Last updated on June 14th, 2024
Aaron Pearson of BitBranding specializes in helping businesses with local video advertising. In this podcast he talks about the “thumb stoppers” that get people to stop scrolling through social media and watch, strategies for reaching users on Facebook, retargeting, email sequencing, and how marketing is essential to your company’s survival.
GUEST: Aaron Pearson of BitBranding. Find BitBranding on Facebook and Instagram. Find Aaron Pearson on Instagram and LinkedIn.
HOST: The VidAction Podcast is hosted by Dane Golden of VidAction | LinkedIn | YouTube
SPONSORS: This episode is brought to you by our affiliate partners, including: TubeBuddy, VidIQ, MorningFame, Rev.com, and other products and services we recommend.
PRODUCER: Jason Perrier of Phizzy Studios
TRANSCRIPT
Dane Golden:
It’s time for the Video Marketing Value podcast from HEY.com. This is the podcast where we help marketers and business owners just like you get more value out of your video marketing efforts. My name is Dane Golden and today we have a special guest, Aaron Pearson of BitBranding. Welcome Aaron.
Aaron Pearson:
Thank you. Really appreciate it. This is, it’s like my real, second interview. I’ve done a lot of podcasts, but they’ve all been in person. So I love the Skype feature and really appreciate you asking me to come on. Thank you.
Dane Golden:
Yeah. Well, when I spoke to you at Social Media Marketing World, you talked about the local video advertising that you’re doing and I wanted to find out more. Is that a good topic for today?
Aaron Pearson:
Absolutely. it’s a fun topic for today too, or at least in my opinion.
Dane Golden:
Okay. So at BitBranding you’ve established a number of practices, but I’ve got to start with finding out what a “thumb stopper” is.
Aaron Pearson:
Okay. So you obviously listened to a Rick Mulready’s podcast.
Dane Golden:
First of all, is it one word or two, a “thumb stopper?”
Aaron Pearson:
It is two words, thumb and stopper. Yes.
Dane Golden:
It’ll be in a famous word soon, so we ought to spell it right.
Aaron Pearson:
Yeah. Hmm. Uh, so a thumb stopper is, you know, we’re all on our phones. We’re scrolling through Facebook or Instagram or just mindlessly going through it. And if, if we’re not really paying attention, we’ll just go there through there for hours. Well, if you’re doing a good job as a marketing agency or if you’re doing a good job as a local business or an online business, if you’re doing something well, it will make you stop your thumb and say, “Oh, this is actually interesting.” Could be a good image, could be a good video. It could be the copy. However that being said about the copy, it’s more than likely going to be the imagery. That’s what stops you first. So the point is to stop the mindless scrolling and put their finger on it so that you have a chance to actually get an interaction and versus an impression. So that’s a thumb stopper.
Dane Golden:
Excellent word. Really Great. So what is the most common mistake local advertisers make with video?
Aaron Pearson:
I think we see an array of different ways that people kind of approach, uh, mistakes whenever they’re making a video. And there’s the ones who tried to completely go over-polished and then there’s the ones who just go completely, um, off the cuff, which is, there’s no problem with off the cuff. It’s very raw. It’s very, very organic and can be effective. But there isn’t any thought process. So the video isn’t necessarily the biggest mistake. The most common mistake is that they don’t plan for the kind of video that they’re going to create. Just like what you do when you’re doing a big production for a movie, you have things that are actually needing to be placed at certain times and you need to have a sequence to take people from point A to point B and tell a story. We have to be able to tell a story. And some people get on live video and they’re very good off the cuff, but they don’t ever take us from, “Hey, this is what I’m getting your attention for” all the way to the end.” So a lot of people think the big mistakes are like the quality of the video. If you shoot horizontally, if you shoot vertically. But really that doesn’t matter too much. And we’ve seen a lot of tests go either ways, but really the most common and probably the biggest mistake that people make and if you change this so that people who are listening, if you change this one thing, I think that your videos will be more effective completely throughout. And that is to actually plan out, even if it takes you five or 10 minutes to play it out: Okay, we’re going to do this video. I don’t know how long it’s going to be. Okay, that’s fine, but we have to go from this point. This is the problem, this is our solution. What’s the story? Or what kind of story arc are we going to get to before we end this video? What are people going to walk away with? Why are they going to find value in this? And if they’re not going to watch it, you know, what can they get a value in the very beginning to, to get something from that. So that’s kind of where I’m going with that.
Dane Golden:
What, and now you mentioned live video, which I assume you focus on live video on Facebook. Well, what about, you know, the mix of various things people could do? This is a focus on local video advertising, but people also upload non-paid media, which you call organic videos. And they do it on Facebook, they do it on YouTube, they do it on social media. How do all these different types of platforms work together? Or do you, do you just focus on some of them?
Aaron Pearson:
Well, it depends on, so our, our philosophy is actually to focus on one thing, and do it really well, before trying to be everywhere. I mean, eventually that’s what you want to do. But my answer most of the time is “you’re doing things mediocre.” Or I would tell the business owner, “you’re doing things mediocre on Facebook, and that’s where you’re spending time.” Okay, you know this the best, let’s get this to an eight or a nine out of 10, instead of a five, before we ever try to expand over into YouTube or LinkedIn. Now if their target market is there, then we may say, okay, Facebook doesn’t necessarily make as much sense for you. That being said, I don’t think I’ve ever said that to anybody. There’s 2 billion users on there and they’re on there, so I don’t usually say that. But say for example, they’re trying to decide between Instagram or Pinterest. Well, depending on what their audiences at, um, or with their audiences spending time, you know, does it make sense to do video and just upload videos from YouTube and put it over on Pinterest cause they want search traffic? Or do they want to get more all authentic and upload stories to Instagram? And it just really depends. That being said, they do work together, and our organic is a key component because we use a lot of organic to test to see if what’s going to work well. If it works well organically, then more like more than likely it’s going to work well as paid traffic. But we don’t ever really advise people to say, “Hey, get on Facebook, get on Youtube, get on Instagram, get on LinkedIn, post the videos everywhere, and then do a mediocre job.” So that’s usually for a local business, which is what we’re kind of focusing on here today. Most local businesses don’t have a good grasp on multiple platforms. They can do what, one or two, but they really can’t expand outside of that. So our goal is to, you know, lay the groundwork for how they’re going to be able to, again, go back to your previous question, the mistake with video, lay out the actual plan to make that content possible across multiple platforms.
Dane Golden:
So your specialty is largely Facebook video as it sounds like, and that also is an area where most local business can have success, if I hear you right. Is that correct?
Aaron Pearson:
Yeah, absolutely. I would say that 70-80% of the video advertising that we do is on Facebook and Instagram with taking a bigger dive into YouTube as of late. Um, but it’s very early on. But yeah, Facebook is cheap views and very, very specific targeting. And most people are familiar with the business owners. Local business owners are familiar. It’s been around for a while. People know Facebook.
Dane Golden:
When you’re a retail business or a restaurant or a local service business, should you advertise for people to come in or call or go to your website, or email you, or download a lead or, or lead magnet or what is exactly the goal that a local business should have when they’re on Facebook?
Aaron Pearson:
Yeah, so the answer is all of the above. But I would not test all of the above. The biggest question that we get asked for local businesses is how do I get more people to come into my retail location? How can I get traffic in here? And there’s a lot of things, there’s a lot of different ways that you can approach this. And what’s cool about video is that you can get in front of people very cheap. And I’ve talked about this before, it’s more of like a very wide net. So a net is in the sense of like, here’s a, I guess not wide but like a five-mile radius video and that it just speaks directly to the audience. The goal is to get them to come into the store. And that’s really ultimately number one, if you can’t get them into the store, secondary to that would be to get their email address so that we can nurture them. Even below that if we couldn’t get their email address is to figure out if they like the content and invite them to like the page.
Dane Golden:
So let me, let me ask – that getting to come into the store. How do you do that? How do you measure it? How do you know when they’ve come in?
Aaron Pearson:
So number one, you have to have an amazing offer. So many businesses that I talked to are like, “Well, I just want to give them 10% off.” And I was like, “That’s not going to make them excited to come in.” You have to do something that’s gonna be really exciting for them. So contests are great ways to do it. You can do a contest where you give away something that’s maybe $200 in value. People love free stuff. You know, if I was like, “Hey, do you want to, you know, a free water bottle?” Even if you didn’t need a new water bottle, you’d be like, “Well I mean sure I would, I would take something for free.” Nine Times out of 10 people will take something for free. So you have to have an amazing offer or a contest to get them in the door. And the best way, like you said, is to, is to use a video to kind of promote this. But then once you measure it, there’s actually something really cool with Facebook that a lot of local businesses don’t use or are not aware of or know how to use them, but they’re calling “offline events.” And it actually is, is very simple. But the this, the process is that if you use a video or something like a video, and the people who watch that Facebook video are now a part of a data point for Facebook. And then whenever you have your POS system connected, you can actually export that data, upload it to Facebook, and with a margin of error, we can say, “Okay, Billy Joe over here watched this video. He also came into the store. We know this because we matched this data. He spent $50.” So do we know that, you know, Billy over here actually watched the video, came into the store because of this video? No, we don’t. But we have a good idea that maybe 60-70% of the chance is that he came in that way. And once you get multiple of those people, so say for example, we ran an offer, you and I had this a popcorn company or a mechanic shop. And we said, “Okay, we’ve got 50 people who came in. We know that those 50 people watched the Facebook video. We matched it up with the POS data. They spent $15,000 with us. We know that, maybe not everybody, but let’s just say half of those people actually came in because they saw the video. Well, we can attribute $7,000, almost $8,000 worth of revenue based off of people who watched that video. So offline events are crucial, And Facebook has some pretty good articles. There’s a lot of other people who have good articles on how to use offline events, but they’re not used enough.
Dane Golden:
So a couple of things I want to ask you about those, what you just said. So you said with offline events, it’s connected to your POS system. That’s the register essentially. And you’re saying when they buy, the owner of the business can export that list, send it to you, you upload it to the Facebook ad system and it matches with people who have seen the video and then you can write a report on that. Is that right?
Aaron Pearson:
That’s correct. And yes, it’s connected to the POS system, which is the point of sale system. It’s not directly connected to Facebook. There is a little bit of a manual process and at least from the ones that I have worked with now, we work a lot with Shopify, but a lot of them are like retail locations that go online and they don’t necessarily measure offline events. But I believe that you can do a feed within, depending on like Shopify has their own POS system. So if they had their own pos system and it connected directly to Facebook through an app on Shopify, you may be able to get offline events in real time through something like that. But you would have to have a lot of sources in play to be able to make that happen. Otherwise it’s manual. And you know, even if you just did it once a week, it would be a really good metric for other marketers or other business owners to see that, hey, this social media stuff really works. I can see that. You know this month alone I paid my guy X amount but I made $50,000 or I made $40,000 and it’s, and I can actually put a number to that.
Dane Golden:
And help me understand about the contest because I know that certain online businesses are quirky about contests. What do you mean exactly by a contest and what’s okay and what’s not okay.
Aaron Pearson:
So you have to follow Facebook’s rules and, depending on when you’re listening to this, we’re recording obviously and June of 2019 this is always updating. So you do want to make sure to check out their, their policies for what you can do for a contest. Like at least for right now, I know that you can’t necessarily tag a bunch of friends below because it looks as you know, spammy or phishing for, for engagement. But so for example, we had, hey, we had that mechanic shop and we said for you know, the first 10 people who, or let’s say we’re going to give away a $500 gift card for any kind of mechanical issue if you sign up for the email list and you, you know, share this post or share this post or something like that, again, you’d have to check the policies, share this with a friend. That’s all you do. And then we say by June 30th, 15 days or 21 days later, we’re going to draw for that. And then we would do some promotions obviously to tell people about the contest, but then do some promotions to do for the people who drew or the people who entered and you know, make sure that we show or told about the winner. But we would also could tell about, or we could tell those other people who didn’t win, “Hey, here’s another offer.” We didn’t give you the $500, but here’s $50 if you use it within the next week or so. So you can just, I mean there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of fun ways to get creative and how to get people to opt in to it. But I would always say that no matter what you want to collect that email address. The email is crucial. Or Messenger is very popular right now. I have them opt in through Messenger cause that’s, you know, a huge open rate for that as well. And so either email or Messenger, that way that you can communicate directly with that customer, even if they never come into your store, you still can continue to stay in touch with them so that you know, eventually they could become a customer.
Dane Golden:
And then, and, and then you have a email series that, a sequence that you send that, gets them interested in whatever way about the store.
Aaron Pearson:
Yeah. So usually that is an indoctrination email. Like do you know, kind of warming them up exactly what you’re saying. And the point of going back to video, I always encourage people that these first two or three emails, they should, they should be videos. A, it’s, it’s usually a bit easier. You can be very, you can shoot them from your phone, but tell them like, hey look, this is John – more than likely for a local business, they own it. It’s usually family-owned or it’s, you know, one person owned or husband, wife, whatever that may be. But people resonate when they know who the owner of the company has versus a big corporation. That’s just, you know, nine times out of 10 people feel better about giving money to a local business than I do about a big corporation. So if you had that email address or the email series that was like the first one was like, hey, this is, you know, I’m Tom and I own this mechanic shop. We’ve been in business since this long, 20 years. This is family-owned, you know, if you ever have any issues, you know, come find me. I’m here, I’m here, the person to help. Well, right there, you’ve got a really good fuzzy feeling about it. You’re like, wow, I really trust this guy. He seems genuine. They’ve been around for awhile. And then next part of the series could all be like client testimonials or it could be telling them about the shop. You could have a little about video to kind of explain like, you know why you’re different or why you’re better or why you priced the way that you price. But those could all be, you know, you could have a five-part video series or an indoctrination email series and that would be valuable to your clients or to the customers, potential customers as well. And it may take those five emails for them to say, “Hey, I need an oil change.” I’m going to go to that mechanic shop down the street.
Dane Golden:
And, and, and when you say you’re sending a video email, what’s the platform that you’re using? Is that like you’re using a Vidyard or a Wistia or Facebook or, YouTube, some other thing?
Aaron Pearson:
A lot of platforms. It’s very, I mean Wistia’s great because for those who don’t know, Wistia, you can, they can’t necessarily, you can set it to where you, they can’t skip forward on the video. They’ve watched the full video or they just don’t want to part of it. So that’s good. What’s really easy though is like most platforms, if you’re using, you know, ConvertKit, if you use InfusionSoft, if you’re using MailChimp, ConstantContact, they all work really well with YouTube. So if you just uploaded a video unlisted on YouTube and just copied the URL, it’s so simple. And for the most part that will do the job 90% of the time for a local business. I think there is a little bit of a cost for Wistia. And if you’re doing some more advanced things than you know, Wistia’s probably the way to go, uh, than, than, when Vimeo doesn’t necessarily, um, make sense. But you could go YouTube and that’s, and it’s free. So –
Dane Golden:
So, so, and when we say a video email, just to clarify for the listeners, it’s not playing within the email itself. It’s a, it’s an image that looks like a video player and when you click it then opens up a video. Is that correct?
Aaron Pearson:
Correct. Yeah, yeah. And I think that there’s actually, there is certain software I could, I don’t know that them off the top of my head, but there are chrome extensions where you can record videos like that. And they actually will play within the email too. And it’s very low, not that it’s not low quality, but it doesn’t take, you know, we’re not talking megabytes so it doesn’t take a ton to, to load. So there are, there are other solutions. I don’t remember the Chrome extension, but it is very easy and I think that there are options right now where you could have the videos inside of the email and not have to have an external source or play it through like YouTube.
Dane Golden:
And what, what categories of local businesses would do best if they did video advertising, let’s say on Facebook. But they’re not advertising as much as they should either because traditionally they don’t do it or they just, it just hasn’t become a trend.
Aaron Pearson:
Yeah. So I think that my answer would’ve been different now, at least here in the Dallas area because like –
Dane Golden:
Because you’re getting everyone to advertise.
Aaron Pearson:
Right, exactly. Or they’re just seeing that, you know, some people taught, that’s the good thing is word of mouth is great because talk, you know, it just spreads like wildfire. So some like for example, one roofer’s doing well and they’re like, “Hey, how did you get a lead for $50 and they’re about to make 10,000? Oh, I did this video on Facebook and like, Oh really? Well I’m going to do this video on Facebook.” So I was going to say roofers and then I would say chiropractors. Uh, and then I would say dentists, but really in the local marketing space, those are kind of like the go-to places now. So those places aren’t as, they aren’t doing it as much places that I do think have a low hanging fruit that don’t do it enough is coffee. Because, and I talked about this in the Rick Mulready podcast as well, is that, you know, most Americans, you know, majority of Americans drink coffee and most people love Starbucks. Sure. That’s great. That’s fine. I prefer to find a local spot and I think a lot of other people do as well. But there isn’t a lot of independent or indie coffee shops are very cool vibe shops that are doing cool marketing to get people in the door. It’s like you have an amazing product. You’re just not telling people. Ice cream places would be really good spot to do something. Car washes would be another good one that you could be doing something. A mechanic would be another good one. Restaurants, they do video, but it’s just so bad most of the time, at least what I’ve seen that it’s just more of like, hey, here’s the picture of the food. And they don’t ever show people enjoying the food, you know? Okay.
Dane Golden:
Cool. Say that again. Slower. I think that’s very interesting. Could you say that part about the restaurants again?
Aaron Pearson:
So restaurants take a lot of video or pictures of their food, but they don’t ever show people enjoying their food. And that’s kind of a psychological approach to things is that we as humans have to put ourselves in the shoes of said person. So for example, if we watch a commercial about Michael Jordan or Lebron James, and then we see them dunk and we’re like, oh, you know, they’re dunking, I may be able to go and dunk. You know, we’re not, we gotta be realistic here. We know that that’s not going to happen. But if somebody else is enjoying this food and we have this video of somebody enjoying this pasta, these new tacos that are at this place, you’re like, “Wow, this person loves it. I just, without them knowing it.” Subliminally they’re like, “Oh, I bet you I would enjoy eating those tacos,” versus here’s a really good picture of this food. Or here’s a really good picture of this video or video of these Tacos, but it doesn’t, you know, and they may look good and you may get some of the same effect, but it’s not the same as somebody actually enjoying and saying like, you know, hearing that crunching noise, seeing them, you know, salivate a little bit and just kind of like, you’re like, “Oh wow, that’s me. I definitely need them now.”
Dane Golden:
So, so you might say it’s a difference between good food to eat versus a good place to eat.
Aaron Pearson:
Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. They may be like, they may want Tacos, but they may not want to talk a favorite place. They may be like, oh, “I’m going to go to my favorite Taco shop” versus “I’m going to go to, you know, whatever it is down the street because that place looks good.”
Dane Golden:
Now if I’m a local business and I’m listening to this podcast and I’m saying, that sounds real, real nice, I have a very low, low, small margin, I don’t have the budget to do this. Um, what is your, what is your point to them? What would you say to that?
Aaron Pearson:
I would say that you don’t have a choice not to do it. And the reason that I say that is that you should, and I think that I’ve talked about this before and in other videos and stuff that I’ve put out online, and this is something that’s from Gary Vaynerchuk, is that, um, people are treating their business. For example, as a restaurant, they’re treating it like a restaurant, instead of a media company, you should be focusing on marketing. Good marketing will get you through a good economy and a bad economy. Bad marketing will get you out of business in a good economy or a bad economy.
Dane Golden:
Okay.
Aaron Pearson:
And, and when you have an amazing product, a lot of people will do the word of mouth talking for you, but you just don’t have the traction when you’re a new business or you’re a local business with so many co competition, so much competition. For example, pizza places, there’s probably, you know, if I was to guess probably five or 10,000 different pizza spots across the u s and if we were talking about pizza spots in, you know, I’m in Allen, Texas here. If there is pizza sponsors, I can count on my, uh, in my head right now, I can think of probably seven or eight within a four- or five-mile radius right now. And then you also have the Costcos, you have Quick Trips, all those other places they serve pizza as well. If you’re not doing marketing, you don’t differentiate yourself and then you just are treated as something completely different or the exact same category and you get tossed up as like, “Oh, that’s just another place to get pizza.” And I think the way that Seth Godin put it, you know, a genius marketer is that you have to do something to differentiate yourself from somebody else. You have to be that purple cow because nobody’s ever going to stop for a brown cow. But people will do a thumb stop, uh, for the people who have a purple cow, you have to do something that’s unique. So to be in business long term, you have to do that. And so that’s what, that’s the only reason I would say that it’s a must. I would move things around. I would take less of a salary because it’s going to pay off. It’s going to be your highest ROI. Because good marketing will help your word of mouth. It will help your online traffic. It will help your overall business. And if you don’t do it and somebody else does, then you may not be in business. And I have to have these rough conversations. I’m a straight shooter to most local businesses. When I say, “Look, you have two ways to go. Either A, you start marketing or B, you know, you figured out something else, but you have to do something that is going to put you in front of your target market. Otherwise it’s going to be very hard for you to stay in business. And when you start talking like that, um, I never try to make people fear doing marketing at all. I usually just kinda step away from that and just laid it on the table and say, “Look, it doesn’t have to be us, but I’ll, and, and I truly believe this. If you choose somebody else, that’s completely fine. I just want you doing something because it helps our local economy. If you’re doing well, local businesses are needed for a thriving economy and for thriving community. And if you’re not doing marketing, that just means that somebody else, like a Pizza Hut, which I love Pizza Hut, or another local spot or another big corporation is going to be taking that money tonight when it could be you.”
Dane Golden:
And so much of our world now can be delivered to the door. We don’t actually have to leave the house to get food, go to the movies, get hardware, we don’t have to go, we don’t have to leave the house. So how do they compete with a larger online retailer like Amazon or whatever? And it’s through getting attention and the right kind of attention and results and just, just advertising is not enough. They really have to understand the strategy and tactics. Like the ones you’re advocating at BitBranding.
Aaron Pearson:
Yes. And, and it’s, it’s all about the brand more than is advertising because you can spend a bunch of money and get crap or you could spend a little bit of money and get a lot. But if you spend the time and effort to make something that’s truly creative, something truly inspirational or something motivational or makes people laugh or it makes people feel a certain way, that is going to move the needle 10 times more than if you spend a a thousand dollars on a video that’s just a very cookie cutter, “Hey, here’s our location. Come by this place. Here’s the offer.” People or five year old kids now, know when there’s an ad that’s going to happen on YouTube.
Dane Golden:
Well, so I wonder when you say you know, spend all your, blow your money on a video that doesn’t work. I wanted to ask how do you break down the percentage of the budget that someone is going to do? If you’re going to, if you could have X amount, what percentage is going to go to making the video assets and the strategy, what’s going to go to just finding people for cold traffic that you didn’t know before? How much is remarketing, calling out those people again? What’s the, how do you break it down generally?
Aaron Pearson:
Yeah, so I spend in our, our philosophy is to spend between 60-80% on creative. This is imagery, voice, video, um, landing pages, coupons, offers, all the automation. All of that is the important part. Without that, it doesn’t matter how much we spend. I would rather spend, say for example, if we had $1,000 total, this is not like a real budget. I’m choosing it because it’s based off the number. If I had $1,000 I would spend 800 of it on all the creative and making everything happen. The other $200 I would spend on advertising, and the reason I would only spend $200 on advertising is that if it’s really good, what’s good about social platforms is they want people to spend time there, so if it’s actually good is they’re going to do a lot of that for us and the users are going to do a lot of that.
Dane Golden:
What does that mean? They’re going to do a lot of that for us
Aaron Pearson:
So the algorithm it placed in place favor to the content. It’s actually good. It’s going to show it to more people and then you have your consumers who see and they’re like, that’s so good. I’m going to share it. That’s free. Then you have people who are saying, Oh, I’m going to comment below and I’m going to tag a friend. “Hey Becky, we got to check this out. Hey Fred, you are, you want to go here tomorrow?” All of that is free. All we’re doing is putting a little bit of advertising money behind it to say, hey, let’s reach some people. And for a local business, you know that that will absolutely just be a game changer for them. And you can start getting into bigger budgets. And you know, like I said, $200. Well, if we’re talking realistically, that’s probably not a budget that I would say, you know, this, if you hired, yeah, it would not be sufficient if you were doing this all in house and if this was your own, then, maybe you could get it get squeaked by. But the most important part is that, that creative, um. So 80% on the creative, 20% on the actual ad spend because, and, and really at the end of the day, that’s what the business owner wants too, is like they want to be able to know what’s tangible to them. You’re like, “Hey, I just paid you X amount of dollars per month. What did I get? I mean, I know I got this. I know I got customers and that’s what I really wanted.” But when you create something for them, they’re like, “Wow, I have this video forever. I can use this forever. I have these pictures.” That’s something that they can see and grab ahold of. And those are those quick wins that they really want, not only for the business owner because a local business owners, they, they’re paying you versus paying for dance recitals or they’re paying you versus going on that family vacation. So they’re, they’re very close to the, to the decisions on whether or not they’re going to hand over cash. And – .
Dane Golden:
And I just wanted to ask, when you, when you said on, uh, the, the paid media part of it, how do you break that up between the cold marketing, meaning people who don’t know you to begin with and the remarketing, which is someone shared, showed some sort of interest, then you’re going to show them something new.
Aaron Pearson:
Okay. So I’ll give you like two scenarios. A, you have a really good following and you can go off. You’re a large warm audience. So like one of our clients, uh, she has about 250,000 people who engage every year on Instagram because she has a great Instagram account and she creates great stuff. So we could go after just warm traffic and that could be 80% of it and just do 20% remarketing. Now there’s other businesses and most businesses fall into this where most people don’t know who they are. So we will spend a good amount of traffic, probably 30-40% on cold traffic while also still nurturing the middle part of that and spending another 30% on the warm audiences depending on the budget and then what’s ever left over for the remarketing. Usually that 20-30% for remarketing. Uh, it really depends on the budget and it really depends on how well the cold audiences are doing for us. So if it costs us a lot to reach those cold audiences, then we know we probably need to go back to the drawing board anyway. But, uh, about 70-80% total would be spent on the actual traffic and then another 10-20% on remarketing. And if you have a good budget, the remarketing could be even smaller because there’s really fun ways to reach back out to people. So Instagram stories are super inexpensive to get in front of people. Uh, we do a lot of reach campaigns which are super inexpensive to get in front of people so we could lower the budget even 10% and spend a huge chunk of it on top of the funnel and middle of the funnel, kind of nurturing them a little bit and then do remarketing at the bottom. And we could spend as little as 10% of the budget on that if we have really good creative to remarket to them. If it’s an Instagram story and it costs us 30 cents to get in front of them, it’s like, you know, this is a no brainer. So it, it does differentiate but would say, you know, 20-30% for cold, 20-30ish percent for that middle of the funnel, the warmer, the warmer traffic. And then anywhere between 10-20% for the remarketing. And those numbers fluctuate a little bit. But uh, that gives you a good baseline.
Dane Golden:
Amazing. Aaron Pearson, I think you’ve given us today a clinic on local video advertising and people can do this all over the country and all over the world, but if they want to work with you, how do they find you?
Aaron Pearson:
Well, the best place to find us really is we spend a lot of time on Instagram, but our website is probably number one. You can go there. We have a lot of content, videos, podcasts, blog. We put out a lot of content every month probably. I mean, it’s insane amount of content so you can find us there. Uh, and then from there, from the website you could always reach over on, uh, Instagram is probably the best. Instagram or Facebook are probably the best platforms and everything is @bitbranding and our website is bitbranding.co. That’s .co not .com. Some guy in Florida will just not give it to us. So yeah.
Dane Golden:
Excellent. Thank you. Aaron Pearson. Thank you. And people will be able to find this episode by searching for “Hey” and “Aaron Pearson.” That’s A-A-R-O-N. P-E-A-R-S-O-N. My name is Dane Golden, and I want to thank you, the listener for joining us today. I do this podcast, the video marketing value podcast from HEY.com and the YouTube videos and everything else because I love helping marketers and business owners just like you grow your customer community through helpful how-to evergreen videos. Because when you share your expertise in a way that helps your customers live their lives better or do their jobs better, you’ll earn their loyalty and their trust and their business. Thanks to our special guest, Aaron Pearson. Until next week. Here’s to helping you help your customers through video.