On May 7, 2016, I was honored to be featured on the Business Innovators Magazine and Radio Show in an interview with Tamara Patzer, owner of Blue Ocean Authority on the topic of Website and Facebook Advertising Tips and Tricks.”
You can click here to listen or download the podcast recording of this interview, or read the transcript of my interview below.
Key Points and Show Notes
1:45 — How Yvonne helps local business owners market their businesses online.
3:05 — How Yvonne helped a local kitchen designer grow her business by creating a new website and social media presence that showcased her work and attracted more of her perfect prospects and ideal clients.
7:25 – How Yvonne helped a local custom home builder land a $150,000 project after revamping his website and posting his information on Facebook.
14:09 – Three things every website needs to have to generate more quality leads.
23:54 – How to advertise effectively on Facebook.
36:00 – A unique and little-known Facebook marketing strategy for restaurants that can add several thousand dollars a month in additional revenue for restaurants.
37:44 – Tips for wedding industry professionals.
38:40 – A unique and profitable Facebook advertising strategy for chiropractors that is generating $10,000 – $20,000 more new patient revenue per month per chiropractor.
Click the image below to listen to the full podcast recording.
Podcast Transcript: Website and Facebook Advertising Tips and Tricks
Yvonne Herbst helps companies in the home improvement and health and fitness industries leverage the power of the internet and social media to reach and attract more perfect customers and generate more repeat business, more sales and more profits.
How Herbst Marketing Helps Local Businesses Market Themselves Online
00:53 — I help companies in the home improvement field and health related businesses create a web presence that establishes them as a top choice in their local marketplace. That can range from setting up their websites, setting up their social media presence, creating web content, creating video content, and helping them get more visible online, so that when people are looking for them they stand out in the search results.
1:29 — Tamara Patzer — can you give us a few examples of how you help them and what are some of the problems or perceived problems that people seem to be having with their marketing today?
1:45 — Yvonne Herbst — Well, a lot of business owners I talk with today used to advertise in the Yellow Pages, they might be advertising in local newspapers and local magazines and they are just frustrated because they are not seeing a return on their investment. They are not able to track that the advertising dollars they are spending in print media these days are generating real dollars and real customers.
And they also know that they could and should be using the internet and social media somehow, but they are just very confused. There are so many choices and they just don’t have time to sort it out, figure out the technicalities. And that’s where I come in.
I help them understand their options and select the best options for them and then often times they might not have any website at all or they might have put up a website on their own that looks kind of amateurish and it’s time for them to step up their game and create a more professional look and feel in their website.
Benefits of an Improved Web Presence
2:55 — Tamara Patzer — Do you have an example of someone you helped to make a better web presence?
3:05 — Yvonne Herbst — Yes, I do. A few years ago I gave a talk at a small local business workshop and one of the attendees was a kitchen designer and she came up to me afterwards and she said she really needed help. She was intrigued with what I said about how to make your website work for you, how to make it get found, how to capture leads.
And so I took a look at her website. It was one she’d built herself. I think it may have been on the Godaddy platform. And it was perfectly fine when she was first starting out, but now she was several years into her career as a kitchen designer and she had a beautiful portfolio of work but when you went to her website it just didn’t showcase her work well. It looked very amateurish.
And so I sat down with her and spent quite a few hours just interviewing her, getting to know her business, getting to know what she wanted her website to do for her, compiling her photos and organizing them, and created a new website for her that showcased her beautiful photos and a lot of blog content that explained the different projects she had worked on and explained the kinds of questions you should be thinking about before you launch a kitchen remodeling project, how to choose a kitchen designer and all this content positioned her as an authority in the local marketplace for people who are looking for a custom kitchen design.
So, a few months after her new kitchen design website launched — after I optimized the pictures, the blog content, and got her listed on Google and other directories, got her listed on houzz.com, coached her on how to get reviews, and produced some educational kitchen design tips videos for her — people started finding her for her long tail keywords, like “kitchen designer in Reston Virginia” or “kitchen remodeling in Fairfax Virginia” … and so they find her just by searching and then they would get intrigued by what they saw and what they read.
And she told me that within 6 months the number of leads she was getting through online search was equaling the number of leads she was getting through word of mouth recommendations, and so her investment in her new website, the optimization, the blog content, the customer testimonials and reviews, really has paid off for her.
New Website for Expert Kitchen Designs, Virginia
6:07 — Tamara Patzer — Did she notice that the length of time it took for her projects to go from start to finish — meaning the relationship she had with her new customer — was shortened after she got her new website?
6:19 — Yvonne Herbst — Yes, one of the comments she made to me was that now when she goes out to meet with potential clients it has made it less awkward in that initial encounter because they feel like they already know her, they know her style, they have seen photos of her work, they have watched her videos, and so they already trust her.
6:50 — Tamara Patzer — I think that’s really important because in the world today, like what you said, her online presence equaled or exceeded her word of mouth or real world referrals, so her website was acting like a referral partner for her. And you also did some work for her husband who is a custom home builder. Can you tell us a little about that?
Learn More: Read or Listen to the Interview with Sandra Brannock, Owner, Expert Kitchen Designs
7:25 — Yvonne Herbst — yes, but before I talk about that I’d like to mention that this kitchen designer now has a couple of dozen reviews on houzz.com, which is the premiere social media site for people in the home remodeling industry. And if you look at her reviews, a lot of these projects are $50,000 – $100,000 projects and probably a good third or a half of them pointed out that the people who hired her found her online. So that just illustrates how it does take up front work to pull your information together and present it in a way that is findable online, but the up front work certainly has paid off. (See example Houzz.com review below.)
Kitchen design lead from the internet.
> Click Here to Watch Sandra Brannock’s Authority-Building Kitchen Design Tips Videos
As far as her husband goes, he is a home builder, and they have a synergistic relationship because she designs the kitchens and if her client does not already have a construction company in mind, then her husband can come in and build the kitchen she has designed.
And he was in a similar position. He had a very rudimentary website that did not showcase his work well at all and so I built his new website and featured photographs of his building projects in a very attractive way with photo galleries and when the website was done I put up his Facebook page and then I put up photos of his work on my own Facebook profile and just by luck the night I posted the pictures of some of his projects they were seen by a friend of mine who was fed up with her own contractor and she had decided to fire him. So the photos I put up on my Facebook page caught her attention.
Facebook Mention of New Website for Brannock Enterprises
And then what happened — because this is the way people work these days — is she went out and looked at reviews and what other people were saying about his work and she was impressed with what other clients were saying about their experience with him.
And ultimately she hired him to do a $150,000 project – building a cottage by a pond on their property.
Learn More: Read Andria Corso’s Review of Brannock Enterprises Custom Cottage Construction in Amissville, Virginia
So this again points out how the ecosystem of the web works these days. You get an authority-building website that showcases your work and you get customers or clients to come in and say good things about you on your own website and other review sites and it turns into business.
10:30 – Tamara Patzer — I think you are absolutely right and those are very good examples. And it also proves how fast something can happen in the online word, because like you said you posted the home builder’s information and it just so happened that it caught the attention of someone who wanted to find a home builder at that exact moment.
And at any one time you are probably only going to have 3 percent of people looking for what you have but it just happened that you were in the right place at the right time and I think that social media and having an online presence puts you in front of the right audience because you can target the very words and people who are your audience. So that is really important.
Let’s talk more about business in general and basic marketing, because I know that you talk a lot in public and you do presentations. So when you meet business people, what do you think their biggest misconceptions are about what you do for them or what you are able to do for them?
Basic Marketing Principles for Local Business Owners
11:57 – Yvonne Herbst — Well, I think a lot of business owners realize that they need a website but they just think they can put up a website themselves and business will just start flowing to them and then they are puzzled when it doesn’t. They don’t understand all the different moving pieces beyond having their website up there that go into marketing your business online.
They also don’t understand basic marketing principles. Like they will get very hung up on having a trendy looking website but then they make it hard to find their phone number. It’s trendy to have their phone number hidden in small print at the bottom of the page.
And they also don’t want to put up some kind of lead capture mechanism or an offer that will get people to give them their email address so they can follow up with them.
They tend to talk about themselves too much. They don’t think in terms of what problem am I solving for my ideal client and how can I communicate that in a powerful and engaging way.
So it’s about who they serve and the problems that they solve.
13:25 – Tamara Patzer — I think that’s a really good point. You mention that a lot of times people have the misconception of “build it and they will come.” They think that if they build a website that people will come but pointing out the fact that sometimes people create websites that are just fancy online brochures. You mentioned a couple of factors about a good website.
Can you give me three tips about what a good well-designed website should include?
Three Tips for Improving Your Website
14:09 – Yvonne Herbst — Well, you need to capture the visitor’s interest within the first 3-5 seconds. So on the home page of the website it should be really clear what you do and who do you serve and how can you help them?
So you need compelling visuals and a compelling message on the home page. And there should be a clear invitation to call you or email you.
And if you can offer something educational or something that will benefit them when they provide their email address, then you can set up an autoresponder that will send them the information they requested and that is the beginning of cultivating a relationship that will lead to sales in the future.
You know, most people who come to your website in most cases are not ready to buy that minute. They might be researching their options. So there needs to be a lead capture and lead nurturing system in place on your website.
15:30 – Tamara Patzer — So people come to your website and you would have some kind of an educational program via email or something so that they can get to know those people better.
The Importance of Online Reviews
So what about reviews? Do you get very much resistance from people about asking for reviews?
15:57 – Yvonne Herbst – Yes, it’s an ongoing process. A lot of people are shy about going to their clients and asking them to review them. They feel like they shouldn’t be tooting their own horn; they feel like that comes across as arrogant. They also are concerned about imposing on their customers or feeling like they are asking for too big a favor.
But what I’ve found is that in most cases if people are happy with the work that you have done, they are more than happy to send you a testimonial.
The difficulty can come in when it comes to asking people to review you on Google because typically you have to have a gmail address and login to Google before you can leave a review so there is a little bit of a barrier there, but if you have a client with a gmail address it shouldn’t be hard to direct your customers and clients to your Google My Business page – you can even give them a link to that page — and ask them to share what they liked about working with you, or what they like about your products or services — and that also helps your search results. When people are researching your company and they see lots of 5-star reviews and your competitors have few or no reviews, it helps you stand out. It gives you more authority.
17:35 – Tamara Patzer — I think you are absolutely right because word of mouth is how most people perceive that they get most of their business, but as we move more online we do get more and more business from the virtual world because people do take time to research a purchase online before they buy it and people do go online to see what other people are saying about you. It’s so easy to push a button and find out lots of information.
Budgeting for Online Marketing
18:18 — Tamara Patzer — I want to talk with you about expectations. When you work with a marketer or a marketing company such as you, what do you feel are some of the things that people don’t realize is involved when working with a marketing company?
18:37 – Yvonne Herbst – Well, first of all they need to have a budget. It’s amazing how often you will talk with a company and you will ask them about their budget and they haven’t given it any thought and they are a little bit shy about what they are willing to spend. It’s a bit of a dance because they are afraid to say how much they are willing to spend in case they are in danger of getting ripped up. But what I am able to do for you varies depending on how much you are able and willing to invest. If you have just a tiny budget the marketing strategy can be very different from what we can do for you if you have a budget that allows us to do paid advertising on Google or Facebook.
Whether you have a budget that would enable me to take the burden off the client in terms of creating regular content and post regular blog articles or get videos done for them.
You can’t expect to get stellar results with a $500 budget. It’s important to be up front with people and discuss what you are willing to invest, and you also need to be willing to put in time and effort on your own end to provide the information the marketing agency needs to do a good job for you.
The OnBoarding Process
20:20 – Tamara Patzer — How much time would you say it takes to do what you would call an intake with a new client?
20:30 — Yvonne Herbst — Well, in the case of the kitchen designer and home builder I mentioned, I probably spent about 10 hours up front just interviewing them, getting a feel for their business. This was not all in one sitting but over several conversations, getting an understanding of their business, getting an understanding of their ideal client, getting an understanding of their value proposition and what differentiates them from their competition, trying to coach them.
In many cases it’s hard for clients to articulate what differentiates them and why a client should choose them over a competitor. So I help them clarify that. I help them wordsmith it. I help them create content that explains that clearly.
Most business owners aren’t good writers. They don’t like to write. They like doing their own job. So they need help honing their message and crafting a message that is powerful and engaging.
So that intake process can take around 10 hours and then you need to expect that the marketing person might be putting in another 50-100 hours creating the website, setting up your social media presence, and if we are doing videos for you then there is time involved in going to your place of business and videotaping you and editing the videos and then getting the videos uploaded and optimized for search and disseminated around the internet.
So a marketing person is not a mind reader. They can’t get inside your mind. You have to spend time and thought on your end so your marketing expert can help you.
22:35 —Tamara Patzer — I think that is really good advice and I hope business owners are listening because you are echoing what often happens to me because I will say, “Do you have a budget” and often the answer is, “No, I haven’t thought about that” or they feel uncomfortable because they are afraid that you are going to take what that number is and get it all spent.
But really what it is all about is having the budget to know whether or not we have to go for all the free strategies or do we have money to do paid advertising like a Facebook campaign.
Facebook Advertising Tips
I want to talk about Facebook because it is something that I think we all should be looking at, because I think there around 1 billion people using Facebook and we are not trying to get a billion people to become our client. We are just wanting to get the perfect client.
So why do you think people should be advertising on Facebook?
23:54 – Yvonne Herbst — I saw recently that there are around 7.2 billion people on our planet right now, and out of that there are around 3 billion people connected to the internet, and of those 3 billion people there are 1.3 billion people who are active Facebook users. That’s not just people who have put up a Facebook profile page and aren’t using Facebook at all.
And Facebook has acquired a tremendous amount of data on its active users. And what is interesting is that you can target almost any demographic you want inside of Facebook and get your message in front of these active users in a very cost effective way.
For as little as $5 a day in direct ad spend on Facebook you can reach several thousand people a day who have a specific interest in what you are doing.
Facebook Lead Ads
The trick about advertising in Facebook is that they recently introduced something called Lead Ads. You have probably seen these ads that show up in your news feed in Facebook, right? If it says sponsored it is a paid Facebook ad.
Example of a Lead Generating Facebook Ad for Dentist
And what Facebook lets you do now is integrate these lead capture forms with your email autoresponder system, like Constant Contact or Aweber or Infusionsoft so that you can now get leads through Facebook and put them into your autoresponder.
So this is a time saving move. You don’t have to get back to the person immediately. They fill out the form and get immediate get your video or report or coupon that you offered in your Facebook ad. And then you can set it up so they get regular follow up email messages and in some cases text messages from you to cultivate the relationship to the point that they know, like, trust and are ready to buy from you.
26:55 — Tamara Patzer – Wow, that is really phenomenal – how much you can do with Facebook. And that is a great value. I mean if you get one client that would be a really good value.
Facebook Advertising vs. Google AdWords
27:09 – Tamara Patzer — So how is advertising on Facebook different from advertising on Google?
27:11 – Yvonne Herbst — Well, what you need to think about when advertising on Facebook is, Google is a search based platform. So with Google Adwords what you are doing is researching keywords that are being searched. Google has a keyword tool that lets you see what keywords people are searching for in Google and it will tell you how much traffic there is for various keywords and phrases and about how much you should expect to pay to get a click on your ad in Google.
So Google is entirely search driven and people who are searching in Google are much further along in the buying cycle. They are interested in buying soon. They are interested in finding an emergency plumber or a locksmith or a local restaurant.
With Facebook, it is better for piquing people’s interest in a social way. Let’s say you are at a cocktail party and you are introduced to someone, you don’t say “Hey, I’m a home builder and let’s set up an appointment so we can see how I can remodel your home,” or, if you are a chiropractor, you don’t immediately say “let’s make an appointment for a chiropractic service.”
No, you get to know people, you have a social conversation and find out what your common interests are. Then you might follow up with them later on, but you don’t try to sell yourself right away in a social setting.
So Facebook ads are social ads targeted to people with an interest in what you are doing. They are there to pique their interest, to get them to click through to watch a video, or to get a coupon for your restaurant, or to learn more about whatever it is you are doing. Maybe get a how-to or tip sheet.
Then once you get these people into your sales funnel, you can follow up with automated messages with more information to move them forward in the buying cycle. And because they requested information these are permission-based messages. You aren’t spamming them.
How to Get Started Advertising on Facebook
29:57 – Tamara Patzer — So, if somebody wants to start advertising on Facebook, how do they do that?
30:02 – Yvonne Herbst — Well first of all you have to have a Facebook Business page. You can’t advertise just from your own personal profile page. You have to have a business page set up for your business.
Then you have to go to business.facebook.com and set up a business account there. They will ask you for your credit card information because when you advertise on Facebook they will bill your credit card. You can set a threshold inside Facebook for when your credit card will be billed, so you can say you don’t want to be billed until you have accumulated $50 or $100 in ad spend on Facebook. You are not billed immediately until you meet the threshold that you have set
Then once you get your business account set up, when you go to your Facebook business page there will be a message that says “Manage Your Page with Business Manager” and you have to click that link before you can post status updates as your business and not your personal self.
From there, there are 2 ways to create ads inside Facebook. One is through the adverts manager which is a simplified advertising tool, but if you want to dive deep and take advantage of lead ads, you need to use the Facebook Power Editor to create your ads. That gets into more detail than I can get into in this interview today but I can talk with your listeners and provide more information if they like.
Facebook Boosted Posts
32:05 – Tamara Patzer — So what is a boosted post in Facebook?
32:10 – Yvonne Herbst — A boosted post is the most basic form of Facebook advertising yo can do. Let’s say you have written a blog and you post the link to that blog on your Facebook page and you are given the option to boost it.
You want to create an eye-catching graphic to accompany that post to call people’s attention.
And Facebook has rules that any image you post that accompanies a boosted post cannot have more than 20% text on that image. If it does, Facebook won’t approve your boosted post.
Then when you boost your post, you have the option to say you want everyone to be able to see the ad, or you only want people who have liked your page to see the ad, or you want everyone who likes your page plus their friends to see the ad, and you can specify the geographic target area where your ad will be displayed as well.
So you can specify you only want people who live within 5 miles of your business to see your ad.
A lot of business owners assume that if 500 or 1,000 people have liked their page that ALL of them will see everything they post on their business page. But in fact, Facebook only shows your business page posts to 1-2 percent of your Facebook fans so if you want to make sure that ALL your Facebook fans see your post then you have to boost our post to ensure that everyone sees it.
And you can specify if you want your post to be displayed over 1 day or 3 days or 5 days or any period of time.
So boosted posts are a way to ensure that everyone who has liked your page sees what you are publishing and it can keep you top of mind with this audience.
33:34 – Tamara Patzer — So do you have any other good ideas besides Facebook for business owners? For example, can you connect your boosted post with a coupon?
33:57 – Yvonne Herbst — Well you can put a link to your website in your boosted post. For example I have a dog grooming client where I will upload a coupon image to her website and then we will boost a post advertising her dog grooming special with a link to the downloadable coupon in the status update on her page. Then people can click that link and download the coupon from there.
35:20 – Tamara Patzer — OK, so boosted posts are an inexpensive way to test a concept or an ad and you can actually take them to your website where all kinds of things can happen with Facebook like retargeting or remarketing. Do you also offer different campaigns? Would you like to talk about your birthday campaigns?
A Unique Facebook Campaign for Restaurants
36:00 — Yvonne Herbst — Yes, birthday campaigns are especially good for restaurants or day spas or any kind of business that provides personal services. Florists for example.
One of the intriguing audiences you can target in Facebook is people with birthdays coming up within the next 7 days. So a restaurant can advertise a free dinner or lunch to people who live near the restaurant and have a birthday coming up in the next week. Birthday celebrants can bring a lot of money into a restaurant because people usually bring at least one and often several people or a large group of people to a restaurant on their birthday.
So when someone decides they want that offer and click on the Get Coupon link, the restaurant receives an immediate notification of this lead and they can track the performance of their Facebook ad and see that it is really working. I know of restaurants that are generating 50-60 leads a month or more and several thousand dollars a month or more from this one marketing technique.
So these birthday celebrants are automatically added to the restaurant’s email list of customers and we can also add them to a text messaging list.
And the beauty of this marketing strategy for restaurants is that it’s a very cost effective way to build your customer list and get a positive return on your ad spend. Once these people are automatically entered into your email database , you can continue to send weekly or monthly offers and invitations to these people long after their birthday to keep them coming back and spending money in your restaurant.
Facebook Campaigns for the Wedding Industry
If you are in the wedding industry, you can target people who have become engaged in the past 3-6 months and send them an offer for your florist services, or wedding planning services, or DJ services.
The key is that you need to send people to an intermediate page – what we call a “landing page” — where your prospects have to provide their name and email address in order to get the offer. Then they are entered into your email or text message autoresponder system and you have their permission to follow up with them.
Facebook Marketing for Chiropractors and Health Professionals
I know someone who does marketing for chiropractors. He advertises Dinner with a Doc and advertises special events to people in the chiropractor’s local area who suffer from migraines or backaches or any kind of condition that a chiropractor can treat and the offer is to come have dinner with the chiropractor for free and learn how chiropractic can remedy your health issue.
This guy is getting 10-20 leads a month from one campaign for his chiropractor clients and these leads are turning into $20,000 or $30,000 a month in long-term patient new patient revenue. So the return on your investment when advertising on Facebook can be huge.
The key is to craft an offer and a compelling image that will get people wanting to learn more and sign up for your event.
40:16 — Tamara Patzer. — Wow. If you were not taking notes, I recommend that you go back and listen to this interview a couple of times because Yvonne I think you have given some really dynamite examples of how to market businesses online, how to create great websites and a great online presence, and then how to start using Facebook for advertising with a small budget and then of course as your business grows you can increase your budget.
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