This is a TV interview (Kochie's Business Builders) where host David Koch asks digital-marketing experts Sabri Suby and Sam Wood how businesses can use digital marketing to survive the COVID-19 crisis. Sabri emphasizes continued advertising (cheap ad inventory), using Google Keyword Planner to find demand, Facebook for prospecting, and mining online forums/Amazon reviews for customer intelligence. Sam stresses branded and non-branded search, consistency and authenticity on social media, precise audience targeting, B2B partnerships, and the importance of having a website for bricks-and-mortar stores.
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Welcome back to Kochi's Business Builders where we're putting small business first. Today we're talking about how digital marketing can help your business survive a crisis. And joining us from Melbourne is fitness and nutrition expert Sam Wood and Sabri Suby, the founder of digital agency King Kong Gents. Welcome to both of you. Sabri, let's start with you. What's the most successful trend you're seeing on the digital marketing front right now?
Just to keep advertising, you know, it's a Henry Ford quote that the man who, you know, stops advertising to save money is like the man who takes the battery aids out of his clock to save time. And the big thing that we're seeing across the board is in these times of uncertainty is the clients that we see, the ones that are winning are the ones that keep pushing out there. Regardless of whether it's Facebook that you're advertising on or it's Google, you know, inventory across the board for all of these ad platforms are really the cheapest that we've seen them in years and it's really not about one or the other, but more so just making sure that you're still out there and aggressively marketing in these times of uncertainty.
Great advice, Sam. I've seen your business explode recently as a result of some pretty serious digital marketing. What's getting the best results for you?
Our branded search stuff has really accelerated, but we've made sure that we kind of drive the non branded stuff. With so many people now searching for getting in shape at home or gym alternatives, we've been in a really, really fortunate position through this pandemic to take advantage of that and then teaming up with some really powerful B2B partnerships so that we can capture searches that are coming from those businesses.
Let's throw some questions at you from our audience. Sabri Annie from Ballarat says or asks you, how do I decide which platform to market on? Do I need to do them all?
Our approach that we really take is first of all we have a look and see. Like we jump onto Google and see are people actually searching for the product or service that you sell. And there's two tools out there like keywords, Google Keyword Planner where you can jump on, throw a few keywords in there and start to get an idea of what kind of volume that there are around the products and services that you sell. That's the lowest lying fruit. They're the easiest people to convert into customers if there isn't any or there isn't any searches or if you've tapped out of that search market is when you really want to start looking at mediums like Facebook, where you can put an ad, a piece of stimulus in front of like an ideal buyer and get them to actually raise their hand and take action. Ideally, you want to look at both of those different channels as standalone businesses. If you're making enough money to pay for the advertising, pay for your overheads, and then have some money left over for pistachios and protein shakes at the end of the month, I would continue to keep doing that and then also look at that. The same thing is with Facebook. If you're making enough money to pay for that, pay for the overhead. You want to keep feeding money into these things if they're really justifying you doing so.
Sam, Jeff from Manly has a question. What are your top tips to building a social media following?
The biggest things are consistency and authenticity. I think if you keep it real and you deliver consistent content and over time, it's amazing how that has a really powerful snowball effect.
Sabri Rohan from Dubbo asks, are old school focus groups still valuable and what's the digital equivalent?
I would argue that they're not. You know, you can get much more honest, straight up feedback online. The digital equivalent really is going to forums. So you really want to have a look at things like Reddit, you want to go to Amazon, read the comments of like the 5 star reviews on the 1 star reviews and you know, really look around because when you're on digital and it's not a focus groups, it's like being on the fly on a wall of thousands of conversations that are happening online. You know, looking at platforms like Quora, YouTube, comments section, social media, Facebook groups. But my favorite one is definitely Amazon because you know, that's people that are actually voting with their money, you know, using their credit card as a form of voting. And the intel that you can get from this stuff is incredibly powerful.
Sam Jennifer from Townsville is asking, I'm a newbie to social media marketing. How difficult is it to set up targeting so my ads find the right audience?
I mean, that's the whole beauty of digital marketing. It is so much easier than mainstream marketing because you can target your audience. You know, we know exactly who our typical 28er is on my online fitness program. They're usually women who like to work out at home between the ages of 25 and 50. So that's where we spend our money. You just gotta get a bit of advice from an expert expert to make sure that you're putting the ads on the Channels in the right way.
Sabri Paul from Bendigo asks, I've only just noticed the Insights tab in Facebook. How can I use the data to benefit my business?
Sure. So what you can do with that is you can get like a full export of your customers from your business, from your CRM, whether it's their email addresses or whatnot. Then you can actually upload that to Facebook to create what we call a lookalike audience. And if you look at the Insights tab based on that audience that you build, it will show you what other pages that they like, what celebrities they follow, what books that they read. And it just really allows you to kind of flesh out what that avatar for your, for your customers look like. So when you write sales copy or you write any kind of marketing message to your audience, it strikes like lightning because you know exactly who they are. It's not guesswork, it's not their 25 to 45 year old females that live in this suburb. You know, down to the forensic details of exactly what these people are spending their time and money on.
And finally, Sam Howard from Moree says, I'm a bricks and mortar store. Do I really need to have a website?
The first place people go these days is Google and if you don't have a website or they can't find you in that way, you're really doing yourself a disservice. I own a gym as well as having an online platform, but we still take having a strong website and doing some digital marketing very seriously. Even though that's a bricks and mortar business, the two marry together really, really well. And I think you're definitely giving your competitors an advantage if you're missing out on that space.
Great advice, gents. Sabri Subie and Sam Wood, thank you so much for helping to answer all of the questions from our viewers. Really appreciate it.
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