Episode 150 Transcript
Heather Porter (00:01.548)
Ben, welcome to the show. How's it going?
Ben (00:04.566)
Very well, thank you Heather. Thanks for having me on.
Heather Porter (00:07.468)
So excited to have you. Guys, I was just chatting with Ben because so many of you have e-commerce companies and Ben really, really specializes in growing these businesses. We're gonna have so much information to share with you. You can probably wanna pull over if you're driving and take notes. I'm actually not kidding.
Do it. No, but anyway, Ben, welcome. We start the show with some really tangible tips. It's called the hustle rebellion. like to, well, we all go through moments of stress, overwhelm when we're growing our businesses. So I like to start with tangible tips on how to get through those harder times. How do you get through overwhelm? Do you have like a few tips that you can share with the listeners on that? Like, what do you do when you're stressing out? How do you get through those moments?
Ben (00:51.042)
Yeah, sure, this is pretty applicable to all of us on our work lives and our personal lives. So from a work perspective, I mean, it goes without saying you've got to have good people around you, a good team. So if you're trying to do everything yourself, you're just going to run out of fuel and you're going to start dropping some balls. So making sure you've got trustworthy people around you is the number one tip that I'd give. And then in terms of your business, I think the systemization.
of any repetitive tasks to make sure the workflow is easy. having, depending on your type of business, having sort of workflows, there's a lot of software out there like JIRA and Trello. We use Asana, there's monday.com to systemize your service such that no balls are dropped, you've remembered everything, you're basically running through check boxes to make sure that you've done.
all your checks and balances, whether it's a product or service, to make sure you haven't dropped any balls there. And then, mean, I think having a strong, robust marketing system and knowing that you've got a good sort of flow of inbound leads is also crucial. Business is nothing without the actual business, without the customers, right? So making sure you've got that marketing platform set up well and no...
which traffic sources are bringing in the leads, which are not. Know your cost per lead by channel, understand your objectives, whether it's conversions, e-commerce, sales, whether it's market awareness, and making sure as a business owner, you've just got that flow of leads coming in and you know that there's a secure amount of new business coming in to top up your existing business all the time.
Heather Porter (02:39.28)
You're so right about leads. I've always say and always hear you can't build a business on referrals alone. mean, referrals are great. But like if you can't control your leads and where they're coming from and it's not clear on how much it costs, like everything you just said, it's stressful. You're not able to turn on the tap, so to speak, right?
Ben (03:00.844)
Yeah, and the referrals you'll sometimes get may be not the type of business that you want. We have a bit of a running joke inside my business where we talk about scented candles. So we might get somebody saying, my cousin, Jenny, she's just started up a business selling scented candles. And I'm like, everyone's doing this. You know, it's something which people have thought up during COVID. getting results for some industries can be extremely difficult.
great having inbound leads, but also having a method to find the types of clients you want is super important.
Heather Porter (03:39.318)
So important. we're gonna have such a good chat. I'm loving this already. guys, you're probably saying, okay, now, why does Ben know all this stuff? I mean, I know you are growing a massive business and all of what you just said is really, really relevant for what you're doing. So I want to know a little bit more about you. I know the business that you have. We're to talk about that. how did you get there? Where did you come from, Ben?
Ben (04:02.274)
Where did I come from? Ask my parents. No, so about seven years ago, I was working for a big global agency and I'd been there for about five years and after a while, I figured out that I can do a lot of this myself. So instead of filling the coffers of this global marketing agency, I thought it was time. I was also turning 40 at the time and I'm like, all right, grow a set, get out there.
give it a crack yourself. And I had the knowledge by then to run campaigns myself. So I started out as a one man band. And funny story here, which the crowd might like. I got a phone call around the time that I was going out on my own and it was a client of mine. And he said, he said, Ben, I want you to run some campaigns for me, not through the current agency, but I want you to run it separately yourself individually.
Heather Porter (04:59.888)
Interesting.
Ben (05:00.856)
And I said, okay. And I said, what are the URLs that you've just bought? He just bought these three quite expensive URLs. And it turned out that the first three websites I was running marketing on, e-commerce marketing, were all adult websites. I'm not going to name the domains for fear of privacy, but I went straight into the adult space and I learned a lot about products and product attributes and applications of products. We won't go there, but...
Heather Porter (05:24.284)
Ben (05:30.802)
It was interesting for a into running your own business. And at the time I was working at a coffee shops. And so I secretly opening up these websites to check the tracking and check the products. But I was kind of like here with the website sort of opening and closing it to make sure people in the cafe didn't think that I was just perusing multiple sites to buy toys for my for my private life. Yeah, yeah.
Heather Porter (05:53.161)
products. That's hilarious. my God. Wow. So now you've grown this business and so tell me more. What's the name of your business? How many employees do you have? What do you guys do?
Ben (06:08.866)
Yep, okay, so the name of the business is Search Rescue. That was born out of the idea of rescuing people within search engines. I also love a bit of surfing, so I thought maybe I can somehow connect that together and Search Rescue came up. I do occasionally get phone calls from people who are lost in the wilderness. I got one the other day from some guy who was out bushwalking and he said, mate, I'm a bit lost, can you rescue me? And I'm like, eh, have you got a business?
Heather Porter (06:31.529)
Wow.
Heather Porter (06:35.379)
Wrong company.
Ben (06:38.338)
But it's search rescue for search engines, not for bushwalkers, okay, to clarify. So initially, after the adult business came on board and a few other ones, I got to the point where I needed a bit of administrative support. So I reached out to some old contacts who I'd previously worked with and they started supporting me. I started with one and then it kept growing. Then I had another two more, got to three. And then I had so much work coming in, fortuitously.
that I had to have a friend of mine help take some of these leads coming in because we started getting a good reputation, getting great results. So I said to my friend Stu, can you come in and service some of these leads? And then he started selling a lot, so we needed more support people and then it just grew and and grew until now I think we've got 40 people in total. We're very support heavy, because a big part of what we do is SEO in addition to Google Ads and Facebook marketing.
I've got about 10 sales reps around the country. We also have an operations manager who's a working mum working out of the central coast who's a weapon. Working mums are awesome. And then like I said, we've got the whole support team which looks after all the backend work, all the fulfillment. So it's a pretty well-oiled machine. We've got about 250 active clients now. And look, we're growing.
Heather Porter (07:45.332)
Nice.
Ben (08:03.104)
Organically, which is really nice. We're not having to reach out too much for new leads. We've got such a good network. We've got such good relationships with marketing agencies, advertising agencies, PR agencies, web developers that we'll often send them work and then vice versa. They'll say, can you help out a lady with her scented candles campaign? No. Can you help out with this particular person who's just started their new business? And we take care of that in terms of the clients we've got.
I'd probably say by customer numbers, we probably have about 50 or 60 % would be in home improvements. A huge part of what works well in Google is infrequent purchases. You go into Google because you haven't already got it, or even Facebook, you haven't already got that number saved in your phone. So we do a lot in the home improvement space, but everything else we have as well. We've got lawyers, we've got adult industries, we've got finance insurance, just...
all manner of weird and wonderful things.
Heather Porter (09:04.992)
Have you purposely not chosen a niche?
Ben (09:09.942)
That was never intentional. We never intentionally chose a niche because I've had a network of working in sales and marketing for the last 15 years and I've got people in landscape supplies and I've got people who have carpet shops. So we just started getting people from all different industry verticals and for that reason we haven't chosen to specialise but we do have, you know,
Heather Porter (09:12.321)
Yeah.
Heather Porter (09:23.968)
Yeah.
Ben (09:39.042)
We do have quite a lot of people in certain industries, like we have a lot of veterinary clinics. We have a lot of skipping clients in frequent purchase. have a lot of audiologists. So we, I wouldn't say we specialize, but we have some industry verticals where we've got multiple, multiple different advertisers in that space. But you know, we can really service anyone. If you know how to run Google and Facebook, then the same rules mostly apply.
to most advertisers.
Heather Porter (10:10.681)
Well said and you mentioned infrequent purchasing a couple times now. want you to expand on what you mean by that.
Ben (10:18.894)
Yeah, sure. So the sales, like I've got a couple of new sales reps coming on board and they're like, let's try calling this person that person. So because I've been running this long enough now, I've sort of encapsulated into the target customer for us, infrequent purchases between $250 and $250,000. In terms of the infrequent purchases part of things, if it's a frequent purchase, like it's a picture shop, you probably already got one and saved in your phone.
Or you already know somebody because you drive past it all the time. So infrequent you think about I mean if you can think back for the other people out there for the Those the big categories in the yellow page is where I worked years ago The the categories which had lots of full pages were things like furniture removals pest control plumbing swimming pools fencing contractors These are the kind of things that you might not need
you know, every six months or a year, it's the kind of thing you need every few years and they are perfect for Google. And then in terms of, yeah, in terms of the dollar value to make it worthwhile, if somebody's selling like a ballpoint pen, there's no point running a Google ads campaign to sell something which is worth $2, right? And on the other end of that, if, for example, we say,
Heather Porter (11:38.146)
Mmm.
Ben (11:44.75)
Ideally not customers with a transaction value is over say a quarter of a million dollars because if say you need a financial planner, just inherited, you know, low and behold, you've inherited $3 million. You don't just go, who's a good financial planner to throw my $3 million at? You're going to ask around, because it's such an important thing with such big ramifications, you're going to ask around your friends and your colleagues on how to use that money and what financial planner, but
The infrequent purchases is what goes extremely well in Google and Facebook.
Heather Porter (12:19.193)
I love that you said that, you guys. can tell Ben knows his stuff, like the way your brain is working is really cool. So case study time. want to know, you said you do, you know, meta ads and Google ads and SEO. Paint a picture for us. Who's somebody you've worked with recently? What was there before? What's there after?
Ben (12:38.466)
Yeah, sure. mean, I'll probably allude to our largest advertiser. He's our greatest success story. He's just come off another record day yesterday leading into Black Friday. He's in the sleep space. out of security for him and out of privacy for him, won't allude too much to what he does. But this particular advertiser came to me probably about 12 years ago when I was at the previous agency and he'd been told that he should run a
Google Ads campaign to trial out how would work to sell his sleep items. I'm being intentionally vague out of respect for him. So with this particular business, e-commerce was a big part of it. Yes, they want phone calls, but they want e-commerce sales. So we had a benchmark ROAS, like a return on ad spend. If you put in a dollar, you might need $3 back to be profitable. You might need $10 back depending on your profit margin.
Heather Porter (13:16.647)
course.
Ben (13:35.822)
So he basically gave us a ROAS target and said, if you achieve this ROAS target, we go up, we go up, we go up. And so we started on $50 a day, sort of 10, 12 years ago. And at the moment we're running at about $12,000 a day. It's slightly higher than normal as we're going into Black Friday week. So he knows it's quite linear to the point of...
where the incremental return starts to taper. So we're always trying to find that sweet spot where he gets his ROAS target, his return on ad spend target, where we're not overspending, we're not underspending, we're capturing all the available market to the maximum potential. And his business has grown exponentially. To his credit, he's also a great marketer. His prices are very competitive. His payment gateway and everything, his customer experience on his website is great.
But this is somebody who we've sort of taken from a small fish in this space and now he's like one of the main players in what he does and he makes a lot of money. Yeah.
Heather Porter (14:43.525)
incredible. Yeah, that's incredible. You mentioned something in there that that I find talking to people that there can be confusion. So it's like the question of you know, how much can I spend or should I spend to get a result or what if I don't know my what my ROAS should be? What would you say to somebody that might be saying to you, Ben, you know, I'm interested in working with you or doing this this ads thing. Like, how do I know what I need to know?
Ben (15:09.762)
Well, it comes down to your profit margin and your business objectives. So often a business that it's in its infancy will be happy to run along at break even for a while to get market awareness such that when these people return later, they keep purchasing and the list of clients grows and grows. I mean, to simplify it as easy as possible, if you sell a widget for a dollar and you make 50 cents in profit,
then you need to have a two to one ROAS to make sure that that sale, that widget broke even. essentially you sold it for $2, you made a dollar, profit margin is 50 % hence the dollar. So it depends on your propensity, I guess, for greed or how far over break even do you wanna operate. Most savvy businesses like that sleep business will know what
a suitable ROAS target is based on profitability levels to run it at. So if you desire an extremely high ROAS, like for every dollar I spend I want $20 back, you can configure that in Google and Facebook, but based on that configuration it'll throttle down what it allows you to spend. So if you have a hundred products and only one of them will deliver that ROAS, you might limp along and spend $37 a month and you might get your 20 to one.
whoop-de-doo, you got your 20 to one but you missed all this other revenue. Whereas if say, it's profitable still to run an eight to one, you might be able to spend 50, $100,000 and get eight to one, which is 400,000 to $800,000. So it's a fine line, but most businesses should have an understanding of obviously their profit margin, but what they desired.
sort of margin, et cetera, would be from marketing.
Heather Porter (17:12.428)
So on the flip side of that question, which is, that's a great answer. So flip side is, is there a business that ads would not work for?
Ben (17:21.484)
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's some verticals these days were reticent to even touch. So I keep referring to Google. We also do Facebook as well. But Google is, I'll come to Facebook in a second actually, but Google is an auction model, right? The more people are attending and the more aggressive they are with budget, the higher it pushes up the cost per click. So I'll give you an example, say plumbers. Every plumber wants to run Google ads. And as a result,
Heather Porter (17:32.247)
So.
Ben (17:50.254)
The last time I checked the Keyword Planner, the cost per click was somewhere between, say, about $15 to $25. So if you've got a daily budget of $100, and just say you capture five clicks at $20, then you've spent out all your budget on those five clicks. One of those clicks could have been your competitor. One of them could have been somebody trying to look for work. One of them could be, I actually don't need a plumber, I need an electrician.
And then the other two could be genuine inquiries of which only one of them calls and somebody's undercut you so you've lost that lead. So certain industries where the cost per click is too high, we generally don't like to touch those. Other industries, like I said, where the transaction price is too low or way too high and not suitable. And then some things...
Heather Porter (18:43.148)
Yep. Yep.
Ben (18:47.267)
would suit Facebook better than Google. So if you've got an attractive product which stops the scroll, then Facebook's great. So just say you're selling bikinis or you're selling like a cool new motocross bike or maybe a cool little kids toy with a great video of things flashing everywhere. I know my wife would go through on Facebook and she's like, wow, look at this kids toy. It's firing off laser beams and stuff and it's only
It's from T-Moon, it's only $12, let's get them. So some things are better suited when they're visual to Facebook potentially. And then the other items might be more suitable to Google.
Heather Porter (19:23.107)
Yep.
Heather Porter (19:29.52)
Really good points. Thank you for explaining that. I want to talk specifically around e-commerce a little bit now because I know you do a lot of good work in this space. So with e-commerce, now that we're coming into 2025, what are your thoughts on the future of marketing a business that sells products? What does somebody need to be aware of to be successful in that space?
Ben (19:52.802)
Yep, yeah, good point. mean, undoubtedly the world is going towards e-commerce more and more and more bricks and mortar shops. I mean, I know a florist in Sydney used to have six shops, COVID came along. After COVID he's like, I'm just going to restart one shop and the rest is going to be e-commerce. So a lot of businesses are pivoting to that because it can be more profitable. There's less overheads with rent, staff, et cetera. They put that towards marketing, which is smart. In terms of what to do,
Heather Porter (20:08.73)
Yeah.
Ben (20:22.35)
for an e-commerce business, it all starts with your website, So making sure that you've got an attractive, well-functioning website with products which have got a good price and a lot of good attributes. So the attribute part might be a little bit technical, but what Google and Facebook want, which is maybe the most important part of the e-commerce business, it's not what your logo looks like, it's not your reputation, it's...
what Google and Facebook, the Goliaths of online want is great product attributes. if, for example, you're selling a sound bar for, know, an audio sound bar system for your home hi-fi, you need to make sure on your website, the products are all separated on their own pages, the price is clear, it's in stock, it says the brand, the heading, title,
Text is complete with all the information people might type. The body information is compelling. You've got reviews, know. These people bought it. You've also got any other kind of backup to why people should use you. So, you your Google reviews. We won this award 24-7, whatever it is. But essentially, if your product hygiene, really boring,
really important, if your product hygiene is good and your prices are good, you've got a chance of succeeding. And furthermore, like I'm not sponsored by WooCommerce or Shopify or anything, but some of these e-commerce platforms, particularly Shopify, are pretty foolproof. If you go to set up a website there, they will trigger you to make sure you're importing all of your product information such that
It talks to Google and Facebook intuitively and it runs campaigns well and delivers a return.
Heather Porter (22:22.418)
Totally. Yeah.
Heather Porter (22:29.396)
Do you help people with the whole, I guess, setup of products on websites? It's part of what you guys do. Do you work with that?
Ben (22:39.434)
We're not strictly a web developer, we're digital marketing agency. So I'd probably say 80 to 90 % of people will have a web development agency who can do that for them. And most often the web developer will bring in all the products with all the attributes correctly. What we do is we take that to market. I can get detail that might bore some people, but we essentially...
Heather Porter (22:41.979)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Heather Porter (22:56.263)
Yeah.
Ben (23:05.144)
Take that into Facebook's commerce manager. Take that into Google's merchant center. Link the website to the publisher, Google and Facebook, through these intermediary software's and then set it live and then try and make people profit. Try and help them scale, try and help them grow and help their business.
Heather Porter (23:24.455)
And what about the future of content like in ads? Cause I know you were saying before meta for products is really important. Stopping the scroll, having visually good looking products. Where do you see the future of the visual side of ads going for, for e-comm any trends that people should know there?
Ben (23:43.5)
in terms of the product images or.
Heather Porter (23:45.49)
Yeah, the product images and or product videos specifically say on meta.
Ben (23:50.04)
Yeah, I mean you've got to stop the scroll, right? So if you've got 10 photos of this little kid's bike, put the best one, put the one which is most attractive. And from an advertising point of view, have a picture of little Jenny riding the bike feeling happy. You want the bike but you want the experience. Sometimes that is not approved on Google, it's maybe more a Facebook thing. But your hero image, which is what Google and Facebook pick up.
It is crucial to the success because in Google, if you're in the shopping ads, people are gonna be looking at your image and looking at your price and probably a little bit about the title. Same with Facebook. Has to be enticing image or video. So that's gotta be enticing. With Facebook, you've got more options available because it's more of a visual platform as opposed to Google, which is text. So with Facebook, we highly recommend people split test.
various ad creatives, so it might be a single static creative, and then we might run a carousel of different, you know, a number of different photos of that particular product. We might run a video, or we might just run a catalog campaign, which is basically grabbing the e-commerce elements, importing that with all the prices and product attributes. So split testing is, know, split testing should be done.
I'm kind of wall marketing with measurability and go, right, you know what, that video image, everyone thinks video works the best. Often the video doesn't work the best. It might be the static image which gets the results, so push more money towards that and push money away from video.
Heather Porter (25:36.433)
Really well said. You mentioned Google shopping as well. How important is Google shopping ads going ahead?
Ben (25:42.446)
Well, it's huge. mean that sleep customer, makes most of his revenue from that. For those who don't know, Google Shopping is obviously the product listing ads that used to be called at the top of the Google results when Google feels that the user intent is product related. They serve ads with the image, title, price. This is in response to the Amazons of the world who came along and ran
their website so Google wants to compete make sure it's getting that revenue shopping I mean it is if I had to restart the agency again, I would probably only do ecommerce clients and focus heavily on shopping It's just exciting in shopping to watch people grow. They're like right We're at this level. It's going well. Let's grow. Let's let's grow. Let's grow so shopping if you're an ecommerce business is a no-brainer, but
Don't bother unless your prices are competitive in this space. If you're not first, you're last kind of thing. So if you're a premium product and you know, a Wicca lounge set and yours is premium, but there's other providers out there which has something which looks exactly the same and it's half the price, you're not gonna win. So extremely important, but you've got to be price competitive to win in that space. People are gonna...
Heather Porter (27:09.304)
Mmm.
Ben (27:09.91)
more likely buy the premium product by going in store, touching it, feeling it, wow, okay, I'll pay that extra, when in fact they could have got something similar by looks for half the price online.
Heather Porter (27:19.834)
So many good insights. So who, if you were to take on some more e-comm clients, who would be the perfect type of client for you?
Ben (27:29.492)
well, I'm not sure I'd probably say particular industries or verticals, but I would say people with good prices is helpful. Like you're not going to succeed without good prices. People who understand the importance of website hygiene and making sure they've got everything set up and categorized well. like agile marketers as well. If you...
Heather Porter (27:40.739)
Yep.
Ben (27:58.606)
Big endowment you don't run specials. You don't check your prices against competitors You're a bit of a slow-moving ship You're going to be last if you're a smart agile Marketer you can keep on pivoting right? Let's we sell apples oranges of bananas, but apples is doing better this month. Let's go towards that you wouldn't sell apples online, but Just an example. So somebody who is is clever with the market
and can move with the times and also who takes our recommendations and does stuff with them. have a lot of clients who are like you should do X, Y and Z on the website and they're like yeah yeah I'll put that on the I'll put it on the list never gets done the people who succeed are the people who are like yep let's do it we'll have it done by next week and they'll benefit from that.
Heather Porter (28:45.721)
Yeah, because you know what you're doing. So you want partnership. You want somebody that's going to use your expertise to make money.
Ben (28:52.63)
Yeah, we're not giving these tips just to make ourselves look good. We're doing it for them.
Heather Porter (28:56.248)
Yeah.
So what's a good first step for people to take if they're interested in working with you? Where should they go and what should they do next?
Ben (29:05.858)
Yeah, the first thing they could do is just go to our website and put in a form to form submission to chat with us. What we do is we give free audits on people's Google Ads account and also their Facebook accounts. And look, we're honest to our own detriment sometimes. We've had accounts come in, we had one come in recently for a water filtration company and I'm like, this account is perfect. I'm not sure what we're going to do. So if
The audit comes back and it looks good. We might say, right, I think you guys are fine. The current guys are doing a good job. 90 % of the time we find issues. We're currently dealing with a big healthcare provider right now where a lot of their placements, like in performance max campaigns, your ads can also appear as display ads and in YouTube and in Gmail.
Their biggest placement is not actually Google at all. It's a gaming site. It's cool. Like it's like a words with friends. So the audit will basically diagnose whether it's set up well or not 90 % of the time we find flaws on the audits and we say let's chat I'll get your proposal 10 % of the time. I like you guys are in pretty good hands. Have a nice day or you're like in a plumber or Insurance or finance where it's so competitive
but maybe it's not worth doing Google Ads and considering something else. I think we give good honest advice, but the first point of call would just be to give us a call or I go to the website and put in a form of submission to book in a meeting and a free audit.
Heather Porter (30:43.527)
Perfect. That sounds like a really great step, everyone. you're out there, have products specifically, specifically e-commerce and you're wondering if you could do better or get started even, definitely take him up on that audit. Contact Ben and the team. They can have a chat with you. You mentioned SEO as well. And you said, for example, for plumbers, if it's too competitive to do Google ads, then do you direct them more into your SEO packages? Is that what comes next? Yeah.
Ben (31:09.25)
Correct, correct. Yeah. So SEO is obviously a different kind of worms and it also works with different advertisers. We've got, for example, an ophthalmologist who's just starting their marketing. If you've got problems with your eyes, you're not going to pick the first guy that comes up. If you need a skip in, you're going to be like the first guy that comes up and the cheapest guy, I don't care if it's rusty, if it's yellow, blue or pink or arrives in a clean truck or dirty truck.
Heather Porter (31:15.057)
Yeah.
Ben (31:38.636)
I want a cheap thing which holds my garbage as fast as possible. Whereas if you're going to get your eyes done, you don't want the cheapest person. You want somebody who's got a good reputation. So that's where SEO comes in. And we prioritize certain things for say in the medical and health field. We do a lot more content to sort of validate that this person is...
Heather Porter (31:41.617)
You're right.
Ben (32:03.788)
accredited, they've done the right study, they've got the right experience, etc. So SEO is definitely more suitable for some industry verticals like that. It's also suitable for say plumbing where the cost per click is just out of control. So a localised campaign where there might be like, you know, Plumber Monavale, Plumber Bill Goeller, Plumber Newport, you know, having individual pages.
can often resonate well for local SEO. like, a cheesy analogy, my team laugh at me on this one, but the cheesy analogy is like Google ads is a bit like renting your home. So as soon as you stop paying the rent, you boot it out and you've got no benefit. You've run those ads with Google, you've got the results, just like renting your home. But as soon as you stop, you're gone. With SEO, it's like renovating your home.
So we actively do work on the website, content backlinks, speed, review management, et cetera, such that lo and behold, if after a year you stop the SEO with us, all the benefits are still there. You've renovated your home. And what that also means is perhaps before you had 5,000 unique users per month and maybe you've got 6,500 unique users per month. Lo and behold, if you're planning on selling the business in five or 10 years time,
A business with stacks of free organic traffic and free leads is worth a lot more than a business which constantly has to spend 10 grand a month to make the phone ring. Because people know that Google ads might be 10 grand a month now, but to get the same amount of clicks soon, it might be 11 grand or 15 grand a month. So they generally should be run in unison to maximize the...
short and medium term benefit in Google Ads, but also the medium to long term benefit of leads through SEO and also to just build that asset, which is your website.
Heather Porter (34:11.765)
I have rarely heard anyone describe SEO as well as you just did. Seriously. And I had to throw that in because I'm, I'm, I'm sensing people listening going, no, what if ads aren't going to work for me? What if I'm one of those people that has like, not the right price or whatever. I'm like, there's going to be another way guys. Just listen, here we go with the other way. Yeah.
Ben (34:17.698)
Renovating.
Ben (34:32.01)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's multiple paths.
Heather Porter (34:37.322)
Yeah, definitely. So as we wrap up and say goodbye, are there any last things that you feel like sharing with our listeners? It can be about the future of e-commerce or just in business in general.
Ben (34:50.296)
Yeah, look, in terms of e-commerce, there's no two ways about it. We're just going to follow America in what they do. So Black Friday, Cyber Monday, all these trends are just getting bigger and bigger in Australia. I think it's quite established already in America because they have that public holiday. I forgot what it is, which is Thanksgiving. Good. You should know that. Thanksgiving into Black Friday into Cyber Monday. So that's been long established over there.
Heather Porter (35:08.892)
Mm-hmm. Thanksgiving. Yeah.
Heather Porter (35:17.856)
Yeah.
Ben (35:20.238)
And every year we're seeing 10, 15, 20 % greater busyness, awareness, et cetera, around Black Friday. So that's only going one way, which is forward. You also need to plan for when does it drop off, what happens at Christmas time. So it does mean that your revenue goes a bit more up and down. But a lot of people delay purchases late October, start in November with a view to going hard. Like I've done, I bought a
Heather Porter (35:30.222)
Yeah.
Ben (35:49.036)
new sound system a couple of days ago. So there's delayed purchase into the last week or so of November in anticipation of cheap deals. So you've got to kind of juggle your resources, your staff, your inventory and your marketing to take advantage of the quiet period and then the crazy period.
Heather Porter (35:51.457)
Nice.
Heather Porter (36:08.075)
Yeah, really, really good advice. Thank you for sharing that. Thank you for being here. Thanks for our chat. I really appreciate it.
Ben (36:13.58)
you're welcome. Thanks for having me on the show.
Heather Porter (36:16.306)
Thanks.
