more. Find us at thebusinessanimal.com We’d love to hear from you. Until next time, keep your business well trained with The Business Animal