Episode 87: Mastering Local Ads with Hannah Zora Strong

Oh, baby. You're listening to the Marketing Dribble podcast, the sexiest marketing podcast around. Hello and welcome to the Marketing Dribble podcast. My self-robial, I'm my co-host, Johnny Kenyon. I a Johnny, how are you today? Surprisingly good, actually, thank you Rob, how are you? Not too bad, not too bad, excited, very excited for a guest and what am I if it subjects at the minute or for a long time, actually, as you know, local marketing. So who's the guest, Johnny? No small talk. No, no small talk. No small talk. The reason. No. We've been coded in 2026. No. Do we sound like doing small talk? It's I've told you before. No one's interested in Johnny. We all skip past that. Yeah, fair. I've got four month old twins, I've got loads going on, new job, tons of stuff I can talk about. You don't want any of it? No. Fine, all right. Let's move on. Let's move on. So today on the show, we've got Hannah, Zora, Strong and I'm not doing intros anymore. I used to do intros that I pulled off Chuck G.P.T. but I'm going to let you introduce yourself. Welcome to the show. Who are you? And what have you come to talk to us about? Hello, my name is Hannah, I'm based upon you, Castle. I am a freelance advertising consultant I specialize in local ads. There you go. Enough said. Brilliant. Look, let's get away to get involved. Avertopic, even though he's rubbish at it. And I pivoted out of a comments and into B2B and a lot of B2B sass. So getting people to physically go places is not really my bag. So I'm genuinely really interested to get stuck into this topic and learn where it's come from. We were just talking offline, as I said, like 10, 12 years ago, when I used to work with Rob, we went to a conference, a new comments conference and someone mentioned a bit of tech where if you walked past a shop, it would text you and say that thing you were looking out online, it's installed next to you. And I didn't hear anything since and I was really excited to hear if it's still a thing. But apparently, I'm a bit outdated, am I, Hannah? Yeah, it was a bit of a flash in the pan. It was a marketing piece of tech that was out, might you say, eights ten years ago. And everyone was so buzzing for it, but it was basically if you had to go to his enable, then it gave you message permissions to get into it with that person. But then I think with GDPR and everything else that's kicked off in the year since then, the tech was quickly voided. So that's how, look today, Johnny is with his e-commerce. Hey, still things just, yeah, yeah, just whoever's listening to this, that's my knowledge levels on this. Yeah. But you go to the conference and you see all this latest tech and then you wait for it to kind of trickle down into the real world and then you're like, that sounded like a cool thing. Where was that? Yeah, Johnny's still waiting for that one, aren't you? Bring it back, bring it back. But yeah, GDPR has put, put, ruined a lot of things for as marketers, hasn't it? But let's not dwell on that. So let's get stuck in, you work with real mix of e-commerce and lead gem brands, but you kind of got a bit of a focus on local customers. Why did you choose that? What kind of drew you into this, I guess? Well, I've been, I feel like quite a way, P of PPC, I've got myself, I've been again for like 14 years and was head of department, two agencies in the North East before having kids and then, and then going freelance. And I know a lot of consultants double down into B2B, like yourself or Econ or just one platform, like just Google, just like, then just matter. But I like the variety of working across multiple accounts and I thought, well, I don't want to choose an industry in case it goes a bit south, like during COVID, obviously hospitality was a bit of challenge and there is industries that have their like peaks and trusts over years. And then I didn't want to be pigeonholed into a certain KPI either. I just like the variety of working across multiple accounts. So I think for me, the best campaigns, my favorite campaigns, the best performing campaigns have always had a local slant. And so that's why I thought, well, I feel like all of my career has been building up to this. I do have the choice of what I double down in, but I think it's important for agencies and freelancers to kind of say, do all the line in the sand, this is my specialism. Yes, I can work across multiple, but this is my preference because it's easier to market yourself than so. It was just the most natural fit. Yeah, I went in, obviously, local, it can be UK wide, there's lots of local businesses. Do you find a lot of them are actually local to where you are because they like the fact you're near them? Or does it not matter? And it's just anywhere within the UK. I've got a real mix to be honest. Most of my clients have come through referral. So it's either been clients that have moved to a different company and then they've called me up or ex colleagues have gone freelance and they've kind of got me into support when they've done the SEO and I've done the PPC. So I do work with a wide range of clients across the UK. I actually work with the Newcastle Council, my business support program. So any kind of small businesses from North London down to County Durham can apply for like 12 hours to free with me and that's fully funded by the government and so the PIPC. So I am working with a lot of local to the North East clients through that scheme. But a lot of my bigger clients are nationwide. That's really cool. Well, Greg, if you're listening and you're obviously European Newcastle, Gentertch, Gentertch, yeah, yeah. You can do that when they've got pasties and stuff. Next slide. Oh, back on your thing. Yeah, pasties are not first. You walk past the shelf. That's the straw that you were thinking about earlier. Yeah, yeah. Johnny's still waiting for that thing. So something next question is I think it's really interesting for me because Google ads are no, I know quite well. LinkedIn ads are done and nothing about them. So what I'm interested in is what does a business sort of genuinely need, do they business actually need LinkedIn ads or Google is LinkedIn ads and waste the money for them, especially in the local or is there kind of a mix between the two? I always say to clients, if there is demand for your product or service already, like people know what it is, then Google's always best because the system is completely designed to capture demand. People search on Google for something and then an ad is the answer. So I always recommend Google first, but if it's a challenge of brand, if it is a brand new product on new service, you have to kind of drum up that demand first before you can expect people to know what it is to search for it. And then it's generally recommended for B2B clients. And if they are super clear on their ICB, like their ideal customer profile and they have a certain kind of job title in mind, they know which industries they work with, they know which company size they work best with. Locations, it can be a factor, but it's mainly industry job title member skills, member groups potentially. So for example, I'm working with a spin off of the kind of brand called Starpods at the moment and they are recruiting landlords because they've got 2,300 pubs in the UK, some of them hand-like lords at the moment, but some of them don't. So we've got campaigns designed to try and find new landlords. So we're targeting bar managers, restaurant managers, people who are like maybe managing and running the operations, but not quite owning a pub yet. And we're sending them an email and we're appearing in their LinkedIn feeds to be like, hey, could running a pub be your next step? And it's something quite attention grabbing. The cool to action is to download a guide, so it's really like touch. And then from there they can kind of chat and find out more. So it's really for kind of white papers for guides. I do a lot of link data out for conferences as well. So if they've got free tickets to give away in certain job titles, we can exactly pinpoint who they are, pinpoint the decision maker, get in front of them, emails are pretty good. They've got like a 40 to 60% anchoring rate as well. So the app from like a cold email, so it's quite good compared to having to buy data, getting a poll on list and all the kind of GDPR hoops. We're back again. Yeah, yeah. So jump through. But yeah, it's definitely worth doing. I think that, Johnny, when AI takes our jobs over, then that's it. Become landlords. I think that's the next step for us to what you think. But it's all good at the pub. I said before I'm going to become a park ranger, I'm really excited. Although drones are probably doing this. Yeah, we'll see. We'll see. Let's not get on to that, Rob. You've got your AI question in later, so save it. Okay. I'd love to dig off and talk about all the different social, like social paid platforms, but I'm not going to just stay on track. We can maybe talk on the end if we get time. But what sort of differences then have you using the local service ads versus traditional Google ads? Because I don't know. So if you ever use local services ads, it is like Google's poor cousin to Google search. It's really like neglect did. You wouldn't think it comes from the same, the same corporation, honestly. It's designed for kind of tradespeople, people work out of home, so it could be like handing people. It could be locksmiths. It could be moving services, flooring, fitters, anyone who works within a radius, but is out of their own home. Going to the clients. The platform itself, you don't bid on keywords, you don't have ad copy or your luxury saying to Google during the settle is this is my business and you link it to Google business. profiles, so that's where kind of good SEO on your business profile comes into play. You can tell Google which services you offer, what your budget is, which areas you cover, and then you kind of set it away. In terms of kind of optimization, it's really just plain about with either a cost per lead target or like a rookie budget target, because if you're searching for kind of locksmith near me, then you'll find it's a local services ads pack that comes up and the the way you get in touch with people is either like a message or a call, so you don't even visit the website. You literally just get the option of calling them all or messaging them, and then as a business you get the lean fire email to say someone's been in touch and then you can kind of message them through the platform. Interesting. So you say it's sort of designed for those people. If someone came and used you and paid you like who what what types of businesses should be used in these ads, what type of businesses can, which one shouldn't I guess like who do you feel like it works well for? I think it works well for anyone that like is like a tradesman not tradespeople because sure. And ideally one or two people businesses because I've worked with clients before that have like there are a removals company for example and they have three locations and they have three different Google my business profiles. So trying to get those set up and then once the leads come into the business that they're funneled out to various teams, whereas the system's really designed for kind of one locksmith with one owner and one person doing it because the lead just comes straight to that person and they can answer the query. So it really is targeting smaller businesses. You know Google did set up a similar campaign format called Smart campaigns or I mean not as smart about them, this might be sick and it's supposed to be more like a plug and play sort of option for people that don't know or don't want to be in Google ads all the time. I mean it's my bag. It's not everyone's and the idea is that it's really simple to set up. You can just tell the system what services you do and what you cover and then off you go. So it is great for if you want like a really like touch lead feeder but it requires you to have like a decent Google buy business profile lots of reviews, good pictures, yeah all of that needs to be updated and looking pretty fresh. But within that, how do you love Rob don't you? I just wanted to know that is a way can you track how well it's doing or how do you know how well the performing is. So every time you get a lead or a phone call, you get an email. So any email address that's attached to the account, they'll say I like customers tried to get into a tree. Do you see just get their phone number but as they call you obviously you'll get the phone call. If it's a message you'll get through the local services ads platform and you could just message them back. Yeah good. So my friend is a builder. He does these sort of tried a foray into ads, social ads and Google ads and it didn't go so well. He just brought me his phone one day and the problem was like, Jody, I spent hundreds of pounds. I don't know I've done wrong here and had a quick look. So you probably see a lot of people making mistakes on these. I think your mantra is never set and forget, always test, learn and scale. But if people get hold of these themselves and like you say that it's like local plumber kind of having it having a go, what kind of mistakes do you see when they end up coming to you and saying, help me sort this out? Sometimes I'll find that they haven't actually linked to their Google business profile. And that isn't really helpful. I find that a lot of people don't actually know this ad format exists. Google don't promote it that well. Because it's a bit okay. Like I said, it's not really worse promoting. Bless it. But a lot of people will have tried Google search, probably got burnt because of what's everything on broad match and haven't understood location target ticket. They've just sort of, you know, spent a ton of money and not had conversion traffic set up and it's kind of gone about sales. So the whole point of this, the real benefit of local services ads is you only pay for leads when you get them. Like it's cost per lead, not cost per click. And again, because it's using the Google search algorithm, people are searching for plum and in me and in my near me, you know, with the new castle, you know, it's only when people are actually requesting that service that they get the ad. So it's an over a no like conversion makes way better. What's the cost like on these kind of channels? Because obviously LinkedIn is so expensive to get in front of these targeted people. I guess this is more like you say, capturing that bottom level demand. How is it? Obviously, for smaller businesses with less budget to spend. Is it, I don't know, is it a accessible platform? It is, it is definitely. It is quite cheap to be fair and but the challenge is, with like traditional Google search, you can obviously use Keyword Planner to understand the search volume in your area and get a cost per click and then like apply a conversion rate to get kind of a rough CPA before you've even launched a campaign. Whereas with the local services ads, you have to go through building your account first and then when you select your services and you select your locations covered. Google will suj A weekly budget and a target cost per lead for you. And it's based on the demand in that area and the amount of other advertisers in that area. So if there's loads of builders in Manchester and you're also a builder, then it's going to say your cost per lead might be like £40, £50, whereas if you're operating in Newcastle, then there might be lowered demand or it might be lower competition and then it will completely change. So it's really hard for me to say to clients, "Oh, here's our figure in the air of like budget or cost per lead until we get into actually building the thing." That makes tell sense, isn't it? Yeah, the demand is, it's to say about advertising for all sorts of products. If you are advertising on e-commerce, like a marketplace like Amazon, something to demand, then it obviously goes up and there's no demand for it, yeah, it goes down, so yeah, it makes tell sense. I am into my question now. Look at my credit theory, like I'm so excited. This is the question I've been waiting for. I also want to come back to the LinkedIn. I also want to come back to the LinkedIn, excuse you said it was expensive. Finished. LinkedIn's over. Finished. AI. You got up me, I have a question. Chat bots, like chat GPT and all the others are now showing when you search something and asking questions, local recommendations, local businesses, you can ask a question of who's good. A bit like the sort of like your question is, you might ask in Google, you know, I need to find something new, me a car valed to or something, it bring you different ones up. This is reasonably new and I want to know is how do you think it's going to impact local businesses and then how do they take advantage of this type of search? I know it's going a little bit worse than the paid thing, but I just know that I think so chat GPT and the rest of them, I'm expecting ads, well, chat GPT is already launched ads, they're in beta in the US at the moment, so within a matter of months or years, they will be rolled out to the rest of the world. And so I think there will be an opportunity for local business to appear on multiple platforms. I know Google's not going to be the dominant monopoly that it has been forever, obviously Microsoft exists, bless it, but there will become more competition for Google. So I think, yeah, it's only an opportunity for local businesses to spread out and get leads from different sources. I think it's an opportunity, it's a boasting what's right. One thing that I think the chat GPT and AI agents will do quite well in is at the moment you can search for like local to owner or plumbing in me on Google and it's final, give you some plumbers, whereas because AI is more conversational if you've asked for like best plumbing in me or like highly rated or like yeah, I can more like how you'd ask the human it's more a to more personal approach. Instead of just having here's a list of potential answers that you do on Google that AI result will bring in kind of trust pilot reviews, it will look at review, it will look at FIFA, it will look at if you're looking for best, it knows that it'll need to look at reviews and it will give you one answer based on these multiple different sources and I think that's how it's going to be a real challenge to Google because I know there's an AI overview, but it's not going to be as popular forever. No, that makes total sense and I love a lot of questions. No, not a lot of questions, but I look like you say where it brings in the views, giving you the whole picture at once. So you know, like you say in Google, plume in me and you get like a list of five plume and you're probably could go off yourself and research and do each for each one, but it's so much whether you people are trusting it or not. Again, you just want the best one, or the cheapest one, or the fastest one. Yeah, or what's it going to be? Yeah, so it's like you say, it's that conversation, so you can have a more of a conversation, which one's going to suit me doing this or I want a new boiler or whatever it might be. Yeah, I think that's going to be really, really powerful. I can see Johnny just like closing his eyes and going to sleep. You need people. Do we go on a tangent or do we do a separate episode on that? Well, it's like you can't be enjoying them. You know, because I think, you know, you've got to get on board, Johnny, or you're going to be left behind. And like people ask me like, are you going to run, because obviously there's like late day and there's a better Snapchat, there's Pinterest, you know, Reddit, ad platforms and everyone's like, oh, what's going to happen? Like, will you launch GBT ads? I was like, well, yeah, with my clients promoting products and services that will be found using GBT ads or Gemini ads or whatever, then you have to move with the times. You do. That's another episode, Rob. I'm so interested in it. And I would like to dig into that. So if you're listening, you think you want to come on and talk to us about, I guess, those kind of ads, then then come on. I'm going to pivot a little bit. So I think we've covered local services pretty well there. I'm going to send this to my friend Matty, the builder, and he can learn how they would and what to do with them. That makes a lot of sense. And it's been very interesting, I think, to get caught up on that. I'd like you said I didn't know it was like a totally separate thing, and you just don't, I guess, unless you're using these kind of platforms. But obviously, when I was in e-commerce, we have talked about those physical stores and getting people into those. If someone had a physical store, what kind of options are available for them? What would you recommend they do? So I worked with a couple of e-commerce clients, and usually they offer, you know, anyone from other country to buy. You can run your standing shop and you stand at Performance Max campaigns to capture the e-commerce element anyway. But if you want football traffic, then really the only ad format available to you is Performance Max, because when you use Google's campaign builder and you select your objective as "footfall", Performance Max is the only one really that can optimize for that. And it's also the main format that all launch ads on Google Maps. Because the way people have searched even five years ago has changed, you know, when you were in the middle of town and you might have searched for like coffee near me, you always used to put near me or coffee in then city name, whereas now, because of GPS and Google know where we are at all times, as long as you've got that setting enabled, then you don't need to put near me or the city, you could just type "coffee". If you go open Google Maps, type "coffee" and it will give you all the cafes around you, isn't it? It doesn't need that near me or location signal anymore. So what happens is when someone's searching for restaurant near me or coffee near me, they will be in Maps search for that and then the ads will appear in Google Maps and then when you can, when you're on desktop, for example, you'll see like sponsored ads at the top and then all the organic listening underneath or if you're on mobile, you'll see a promoted pin and it's only performance in Maps that can give you a promoted pin. So if you open Maps now, don't even search for anything, you will find some square pins. If you see the square ones, they're promoted. If you see around one, it means they will go like, "Do not know that. Interesting. There you go. Tipper. There you go." Yeah, because obviously football is declining. Look at, maybe you should have gone with the BHS 10 years ago or so. Yeah, they could have done it with it. Would you open Maps or IP? That's interesting. Showing our age level. Yeah, maybe. This is my knowledge levels of physical stuff. Do you think more physical stuff should be adopting these kind of things? Do you think P-Max is a good thing? Do you think they should be trying to drive football or like football? Like if, you know, if they were going to their board, it's like, let's try and do it. Or is there a point? I don't know. Yeah, for sure. I work with everyone who has the hospitality industry is like, facing real challenge at the moment with like wages increasing and that and lower people, that number of people eating out. I found this performance max, football campaigns to be a game changer because you can see how many people have searched for stake restaurant, how many people have then clicked the ad and then visited. In that instance, you can say, right, we know that on average people spend 200 pounds on the expectation that 3.4 people dying on average, you know, you can put a real, fronterifiable value on running this activity and not a lot of channels can do that unless you have like a coupon redemption sort of system, well, like they might be a Facebook ad, but a 10% offer a free drink or whatever when you share this code and stuff. But if you're a small business and you don't have that capacity for like a more advanced POS system, then this is the main way that you can drive people to your store for cheap and really measure how well that's going. I say measure because I do want to cover out something and this isn't a me problem, this is a Google problem. Google are very vague with the sort of eligibility criteria to set up in store tracking. Yeah, there's no like minimum spend or minimum clips, minimum of impressions. It's based on how many other people are around your store because it's about data and assign chai saiyas word. A non-imitty? No. How anonymous the data is. I'm just going to say that. Sure. I'm not a non-imitty. I'm thinking the word in my head, but I know if I tried to say how allowed it's not going to work. Yeah. That's like, I need a better way of saying this. Yeah, it's how anonymous the data is. So for example, I've got a client who operates out of a trading estate. They spend like six grand a month promoting their flooring. But because they're on a trading estate, there's not a lot of footfall to that location. So there's not enough data, enough people visiting to make that visit data anonymous. Whereas I've got a restaurant client who has a couple of restaurants in Glasgow and Aberdeen and they're spending a grand a month. But they've got tracking set up because the amount of people who are in Glasgow City Centre in Aberdeen City Centre means there's enough people to make the data anonymous. So it's really hard for me to say to the client like, how much should I spend or how many clicks do I need? I don't know because Google don't have a limit or a threshold. It's just whenever the data becomes anonymous enough. There you go. For sure. This is why I love these episodes, where I just don't know much about topic. Sorry if it's been painful for the listeners with my rookie questions. But like, I've learned a lot and I think this would be really good for someone who's just looking to start out or just didn't know this existed. I've learned a lot and I love these kind of episodes. So I think to finish on, you might have a look under the point, Rob. I just want to get one more from a really hot tip. What's your hot tip that every business should be doing right now? I'll keep it brief about everything we've talked about just I guess with what should they be doing in the opinion to attract more business maybe? Other than hiring yourself of course. That goes a lot of saying. I mean, my interest is obviously local and I see so many businesses getting that wrong or it's an optimization area that is really overlooked because people obviously look at if you run in e-commerce campaigns, it's your product feed. If you run in any other search campaigns, it's you keep it at any keywords and you search query report and everything else. But the number of times that I've seen like the location settings set to presence and interest as opposed to just presence, it's wasted spend from around the world. It's a really it's a quick fix and it's really painful when I'll go to order an account or if you do a screen share with a potential client and I'll say, "Oh, just click here, click here, click here." And you can see like hundreds of thousands of pounds wasted just because the wrong settings been toggled on. So I don't want to come on and say something completely whiz-bang when it is just the foundations sometimes that people need to get right. I had a client come back to me actually and I worked with them about four years ago for a couple years but then they left me to go to an agency that specialized in financial services because they're a mortgage broker. But they came back to me. We had like an audit call again in December and to see that oh, they'd spent 12,000 pounds, they'd driven kind of about 350 leads over the course of the year but none of them have converted. I was like, that's impossible. How can you drive that many leads and not have a single sale? But then when we looked into the account, they were this kind of client specialises in northern blend, time and way encountered a room. And instead of just targeting those areas and excluding the rest of the UK, this agency had targeted the UK and excluded those locations. We discovered that on the call because I was at your dinner screen showing with them and I was like, oh, click here, click here. And then like my face dropped when I realized that like all of that time, all of that money is just the opposite of what they want. So it just goes to show like that. And that's a good tip, good tip across everything to be honest because even in B2B, so that a lot like you talk to people and they're just they're not putting negative keywords in. So there's so much wasted spend and it's like getting things right from the offset or tracking conversions right. People might just be tracking like a page view as a conversion. That's what I mean. So it's just getting all that initial setup. I think it is just a really good tip and obviously people might the sort of people you'll be working with on the locals that his ads just wouldn't have a clue on this kind of stuff. So I think yeah, get it checked by an expert because you could save yourself tons of money in the process. If you get it right at the start, you know, you know, things are working. Get your foundations right. Yeah, good tips. Absolutely. That's a great tip guys. Yeah. All right, Rob, you got anything to add? Anything you want to add? I'm going to skip it. It's the only way I've wrapped it up because AI related. So I'm banned from that. I don't want question per episode. I'm sorry. But yeah, I could go on. No, no, no, that's been really great. And I think you've been very, very generous with your time. But if people have listened to that and they've enjoyed it and they want to work with you, I don't want to follow your stuff like where can they go? So I am on zora market team.co.uk, produce regular blog content on there with and what I've been up to and obviously optimization tips if people manage their own accounts. Otherwise, I am just on LinkedIn. My kind of URL slogan is hammer dash wrong dash PPC. I like to search for Hannah Zora because there's not many of those. And I'll be the same chatting about all things local and what I'm up to on there as well. You got a subject? I'll be following along. We're really looking forward to the updates and Rob, do you want to lie to all our listeners again and say that you'll link these in the show notes and link it in the social post? Yeah, I'll link it in the show notes and link it in the social post. Really, look forward to seeing that definitely happen. But now, I can say, I've really, really enjoyed this. Thanks again so much for coming on. Yeah, say for me, I'll see you all the next one. I saw her. Yeah, it's been yourself. Pleasure. Thank you guys. Thanks.