13 Google Marketing and Paid advertising with Ben Clay

Hey there, it's Ali here. Thanks for checking in to create a thriving hypnotherapy business podcast. This podcast is most definitely for you if you're a new or established hypnotherapist who wants to flourish in practice and stay in business. Just so you know, we have a growing Facebook community where you can go for support, sanity and inspiration. Check out the show notes for a link, but for now though, let's get on with the show. Today I'm delighted to welcome an absolutely exemplary human being Ben Clay from Digital Defined and Ben I know because he works with us in the school that I trained for and also helps me with my own hypnotherapy practice and he is a specialist in search marketing. Hello, Ben. Hi, Ali. Was that an appropriate intro by the way? Yeah, super perfect. Yeah, cool, excellent, good. Because, well, the first thing is because the reason I ask that is not just because I want to get Ben's okay, it's because anything in search marketing, SEO, who I've got another person specialising in coming on the podcast for that is what I would put under the term dark arts. So, so yes, so when I introduce it, I'm not really even sure what I'm introducing most of the time. So it's really important that, you know, we find out more about it because it's such a huge, it's such a big deal, isn't it, Ben? Yes. The internet's a place that's full of people who are competing for the same traffic and it's very difficult, especially when you're starting out with a brand new domain, a brand new website, a brand new business and you're just trying to get visible, you're just trying to have a presence and with the kind of the support that you can get from specialists like myself and others, we try and help you to improve your online visibility. I'll kind of focus today is all about search marketing but my focus is all about paid ads and paid search advertising. The difference is being is the SEO is a bit of a long-term strategy and it's really valuable, it's definitely something that is necessary or in terms of paid ads, it's a great quick fix but it's also a great opportunity for you to get in front of people with the right level of intent and that's where we focus, that's where we look for the value. It's really important to make sure that you've got that online presence but there you go. Ben has 10 conversations in his head all at the same time just so you know. I said we did it, I probably won't because it's really good fun listening to someone. Yes, that's first thing because I was just used the term search marketing and I presume it's paid, that's how I would describe it. So search marketing is much more SEO and the paid search marketing so there's kind of a change in management. It's kind of like the whole thing together whereas the way that we would define it in the industry is that I do, it is what it's called, PPC, paper click but I have specialised in paid search advertising and then you'll have all the people that would just focus on SEO as well. They definitely go hand in hand together and it's something that if you can afford it and again that's most of the time the problem is that setting these projects up or setting a website up is quite an expensive thing to start out within the first place so it's probably important at that point that you kind of think about everything right from the get-go to make sure that everything's taken into account when you're budgeting for your marketing spend as well as thinking about your website it's important to start talking to people about SEO about paid advertising, getting understanding and an idea of how much it's going to cost you to achieve the goals that you're after. Don't expect everything to work immediately, don't expect everything to be spending exactly what you think it's going to spend. Initially ask the honest questions and get honest answers back, try and find people that you trust that you can work with and that you can create a great personal relationship with. If you can build a really good personal relationship with somebody that trust is always going to be there I think. Yeah absolutely. So what's your experience of paid search marketing with hypnotherapists? That's a long long time. Why is that? So I mean I've been working with hypnotherapists for some time now and it's because my mother is a hypnotherapist. She also works with CPHT running the the school in Leeds training future hypnotherapists as well. So I've kind of had a little bit of a back to all to hypnotherapy for quite some time now and I've been working with people all over the country in the industry since I settled really. It's kind of put me into it not just into hypnotherapy but I've kind of become a bit of a therapist specialist with paid search. It's not just hypnotherapy that I work with now is the broad therapist group but I've really enjoyed it and this learning every day. So what do you think is different about paid search marketing for therapists or hypnotherapists? Is there any difference? Yes there is. Some of the kind of typical problems that we see hypnotherapists come up against is they will start out a bit too broad and unfortunately that results in Google and Bing Bing do paid ads as well for search but Google is where most people start but I think most people most hypnotherapists start off and maybe go a little bit too broad in the hopes that they'll get more but what we've actually found is that the best they can do and the most valuable thing they can do is to just make sure that everything they want to have they achieve and they have 100% visibility in those areas. So an example would be that maybe somebody tried adding a new keyword to their Google ads account to pick up people that are looking for support and counseling or mental health support. I've seen that a few times and unfortunately Google doesn't quite understand the relevance and it starts showing ads up that aren't as relevant to that person and to the business and so people will start getting inquiries that don't relate to hypnotherapy. I've even seen people get phone calls from prospective customers that we're looking for mental health help lines because their ads accounts are just a little too broad at the start and they've made a few mistakes and it just results in people spending money they don't need to spend when ultimately all we want to do is to kind of really target everything that we know is going to work from years of experience. You want to understand exactly what we can do and then we want to start branching out we want to find we want to focus on those things we know are going to be right and then branch out and start testing what else could we do what else and where is the other opportunities to kind of improve your visibility to get people to get in front of people that might want your services some of the areas to kind of avoid going anywhere near are kind of targeting people based on medical issues and that is extremely difficult with hypnotherapy and the reason why I try and avoid it is because if Google thinks you are targeting users based on medical data then all of a sudden it will block your account from being able to remark it and then we won't be able to go after people that have been to the site and haven't converted because it's got policies in place to protect people's personal data and obviously if they're searching for a medical related issue then there's a good chance that they suffer from that issue. Right, so what would that look like? What would that say? What would be an example of that? Because my brain's going what would that be like? So I mean there's lots of things, common issues that people come to, hypnotherapists for, might be stress, anxiety, IBS, all of these types of issues and medical issues and if we start bidding on those keywords, having a copy that relates to those medical issues and then dropping those people onto medical pages that are specifically about those issues, there's a good chance that Google is going to say that we're in a violation of a policy and then they're going to disable the option for us to actually remark it people. Now initially it's not an issue because most of the time we're starting off and we're going to spend maybe 10 to 12 to even 15 pound a day going after search traffic for our website and that doesn't generate enough traffic for us to remark it but if it does get to a point where the business is working really well, it's successful, you get lots of traffic through organic search, through social, through paid ads, it could be that you get to a trigger point where you've had enough people come to your website and then ultimately all Google is looking for is enough people sitting in a bucket to say that's the threshold, we've had over a hundred people, we can start showing these people. that have been to the website and not converted advertisements on display, and so advertisements on display are, you've all been to websites like the Radio Times website, Daily Mail, the Sun. These websites all actually allow us to advertise through Google Ads with what's called a display advertisement, and you've probably seen that there's hundreds of different variations of formats, but Google has a pre-built format in the ads itself and it allows you to upload images to upload videos, logos, headlines, descriptions, long headlines, lots of different things, using all of those different components. It actually puts together the ad itself and it will take the colors out of your logo and use those to brand the asset up a little bit, but it gives us the opportunity to have a great visibility to people that aren't actively searching but have been to the website or maybe they're just interested in a certain type of thing that would show them, that would show you that they're a customer or a potential customer for you, so it could be that they're in the market for a certain service or they're in the market for a certain product and you know from your data that typical converter, the person that typically books a session with you is two or three times more likely to be in market for a four by four car or something bizarre, and so all this data is available to us through Google ads. We can seal this type of thing, yeah, being seal of this and we can take that and kind of use it for our benefit as well. The reason why display is so powerful is because it kind of gives us that mass visibility where it's showing maybe hundreds of thousands of impressions and in impression being somebody's had an ad pop up on the screen, but it's really low cost and so if we can kind of get to a certain point where we understand our users, we understand our converters, we understand the data behind it, we can actually build out similar looking audiences and go after them proactively as well and we can do it extremely cost efficiently, so we can, you know instead of spending maybe £1.52, £50 a click on search ads, we could be spending seven peer click on a display ad and it kind of drives a lot more traffic to the site, and the traffic is less valuable and you know we do get a lot of people coming in and they're leaving immediately because it's not something they were actively searching for, but it does help to kind of promote the brand and get it in front of people, especially with their small target area because with hypnotherapy, something that I think hypnotherapists kind of need to focus on and need to kind of understand is what does a typical customer journey look like to them, and I think it's really valuable to think about what's a similar kind of therapist that people might travel and so recently I've had the lovely experience of hurting my back and I had to go and visit a osteopath, yes, and all I did was Google osteopath near me and found a close one with decent Google reviews and I wouldn't have travelled more than 10 minutes, and I think that's something that maybe we've got to think about when we're doing things like paying for ads, we don't need to go too broad, we don't need to go too far, we've got to think about what is it that the customer is likely to do, in every town there may be one or two hypnotherapists, so we've already got competition, if we broaden ourselves out further, we're just going to be competing with others outside of an area, and we're going to be spending money where it's unlikely to convert, and I think initially if we're setting up a business, the first thing we need to do is just to set that 10 mile radius around the practice itself and just focus on those areas and driving 100% share of the market so that when people are searching irrespective of what they're searching, we're always the first option for them. Yeah, so you said when they're searching on Google, you know, it's like because we talk about Google places as well, so that would be attached to that as well, wouldn't it? Let's have a chat about that. Yeah, so Bing is Bing Places and Google is Google My Business, so there are two listings areas for those two search engines, so if you want to show your business on a search results page, whether it's Bing or Google, you need to make sure that you have a presence on Google My Business and a presence on Bing Places, now the benefit of Bing is that they're used to being in second place and following Google, so one of the things that you can do quite easily is get your Google, my business profile set up so that people can find you easily in Google Maps and you start showing up for local searches, but then when you go over to Bing Places, you can actually duplicate your Google My Business listing straight into Bing Places and this kind of just makes it a little bit easier because they're, you know, all of these different tasks that you've got to do, all of these things that you've got to set up, all these directories that you've got to list your business in when you first setting up, take a lot of time and it's just making sure that these two, these, you know, they are very important, they don't just show up in search results, they show up on a phone when people are searching on a map for a solution, so if somebody is searching for a therapist, we want to make sure that you are listed, you've got your location on there, you have verified your post, you know, through the post you have verified your location. And then other things are, we all understand that the largest value any business is ever going to get, especially the sizes of businesses that we are, is through word of mouth referrals. It's always going to be the most important, but we can support Google, we can support Bing, we can support Facebook by just pushing our customers to give us a review and it's very easy nowadays, they've made it easier and easier for us to log into Google, my business, and get a link to central customers to make the process easy, same with Facebook, it's something that I've experienced historically to, it's not always somebody's first priority and they're always happy to say yes, and you always have to chase it and you know, marketing is always, any business is last priority, but with customers, their last and smallest priorities is always going to be, they've paid the invoice and they may be coming back again at some point, but if you've asked for a review, it's probably going to be done on a list that's going to be put somewhere forgotten about, and so I think I've never had any negative experience from chasing people for reviews, but I understand that there's a significant value to the reviews and it really helps people to get confident in you as a provider, so it's definitely something that I chase after. Yeah, it is a priority isn't it, so yeah, Google my business and get what we would kind of just hear as Google reviews, yes, it is very, very worth it and actually not that difficult to do, but yeah, it's like, and we all know, it's like we go, oh, I wish my clients would leave me reviews, it's like how many reviews do we leave, and because there's one thing moaning about it and there's another guy, oh yeah, I see how that would happen, so you know, it's something that I kind of make a real point of is to leave reviews, because I know how much I appreciate it and I know what the value of it is as well. Yeah, definitely, yeah, it's small business, it's just so hard to set up and it's so hard to get moving forward and to get established and then, you know, eventually you'll get that word of mouth referral rate where people just already know who you are, but I think you just need to kind of support it and it's great as well, because we've had experience in the past of people having negative reviews left, maybe they worked for the right business and it's so difficult to kind of deal with them and to kind of, you know, if they're not left, if they're not wrong, sorry, to get them removed is very difficult and I think the best thing to do is to mitigate it and always make sure that you've got enough positive reviews, that if somebody does leave a negative review, whether it's right or wrong, that it doesn't have a great impact, because if you've got one review and it's a negative review, you're going to struggle to get past that, because people will always see it when they search for your business, it would be the first thing that people spot, so I just think the best thing to do is to always go after it, proactively at the start, try and build it up as much as you can do, so that you've always got that protection. Yes, yeah, I mean, I've had something, I remember someone leaving a Facebook review and they literally, and it was, because I knew them, I went, why did you leave me a one-star review? That was uncool, and they were like, oh my god, did I? No, I mentally focused on it. Can he kind of change it, please, because you're ruining my writing. I've seen it, I've had a Facebook review from somebody who thought I was a completely different company, but it was five-star, and we did comment and just say, I think you might have left this on the wrong company, because obviously they've worked for that review and the horrible firms are just not getting it, because he's accidentally left it on the wrong business, but yeah, they've extremely valuable, until you get that referral network set up, it's great to kind of supplement it and give a little bit of social proofing help people to kind of see value in you, but I mean, it's Searching itself, I mean, there's so many different ways to kind of think about it and to look at it. But ultimately, all PPC and all paid ads want to do is to make sure that when people are searching for your services and they're in the right area, they're searching with the right type of intent that we're putting an ad right in front of them. And we don't have to be top all of the time, especially at the start, which we were trying to find a happy medium. So in Google, when you search for something, usually there's four ads and when we start out, what we like to do is to get into the second or third position. And then once we've got you in the second or third position, we can kind of start looking and waiting and getting data to understand where the value customers, these people that are clicking, which ones are the ones that are right for us. And then we start working with that data in the back of Google ads and optimizing the account. And what that means is, if somebody has been to your website and clicked on your phone, but clicked on your email link, filled your form out and booked an appointment through calendar, or whatever it is, we send that data from the website back to Google ads and we say, these people did this, we then go and analyze those people and we look at their gender, we look at the rage, we look at all the things that you can imagine that we steal from your data. And we analyze it all and once we understand it, we then go back and look at the way the accounts running and we can be more aggressive with our bids and we can be less aggressive with our bids. So if we're spending money on men that are between 18 and 25 and we found that maybe we've spent 120 pounds and had no leads from that. But with the account, we usually spend 120 pounds and get six leads, we know that there's a problem there. And so what that allows us to do is to just go into the account and say, right, if this person is a man and he's 18 to 25, let's just say, instead of bidding a pound bid 20p for that person, we still want to be visible, but we're not happy with the amount we're spending on this. But on the flip side, we can do that for the positive too. So if we can see that most of our conversions, most of our positive actions on the website are women, 35 to 40, then we can go in and put an aggressive bid on that and so we can say, well, actually let's let's increase this bid by 50%. And so it's all based on an analysis. So we look at the conversion rates for these different things. We look at the cost for conversion for each of those things a conversion being a positive action on somebody's website and that's something that we need to go back to because this is one of the most common things that is missed. From new businesses, new websites and I've even found old websites where they're not tracking activities on their website, so they don't actually know who is valuable. They can see in Google Analytics when somebody comes to their website, they can see where they've come from, but they just don't understand from that point on. Did they reviewed lots of different types of content? Did they fill out reforms? Did they do anything that kind of indicates that it wasn't just a typical person view in the website? They were a prospect, they were likely to convert with us. And so we can add something called a tag which fires and it sends information back to Google ads and says this user from your Google ads click or Google organic click or wherever has just completed your form and sent it through all they've just booked an appointment in calendar. They've clicked on your link to email you and we can grab all of these little bits of information and we can send them to Facebook ads, we can send them to Google ads to Bing to Google Analytics, whether it be Google Analytics UA, Universal Analytics or Google Analytics for whichever one we can do it all. But these little things, they're the most valuable things that we need to go and have a look at and historically what we tend to find is people who've set up a Google ads account will be optimizing towards conversions which are referred to as Google hosted conversions. The Google hosted conversion is it can be anything from a phone call generated from the ad which is a perfect for us that's exactly what we do want to go for all the way through to somebody viewing a page on your website or looking for directions to your business. And they're not really indicative of somebody who's going to provide valuable sorry value to your business. If somebody's looking for directions to your business, there's a high chance that they're already a customer and they are just looking for your practice. And the worst thing about that is if that's a conversion through Google ads, then we've paid for that and that's what we want to avoid. So all of these things that we can track that are positive on the website, we need to be making sure that that information is sent and shared with Facebook, Google, Bing with all these different platforms that we use so that we can see what we're doing when it's working and what we need to do more of. Fabulous. OK, so at this point, most of our we don't run a search marketing agents, a paid search marketing agency, BBC company brains are well, I don't know about anyone else but mine just dribbled out my ears a little bit and which is why I always say dark are make sure you trust them, you know, would you let them look after your dog for a day because if not don't let them look after your Google ads. I think that's a great rule of thumb personally. So in, OK, imagine somebody is in their first month, what's the simplest safest thing that they can do so that they don't spend 300 quid overnight because they like put something on, you know, hypnotherapy for sleep or something like that, which by the way, don't ever do that. You'll just get people googling you at one o'clock in the morning looking for relaxation tracks. So don't do that. It'll cost you money. So yeah, what's imagine somebody's like their first kind of month in practice and going, right, I'm going to get some traffic through to my website, get people knowing and being able to see me. What's the safest way to go about that? The first thing I always recommend is look for a voucher. There's so many opportunities out there, Google want your money, they want you to be spending. When you set up your Google, my business listing, they will be on your Google, my business listing offering you free credit. Usually it's three, four hundred pounds. I've just set one up for a business and they were offered 800 pounds free ad spent if they spent 800 pounds on Google ads by a certain date. And it was beneficial to them. So we've set that all up and it's all up and really now. But I think that's the first thing I would recommend is don't go rushing into anything. Take your time, have a look around, try and find and see if there is any opportunities to kind of get a bit of money back out of it because Google want you to kind of get the most out of it as possible. It's in terms of setting up the account. It gets a little bit complex because there's an argument in my head for people, people need to have the ability to kind of set these things up themselves when they first go into to business because. Paying somebody like me, four hundred pounds to set them an account up might just not be feasible at that moment in time, but they still need to have a presence or they still want to have a presence. What I would do is don't go too far, don't put too much in, do some research, look at what people in your area are doing, look at your competitors, you don't need to have every keyword when it says put some keywords into Google ads. Because when you're setting up a new account nowadays, Google have changed the process and they try and force everybody into this smart approach where you just tell it a few things, you give it a few things, you tell it how much you want to spend and then it will run. It does, it doesn't tell you anything, doesn't give you any insight back, you can't improve it, it just runs on its own. There is a way that we can switch that account over to an expert mode account, but that's Google's attempt to try and make Google ads more accessible to everybody, but it just is a lot less targeted and a lot less likely to provide as many opportunities or prospects to your business. So what if you did a targeted approach? Yeah, so to Google offer any training free training at all. Yes, so have resources and things like that that people could look at to feel a little bit more confident. They do. Yeah, so they offer online training courses and exams for people that want to learn more about Google ads. And you know, these are these are courses that I've done myself because to kind of be a Google ads partner, you have to kind of do their training and complete their exams. My reservation with the courses that Google offer is that it's all about making sure that you're going to spend your money. And so they use lots of terms that are kind of trying to make it easier for people to think about how things work and how it's going to benefit you. and this is why we kind of advise our clients to avoid speaking to Google strategists as well. What I'd actually suggest is that if you are looking to kind of set up an account on Google Ads and you're looking for help, ask the questions in YouTube. If you go to, you know, if you go over to YouTube and you've got a specific thing, make sure you ask the question and 90% of the time, if you're asking the right question and that's a big problem is that most of the time you don't know to ask the right question, but 90% of the time you will get decent advice on Google Ads, sorry on YouTube because it's heavily commented on, you know, there's always going to be somebody on there saying you're wrong quite happily. So if a video is doing well, if it's got lots of likes and lots of people have enjoyed it, there's a good chance that they're kind of giving out decent advice that's going to help you reform. The one thing I would say Google Ads is changing so frequently these days. There's so many changes in the most recent history in comparison to maybe the last 10 years. So if you are going to look for support or help on YouTube, I'd expect that you'd kind of have to look at a video that was lonely quite recently. Yeah. And then just look for something that's got lots of positive interactions with people saying this helped and it works. It's brilliant. So thanks very much. Yeah. Because you will find that they're the best responses. But if you go to Google, if you speak to Google Ads, they're called, what are they called now? It's been a while since I spoke into one. You'll tend to get a phone call once a month or once every three months from a Google ad representative. Yeah. They tend to be reading off a script, but recently they've shifted from a script and now they read if you're logging to Google Ads, there's a little button that says recommendations. They tend to just read that off to you and try and force you to press the applying add button. And most of those changes are about Google getting more ad revenue. Yeah. It's not about getting you better results. And you know, this is why anybody in the industry will tell you unless you spend in hundreds of thousands of pounds a month, Google's ad strategists are worth the time. You will lose an hour. You'll come off the phone frustrated. You'll spend more in Google Ads over the next few weeks. You'd be much wiser to kind of book out a couple of hours in your time. And think about the questions that you want answers to and then search for those in YouTube and try and find the support. But yeah, I mean, people like myself are out there as well. We're not looking to kind of make life hard for you. If it is simply enough for the question, you can contact people like ourselves and more than happy to kind of give you an answer and help you along, especially when people are starting out. People help me when I first started out, you know, maybe not with marketing or websites, but it was maybe with accounts. And sometimes you've just got one question or you've just got a couple of questions. Anything. I don't want to spend loads of money on a professional to do all this for me. I think I could do it. But I've just got these questions that I think if I knew the answers to these, I could fix it. Yeah. And then what that does is it gives you an opportunity to create a relationship somebody and find out a little bit more because there will be things you've missed, there will be things you don't understand, and there will be things you will never understand. And I think at some point you've kind of just got to sit back and think, where is my time best spent? And this is something that I found in myself and my own businesses. I was spending three hours a week doing something. And it got to the point where I kind of analysed it after six months. And I sat down with my accountant and we were talking about what I was doing with this time. And it felt like it was valuable to me. It felt like it was something that I needed to be doing. And when we looked it again, it done professionally and the cost of it and the cost that I could be generating from actually just doing my job, it just proved a point straight away. And so sometimes I think it's just worth just having I think and just talk to somebody, ask for advice, ask a few questions. Yeah. You know, I've got a WhatsApp link somewhere on my website, I think. And if I got to run them questions through, I'd quite happily answer it. Good to know. Ben, don't say that out loud. We'll all be on D.O. So yeah, so are there any, when somebody was looking for somebody like you, what would be their, you know, their red flags coming back or kind of red flags in general for this sort of space and this sort of work? For me, the biggest red flag is that you can't talk to the person that's going to do the work. And so I think a great example of a client that we're working with at the minute is Yale. And people are going to to big agencies like this because they offer a really cost effective way of getting present on Google ads. But the likelihood is is that they're outsourcing that work. I used to work for an agency in Manchester, that was neighbourhood another agency that used to look after the yellow camps. So I know full well that Yale doesn't do that work themselves. And the problem with that is this kind of, it doesn't create, you know, you're not creating a relationship, you're not creating something that's going to improve over time. I think you need to find somebody that understands you, understands what you're trying to achieve, understands that you're a new business and that you're not looking to take over the world. You're just looking to set up and establish yourself as a business to get that income regular and to make sure that you can get past the first three months. You can get over all of the pain points and the problems of setting off a business. And then you can start to look at what's next, how do you grow? You know, is that where you are after three months? Is that what you're happy with? Is there another option? Is there other things that you want to achieve in life? And I think it's just thinking that you want to be able to ping somebody a message and just say, look, I'm worried about this or would this work for us? And I think it's just having the faith and trust in that person to be able to just come back to you and give an honest answer sometimes. Rather than just to say, yes, let's build you five websites because they're getting five websites worth of costs or fees. Or let's do that on display and then we're going to cost an extra 200 pound a month for that. I just think you need to find somebody that you really do trust. In terms of red flags. That's the difficult one that is. I'm trying to think of people that I've worked with in the past and you know, was there something that kind of stood out to me? I think if somebody can't understand or doesn't ask what your goals are, what you're trying to achieve, I think that in itself is a massive red flag. Yeah, because it's sort of about that, isn't it? It is. Yeah, I mean, most hypnotherapists have got, I want to see this many people a week. Right okay? Well, it's not going to happen in week one. It's not going to happen in month one. But let's look at putting together something where within three months we can get to that level. You know, if you come off a training course and you kind of go straight into practice, chances are you've already got a lot of people that you're working with, but you probably want to scale that. You probably want to grow it to a point where you're working full-time and you kind of achieve in the salary that you wanted to in your head. Yeah. And I think you just need to have that conversation with the person. Don't be afraid to say, look, this is how much I have to spend. This is where I want to be. Is that a problem? Is that possible? Do you think we can achieve that? And if you think you can achieve that, how long do you think it's going to take to get to that point? And then at that point, where do we go from there? Do we revisit your goals or do we revisit your budget? Do we look at spending less? Because you've got to a point where it's just you've got enough customers and you think, right, okay, well, I'm fully booked now for the next three weeks or two weeks. Do we find an opportunity to kind of push it further or do we just reduce the budget down a little bit and just think, well, we don't need to spend as much now. So we can actually make it more efficient. Yeah. I think it's just having those plans and just making sure that you kind of stick to them as well. You need to make sure that it's somebody that you can just call up as well. I think that one of the things that I've experienced in the past, especially with bigger companies, is that people like to talk. They like to just have a quick five ten minutes sometimes just to catch up and see where things are and talk about other things as well. Because whilst I work on Google Ads, we work on SCA, we work on websites. There's all these different things, all these things that are kind of moving all of the time. And it's difficult for people like yourself or myself when you've got your own business to actually allocate any time to marketing. So when you can find that ten minutes or fifteen minutes where you want to kind of spend a bit of time focusing on it, it's worthwhile making sure that it's somebody that you know is going to be reachable within a relatively straightforward process and a matter of time as well. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So we talked about a couple of the things where, you know, those kind of like starting out things to think about, not just for hip and therapist, but kind of in business in general. Is there kind of other any kind of mistakes? Because I've decided to ask everyone this question because everyone I talked to runs their own smaller business, not necessarily small business. but on the side of smaller, you know, like horrific mistakes you made. And I would say the reason I ask this is because, because here you are still in business and successful, because there's this horrible perception when you're starting out, or even when you've been there for a little while, there's just like if you make, you know, some mistakes you can't come back from, whereas most of them you can. So is there something that comes to mind of like a mistake you thought, oh, good, golly, that was an expensive one, or I don't want to do that one again. Yes, and this is where kind of Google ads get difficult and dangerous. It's not one that I made, but it was when I was working for another company six, seven years ago, there was a story of a chap who'd forgotten to add location targeting to his campaign, and it was a very big account, and they were spending a lot of money, but they did have a limit time, which they wanted to spend for the month, but because the chap had forgotten to set the location targeting to United Kingdom, the budget was spent within an hour. Oh, wow. That by far, that's something that I remember people talking about and standing out is you've got to make sure that you kind of have these things ticked, and that's, you know, don't get me wrong, these new businesses that we're talking about, they're not going to have those risks as much because you get these prompts that come up in front of you to kind of make sure you don't miss all of these things. But yeah, that was that was on the more difficult side of Google ads where we kind of go a little bit more targeted and focused. Yeah, I mean, that's the worst I've ever heard, but I think of something that I've done that didn't work. I think one of the things I do like to do is do things that don't work. I've worked how that doesn't work. I've split tested that. Let's do something else. Well, the thing to think about is we've all got these kind of notions of what's going to work and why and how. And I think that's something we had an interesting conversation with the therapy training school. And one of the things that I really like the idea of is if somebody's interested in therapy training, there's a chance that maybe they could be interested in still searching for some kind of talking therapy service. They still want to get into the career. They still want to get into that kind of lifestyle of helping people. And so we explored different opportunities through search to show people ads that were relevant. And so we did something called an RLSA campaign. And it's just remarketing lists for search ads. And so all it means is we set up this new campaign and we only allow people to see ads from this campaign if they've been to our website in the last 12 months. And then what we did was come up with a list of key words that were similar in market to chemotherapy training, CBT training, counseling training, chemotherapy, not even therapy, so much. I like to do things like that because if we can find opportunities for things that aren't going to work, we know about it. If we can find opportunities for things that aren't going to work, we know about it. I think marketing is all about testing. I think one of the things, especially with social media marketing, is people will set up a strategy in their own heads of what they want to do. And sometimes I think you need to sit down after the fact and look back and think what have you done? How did it work? Did people engage with it and revisit those theories and kind of set up a new strategy after a while and search ads is great for that because we can test these different things out and see what's going to work. If we have a list of 10 competitors and we add a display campaign for people that are looking for those competitors, does that mean that we get more leads? Does that have any kind of impact on the amount of leads we're getting through to our site? If it does, how, what's the conversion rate and how cost effective is it? Is it doing what we expect it to do? It's just making sure that you understand if something's not worked, what do you do about it? You don't just turn it off. You need to understand what didn't work about it and then make sure you apply anything that you learn to everything that you've got running and everything that you do in the future as well. So doing things wrong is something that I do enjoy doing that. But it's doing things wrong on a grand scale. I don't enjoy doing that. There's nothing worse than that sinking feeling that you're spending somebody else's money. So I have lots of processes in place. One of the things I like to do is to make sure that I track everybody's ad spend. So I've got a few accounts that we manage through Google ads and so I use a tool that we've built that plugs all of their budgets into like a report that's live and it looks at how much people are spending today, yesterday, average of the last seven days and then it sets up a projected end date for, you know, if that client's told me they've got 200 pounds for the month, if we keep spending at the rate we're spending today, yesterday and the last seven days, when will that run out? And so that allows me to make sure that for those clients, especially small new businesses, that we kind of keep within their budgets as much as possible. One of the kind of issues that we've seen in the past is that clients might set up their Google ads campaign for the first time and not realise that Google can spend twice that limit. And that's part of how Google ads runs is, you know, you can, you can spend 200, 200% of your daily budget that you've set in a campaign or one of those kind of things is that it will claw that back by the end of the month. So you don't need to worry about things as much as it looks like you do sometimes. I'm trying to give you an example of, I think there was a hit with a reference that we weren't with a few weeks ago. And on the first day we went live with her account, it's about 40 pounds. And that kind of just showed us that there's lots of opportunity to find savings, there's lots of opportunities to kind of pull back in lots of different areas. Yeah. But she was worried that that was going to spend her entire budget in a month. But what we did there was just get the account running as quickly as possible, find all of those things that we didn't want to be showing up for. And kind of remove all of those. So for the next three and a half weeks, we've got a nice account running smoothly. We've got enough data to say that the things we are showing up for are things we want to show up for. And they're likely to be people that are going to be looking for us services. Fantastic. Ben, that has been a lovely winding magical mystery tour. As it always is with PaperClick. So what kind of things do you offer to people like me? Little little hit with therapists. You're not typical hit with therapists, I don't know that. Yeah. Yes. So we do offer affordable entry level websites to people. So for smaller and newer businesses that are setting up, we've got a kind of a small website that we can kind of build out for people. We're aware that it's, it's, again, you go in that catch 22 where you want the best website going, but your budget doesn't really match or reflect it. And what we've tried to do is to kind of build a product that helps small new businesses to kind of move forward. So we've developed a template website that I think it's seven page website. And it allows you to have a homepage and about as page and a contact as page with a form and then it's everything's configured and set up and then add all the different treatments on it as well. But we rather than trying to charge you for the whole website and what we tend to do is try and spread the cost over a year or two, depending on how that's going to work on a payment plan. Yeah. The other services that we offer people are SEO paid ads. So whilst we focus today on Google ads, we also work on Bing, on Facebook and Instagram. I could keep going. There's so many like Pinterest and Twitter and LinkedIn and all sorts of things. Video ads everywhere. And it's just, it's horses for courses, what works where it works. So there's lots of opportunities to kind of get in front of people for different things. Search ads is, it's kind of always going to be number one because it's people that are actively searching, which is kind of great in itself. But then by the type of thing that they're looking for, we can decide whether or not they have the right type of intent. They're not somebody who's thinking of a career in hypnotherapy or they're not somebody who's looking to write a CV to become something or, you know, these types of things are things that we can kind of learn from the data and make sure we're not spending money on. Yeah. The most important thing I think once you've got a website as well is to make sure that somebody's built the tracking on this as well. So that when somebody is doing something that's valuable, whether it's, you've got a calendar or a 10 to 8 link that you are sending data somewhere to say this person's just unless you need to push that data somewhere. Whether it's a link on the website itself or something else, we need to make sure that if it's a positive action, we know about it so we can spend more money on that kind of person than other types of people that may be interested a bit too broad, not really in the market just yet. Sure. Cool. So, I will put it in the show notes, but is there anything other than obviously your website digital defined? Is there anywhere else anyone should look for you that might be interesting? I was like, yes, they can find me on LinkedIn. Cool. It's probably the easiest place to go and find somebody these days because you can kind of find people and connect with them and send them a message quite easily and it's nice, safe platform and it's not connected to your personal life, life, Facebook so you don't have to stop sending things from your personal accounts, but yeah, it's, I think WhatsApp's probably the best opportunity if people want to get into it for theirs. We do have a WhatsApp account for the business. Yeah. Somebody's already, you know, I've got it in the minute but somebody's always got access to it and if somebody sends us a question, I'm not going to kind of just ping back and answer if it's a short, sweet one, sometimes we might need to set up a call to just investigate a little bit more, but yeah, it's relatively straightforward to get into it through the website as well. I definitely need to. Brilliant. Excellent. So, LinkedIn, because it's for grownups, WhatsApp or your website, that's absolutely fantastic. Well, Ben, thank you very much, that has been absolutely amazing and yeah, I should put all the links in the show notes and I've actually just thought of something really cool that I'm going to persuade Ben to write me a glossary of terms. So, and I will add that somewhere so that we know what we're talking about because that's often one of the things that is just like, that's great, I heard you say lots of exciting words, I understood five of them. So yeah, we will do that for you guys so that we have all are a little bit more educated so we don't make the hundreds and hundreds of pounds mistakes that is possible to make on paid for advertising, so thanks very much and thanks ever so much, Ben, for being here today. Yeah, they've probably been great. Thank you. Thanks so much for hanging out with us today, remember to check out the Facebook community through the link in the show notes and be sure to rate, review and follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, anchor or wherever you get your podcasts, especially be sure to follow, rate and review the podcast if you really liked it, if you didn't, don't worry about it, it's fine. And be a great friend and share it with your hypnotherapy friends and colleagues, there are enough clients to go around so let's build everyone up. I'll see you next time on Creative Throbbing Hypnotherapy Business Podcast and let's go change the world. (upbeat music)