Dominate with Local Marketing – Part 2
January 24, 2024
Listen anywhere podcasts are available
Click the links below to access podcast episode information.
Featuring Guest: Tina Smith
Founder and Co-host, Natural Products Marketer Podcast
Categories: Business Growth, Marketing Tactics Examples
Tags: audience segments, email marketing, email segments, local, local marketing
Podcast Episode Description
Follow Tina Smith:
Peel back the layers of creating a trust-rich website, using storytelling to captivate your audience, to climb the search engine ranks, and craft a social media presence that truly engages with customers. Today your hosts will take you through the intricacies of email marketing, show you how to transform those fleeting website visits into a thriving community of repeat customers, eagerly awaiting your next email drop filled with irresistible content.
As your marketing guides, they don’t just stop at the inbox. They will share the art of creating urgency through event marketing deadlines, and reveal how personal stories can skyrocket your connection with customers. Tina and Amanda dissect the world of PPC advertising, offering up their wisdom on budget management and the finesse of remarketing. By the time we wrap up, you’ll be armed with strategies for tracking conversions like a pro, leveraging customer reviews for credibility, and you’ll be itching to grab the exclusive bonus resource on our website—a treasure trove of marketing quick wins to give your natural products business the edge it deserves.
Resources
Guest Bio
Since 2014, Tina has worked with multiple natural products businesses, discovering how to market their CBD products online, without having their payment processor shut them down, to letting customers talk about their health issues those products have helped them solve. She knows first hand how experts like you offer the best products and a superior customer experience, that is why she is committed to helping you find an easy way to grow your natural product business.
Full Show Transcript
Tina 00:00
Typically to get on an email list. These days, you’re delivering something of a little bit more value to them, so that they’re saying, yeah, I like the information that you’re giving me, I like the relationship that we’re creating. So it’s a warm lead instead of a cold lead that comes up through paid advertising. Welcome to the Natural Products Marketer podcast.
Amanda 00:24
I’m Tina and I’m Amanda, and we’re here to make marketing easier for natural products businesses, so you can reach more people and change more lives.
Tina 00:35
Hey guys, welcome back. We are covering the seven steps for you to dominate your local market. Last week we covered the first four things and we’ll just recap those really quickly. They were having a website that builds trust, having a content platform to tell your story, search engine optimization and social media engagement. If you have any questions about the details that are surrounding those, just go back and listen to the previous episode. There will be a link in the podcast notes. But what we really want to do is dive into the last three, which are email marketing, paper clicks, and then we’ve got a bonus at the end to stick around and listen to that last bonus element that helps you do everything else in this list of seven elements that will help you dominate your local market.
Amanda 01:21
Yes. So let’s kick this off. Email marketing. I know you and I both love email marketing Super effective, probably my personal favorite but I would love to just dive into a little bit more detail. I know we’re going to have some episodes completely about email marketing, but can we just do a quick overview of why email marketing is so important in dominating your local market?
Tina 01:48
Absolutely. And just one thing to cover quickly the reason that we’re talking about these seven things that are going to help you dominate your local market is because you are competing against big brands and online brands that are bringing people to their stores by investing a lot of marketing dollars. What we’re trying to help you do is turn your smaller marketing budget into bigger revenue and bigger profits for your local store. So how do you do that? We believe in email marketing, and the reason it’s so important it is still the best conversion channel that you have. The reason is only 7% of people visiting your website are ready to buy at any particular time. So then, what do you do? You have to be top of mind when they are ready to make a buy and sell decision. One of the ways that you do that is you keep them warm. You want to always stay in front of them.
02:38
I was actually doing some research around hiring someone for a particular project that we were working on the other day, and I had worked with a person that absolutely could fulfill that role earlier, and I just forgot about them until they showed up again in my inbox, and again the next week, and again the next week, and then at some point, it just dawned on me oh yeah, this person is a perfect match for this role that I’m looking for, and you don’t know how many times that’s happening. Seeing your name over and over again and being in front of people at just the right time when they’re ready to buy is so important, and email marketing helps you do that. If you have people who have signed up on your list on purpose, they want to hear from you and they’re giving you permission to stay top of mind for them, so be there whenever 93% of them are going to want to make a buy decision later. Just keep showing up so that you can be there when they’re ready to buy.
Amanda 03:37
Yeah, absolutely, and I think that you touched on something of them opting in to your email list. People might like you on social media, but that doesn’t mean that they’re really like. Oh man, I’m just chomping at the bit, waiting to see what they have to say. Sometimes that might be the case, but with email, I mean, I know me. I’m very selective with who I give my email to, and so if I give you mine, I really like you. It’s not just like oh, I have Facebook like you and I click that button once and maybe I did you a favor or got to enter in to win a gift card or whatever. It is Like. I really want to see you if I’m on my email, because it’s a very intentional place, I know for me, like I’m not just scrolling through my inbox, like I’m deliberately opening those emails that I want to read. It’s much more intentional than just scrolling through Instagram.
Tina 04:27
Yeah, and the other thing is typically to get on email lists. These days, you have to deliver something of value. So you were just talking about like you might do someone a favor by liking the Facebook account, or maybe they were giving you a one time discount or you were entering to win a sweepstakes, which you can do that with email as well. But most of the time, you’re delivering something of a little bit more value to them so that they’re saying, yeah, I, I like the information that you’re giving me, I like the relationship that we’re creating. So it’s a warm lead instead of a cold lead that comes up through paid advertising, and we’re not going to skip paid advertising, but just realize that email marketing is more effective because they are warm to your product, your service and the information that you’re giving.
Amanda 05:13
So let’s dive a little bit more into what the content of these emails needs to be, because I think gone are the days and I don’t even know why these days existed in the first place where we just sent out like a generic newsletter and like the cap, the. You know the subject line of the email is my newsletter. You know, august 2023. It’s like no one, like that’s not interesting. So how do we make our email content more engaging? And, you know, kind of tow people along that line of going from, oh yeah, like I forgot about this company or you know, oh, I haven’t visited them in a while. Maybe I should come back to. I really need to go see them.
Tina 05:56
Yeah, I think a few things need to happen there. First, clean up your email list. So if it’s been a long time since you reached out, do you some kind of promotion or something to engage people again, something that’s interesting and a value to them at the very beginning and just re warm them up. And then clean off a lot of people that haven’t opened in a long time, because what we’re looking at is industry standard is typically open rates somewhere between 19 and 22 percent. So anything above and beyond that you’re doing really well and we have clients that are in the 30 and 40 percent open rates and that’s what we really want to see is that more people are are opening and actually seeing the content that you’re sending along. An engaged audience is more likely to buy than an unengaged audience. So clean off anything that’s old. And then, second, continue to offer value.
06:51
And so how do you do that? You do promotions, like we were talking about earlier. Maybe it’s a five percent off, maybe it’s a Labor Day sale, maybe it’s a new product, so there’s something that you’re promoting and they might have a discount, or there might be some sort of bundle buy, or maybe you’re launching like a new subscription offer. These are all things to get your audience re-engaged with your products and services and things that are just normal to your store anyway. So you’re already making like promo marketing materials. If you’re offering a promotion, so just slip that right into your newsletter as well and people, that gets people excited about both coming to your store and buying from you yeah, one thing I’ll add just to kind of increase your open rates.
AmandaHost07:37
You know, it’s one thing to have your, your big email list right, but I think there’s another thing that I’ve found to be really effective is categorizing your subscribers.
07:47
So, yeah, just recently I created a very niche group of shoppers in my store where I was like you guys are super interested in this one category that we sell.
08:01
So I created a landing page for the website and basically it’s just like, if you want to be the first to know about anything new in this category, we’re going to send a targeted email just to people that are interested in this.
08:15
Because if I were to send that to my whole email list of you know, however many thousand people you have hopefully you have a couple thousand if you’re going to send that out to the masses, it’s probably not going to hit as well because it’s very specific. But if you are getting opt-ins for this ultra specific thing, these are people that love that category in your store and they see an email that’s just for that category I can guarantee you your open rate is going to be higher for that particular segment of your audience than it would be just for, you know, everybody in in the audience and the other thing that’s great about that, amanda, is if you have several categories in your store so I know a lot of you guys are offering, like kids supplements, prenatal supplements, supplements for men, supplements for women, supplements for women over 50.
Tina 09:05
There are all these categories that you’re already serving that are different and for different people. So just imagine how many promo ideas or hey, don’t forget about this product and hear all the benefits of it or even success stories around people using these types of products and services. Think about how many of those you could send out and how much more relevant it’s going to be if you’re a man over 50, getting information about things that would be good for men over 50, versus if you’re a man over 50 and you’re getting the women’s aging supplements or the prenatal stuff. Like those are not going to be as relevant to you. So then it’s going to start to look like noise coming into your inbox. So segmenting is always appropriate and the more you segment, the more that people are going to pay attention when you send something out because they are interested in that product.
09:59
Like pets, if I don’t have a pet, I don’t necessarily need to hear about your pet products all the time. So once in a while you could sprinkle it into my kind of content and see if I have a pet then just to re-engage in that category. But if I don’t have one, I don’t need to hear all the updates about the latest pet product that you have, and it just removes that noise from what I’m hearing so that I hear about things that I actually am interested in, which is going to make me pay more attention to you every time that you talk to me. Yeah, spot on and.
Amanda 10:28
and one other thing that I’ll add is you know Tina just listed you know 10 different segments that you could have in your audience list.
10:36
You don’t have to contact them all the time, like if you’re sending weekly emails to, you know your large list, that’s great. You don’t have to email each segment every single week too. It’s really only when there’s relevant information. And again, kind of just to keep you top of mind, if you are, you know, more of a supplement store and people are coming in, you know buying their products once a month from you, like make sure you are contacting them at least once a month, kind of knowing what your customer cycle is, but obviously you want to encourage them to come back more than that. So kind of just be mindful of customer shopping patterns in your store and then make sure that you’re hitting them with anything new and exciting. So if you get a new product line in that you’re really jazzed about that fits that segment, send out an e-blast immediately. But don’t feel like you have to be sending out 10 emails a week just so you touch all of these different corners of your customer base, because that can be very overwhelming.
Tina 11:38
Yeah, and the other thing that makes this really easy, amanda, is if you’re doing those online review campaigns that we’ve talked about in the last segment, which is really important for getting that search engine optimization up so that you do dominate in local when people look on Google Maps. If you’re working on those review campaigns, an easy segue into an email campaign is to take a review and shoot it out to your people. You can write some commentary around it, or don’t you know? It’s really great to remind people that people are doing well and loving the product. They love the environment, they love the service, whatever it is that you’re offering, for them to hear that from other people and it makes your content job super easy if you just start sharing those reviews.
Amanda 12:26
Yeah, absolutely. The other thing that you can do is something super simple If you have any events in your business that you need to promote emails, the best way to do that. You can print out flyers and things like that in your store, but emails, by far, are going to be the best way to get the word out as quickly as you can on that.
Tina 12:45
And you know what’s great about events is there’s a whole behavioral marketing tactic that really works psychologically for us and it’s related to a deadline. So if I have to do something and interact with something by a certain date, I’m more likely to open things, I’m more likely to interact, I’m more likely to click and I’m more likely to engage, and so an easy way to use events for that, and even promotions, especially if it’s a limited time, is to talk about limited time or don’t miss by X date, and that’s a way to get more engagement around those events. And you’ll get better open rates and better conversion rates from your emails just by using date driven content. Here’s the last thing I’ll share, and it’s around stories. So I know that some of the owners and store operators can feel a little bit uncomfortable with this, but one of the biggest things that we’ve seen as a success from an open rate and a click through rate to your website is for you to share a personal story about your own health journey.
13:53
So when people feel like they get to know the owner or the people that they’re coming to see at the store, they feel a lot more connected to you.
14:01
You’re starting to create a community and if you’re telling your own health journey especially if it isn’t always linear, you know, if it isn’t always clean, if it’s a little bit messy too, as you’re struggling through your own health issues and you’re trying to take different tactics to fix that with your own natural products, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, and then you have to make adjustments. Sharing that kind of journey with your audience makes them feel more connected. They’re more likely to trust you because they see you as a human being and, plus, they just get a personal. They start to feel like your store is more person driven and people buy from people. They don’t buy from brands. So that is just a great way, and we’ve seen engagement rates more than double when things are sent out from the store owner, store manager, operator or someone who’s working in the store and a story related to their own personal health journey Awesome, all right.
Amanda 14:57
So the next element is paid per click advertising. So that is, I know, for me. When I first got into marketing, my employer at the time was like, hey, do some Google Adwords. And I was like what the heck? Like one, what are those two? How do I do them? The platform is super intimidating and if you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s like you feel like you’re just wasting your money. So can you kind of talk us through it? Yeah, you probably are. So can you just kind of give us a brief overview of the importance of doing some paid per click, you know, figuring out what’s right for you within your budget and all of that, and kind of just how that whole system works.
Tina 15:43
I have four main places that I love for people to start with paid per click advertising, and you can totally do this yourself. There are plenty of classes on Udemy, as an example, where you can learn how to set this up in Google. But I will tell you, if you just follow the Google script which feels really easy because it’s like do this step one, do this step two, do this step three If you set it up that way, then typically you’re overpaying by more than 50% and that’s why people hire experts to help them set up their ads. If you don’t want to hire someone, then definitely take a class online to learn how to set this up properly. Don’t just follow Google’s 123 steps. You absolutely will overspend. So, whatever you do, don’t follow the template Follow. There are plenty on YouTube that are free. There are plenty of platforms where you can find some training around paid per click.
16:38
So the four ways that I would start using this is first, your business name. Now, if you’re doing good search traffic, organic search coming to you, and it is your brand name, your ranking number one, you might not want to spend money on it, but you might still, because if you notice every time that you do a search on Google, even if you’re searching your brand name and even if you’re in number one, there are still sponsored slots that are coming above you. And so let’s just say that you have a store called natural product store and you do rank for that number one because you have it all over everywhere and you’re constantly using your brand name and you have built up your credibility online so that you starting to rank in first place for that. Someone else could start to mention natural products store lowercase. Without you. They’re going to use your brand name but like lowercase in their content and then they’re going to do paid advertising so that they show up in the spots or spot or two spots above you. So even if you’re ranking number one, you might want to buy your brand name so that anytime that someone types that into Google, especially in your geo location, you will be in the first slot around the country. So that’s my biggest recommendation number one, especially because when people are looking to go buy supplements or natural products and they look in something like Google Maps that is driven by search and paid how people show up in Google Maps and a lot of people are searching in Google Maps to go find the health products and services that they want. So buying your brand name is always a good strategy.
18:25
Number two remarketing is one of the best ways that you’re going to spend ad dollars. So sometimes people are wondering what in the world is remarketing? And all I mean by that is if someone visits your website, then you want to show up later for them, either in Google ads or on Facebook, instagram, linkedin, wherever your crowd is gathering. So there’s a script and a tag you can put on your website that will then allow you to advertise to those people. Now that’s getting a little bit more murky, as people are, like asked not to track across platforms. You know Apple started that rollout and there are other privacy laws that are coming into play, and so it’s getting more difficult to remarket, but it’s still available. So do it as much as you can. Remarketing is always a smart move because it’s warm. It’s not a cold lead anymore. Someone has actually visited your website looking for a product or service. Then you’re just going to show up to remind them that you’re still available. So remember that 7% of people are buying 93% or not at the time that they first discover you or come to visit your website. So keep showing up until they’re ready, and remarketing helps you do that.
19:40
The third is to buy local. I kind of mentioned this when I’m talking about buying your brand name, but if you have a brick and mortar store, and especially if you don’t do e-commerce, you want to buy traffic that is in your geo location. And all I mean by that is if your store is called natural product store, you want to buy the term natural product store and you want it to be based in Charlotte. If you have a store in Charlotte, as an example, and you can actually geo target on all the ad platforms, now that only serves these ads up to people who are in the location where your store is, and you can do that with keyword terms as well. So let’s say, you’re called natural product store but you also have prenatal vitamins and that’s the search term that people might be looking for, especially on Google Maps when they’re looking for you, then that’s the term that you would buy, but only served up in Charlotte. So it’s this geo targeted buying local. You only want your ad served where people are going to come into your store.
Amanda 20:47
Yeah, and I’ll add to that just a little retailer trick that you might not know about. There’s a service Google actually acquired them several years ago. It’s called pointy, and this is a device that you plug into your point of sale. You have to make sure that you’re compatible with them. But if you do not offer e-commerce or if your e-commerce is not really compatible with paid advertising which there are quite a few that aren’t, so just be mindful of that.
21:17
But this device syncs up with your point of sale. So every time you scan an item, it populates your pointy store front and you can’t buy anything on there. But it does sync up with Google and your local area and you can do paid ads through that service and set your radius around your brick and mortar location so that way, when someone types in magnesium Kelaid near me, you should pop up for a sponsored spot in that area. Now you’re going to have competitors like Walmart on there, target’s on there, but you can pay to climb up those ranks through a service like that. I believe that it’s still free, or it’s like $75. It’s super reasonable. Highly, highly, highly recommend it.
Tina 22:06
Yeah, and we’ll put a link in the show notes to pointy, just to make sure that you can find it.
Amanda 22:11
Yeah, and you just set it up through your Google my business account. It’s all in one location, so it’s it’s very easy to work with yeah, and probably last around paid advertising.
Tina 22:22
So he said I would share four things. The fourth is buying tough rankings. Look, I believe in the long game of search engine optimization for Organic search, because I think that you shouldn’t have to pay so much for traffic coming to your website. You can produce content that’s good enough and you can get people to your website around the products and services that you sell Without having to pay for it, unless you need to pay for it, and that sounds crazy. But what’s happening there is.
22:54
There are certain key search terms, like health food, health food stores, that it’s gonna be really difficult to rank for those, because you will be competing with the Amazon’s, the Walmart’s of the world, and it’s gonna be really unlikely for you to show up on page one for the Organic search for some of those keyword terms, and so what you need to do is you’re gonna have to outbid them for certain keywords by paying for it, and what I would encourage you to do is look high demand, high margin and, again, products that you really believe in, but high demand, high margin. Say that you know people are looking for this product and you know that You’re gonna make enough money to cover the paid advertising around it. So those are the key terms that start buying those up or start competing for them and see how your sales increase and how much more foot traffic you start getting in the store Related to high demand products and services.
Amanda 23:55
Yeah, that’s great and I think that was kind of a really good segue into our bonus element of reporting. Because I think just saying like you know what are your high margin items Is it worth paying for, and then are you seeing that you know increase in foot traffic. You kind of have to know what your reports are showing and even how to get those reports.
Tina 24:16
So can you just touch on Reporting yeah, and you know I’m just a huge fan. Still, there are plenty of products and services that you can go pay for To have good reporting, but I’m still a huge fan of the free Google analytics. Ga4 is really easy to set up with Google Tag Manager to help you track conversions. And One of the tricky parts of that for some of our stores out there are gonna be Compatibility with their online e-commerce store. So you know that different stores use different platforms. You we hear things like ECRS We’ve seen people using Instacart and those platforms have their own tracking systems, and then you really have to sort of dig deep to either get them to be compatible so that you can track the conversions, or have someone on their team.
25:14
You share reporting with you. So those are the things that you’re gonna be looking for, what we like to know, because conversions are People who are signing up for your email list, people who are going to your e-commerce platform. If that’s the case, a conversion might be calling your store. That might be a conversion for you and you have to decide if that makes sense. There might be a conversion of just like, find my store. If you’re not doing e-commerce, finding your store or getting the map to your store and clicking through to that is gonna be a type of conversion for you, because that’s gonna tell you how much foot traffic is related to your online presence. So those are the things that I would track all the time and again. You can look this up YouTube videos abound for setting these things up. But if you don’t have time and you don’t want to put the effort into it, it’s really easy to contact a marketing company for you to help get reporting set up and then work together to decide what events you want to track, what conversions online you want to track, and then how can you work with your e-commerce Platform to get the right reporting to know.
26:28
Okay, this came from my website, and where did they come before it? They were on my website. Was a referral from social? It was it a click through my ad? So what you’re really trying to do is follow this trail of someone’s on ad. They click to the website, they went to the e-commerce platform and then they bought x product.
26:47
So we can start to see did you get an ROI from Either the organic content you’re creating or the ads that you’re paying for, or the emails? Because there is a way to track. They clicked from an email to your website, to your e-commerce store, and bought a product, or To call your store or to find the map to get to your store. So these are the things that we want to be tracking to make sure that not only are people engaging, but they’re actually taking action that turns into revenue for you, and track that every week, every month, and what we like to look at is month-over-month data. That’s always good, but we know there are cycles With natural products and we like to look at year-over-year data and compare that to see how we’re growing and to start to map those cycles.
27:38
So we’ll know hey, this product starts to go up during this season. So, flu season, allergy season as the seasons change, we get a lot more people buying allergy products. Or, you know, flu season, we get people trying to get immune boosters or or whatever those are. But you can start to see some trends. It helps you stock better and it also helps you know which of your marketing efforts are actually paying you off in revenue Awesome so I feel like we’ve covered a lot.
Amanda 28:08
Obviously, we had seven elements, hence why we had to break it into two episodes. It’s a lot of things to digest. So what are some like Easy, quick wins that people could just do today, like one or two little things that they could just be like? You know what I listen to. You know, this episode and the email marketing really resonated with me like what are just some, some things that they could just take away from this episode right now?
Tina 28:37
You know what I think? It’s the reviews. I will hit that over and over again. If you do a review campaign and if you’re already doing that, great, turn it into an email. I just think there’s so much that you can do with reviews from a client testimonial perspective. They start to say things about your products and services that maybe you can’t even talk about, because they’ll talk about benefits to them. They’re sharing a story like that. I did this, I had this service. Here’s my experience. So the more of those you get, it builds your credibility. It helps with organic traffic. You can start to use it in an email, use it in an advertisement to you know, use that as a paid Facebook post to remind people that you can use it in your remarketing. I just think one of the biggest, quickest wins that people can do is getting those reviews and doing something with them.
Amanda 29:27
Yeah, that’s the key part doing something with them.
Tina 29:30
Yeah, I mean, I guess the real pieces quickest win. Take action. Second, if you want to know what to take action on, reviews is the huge one that I would implement immediately. The others you might have to do some research or you might have to go out and hire someone to help you, and that’s the only reason I’m not putting those forward first, because it’s going to take a little bit more time and a little bit more effort, but reviews are super easy to get. You can even talk to a customer and ask their permission and then use the platform you know how to use. If that’s paid advertising, go use it. If it’s email marketing, go use it. If it’s a poster in your store, use it. So get it, get out of review and put it to use and it will help in every one of these seven areas.
Amanda 30:22
All right, any closing pieces of advice? Or? I know you said you had a little bonus.
Tina 30:30
Really the bonus is that if you go to our website, nationalproductsmarketercom, then you can, for free, get two to three quick wins that are relevant to your business. There will be a series of questions that you can answer and then we can shoot back to you and I promise that we won’t just say reviews, put them into action there. We will give you specific two to three things that we think can move the needle on your business today, totally free. And then there is a paid version as well. If you wanted a complete online marketing review, take a look at that on the website as well. You’ll see all the elements that you’ll get back and it will give you a ton of information for how to win and dominate local. So go, look up those two resources. We will have links in the podcast notes below, and I would absolutely take advantage of that. Free two to three quick wins that are relevant to your specific business. Answer a couple of questions and we’ll shoot your report right back. Who doesn’t love free?
Amanda 31:30
Who doesn’t love free? Awesome. All right guys. Well, I think that is it for today. Thanks for joining us and we’ll see you next time. All right bye. Thanks so much for listening to the natural products marketer podcast. We hope you found this episode to be super helpful. Make sure you check out the show notes for any of those valuable resources that we mentioned on today’s episode.
Tina 31:51
And, before you go, we would love for you to give us a review. Follow, like and subscribe on Apple podcast, spotify, youtube or wherever you’re listening today, and make sure you join us for our next episode, where we give you more marketing tips so that you can reach more people and change more lives.