November 5, 2025 • 47 mins
Search is slipping, social buries links, and great employees aren’t browsing job boards. That’s the new reality for natural products retailers, and it’s exactly why we’re leaning into programmatic ads and geofencing to reach both customers and potential hires where they actually are—on their phones, inside apps, and in connected TV.
Dan Kraus of Shift Advertising walks through how precise geofences around health fairs, yoga studios, natural grocers, and even training programs can build an anonymized audience of motivated people without creeping on identities. Then we get practical: dayparting to hit after‑hours crews, CPMs you can plan for, and why a two‑week display burst can move the needle when you stay narrow on one category your store already dominates. You’ll hear examples from staffing a clean‑room manufacturer to recruiting for stretch studios, plus the reporting that matters: actions, store visits inside conversion zones, and 60‑ to 90‑day lift instead of last‑click myths.
We also cover the conversion chain most teams miss. If ads perform but sales stall, check the landing page, train staff on the exact offers running, and make sure shelves and scripts match the message. Warm audiences win fastest, so upload your email list and loyalty members, retarget recent site visitors, and use ads to boost email opens with “check your inbox” creative. In a softer economy, highlight essentials customers still buy—coffee, toothpaste, shampoo—and keep your brand top of mind so paused routines don’t become lost customers.
Whether you need a pipeline of service‑minded floor staff or you want profitable store traffic without wasting spend, this playbook shows how to target smarter and measure what matters. Subscribe, share with a fellow retailer, and leave a quick review so we can bring more expert strategies to your feed.
Connect with us:
Email: info@naturalproductsmarketer.com
About Tina Maddock
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.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Tina Maddock (00:00):
Welcome to the Natural Product Marketer
Podcast.
I'm your host, Tina Matdock.
On this podcast, you'll hearfrom manufacturers, retail
owners and operators, and otherbusiness experts that will help
you grow your business so youcan serve more people and change
more lives.
Yeah, so let's back up.
Obviously, you and I are in themiddle of a discussion right
(00:21):
now.
And um Dean and I work togetherdoing ads for natural products
retailers plus other people thatcome and need some help.
But let's talk about how youeven got into the ad space.
Dan Kraus (00:39):
Oh, I've had such a long journey into the ad space.
How far back do you want me toroll it back?
No.
Um actually my very first jobout of college, um, and I don't
have enough gray hair to lookat, but um we're going back to
the 80s, um, was sellingadvertising when you could first
do a local ad on something likeCNN or ESPN or MTV when it was
(01:02):
actually still music television,um, and and you could buy that
local insertion.
And um I really loved doingthat and you know, kind of moved
away from it for a lot ofyears.
Um got to a point where I wasrunning a marketing agency, did
kind of everything.
And what I watched happen abouttwo and a half years ago when
(01:24):
AI started really creating a lotof results in search, is I
watched all the Google campaignsand a lot of the search
campaigns that I run ran forpeople really lose a lot of
their effectiveness.
Because what was happening issomebody would do a search and
then Google would give them a uhan answer with one of the
(01:47):
AI-gener snippets that actuallyanswered the question.
So they've never actually leftGoogle and went to the website
or to the content that wasproviding the answer.
And you know, in the threeyears since then, it's actually
continued to go down that road,right?
So now you have people who justgo to Chat GPT on their phone
and ask a question, or they goto Claude, right?
So we're we're seeing more andmore of what used to be um a
(02:11):
monolithic experience where,hey, I need to ask a question
and it's just gonna be Googleand I'm gonna get the answer,
um, get really fractured.
So everybody's kind of doing ita little bit differently.
And I don't know how deep youwant to go on this, Tina, but I
mean if you look at the if youjust look at the marketing world
overall, right?
We used to be able to gettraffic, get our message out,
(02:34):
let people know we were there,and not have to spend a lot of
money to do it because we couldpost on social, right?
We put a blog post up andpeople would come and find it
from search.
Um, you know, we could post onyou know Google Maps.
There's lots of different waysto get our message out there and
people would see it.
And they're really not anymore.
So it really feels like we'vegone back to the future or back
(02:55):
to the future to the past wherewe're really in a play-to-pay uh
pay-to-play environment, right?
If you want people to see yourmessage, you've got to get it in
front of them in some way,shape, or form.
Tina Maddock (03:05):
I talking about search, I and even ads.
So a lot of times we talk aboutGoogle ads because it's one of
the first things that comes tomind for people or used to for
how I'm gonna advertise and geton the board.
And um one of the things Ifound with just general search,
(03:26):
even if you have likekeyword-relevant content that
you can advertise with ads whenpeople are searching that
keyword, um, I find that youhave to put a lot of pennies in
the slot in order to get thealgorithm to learn well enough
to serve up the ad to the rightaudience at the right time that
(03:48):
might be in your area.
So I became disenchanted withGoogle Ads over the past few
years.
Um, not because they don't,they're not effective anymore.
We we could talk about thenuances of that.
I'm sure there are people thatget it done well, but I think
you have to spend three to fivethousand dollars a month in
(04:10):
order to really see resultsthere.
So when you first startedtalking to me about programmatic
ads, that's when I sort ofperked up and I was like, wait a
minute, this sounds a lot morelike we're getting in front of
exactly the audience that we'relooking for.
Dan Kraus (04:26):
Yeah, and I mean, search works for people who are
looking for you.
Yeah.
Or looking for what it is thatyou do.
If they're not activelylooking, and let's go back to
your example of the yoga studiolooking for employees, right?
If those people aren't activelylooking for a new job, they're
not gonna find you, right?
If somebody's not activelylooking for your product or they
(04:46):
don't know that your brandexists, and so they're never
doing a brand a brand search,you're not gonna show up in a
search.
So what becomes acost-effective way to put your
brand, your message, yourimagery in front of the right
person?
Um and the programmatic or whatI call targeted direct, I mean,
allows you to do that becauseif you can identify where your
(05:08):
audience is hanging out, andthat can be digitally or in real
life, right?
Then we can actually get yourmessage in front of them.
Um, I mean, the analogy I usefor a lot of people is that you
can drive by a billboard on thehighway and see a message, or
you can put the billboard in thecar.
Right.
And with with the programmatic,we're putting the billboard in
(05:28):
the car.
So yeah.
Tina Maddock (05:31):
So people ask me all the time, like, what is a
programmatic ad?
Like, what are you talkingabout?
So help me explain.
Dan Kraus (05:38):
Um, the easiest way to explain it is um generally
practical experience.
So if somebody opens a weatherapp on their phone, if you hacke
weather or weather.com and youopen the app on your phone,
there's an ad in there, right?
That ad is getting servedthrough a programmatic process.
Somebody has identified you asbeing part of a group that they
want to serve an ad to, andyou're getting that ad put into
(06:01):
that app.
Right?
Um, that can show up as abrowser-based ad.
And if you've ever noticed, asyou're now watching a streaming
TV show, that the ad seemsremarkably relevant to you,
that's also another example ofprogrammatic, right?
That's ads are being servedbased off of who you are as
opposed to what you're watching.
(06:22):
Right?
Tina Maddock (06:23):
Yeah, and so how do you get to the right people,
the right audience?
Dan Kraus (06:29):
Yeah, this is the creepy part for most people,
right?
And I've been accused of beinga stalker for that reason.
Um, but you know, if you youknow, if you're into well, let's
let's just say in the naturalproduct space, right?
You know, there's a health fairgoing on, um, and you know that
the the people that you wouldwant to expose your service or
(06:51):
your brand to are going to be atthat health fair.
Um, we create the electronicfence around that health fair,
whether it's indoors oroutdoors.
And when you and your phonewalk through that fence, we're
able to identify you, providingtwo things are happening.
One, you have location serviceson on your phone, and almost
everybody does, because we can'tuse weather or maps or a lot of
(07:11):
things without it.
Um and the second is that youhave an ad-supported app running
somewhere in the background.
And most of us have a game orthat weather app or something
else running in the backgroundbecause we didn't shut
everything down on our phone.
And as long as those two thingsare happening and you walk
through that fence, we're gonnapick you up and make you part of
an audience.
So now we're gonna do that.
Tina Maddock (07:31):
Yeah, so so one of the things, and the reason that
we're talking about this today,of course, we can do this for
customers.
Um, and I think people areaware of running ads for
customers.
But where I find this veryinteresting is right now, it's
so difficult to find good peopleto do customer service jobs on
(07:53):
the floor at the place becauseeveryone's gotten so digital.
I can work from home, I can dowhatever.
They have so many options.
And finding a good floor teamwho can who knows natural
products, number one, but alsocan offer, you know, the best
customer service, it's difficultto find those people.
So one of the things that youhave people are employed,
(08:16):
they're not looking.
Yeah, I know.
I know.
They're definitely not thebest.
The best people are not lookingfor jobs typically.
And so you have to findcreative ways to go find them.
And especially if you know thatthere is um an alignment with a
location near you that hasalignment in like values and
(08:39):
philosophy of how you deliver tocustomers, then that's a great
place to geofence, like you weretalking about, because you can
teach people about products alot of times.
It's harder to teach people howto interact with people and
treat people well.
Dan Kraus (08:57):
Yeah, no, uh it's a great point.
And the other thing to thinkabout is the people that would
be great employees for you maynot necessarily be in a
traditional place where you'drecruit from.
So, you know, think about a,you know, a hospital that's
trying to get, you know, nursingassistants.
Well, you could go and actuallygeofence the nursing school to
(09:18):
get people before they've gottheir degree for part-time help,
right?
Or if you run one of theassisted stretching labs, right?
You can go and recruit peoplethat are working for a PT
office, right?
That might be either lookingfor part-time or downsized work,
right?
There's a lot of different waysto think about who are the
people that I want to get umworking for me.
Tina Maddock (09:40):
Yeah, I mean, even restaurants like great servers,
um, especially if they're likea more healthy place.
I think there's overlap there.
And um just anywhere you walkin, you're like, wow, that's
great customer service.
Now, look, you can give them acard.
That's great.
You can post on indeed and andcome up in a job search.
(10:04):
But like you said, if they'renot looking for a job, then
they're not coming your way forthat.
So this is one way to get goodpeople who are happy and maybe
not looking for something, butrecruit from that pool of
candidates.
Dan Kraus (10:21):
Absolutely.
And you know, the the otherthing is that good people tend
to know other good people.
Tina Maddock (10:27):
Oh, yeah.
Dan Kraus (10:27):
Right.
So a lot of times if you canfind a location that works for
finding one or two of thoseemployees and you're advertising
into that area, um, you'regonna find people that know each
other and that have workedtogether, right?
So you you're just creating anawareness that there's an
opportunity to come work withyou for you, whichever word you
choose to use.
Tina Maddock (10:47):
Yeah.
So just think about like WholeFoods, Trader Joe's, places like
that.
Um, and I love that you can dothe after hours crew.
Dan Kraus (11:00):
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, we can day part at howwhatever timing you want to.
Um, it's the the stuff isn'tthat expensive.
That's the other thing ispeople like, okay, well, this is
gonna cost a lot to do.
And it's really not.
I mean, if you want to do itjust with basic display ads, um
you're talking about $15 to $20per every thousand ads that get
served.
How many people are you tryingto hire?
(11:21):
Right.
So, you know, you can do atwo-week flight for a couple of
hundred bucks um and you know,get the attention of somebody
that you're looking for ifyou're trying to hire one or two
people.
So pretty quick turnaround toget it all done.
And it's not that expensive.
You know, you look at the costof posting on Indeed, you look
at the cost of running Facebookads to try and find people.
(11:42):
Um it's pretty comparable andit's a different way to do it.
Tina Maddock (11:45):
Yeah, totally.
I love that.
So give us, I love some storieslike how where have you done
this before?
What kind of results have youseen?
Dan Kraus (11:53):
Um, so the stretch lab, the stretch lab is actually
one that I did we did do,right?
We um we were trying to recruitfor uh a stretch company that
was trying to increase thenumber of people that they had
because those locations have alot of turnover, right?
People tend to go in and out ofthose places about every four
to five months.
So they wanted to build apipeline.
And we've been able to helpthem get a list of people that
(12:14):
are actually going through andand increasing their input,
their their throughput throughIndeed, right?
So we're not trying to get themto walk in the door and apply,
but we're trying to move from,you know, hey, we're getting
five applications a week onIndeed to we're trying to get 15
a week on Indeed.
So we're able to move thatnumber up, um, which helps them
out.
And then we had uh a company upin New Hampshire that was
(12:37):
trying to they're trying tostaff a clean room.
They they they manufacture in aclean room environment.
And um it's an area in NewHampshire where there's a lot of
factories, but it's not a lotof people working in each one.
So you got a lot of factorieswith like 15 to 20 people.
So um we actually geofenced, Ithink, 13 different locations
(12:58):
for them to get kind of theemployment ads out there.
So it was a little uh hitting alot of different places with a
little bit of advertising to tryand drive some some traffic.
And um I don't know what theend results were because it was
going through their own privateum their own private system and
they weren't sharing the resultsback.
So they ran it for threemonths, so I think they got the
(13:19):
employees they were looking for.
Tina Maddock (13:21):
So yeah, I I hate that when we can't like look at
results because it's hard for usto be like, hey, this worked or
it didn't work.
So it's a tough one.
Um but still, you know, ifpeople continue running the ads,
they're probably effective ingetting them what they need.
Dan Kraus (13:39):
Yeah, and you know, just basic recruitment stuff,
right?
You always want to be lookingfor the next great employees
because you never know whensomebody's gonna leave, right?
And you know they win they winthe lottery, their spouse wins
the lottery, they decide to moveto Alaska, you know, all this
stuff happens.
Tina Maddock (13:54):
Yeah, you know, we talk about when you're when
you're thinking about hiring,and even when you're not
networking and makingconnections so that when you
have the spot available, youhave the ability to reach out to
a network is always helpful.
And if you have a pipeline,like who would have thought that
recruiting employees would beanother thing you have to market
(14:17):
around?
Dan Kraus (14:19):
Well, yeah, and I mean there's a lot of choices,
especially when you when youstart to get to okay, I can work
from home, I can do reviews, Ican do all these things.
I don't have to go and stand ina retail environment or I don't
have to work with people faceto face, right?
If if I don't want to.
Well, some of the best peopleare hiding.
So how do how do you get infront of them?
Tina Maddock (14:37):
So yeah, really.
Okay, so you mentioned like youcould do ads to move people to
Indeed, like a job descriptionon Indeed.
Can you just do that on yourown website instead of going
through Indeed?
Dan Kraus (14:51):
Yeah, and actually what I'd encourage most people
to do is you know, India givesyou a widget that you can put on
your site.
So you actually want to putthem onto a page on your site
that's got that widget there.
So you're driving them throughthat experience.
You you want to let themexperience your culture as much
as you can within the website asthey're going through that
process.
Tina Maddock (15:08):
Yeah, and I mean like values, philosophy, who we
are, what we do, so that peoplecan self-select out as much as
self-select in.
We always talk about that.
Dan Kraus (15:20):
So and it's um, you know, it's it's difficult to
convert people off of any typeof advertisement, whether it's
you know, whether we weretalking about Google search
earlier or programmatic or evenoff of advertising on LinkedIn
or Facebook, right?
So you're bringing people backmultiple times, and we actually
(15:42):
have the ability to see thepeople that have seen an ad and
have come to your site orwherever you're directing them,
either directly or they saw thead and then they typed it in and
came on their own.
So we're actually able to trackum what we call actions versus
clicks and be able to see seehow that works out for somebody.
Tina Maddock (16:01):
Yeah, and I mean this is the again creepy part,
but you can also see if someonecame to their physical location.
So these are brick and mortarstores that we're talking about.
If someone thinks they might beinterested in a position with
you, they are coming to yourstore.
And now we can see from the ad,like if they make it to the
(16:23):
store.
Dan Kraus (16:24):
Right.
So the same way that we wouldsend it set up a fence to
capture somebody, we set up afence as a conversion zone.
So we can actually see somebodywho's seen an ad and then walks
into that zone.
So yeah.
Yes.
Um, it if you have any anysuspicion that you're being
tracked, you are absolutelycorrect.
You are being tracked, you'rebeing tracked by everybody in
this world at this point.
Tina Maddock (16:44):
So true.
Um I I know it's hard, it'svery difficult to stay off the
grid.
Um, and for people who areworried about this, um most of
the time, the more relevant theadvertisement is for the person,
the more that they aregrateful.
(17:07):
Because sometimes you getthings served up to you and
you're like, why?
Dan Kraus (17:11):
Right.
Yeah.
If I have to watch an ad, Iwant to watch one that's
relevant to me, right?
That's that's absolutely key.
Um, and the other thing Ithink, you know, you're being
tracked, but you're not beingtracked personally, right?
A lot of this is being donewith anonymized cookies.
If people say, well, you know,you you captured this audience,
can I see who it is?
And I can't see who it is.
None of us can see who it is.
(17:31):
It's all it's all digital, it'sa series of 64 hexadecimal
digits that mean absolutelynothing except to the other
computers that are talking toeach other.
So from a human beingstandpoint, we can't identify
who you are.
Tina Maddock (17:44):
Yeah, and also just um, you know, we're looking
at that to say, hey, we cansend ads back to them again and
do higher frequency or um evencreate look-alike audiences that
are like that, but again, it'snot the person.
Speaker (18:01):
Right.
Tina Maddock (18:02):
We wouldn't know the person if they walked in
your door, we wouldn't say, Hey,there they are.
Dan Kraus (18:09):
The reality is I'm not capturing a person's
information, I'm capturing adevice information.
And I use person as a shorthandfor it, but the reality is what
I'm capturing is a device.
unknown (18:18):
Right.
Tina Maddock (18:18):
Yeah, one of the coolest things that though, when
we first started talking aboutthis, I was like, oh my gosh,
this is so cool that once theperson or device is captured in
whatever geofence, if they goback and they get on another
Wi-Fi network, you can captureanyone who's on that Wi-Fi
network as well.
Dan Kraus (18:39):
Yeah, which works in your favor most of the time.
unknown (18:42):
Right.
Dan Kraus (18:43):
Sometimes it can be a little um overwhelming.
So we had we had one instancewhere somebody went and got onto
a university campus and all ofa sudden it looks like every
single ad was being served tothis one particular university
campus.
So we made some changes to it.
But um, you know, that's that'swhy you don't set it and forget
it.
You actually monitor it and youmanage it.
Tina Maddock (19:02):
Yeah, that was gonna bring me back to look, you
know, I have dabbled over theyears in ads.
It's so complicated.
And it is like watching, it'slike day trading, honestly.
Um watching like what'shappening, and then you're like,
whoa, that was weird.
What's going on here?
(19:22):
So I mean, the other day I wasdoing a meta ad.
Um, and when I added moremoney, the frequency went down.
And what I was trying to do wasbump the frequency up, but it's
because I did too much of anadding, you know, spend
increase.
And they were like, oh, wecan't serve that to the same
(19:42):
audience again.
We have to redo the audiencebecause they're, you know, the
robots are making adjustmentsthat they think are what you
need.
And sometimes you're like, no,no, no, I wanted to bump this
up, not that.
And so watching that is alittle bit like day trading,
where you're like, oh my gosh,don't spend that money there,
(20:03):
stop.
Dan Kraus (20:04):
Yeah.
And there, you know, the thingis there's a especially with the
the programmatic, there's a lotof levers, and I think
programmatic sometimes gets abad name because people think
about, oh, I'm just gonna bunchof dump, dump a bunch of money
in and it'll go figure it out.
And it can absolutely do itthat way.
You can say, I want to buy, youknow, quote unquote, a number
of rating points, I want to buya number of uh a number of
impressions and just let it run.
(20:24):
Um, I worked with somebodyrecently that um they were
working with a a platform andthey said, Hey, I want to
geofence this show that's at theSeattle Convention Center.
And whoever set up the campaignjust put in the Seattle
Convention Center as thelocation.
Well, it did a geofence, but itdid it as a radius, so it got
all the streets as well as theconvention center.
Speaker (20:47):
Yeah.
Dan Kraus (20:47):
So I ran a fence for the same show.
They got 12,000 people for theshow.
I got 4,000 because I went inand hand drew the fence exactly
on the direct the diameters ofthe building.
So I mean, that's an example ofjust where one little thing can
change your spend, the amountof waste that you have, etc.
Um, you know, things like youwere just talking about with
(21:10):
frequency, right?
Do I want to serve an ad tosomebody four times a day or 40
times a day?
Right?
If it's four times a day, Ineed to make sure that my
audience is big enough and itforces the computers to spread
stuff out.
So it's um, you know, you'vegot to pay attention to it.
And the tools are really good,but the reason we only do
programmatic ads as an agencynow is because we want to be
(21:32):
really good at one thing and notokay at a lot.
Tina Maddock (21:36):
Yeah, so I think, you know, my the reason I talk
about like, oh my gosh, thisthere, it's like day trading is
because you really want aspecialist who is gonna keep
their eye on it.
Um, rather than just dabbling.
And you can dabble for smallamounts of money, but once you
start putting hundreds ofdollars, especially for these
(21:58):
smaller stores, into it, theyneed a return.
So you need someone who's gonnaknow what they're doing, which
levers they're pulling, and andwill adjust as things go.
So, you know, as an example,you and I work together, we look
at reports weekly.
And sometimes we're like, okay,this can be an anomaly, but
(22:19):
next week, if it looks softagain, we got to adjust
something.
Right.
Um, and you're advising onthat.
And I'm bringing the knowledgeto the table of here's what's
happening at the retailer, oryou know, who's buying, what
numbers are going up or or downin their point of sale system?
Dan Kraus (22:40):
Yeah.
Well, and you're hitting onsomething that's really
important, Dean, is that a lotof people over the last 25 years
have gotten trained to thinkabout um last click attribution,
right?
What caused this to happen,right?
What caused somebody to walk inthe store?
What caused somebody to buythis product?
Um, but the reality is with allthe different touch points that
people are getting today, andit could be 15, 16 different
(23:02):
ways that they're getting yourmessage, right?
We've got to look at theoverall lift over a period of
time, right?
This is not, hey, what am Igonna do this week and did it
have an impact next week?
It's what do we do in thesenext two months and what's the
impact for the two months afterthat, right?
We've got to a lot of timeslook at a longer time horizon to
be able to understand theimpact.
Tina Maddock (23:20):
You know, with ads, we always talk about give
it 90 days to settle in.
Because there are these levers,and if we watch and we figure
it out, it gets drilled in overa period of 30, you know, 60
days, and then you get theresults over the next few
months.
So if you are like, I I have afew hundred dollars to spend and
(23:44):
I just want to do it for amonth, it's probably not the
best place to use that money.
Like go support a localsoftball team instead.
Dan Kraus (23:54):
Well, you know, that'll put your name on the
back of the walls for you know,for a season, right?
That's not a bad way to do it.
Or, you know, if you're tryingto hire and you don't have any
money to really spend on that,then go print a few business
cards that you go hand out topeople to waiters, like you
said, that that provideexceptional service, right?
There's a lot of different waysthat you can use that money.
But yeah, it's um um I I reallytry to counsel people away from
(24:16):
throwing what I think would begood money at a bad idea because
I don't want them to use itonce, right?
This is really powerful stuffif you use it right.
But if you get turned off fromit, then you don't come back,
and that doesn't do either of usany good.
Tina Maddock (24:30):
Yeah, and if you are working with someone who has
expertise on it, then they cantell you look because we can do
good work with advertisement,but if something weird is
happening at your store with acustomer experience, you're not
gonna see the level ofconversions.
So, you know, I like to walkback, and and I've done this
with websites and everything,like, okay, where is the chain
(24:55):
failing?
Because it's a bunch of littlelinks, and at each touch point
for the consumer or someonewho's looking for a position,
they need to have the rightexperience to nudge them to the
next place.
So if you've got people who aresuper interested in the ads, so
you know, a lot of times peopleare like impressions or
(25:16):
frequency or whatever it isrelated to ads, like that's
dead.
We just want conversions.
I agree that conversion is thein number that you that you look
at, but I like to look at everylink in that chain that gets
them there to a conversion andbe like, these are good numbers.
And we've got benchmarks thatwe know work.
So these are good numbers.
(25:38):
It's been running for longenough, and this is happening.
So I can see the number ofpeople looking at it are great,
the number of people clickingare great, and then there's no
sale.
So something else is happeningin between.
Is it a landing page?
Is it they walk in the door andsomething weird is happening in
your store?
And so this can also give yousome good feedback about what's
(25:59):
really happening for a specificsegment.
Dan Kraus (26:03):
Yeah, and it it's hey, I solved this problem.
What's the next problem that'sgonna come up, right?
Because there's always going tobe a next problem.
Tina Maddock (26:09):
Yeah.
Dan Kraus (26:09):
So it's it's very rare that it's not.
I mean, even even the big ones,like I mean, I ordered
something on Amazon last night,and instead of getting an order
confirmation, I got a oops,something didn't work right.
Yeah.
It was fixed two hours later,but you know, that was a
feedback loop to them, right?
So those feedback loops existeverywhere in your sales and
(26:30):
marketing process, to yourpoint, right?
Tina Maddock (26:32):
Yeah.
And uh just as an example, likeit something that we uncovered
during one of these ad campaignswas because we like to do very
um targeted segments, itproduces faster conversions from
what we've seen.
They're top, there's top offunnel.
And what I mean by that is justexposure to your brand and who
(26:55):
you are that you want to do.
And you need for people to belike, oh, I'm aware that they
exist.
And now I understand what theydo, and I'm kind of interested
in that.
And here's some options tostart trying them out or um
getting more familiar in my walkin the door.
But what we like to narrow itdown to, especially the lower
(27:17):
amount of money that you have tospend, are people that are warm
and moving them into a hey, Ijust purchased something.
So we we did a sports nutritionrelated campaign.
You know, you had geofencedsome um gyms for us, and it
turned out that people wereinterested in coming to the
(27:42):
store, and we even could tellthat some people were walking
in, but there were no peoplebuying.
So that uncovered something atwhere it was very obvious: like,
okay, um, the ads are doingtheir part.
You've got a store problem.
You are gonna need to talk tosomeone, either the display's
(28:02):
off, or people are notconnecting with your people, or
there's not knowledge about thesports nutrition product line in
the store when people come inbecause they're gonna have
questions around that.
So this is a great way touncover like, hey, something's
not working, whether it'sdigitally or in person.
Dan Kraus (28:25):
Well, yeah, and I mean it it's it's a point that
you know what I think asmarketers we take for granted a
lot, but it's one that's reallyworth pulling out, which is you
need your staff to know whatyou're promoting, right?
Because if you start a programbut your staff doesn't know it,
and people are coming in andasking about something, all of a
sudden, right?
(28:46):
Um and it's do they have theknowledge, are the pieces tied
together?
And I look at a lot of times Ilook at this from a marketing
standpoint, which is are my adsand my emails tied together,
right?
Because um, you know, storesspend a lot of time and a lot of
money building up loyaltyprograms, right?
And they've got the email listand they've got the contact
(29:06):
information.
And then it's oh yeah, I youknow, I drop in a blast every
couple of weeks, right, to it,or I'm using it to to drive
something through an app.
But email tends to get ignoredafter a while too, right?
We just become blind to thesubject lines, et cetera.
But you can actually useadvertising to draw people back
to an email, you can useadvertising to draw people into
(29:29):
the store, you can make yourstaff aware of what's going on
so all those pieces tietogether, right?
And now they know how to reactto it.
And so it's really trying tomake it all happen.
I was actually just talking tosomebody about, you know, they
do a lot of emails and theydon't get a lot of conversion
off of it.
And it was, well, let'sadvertise whatever's going out
in the email with the commentline of check your email for
more details, just in the ad.
(29:49):
Right.
So we're actually usingadvertising to get people to
read the longer message.
Tina Maddock (29:54):
Yeah.
Dan Kraus (29:54):
Not a crazy, but it does actually work.
Tina Maddock (29:57):
Oh, totally.
Well, and you know.
So even the best emails aregetting open 30, 35% of them are
getting open.
So if you have a 10,000-personemail list, you know, you're
you're only getting to 3,500 ofthose people who are opening and
reading the email.
You stick that same email listin programmatic and you say read
(30:20):
your email, that open rate'sgonna go up, or they're just
gonna come in.
Dan Kraus (30:26):
Yeah, you know, we'll we'll we'll take it up a couple
of percent each time that thatwe do it.
And yeah, or they're just gonnacome in, right?
That's like, oh, I read it.
Yeah, I saw I saw this, I camein.
Um it's really interesting.
If I go, if I go all the wayback to where we started this
conversation, how I got intothis.
So what was really cool when Iwas selling TV insertions is we
knew that it worked becausepeople would say to business
(30:48):
owners, I saw you on TV or I sawyour ad.
Right.
But we don't know a lot oftimes if people are seeing our
digital stuff or our video adsthat are running out there,
because people don't equate,especially older people don't
equate um a video piece thatthey saw on their computer the
same as a video piece that comesacross their smart TV, even
(31:09):
streaming.
Speaker (31:10):
Yeah.
Dan Kraus (31:11):
Right.
And the beautiful thing aboutprogrammatic is you can tell a
really good story on TV in 15 or30 seconds for like six cents
an ad delivered.
Right.
So it's not really expensive todo, and you can you can get a
really detailed story in frontof folks.
So it it it opens TV up againtoo, I think a lot of people who
(31:34):
haven't ever thought aboutthat, hey, you know, TV could do
something for me here.
Tina Maddock (31:38):
Yeah, and I think that the where we've seen the
best performance with theprogrammatic ads for retailers
specifically, it's somethingthey're already doing well if
you start there.
Right.
So, you know, if you're ifyou're not a great sports
nutrition shop, then don't startthere.
Start in a a different categorybecause there's something that
(31:59):
um people come to you for a lot,right?
So start where you're alreadyblooming and grow that even
more.
And then you can start to talkabout, and you were talking
about like say it to the staff.
In certain situations, you'reso good at one thing.
Um, it's great if you tell thestaff, but you wouldn't even
have to talk to the team aboutit because they're on it every
(32:22):
single day, and you're justgrowing that, that they're gonna
have more contact around thatsubject matter.
Um, so starting where you'realready strong is a high
recommendation.
We like warm audiences.
So putting an email list intothe programmatic, your loyalty
rewards people into theprogrammatic system is gonna
(32:47):
produce higher conversions.
People that are visiting yourwebsite.
Dan Kraus (32:51):
Yep.
Tina Maddock (32:52):
Um, so retargeting, remarketing pixels,
having those capture the peopleas they're coming and they see
you again.
Um, and then uh people who havealready purchased.
So those lists in a segmentedway, offering them products or
services that are around thosetopics, high conversion rates.
(33:14):
And again, I do think you needtop-of-funnel stuff.
It's just not gonna be as highof a conversion rate.
So if you're looking forsomething, the the quickest
gains are gonna be like, allright, where are you already
doing really well?
And you talk to people about itevery day.
Dan Kraus (33:29):
Yeah, no, I it it's it's can you cross-sell to your
existing customers?
Can you reactivate a customerthat hasn't bought from you in a
while?
Right?
Those are people that alreadyhave a relationship with you.
So they've already got somelevel of no-like and trust
already.
Yeah.
Right.
So those are the easiest onesto move through the purchase
cycle.
And then as you go further awayfrom people who've ever
interacted with you, those arethe ones that require the more
(33:50):
touches.
So how do you do that costeffectively at the end of the
day?
Tina Maddock (33:54):
Well, the other thing that we've been talking
about too is because the summerwas a little bit soft.
And I don't know if this is atrend or if it'll continue.
You know, I mean, this businessis cyclical, summer, summer's a
little bit soft anyway, butthis summer was way soft um for
many of our retailers.
And so um one of the thingsthat um that we talk about doing
(34:20):
is um I now I've totally lostmy train of thought.
Summer was soft.
Oh, so what's happening in theeconomy right now is um that
people are downsizing, likethings that products that they
don't think they need.
They're like, oh, I can dowithout that for a month or a
week, or maybe I can squeeze thelast little bit of toothpaste
(34:42):
out of this and instead ofbuying a new tube yet.
Um, so they're making fewerpurchases, especially for the
non-essentials.
And that's up to the consumerto decide like what's essential
in their life and what isn't.
So we've been talking toretailers about highlighting
that they have essentials.
(35:02):
And depending on the store,it's different, like what
essentials are available there.
But using programmatic ads asthis, hey, did you know that we
had toilet paper or coffee ortoothpaste, xylitol gum, like
things that are more people arenot gonna do without um
(35:24):
mouthwashes and those sorts ofthings, um, even lotions to some
degree, shampoo for sure.
People are not doing withoutshampoos and soap.
If you highlight, hey, you canget that here, especially to
people who purchased before, andsay, hey, did you know that we
have these essentials and youcan just drop by and get those
(35:44):
while you're here?
I I think that's a great wayright now to remind people that
they don't need to take you offtheir list if they're
downsizing.
Dan Kraus (35:54):
Yeah, I I think and the other risk I think from
downsizing is that and thishappens to me, it may not happen
to everybody.
If I change my routine for acouple, three months, all of a
sudden I've forgotten some ofthe products that were in that
routine.
And so, you know, advertisingbecomes a way to again
cost-effectively keep yourselfin somebody's mind, right?
(36:15):
You want to keep that position,you want to keep that position
filled even if it's not beingbought right now, right?
And top of mind.
Yep.
Tina Maddock (36:23):
Staying top of mind.
Dan Kraus (36:24):
Remember where the phrase comes from.
So yeah, you know, it's like,how do how do I stay there even
though you're not buying itright now?
Tina Maddock (36:31):
Yeah.
So here's another thing becausewe always talk about doing
customer reactivation campaigns.
So someone who hasn't been inyour store in 90 days, and 90
days, we like 90 days becauseyou can get a 90-day supply of
things while they're in there.
Maybe 30, 60s, right, forcertain products, but um, 90
days if they haven't come back,it's a good time to nudge them.
(36:52):
We typically do that via email.
Again, open rates are not high.
So this is the perfect time toload that group up into an
advertisement and be like, checkyour email.
Dan Kraus (37:05):
Absolutely.
You know, just to just to keepkeep again, you know, it's we're
more likely to open somethingwhen we recognize the center,
when we recognize a subjectline, right?
And most of us go through andclean out, you know, the
promotional tab or et cetera,but still we're generally still
scanning what they are.
And if it's something that thattriggers a memory, we'll still
(37:27):
pause on it and look and seewhat the subject line or what
the preview text is.
Speaker (37:31):
Yeah.
Dan Kraus (37:32):
So, you know, it it top of mind does help you with
everything else down the funnel.
Tina Maddock (37:38):
Yeah, and the other thing that we've kind of
been talking about is um becausesearch is a little bit up in
the air.
And here's what I've beennoticing.
Um, and this changes everyweek, month, whatever.
So don't if if this is aged alittle bit, it could be wrong,
by the way.
But here's what I've beennoticing right now is um for
(38:00):
search, SEO still works.
It works really well for peoplewho've done no work on it.
Like you start getting traffic,if you start doing content and
you have a good hierarchy ofcontent on your page, and if you
have no idea what I'm talkingabout, because I'm I'm nerd
speaking a little bit, listen toan episode that's just on SEO.
(38:23):
I'll put a link in the in thechat here.
But the the thing is like ifyou're starting from zero,
you're gonna get some resultsand it's gonna be pretty quick.
If you have content that hasn'tbeen organized well, that
helps.
If you have had like reallygreat SEO and you've worked on
it, it's structured, you'reprobably seeing fewer clicks
(38:46):
right now.
Because of AI.
That's how, and I'm not sayingdon't continue doing that
because you nudged me the otherday and were like, hey,
advertise to your articles,advertise to your content,
because that is it's one waythat people get into your
(39:09):
purchase funnel.
And so um you can do that andget in front of people that you
can't get in front of anymorevia search.
Dan Kraus (39:18):
Well, or social, right?
Because social, I mean, youcan't put a blog post or a
snippet on social with a link toyour blog post anymore and get
any traffic.
Speaker (39:26):
Yeah.
Dan Kraus (39:27):
Right?
The the the whether whetherit's a meta platform, it's
LinkedIn, it's TikTok, it'sSnap, it doesn't matter.
They all want you to stay ontheir platform.
Yeah.
So if you're linking off, yourpost is getting buried.
Tina Maddock (39:39):
Yeah.
Well, and I mean this industryis used to that because um their
posts have been getting buriedfor a few years now in an effort
to not have like the snake oiloil salesman type of
transactions happening, which isum it's too bad because they
have really great products tooffer consumers that could be
(40:00):
really helpful.
But it's just it's beendifficult to get visibility in
this industry for a while.
Changed a little bit with thenew administration.
I think things have opened up abit um once that change
happened, but it's stilldifficult, especially if you're
taking people off the platform.
Dan Kraus (40:18):
Yeah.
Well, I think they they want tokeep the traffic on the
platform, they want to serve theads on the platform, right?
So they don't want to.
Tina Maddock (40:29):
Which is why they're serving up AI.
And they have this weirdtension.
It's the same with theplatforms, they have this weird
tension because what drivestheir business growth are people
who are advertising on theseplatforms, and now they've got
people mad at them about that.
So it's so strange, but you'reright.
(40:49):
You they want people to stayput, just like we do.
Like all the people that we'rehelping advertise for, we want
them to stay on your platform.
Dan Kraus (40:59):
Absolutely.
Tina Maddock (41:00):
So yeah, it's it's interesting and it does change
regularly.
Those are a few of the changesI've seen from or from an
organic standpoint.
Dan Kraus (41:11):
Yeah, I mean, the the market, the whole marketing
technology field, all of ourdifferent media choices, um,
it's pretty crazy in terms ofthe sheer number of choices that
we have to promote ourbusiness.
And if you flip that around andyou put yourself in your
consumer role, think about allthe different ways that people
(41:32):
have to get a hold of you.
Right.
I mean, I get unsolicited text,I get unsolicited WhatsApp
messages, I get things onMessenger, I get every single
possible way so that somebodycan hunt me down, they're going
to hunt me down.
Right.
So it's And I hate it.
But it it's unfortunately theworld we live in because
everybody's trying to figure outthe best way to get a hold of
(41:54):
you.
Um they've got something tosolve a problem for you.
Um and um you know, it's notthat advertising makes the world
work go around, but it isprobably the second oldest
profession, right?
Tina Maddock (42:06):
So yeah, anything else, tips or tricks um that you
have discovered since we'vebeen working on retail?
Dan Kraus (42:18):
Um, I I think your your point that you made about
picking a category, picking aspecific product's really
important, right?
Because especially inprogrammatic, but in advertising
in general, you have suchlittle time to get somebody's
attention.
You have so few words, um, it'svery hard to do that with a
(42:42):
mushy message, right?
You need to know exactly whatit is you want to promote and
why.
Because a lot of times you'vegot 10 words or three seconds,
right?
Can you grab somebody'sattention in that amount of
time?
And if you're trying to promotea brand that isn't really well
defined, that doesn't work.
Speaker (43:02):
Yeah.
Dan Kraus (43:02):
So um being narrow, being specific, both are really
beneficial.
Tina Maddock (43:08):
Yeah, and I think um one of the things you
mentioned to me the other daywas uh can they call the store?
Speaker (43:17):
Right.
Tina Maddock (43:18):
Is this is this the right time to do a call to
the store?
So we're constantly likelooking for ways to make these
more effective um and testingthem out and seeing like, does
this work?
Does this not work?
Is it turning into money or isit just turning into more work
for people?
Dan Kraus (43:36):
Right, yeah.
All of the above.
Tina Maddock (43:38):
Yeah.
And so we're asking a lot ofthose questions as we're putting
these together, um, thecampaigns and watching them.
Um, and thankfully you've beena great partner to work with to
like make suggestions, watch theticker so that I don't have to
or the store doesn't have to,but that I can correlate with
(43:59):
different messages and um, youknow, sales data to see like
what are we doing, or evenwebsite data just to see are
like coming to the content, arethings happening.
So um it's been a pleasure umwork doing work like this.
And I think that we havefigured out some real things.
Some of the examples that wegave today about getting niche,
(44:22):
making sure it's somethingthat's working in your store
already, if if you want thequickest results and then
layering in other things whereyou get more interest and you
start to build relationshipswith people, but starting
narrow, being very focused,pulling people in for something
you're already really great at.
Um, that I feel like that's areally great place to start.
Dan Kraus (44:41):
Yeah, absolutely.
So appreciate it.
Thanks for the time.
Tina Maddock (44:45):
Okay, so I just want to like circle back to the
reason that we had thisconversation because we
definitely went down the findthe consumer, pull them in and
increase your sales um road.
But really what we were talkingabout, and and this came up
when I was at Soho with peopleum talking to me about like,
gosh, it's been really difficultto find a good employee to come
(45:10):
in and work on the floor that'sgood at customer service and
can also help understand theproduct itself.
And so I think it's a reallyunique way of getting in front
of possible employees withoutspending a ton of money
recruiting.
Dan Kraus (45:29):
If you know, if you know where you want to recruit
from, it's a great place to doit.
And that can be, you know, itcan be competitors, it can be
people that are adjacent, it canbe schools.
Um, if we can isolate them, wecan reach them.
So that's that's the goal.
Tina Maddock (45:42):
Yeah.
So if you're having thattrouble finding the right person
for your team, or you want totry out some of these customer
acquisition tools that we'retalking about today, um, let us
know.
Info atnaturalproductsmarketer.com.
We can help coordinate withDan.
Obviously, we understand thenatural products market.
And um, Dan's the win whiz onthe um the programmatic ads and
(46:08):
helping get those set upcorrectly and watching them to
make sure that they'reperforming well.
So contact us, let us know.
We can help you get set up.
Even if you don't contact us, Ifeel like these are the right
strategies for doing digitaladvertising today.
So hopefully you learnedsomething, if nothing else.
Dan Kraus (46:26):
We're always learning.
Always take.
Tina Maddock (46:29):
All right.
Thanks for coming, and we'llsee you on the next episode.
Thank you so much for joiningus for the latest episode of the
Natural Products Marketerpodcast, where we're here to
help you grow your business soyou can serve more people and
change more lives.
If you have any questions thathave come up during this episode
or others, or there's just aretail challenge that you're
(46:50):
facing today, I would love foryou to reach out to us at info
at naturalproductsmarketer.com.
We're here to answer questions.
But most of all, if you have aquestion, then another retailer
probably also has that question.
So we can bring experts ontothe podcast to give you the
information that you reallyneed.
And if you liked what youheard, give us a thumbs up or
(47:13):
give us a review on uh YouTube,Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you're listening today.
All right, it was great to seeyou.
Welcome to the Natural Product Marketer
Podcast.
I'm your host, Tina Matdock.
On this podcast, you'll hearfrom manufacturers, retail
owners and operators, and otherbusiness experts that will help
you grow your business so youcan serve more people and change
more lives.
Yeah, so let's back up.
Obviously, you and I are in themiddle of a discussion right
(00:21):
now.
And um Dean and I work togetherdoing ads for natural products
retailers plus other people thatcome and need some help.
But let's talk about how youeven got into the ad space.
Dan Kraus (00:39):
Oh, I've had such a long journey into the ad space.
How far back do you want me toroll it back?
No.
Um actually my very first jobout of college, um, and I don't
have enough gray hair to lookat, but um we're going back to
the 80s, um, was sellingadvertising when you could first
do a local ad on something likeCNN or ESPN or MTV when it was
(01:02):
actually still music television,um, and and you could buy that
local insertion.
And um I really loved doingthat and you know, kind of moved
away from it for a lot ofyears.
Um got to a point where I wasrunning a marketing agency, did
kind of everything.
And what I watched happen abouttwo and a half years ago when
(01:24):
AI started really creating a lotof results in search, is I
watched all the Google campaignsand a lot of the search
campaigns that I run ran forpeople really lose a lot of
their effectiveness.
Because what was happening issomebody would do a search and
then Google would give them a uhan answer with one of the
(01:47):
AI-gener snippets that actuallyanswered the question.
So they've never actually leftGoogle and went to the website
or to the content that wasproviding the answer.
And you know, in the threeyears since then, it's actually
continued to go down that road,right?
So now you have people who justgo to Chat GPT on their phone
and ask a question, or they goto Claude, right?
So we're we're seeing more andmore of what used to be um a
(02:11):
monolithic experience where,hey, I need to ask a question
and it's just gonna be Googleand I'm gonna get the answer,
um, get really fractured.
So everybody's kind of doing ita little bit differently.
And I don't know how deep youwant to go on this, Tina, but I
mean if you look at the if youjust look at the marketing world
overall, right?
We used to be able to gettraffic, get our message out,
(02:34):
let people know we were there,and not have to spend a lot of
money to do it because we couldpost on social, right?
We put a blog post up andpeople would come and find it
from search.
Um, you know, we could post onyou know Google Maps.
There's lots of different waysto get our message out there and
people would see it.
And they're really not anymore.
So it really feels like we'vegone back to the future or back
(02:55):
to the future to the past wherewe're really in a play-to-pay uh
pay-to-play environment, right?
If you want people to see yourmessage, you've got to get it in
front of them in some way,shape, or form.
Tina Maddock (03:05):
I talking about search, I and even ads.
So a lot of times we talk aboutGoogle ads because it's one of
the first things that comes tomind for people or used to for
how I'm gonna advertise and geton the board.
And um one of the things Ifound with just general search,
(03:26):
even if you have likekeyword-relevant content that
you can advertise with ads whenpeople are searching that
keyword, um, I find that youhave to put a lot of pennies in
the slot in order to get thealgorithm to learn well enough
to serve up the ad to the rightaudience at the right time that
(03:48):
might be in your area.
So I became disenchanted withGoogle Ads over the past few
years.
Um, not because they don't,they're not effective anymore.
We we could talk about thenuances of that.
I'm sure there are people thatget it done well, but I think
you have to spend three to fivethousand dollars a month in
(04:10):
order to really see resultsthere.
So when you first startedtalking to me about programmatic
ads, that's when I sort ofperked up and I was like, wait a
minute, this sounds a lot morelike we're getting in front of
exactly the audience that we'relooking for.
Dan Kraus (04:26):
Yeah, and I mean, search works for people who are
looking for you.
Yeah.
Or looking for what it is thatyou do.
If they're not activelylooking, and let's go back to
your example of the yoga studiolooking for employees, right?
If those people aren't activelylooking for a new job, they're
not gonna find you, right?
If somebody's not activelylooking for your product or they
(04:46):
don't know that your brandexists, and so they're never
doing a brand a brand search,you're not gonna show up in a
search.
So what becomes acost-effective way to put your
brand, your message, yourimagery in front of the right
person?
Um and the programmatic or whatI call targeted direct, I mean,
allows you to do that becauseif you can identify where your
(05:08):
audience is hanging out, andthat can be digitally or in real
life, right?
Then we can actually get yourmessage in front of them.
Um, I mean, the analogy I usefor a lot of people is that you
can drive by a billboard on thehighway and see a message, or
you can put the billboard in thecar.
Right.
And with with the programmatic,we're putting the billboard in
(05:28):
the car.
So yeah.
Tina Maddock (05:31):
So people ask me all the time, like, what is a
programmatic ad?
Like, what are you talkingabout?
So help me explain.
Dan Kraus (05:38):
Um, the easiest way to explain it is um generally
practical experience.
So if somebody opens a weatherapp on their phone, if you hacke
weather or weather.com and youopen the app on your phone,
there's an ad in there, right?
That ad is getting servedthrough a programmatic process.
Somebody has identified you asbeing part of a group that they
want to serve an ad to, andyou're getting that ad put into
(06:01):
that app.
Right?
Um, that can show up as abrowser-based ad.
And if you've ever noticed, asyou're now watching a streaming
TV show, that the ad seemsremarkably relevant to you,
that's also another example ofprogrammatic, right?
That's ads are being servedbased off of who you are as
opposed to what you're watching.
(06:22):
Right?
Tina Maddock (06:23):
Yeah, and so how do you get to the right people,
the right audience?
Dan Kraus (06:29):
Yeah, this is the creepy part for most people,
right?
And I've been accused of beinga stalker for that reason.
Um, but you know, if you youknow, if you're into well, let's
let's just say in the naturalproduct space, right?
You know, there's a health fairgoing on, um, and you know that
the the people that you wouldwant to expose your service or
(06:51):
your brand to are going to be atthat health fair.
Um, we create the electronicfence around that health fair,
whether it's indoors oroutdoors.
And when you and your phonewalk through that fence, we're
able to identify you, providingtwo things are happening.
One, you have location serviceson on your phone, and almost
everybody does, because we can'tuse weather or maps or a lot of
(07:11):
things without it.
Um and the second is that youhave an ad-supported app running
somewhere in the background.
And most of us have a game orthat weather app or something
else running in the backgroundbecause we didn't shut
everything down on our phone.
And as long as those two thingsare happening and you walk
through that fence, we're gonnapick you up and make you part of
an audience.
So now we're gonna do that.
Tina Maddock (07:31):
Yeah, so so one of the things, and the reason that
we're talking about this today,of course, we can do this for
customers.
Um, and I think people areaware of running ads for
customers.
But where I find this veryinteresting is right now, it's
so difficult to find good peopleto do customer service jobs on
(07:53):
the floor at the place becauseeveryone's gotten so digital.
I can work from home, I can dowhatever.
They have so many options.
And finding a good floor teamwho can who knows natural
products, number one, but alsocan offer, you know, the best
customer service, it's difficultto find those people.
So one of the things that youhave people are employed,
(08:16):
they're not looking.
Yeah, I know.
I know.
They're definitely not thebest.
The best people are not lookingfor jobs typically.
And so you have to findcreative ways to go find them.
And especially if you know thatthere is um an alignment with a
location near you that hasalignment in like values and
(08:39):
philosophy of how you deliver tocustomers, then that's a great
place to geofence, like you weretalking about, because you can
teach people about products alot of times.
It's harder to teach people howto interact with people and
treat people well.
Dan Kraus (08:57):
Yeah, no, uh it's a great point.
And the other thing to thinkabout is the people that would
be great employees for you maynot necessarily be in a
traditional place where you'drecruit from.
So, you know, think about a,you know, a hospital that's
trying to get, you know, nursingassistants.
Well, you could go and actuallygeofence the nursing school to
(09:18):
get people before they've gottheir degree for part-time help,
right?
Or if you run one of theassisted stretching labs, right?
You can go and recruit peoplethat are working for a PT
office, right?
That might be either lookingfor part-time or downsized work,
right?
There's a lot of different waysto think about who are the
people that I want to get umworking for me.
Tina Maddock (09:40):
Yeah, I mean, even restaurants like great servers,
um, especially if they're likea more healthy place.
I think there's overlap there.
And um just anywhere you walkin, you're like, wow, that's
great customer service.
Now, look, you can give them acard.
That's great.
You can post on indeed and andcome up in a job search.
(10:04):
But like you said, if they'renot looking for a job, then
they're not coming your way forthat.
So this is one way to get goodpeople who are happy and maybe
not looking for something, butrecruit from that pool of
candidates.
Dan Kraus (10:21):
Absolutely.
And you know, the the otherthing is that good people tend
to know other good people.
Tina Maddock (10:27):
Oh, yeah.
Dan Kraus (10:27):
Right.
So a lot of times if you canfind a location that works for
finding one or two of thoseemployees and you're advertising
into that area, um, you'regonna find people that know each
other and that have workedtogether, right?
So you you're just creating anawareness that there's an
opportunity to come work withyou for you, whichever word you
choose to use.
Tina Maddock (10:47):
Yeah.
So just think about like WholeFoods, Trader Joe's, places like
that.
Um, and I love that you can dothe after hours crew.
Dan Kraus (11:00):
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, we can day part at howwhatever timing you want to.
Um, it's the the stuff isn'tthat expensive.
That's the other thing ispeople like, okay, well, this is
gonna cost a lot to do.
And it's really not.
I mean, if you want to do itjust with basic display ads, um
you're talking about $15 to $20per every thousand ads that get
served.
How many people are you tryingto hire?
(11:21):
Right.
So, you know, you can do atwo-week flight for a couple of
hundred bucks um and you know,get the attention of somebody
that you're looking for ifyou're trying to hire one or two
people.
So pretty quick turnaround toget it all done.
And it's not that expensive.
You know, you look at the costof posting on Indeed, you look
at the cost of running Facebookads to try and find people.
(11:42):
Um it's pretty comparable andit's a different way to do it.
Tina Maddock (11:45):
Yeah, totally.
I love that.
So give us, I love some storieslike how where have you done
this before?
What kind of results have youseen?
Dan Kraus (11:53):
Um, so the stretch lab, the stretch lab is actually
one that I did we did do,right?
We um we were trying to recruitfor uh a stretch company that
was trying to increase thenumber of people that they had
because those locations have alot of turnover, right?
People tend to go in and out ofthose places about every four
to five months.
So they wanted to build apipeline.
And we've been able to helpthem get a list of people that
(12:14):
are actually going through andand increasing their input,
their their throughput throughIndeed, right?
So we're not trying to get themto walk in the door and apply,
but we're trying to move from,you know, hey, we're getting
five applications a week onIndeed to we're trying to get 15
a week on Indeed.
So we're able to move thatnumber up, um, which helps them
out.
And then we had uh a company upin New Hampshire that was
(12:37):
trying to they're trying tostaff a clean room.
They they they manufacture in aclean room environment.
And um it's an area in NewHampshire where there's a lot of
factories, but it's not a lotof people working in each one.
So you got a lot of factorieswith like 15 to 20 people.
So um we actually geofenced, Ithink, 13 different locations
(12:58):
for them to get kind of theemployment ads out there.
So it was a little uh hitting alot of different places with a
little bit of advertising to tryand drive some some traffic.
And um I don't know what theend results were because it was
going through their own privateum their own private system and
they weren't sharing the resultsback.
So they ran it for threemonths, so I think they got the
(13:19):
employees they were looking for.
Tina Maddock (13:21):
So yeah, I I hate that when we can't like look at
results because it's hard for usto be like, hey, this worked or
it didn't work.
So it's a tough one.
Um but still, you know, ifpeople continue running the ads,
they're probably effective ingetting them what they need.
Dan Kraus (13:39):
Yeah, and you know, just basic recruitment stuff,
right?
You always want to be lookingfor the next great employees
because you never know whensomebody's gonna leave, right?
And you know they win they winthe lottery, their spouse wins
the lottery, they decide to moveto Alaska, you know, all this
stuff happens.
Tina Maddock (13:54):
Yeah, you know, we talk about when you're when
you're thinking about hiring,and even when you're not
networking and makingconnections so that when you
have the spot available, youhave the ability to reach out to
a network is always helpful.
And if you have a pipeline,like who would have thought that
recruiting employees would beanother thing you have to market
(14:17):
around?
Dan Kraus (14:19):
Well, yeah, and I mean there's a lot of choices,
especially when you when youstart to get to okay, I can work
from home, I can do reviews, Ican do all these things.
I don't have to go and stand ina retail environment or I don't
have to work with people faceto face, right?
If if I don't want to.
Well, some of the best peopleare hiding.
So how do how do you get infront of them?
Tina Maddock (14:37):
So yeah, really.
Okay, so you mentioned like youcould do ads to move people to
Indeed, like a job descriptionon Indeed.
Can you just do that on yourown website instead of going
through Indeed?
Dan Kraus (14:51):
Yeah, and actually what I'd encourage most people
to do is you know, India givesyou a widget that you can put on
your site.
So you actually want to putthem onto a page on your site
that's got that widget there.
So you're driving them throughthat experience.
You you want to let themexperience your culture as much
as you can within the website asthey're going through that
process.
Tina Maddock (15:08):
Yeah, and I mean like values, philosophy, who we
are, what we do, so that peoplecan self-select out as much as
self-select in.
We always talk about that.
Dan Kraus (15:20):
So and it's um, you know, it's it's difficult to
convert people off of any typeof advertisement, whether it's
you know, whether we weretalking about Google search
earlier or programmatic or evenoff of advertising on LinkedIn
or Facebook, right?
So you're bringing people backmultiple times, and we actually
(15:42):
have the ability to see thepeople that have seen an ad and
have come to your site orwherever you're directing them,
either directly or they saw thead and then they typed it in and
came on their own.
So we're actually able to trackum what we call actions versus
clicks and be able to see seehow that works out for somebody.
Tina Maddock (16:01):
Yeah, and I mean this is the again creepy part,
but you can also see if someonecame to their physical location.
So these are brick and mortarstores that we're talking about.
If someone thinks they might beinterested in a position with
you, they are coming to yourstore.
And now we can see from the ad,like if they make it to the
(16:23):
store.
Dan Kraus (16:24):
Right.
So the same way that we wouldsend it set up a fence to
capture somebody, we set up afence as a conversion zone.
So we can actually see somebodywho's seen an ad and then walks
into that zone.
So yeah.
Yes.
Um, it if you have any anysuspicion that you're being
tracked, you are absolutelycorrect.
You are being tracked, you'rebeing tracked by everybody in
this world at this point.
Tina Maddock (16:44):
So true.
Um I I know it's hard, it'svery difficult to stay off the
grid.
Um, and for people who areworried about this, um most of
the time, the more relevant theadvertisement is for the person,
the more that they aregrateful.
(17:07):
Because sometimes you getthings served up to you and
you're like, why?
Dan Kraus (17:11):
Right.
Yeah.
If I have to watch an ad, Iwant to watch one that's
relevant to me, right?
That's that's absolutely key.
Um, and the other thing Ithink, you know, you're being
tracked, but you're not beingtracked personally, right?
A lot of this is being donewith anonymized cookies.
If people say, well, you know,you you captured this audience,
can I see who it is?
And I can't see who it is.
None of us can see who it is.
(17:31):
It's all it's all digital, it'sa series of 64 hexadecimal
digits that mean absolutelynothing except to the other
computers that are talking toeach other.
So from a human beingstandpoint, we can't identify
who you are.
Tina Maddock (17:44):
Yeah, and also just um, you know, we're looking
at that to say, hey, we cansend ads back to them again and
do higher frequency or um evencreate look-alike audiences that
are like that, but again, it'snot the person.
Speaker (18:01):
Right.
Tina Maddock (18:02):
We wouldn't know the person if they walked in
your door, we wouldn't say, Hey,there they are.
Dan Kraus (18:09):
The reality is I'm not capturing a person's
information, I'm capturing adevice information.
And I use person as a shorthandfor it, but the reality is what
I'm capturing is a device.
unknown (18:18):
Right.
Tina Maddock (18:18):
Yeah, one of the coolest things that though, when
we first started talking aboutthis, I was like, oh my gosh,
this is so cool that once theperson or device is captured in
whatever geofence, if they goback and they get on another
Wi-Fi network, you can captureanyone who's on that Wi-Fi
network as well.
Dan Kraus (18:39):
Yeah, which works in your favor most of the time.
unknown (18:42):
Right.
Dan Kraus (18:43):
Sometimes it can be a little um overwhelming.
So we had we had one instancewhere somebody went and got onto
a university campus and all ofa sudden it looks like every
single ad was being served tothis one particular university
campus.
So we made some changes to it.
But um, you know, that's that'swhy you don't set it and forget
it.
You actually monitor it and youmanage it.
Tina Maddock (19:02):
Yeah, that was gonna bring me back to look, you
know, I have dabbled over theyears in ads.
It's so complicated.
And it is like watching, it'slike day trading, honestly.
Um watching like what'shappening, and then you're like,
whoa, that was weird.
What's going on here?
(19:22):
So I mean, the other day I wasdoing a meta ad.
Um, and when I added moremoney, the frequency went down.
And what I was trying to do wasbump the frequency up, but it's
because I did too much of anadding, you know, spend
increase.
And they were like, oh, wecan't serve that to the same
(19:42):
audience again.
We have to redo the audiencebecause they're, you know, the
robots are making adjustmentsthat they think are what you
need.
And sometimes you're like, no,no, no, I wanted to bump this
up, not that.
And so watching that is alittle bit like day trading,
where you're like, oh my gosh,don't spend that money there,
(20:03):
stop.
Dan Kraus (20:04):
Yeah.
And there, you know, the thingis there's a especially with the
the programmatic, there's a lotof levers, and I think
programmatic sometimes gets abad name because people think
about, oh, I'm just gonna bunchof dump, dump a bunch of money
in and it'll go figure it out.
And it can absolutely do itthat way.
You can say, I want to buy, youknow, quote unquote, a number
of rating points, I want to buya number of uh a number of
impressions and just let it run.
(20:24):
Um, I worked with somebodyrecently that um they were
working with a a platform andthey said, Hey, I want to
geofence this show that's at theSeattle Convention Center.
And whoever set up the campaignjust put in the Seattle
Convention Center as thelocation.
Well, it did a geofence, but itdid it as a radius, so it got
all the streets as well as theconvention center.
Speaker (20:47):
Yeah.
Dan Kraus (20:47):
So I ran a fence for the same show.
They got 12,000 people for theshow.
I got 4,000 because I went inand hand drew the fence exactly
on the direct the diameters ofthe building.
So I mean, that's an example ofjust where one little thing can
change your spend, the amountof waste that you have, etc.
Um, you know, things like youwere just talking about with
(21:10):
frequency, right?
Do I want to serve an ad tosomebody four times a day or 40
times a day?
Right?
If it's four times a day, Ineed to make sure that my
audience is big enough and itforces the computers to spread
stuff out.
So it's um, you know, you'vegot to pay attention to it.
And the tools are really good,but the reason we only do
programmatic ads as an agencynow is because we want to be
(21:32):
really good at one thing and notokay at a lot.
Tina Maddock (21:36):
Yeah, so I think, you know, my the reason I talk
about like, oh my gosh, thisthere, it's like day trading is
because you really want aspecialist who is gonna keep
their eye on it.
Um, rather than just dabbling.
And you can dabble for smallamounts of money, but once you
start putting hundreds ofdollars, especially for these
(21:58):
smaller stores, into it, theyneed a return.
So you need someone who's gonnaknow what they're doing, which
levers they're pulling, and andwill adjust as things go.
So, you know, as an example,you and I work together, we look
at reports weekly.
And sometimes we're like, okay,this can be an anomaly, but
(22:19):
next week, if it looks softagain, we got to adjust
something.
Right.
Um, and you're advising onthat.
And I'm bringing the knowledgeto the table of here's what's
happening at the retailer, oryou know, who's buying, what
numbers are going up or or downin their point of sale system?
Dan Kraus (22:40):
Yeah.
Well, and you're hitting onsomething that's really
important, Dean, is that a lotof people over the last 25 years
have gotten trained to thinkabout um last click attribution,
right?
What caused this to happen,right?
What caused somebody to walk inthe store?
What caused somebody to buythis product?
Um, but the reality is with allthe different touch points that
people are getting today, andit could be 15, 16 different
(23:02):
ways that they're getting yourmessage, right?
We've got to look at theoverall lift over a period of
time, right?
This is not, hey, what am Igonna do this week and did it
have an impact next week?
It's what do we do in thesenext two months and what's the
impact for the two months afterthat, right?
We've got to a lot of timeslook at a longer time horizon to
be able to understand theimpact.
Tina Maddock (23:20):
You know, with ads, we always talk about give
it 90 days to settle in.
Because there are these levers,and if we watch and we figure
it out, it gets drilled in overa period of 30, you know, 60
days, and then you get theresults over the next few
months.
So if you are like, I I have afew hundred dollars to spend and
(23:44):
I just want to do it for amonth, it's probably not the
best place to use that money.
Like go support a localsoftball team instead.
Dan Kraus (23:54):
Well, you know, that'll put your name on the
back of the walls for you know,for a season, right?
That's not a bad way to do it.
Or, you know, if you're tryingto hire and you don't have any
money to really spend on that,then go print a few business
cards that you go hand out topeople to waiters, like you
said, that that provideexceptional service, right?
There's a lot of different waysthat you can use that money.
But yeah, it's um um I I reallytry to counsel people away from
(24:16):
throwing what I think would begood money at a bad idea because
I don't want them to use itonce, right?
This is really powerful stuffif you use it right.
But if you get turned off fromit, then you don't come back,
and that doesn't do either of usany good.
Tina Maddock (24:30):
Yeah, and if you are working with someone who has
expertise on it, then they cantell you look because we can do
good work with advertisement,but if something weird is
happening at your store with acustomer experience, you're not
gonna see the level ofconversions.
So, you know, I like to walkback, and and I've done this
with websites and everything,like, okay, where is the chain
(24:55):
failing?
Because it's a bunch of littlelinks, and at each touch point
for the consumer or someonewho's looking for a position,
they need to have the rightexperience to nudge them to the
next place.
So if you've got people who aresuper interested in the ads, so
you know, a lot of times peopleare like impressions or
(25:16):
frequency or whatever it isrelated to ads, like that's
dead.
We just want conversions.
I agree that conversion is thein number that you that you look
at, but I like to look at everylink in that chain that gets
them there to a conversion andbe like, these are good numbers.
And we've got benchmarks thatwe know work.
So these are good numbers.
(25:38):
It's been running for longenough, and this is happening.
So I can see the number ofpeople looking at it are great,
the number of people clickingare great, and then there's no
sale.
So something else is happeningin between.
Is it a landing page?
Is it they walk in the door andsomething weird is happening in
your store?
And so this can also give yousome good feedback about what's
(25:59):
really happening for a specificsegment.
Dan Kraus (26:03):
Yeah, and it it's hey, I solved this problem.
What's the next problem that'sgonna come up, right?
Because there's always going tobe a next problem.
Tina Maddock (26:09):
Yeah.
Dan Kraus (26:09):
So it's it's very rare that it's not.
I mean, even even the big ones,like I mean, I ordered
something on Amazon last night,and instead of getting an order
confirmation, I got a oops,something didn't work right.
Yeah.
It was fixed two hours later,but you know, that was a
feedback loop to them, right?
So those feedback loops existeverywhere in your sales and
(26:30):
marketing process, to yourpoint, right?
Tina Maddock (26:32):
Yeah.
And uh just as an example, likeit something that we uncovered
during one of these ad campaignswas because we like to do very
um targeted segments, itproduces faster conversions from
what we've seen.
They're top, there's top offunnel.
And what I mean by that is justexposure to your brand and who
(26:55):
you are that you want to do.
And you need for people to belike, oh, I'm aware that they
exist.
And now I understand what theydo, and I'm kind of interested
in that.
And here's some options tostart trying them out or um
getting more familiar in my walkin the door.
But what we like to narrow itdown to, especially the lower
(27:17):
amount of money that you have tospend, are people that are warm
and moving them into a hey, Ijust purchased something.
So we we did a sports nutritionrelated campaign.
You know, you had geofencedsome um gyms for us, and it
turned out that people wereinterested in coming to the
(27:42):
store, and we even could tellthat some people were walking
in, but there were no peoplebuying.
So that uncovered something atwhere it was very obvious: like,
okay, um, the ads are doingtheir part.
You've got a store problem.
You are gonna need to talk tosomeone, either the display's
(28:02):
off, or people are notconnecting with your people, or
there's not knowledge about thesports nutrition product line in
the store when people come inbecause they're gonna have
questions around that.
So this is a great way touncover like, hey, something's
not working, whether it'sdigitally or in person.
Dan Kraus (28:25):
Well, yeah, and I mean it it's it's a point that
you know what I think asmarketers we take for granted a
lot, but it's one that's reallyworth pulling out, which is you
need your staff to know whatyou're promoting, right?
Because if you start a programbut your staff doesn't know it,
and people are coming in andasking about something, all of a
sudden, right?
(28:46):
Um and it's do they have theknowledge, are the pieces tied
together?
And I look at a lot of times Ilook at this from a marketing
standpoint, which is are my adsand my emails tied together,
right?
Because um, you know, storesspend a lot of time and a lot of
money building up loyaltyprograms, right?
And they've got the email listand they've got the contact
(29:06):
information.
And then it's oh yeah, I youknow, I drop in a blast every
couple of weeks, right, to it,or I'm using it to to drive
something through an app.
But email tends to get ignoredafter a while too, right?
We just become blind to thesubject lines, et cetera.
But you can actually useadvertising to draw people back
to an email, you can useadvertising to draw people into
(29:29):
the store, you can make yourstaff aware of what's going on
so all those pieces tietogether, right?
And now they know how to reactto it.
And so it's really trying tomake it all happen.
I was actually just talking tosomebody about, you know, they
do a lot of emails and theydon't get a lot of conversion
off of it.
And it was, well, let'sadvertise whatever's going out
in the email with the commentline of check your email for
more details, just in the ad.
(29:49):
Right.
So we're actually usingadvertising to get people to
read the longer message.
Tina Maddock (29:54):
Yeah.
Dan Kraus (29:54):
Not a crazy, but it does actually work.
Tina Maddock (29:57):
Oh, totally.
Well, and you know.
So even the best emails aregetting open 30, 35% of them are
getting open.
So if you have a 10,000-personemail list, you know, you're
you're only getting to 3,500 ofthose people who are opening and
reading the email.
You stick that same email listin programmatic and you say read
(30:20):
your email, that open rate'sgonna go up, or they're just
gonna come in.
Dan Kraus (30:26):
Yeah, you know, we'll we'll we'll take it up a couple
of percent each time that thatwe do it.
And yeah, or they're just gonnacome in, right?
That's like, oh, I read it.
Yeah, I saw I saw this, I camein.
Um it's really interesting.
If I go, if I go all the wayback to where we started this
conversation, how I got intothis.
So what was really cool when Iwas selling TV insertions is we
knew that it worked becausepeople would say to business
(30:48):
owners, I saw you on TV or I sawyour ad.
Right.
But we don't know a lot oftimes if people are seeing our
digital stuff or our video adsthat are running out there,
because people don't equate,especially older people don't
equate um a video piece thatthey saw on their computer the
same as a video piece that comesacross their smart TV, even
(31:09):
streaming.
Speaker (31:10):
Yeah.
Dan Kraus (31:11):
Right.
And the beautiful thing aboutprogrammatic is you can tell a
really good story on TV in 15 or30 seconds for like six cents
an ad delivered.
Right.
So it's not really expensive todo, and you can you can get a
really detailed story in frontof folks.
So it it it opens TV up againtoo, I think a lot of people who
(31:34):
haven't ever thought aboutthat, hey, you know, TV could do
something for me here.
Tina Maddock (31:38):
Yeah, and I think that the where we've seen the
best performance with theprogrammatic ads for retailers
specifically, it's somethingthey're already doing well if
you start there.
Right.
So, you know, if you're ifyou're not a great sports
nutrition shop, then don't startthere.
Start in a a different categorybecause there's something that
(31:59):
um people come to you for a lot,right?
So start where you're alreadyblooming and grow that even
more.
And then you can start to talkabout, and you were talking
about like say it to the staff.
In certain situations, you'reso good at one thing.
Um, it's great if you tell thestaff, but you wouldn't even
have to talk to the team aboutit because they're on it every
(32:22):
single day, and you're justgrowing that, that they're gonna
have more contact around thatsubject matter.
Um, so starting where you'realready strong is a high
recommendation.
We like warm audiences.
So putting an email list intothe programmatic, your loyalty
rewards people into theprogrammatic system is gonna
(32:47):
produce higher conversions.
People that are visiting yourwebsite.
Dan Kraus (32:51):
Yep.
Tina Maddock (32:52):
Um, so retargeting, remarketing pixels,
having those capture the peopleas they're coming and they see
you again.
Um, and then uh people who havealready purchased.
So those lists in a segmentedway, offering them products or
services that are around thosetopics, high conversion rates.
(33:14):
And again, I do think you needtop-of-funnel stuff.
It's just not gonna be as highof a conversion rate.
So if you're looking forsomething, the the quickest
gains are gonna be like, allright, where are you already
doing really well?
And you talk to people about itevery day.
Dan Kraus (33:29):
Yeah, no, I it it's it's can you cross-sell to your
existing customers?
Can you reactivate a customerthat hasn't bought from you in a
while?
Right?
Those are people that alreadyhave a relationship with you.
So they've already got somelevel of no-like and trust
already.
Yeah.
Right.
So those are the easiest onesto move through the purchase
cycle.
And then as you go further awayfrom people who've ever
interacted with you, those arethe ones that require the more
(33:50):
touches.
So how do you do that costeffectively at the end of the
day?
Tina Maddock (33:54):
Well, the other thing that we've been talking
about too is because the summerwas a little bit soft.
And I don't know if this is atrend or if it'll continue.
You know, I mean, this businessis cyclical, summer, summer's a
little bit soft anyway, butthis summer was way soft um for
many of our retailers.
And so um one of the thingsthat um that we talk about doing
(34:20):
is um I now I've totally lostmy train of thought.
Summer was soft.
Oh, so what's happening in theeconomy right now is um that
people are downsizing, likethings that products that they
don't think they need.
They're like, oh, I can dowithout that for a month or a
week, or maybe I can squeeze thelast little bit of toothpaste
(34:42):
out of this and instead ofbuying a new tube yet.
Um, so they're making fewerpurchases, especially for the
non-essentials.
And that's up to the consumerto decide like what's essential
in their life and what isn't.
So we've been talking toretailers about highlighting
that they have essentials.
(35:02):
And depending on the store,it's different, like what
essentials are available there.
But using programmatic ads asthis, hey, did you know that we
had toilet paper or coffee ortoothpaste, xylitol gum, like
things that are more people arenot gonna do without um
(35:24):
mouthwashes and those sorts ofthings, um, even lotions to some
degree, shampoo for sure.
People are not doing withoutshampoos and soap.
If you highlight, hey, you canget that here, especially to
people who purchased before, andsay, hey, did you know that we
have these essentials and youcan just drop by and get those
(35:44):
while you're here?
I I think that's a great wayright now to remind people that
they don't need to take you offtheir list if they're
downsizing.
Dan Kraus (35:54):
Yeah, I I think and the other risk I think from
downsizing is that and thishappens to me, it may not happen
to everybody.
If I change my routine for acouple, three months, all of a
sudden I've forgotten some ofthe products that were in that
routine.
And so, you know, advertisingbecomes a way to again
cost-effectively keep yourselfin somebody's mind, right?
(36:15):
You want to keep that position,you want to keep that position
filled even if it's not beingbought right now, right?
And top of mind.
Yep.
Tina Maddock (36:23):
Staying top of mind.
Dan Kraus (36:24):
Remember where the phrase comes from.
So yeah, you know, it's like,how do how do I stay there even
though you're not buying itright now?
Tina Maddock (36:31):
Yeah.
So here's another thing becausewe always talk about doing
customer reactivation campaigns.
So someone who hasn't been inyour store in 90 days, and 90
days, we like 90 days becauseyou can get a 90-day supply of
things while they're in there.
Maybe 30, 60s, right, forcertain products, but um, 90
days if they haven't come back,it's a good time to nudge them.
(36:52):
We typically do that via email.
Again, open rates are not high.
So this is the perfect time toload that group up into an
advertisement and be like, checkyour email.
Dan Kraus (37:05):
Absolutely.
You know, just to just to keepkeep again, you know, it's we're
more likely to open somethingwhen we recognize the center,
when we recognize a subjectline, right?
And most of us go through andclean out, you know, the
promotional tab or et cetera,but still we're generally still
scanning what they are.
And if it's something that thattriggers a memory, we'll still
(37:27):
pause on it and look and seewhat the subject line or what
the preview text is.
Speaker (37:31):
Yeah.
Dan Kraus (37:32):
So, you know, it it top of mind does help you with
everything else down the funnel.
Tina Maddock (37:38):
Yeah, and the other thing that we've kind of
been talking about is um becausesearch is a little bit up in
the air.
And here's what I've beennoticing.
Um, and this changes everyweek, month, whatever.
So don't if if this is aged alittle bit, it could be wrong,
by the way.
But here's what I've beennoticing right now is um for
(38:00):
search, SEO still works.
It works really well for peoplewho've done no work on it.
Like you start getting traffic,if you start doing content and
you have a good hierarchy ofcontent on your page, and if you
have no idea what I'm talkingabout, because I'm I'm nerd
speaking a little bit, listen toan episode that's just on SEO.
(38:23):
I'll put a link in the in thechat here.
But the the thing is like ifyou're starting from zero,
you're gonna get some resultsand it's gonna be pretty quick.
If you have content that hasn'tbeen organized well, that
helps.
If you have had like reallygreat SEO and you've worked on
it, it's structured, you'reprobably seeing fewer clicks
(38:46):
right now.
Because of AI.
That's how, and I'm not sayingdon't continue doing that
because you nudged me the otherday and were like, hey,
advertise to your articles,advertise to your content,
because that is it's one waythat people get into your
(39:09):
purchase funnel.
And so um you can do that andget in front of people that you
can't get in front of anymorevia search.
Dan Kraus (39:18):
Well, or social, right?
Because social, I mean, youcan't put a blog post or a
snippet on social with a link toyour blog post anymore and get
any traffic.
Speaker (39:26):
Yeah.
Dan Kraus (39:27):
Right?
The the the whether whetherit's a meta platform, it's
LinkedIn, it's TikTok, it'sSnap, it doesn't matter.
They all want you to stay ontheir platform.
Yeah.
So if you're linking off, yourpost is getting buried.
Tina Maddock (39:39):
Yeah.
Well, and I mean this industryis used to that because um their
posts have been getting buriedfor a few years now in an effort
to not have like the snake oiloil salesman type of
transactions happening, which isum it's too bad because they
have really great products tooffer consumers that could be
(40:00):
really helpful.
But it's just it's beendifficult to get visibility in
this industry for a while.
Changed a little bit with thenew administration.
I think things have opened up abit um once that change
happened, but it's stilldifficult, especially if you're
taking people off the platform.
Dan Kraus (40:18):
Yeah.
Well, I think they they want tokeep the traffic on the
platform, they want to serve theads on the platform, right?
So they don't want to.
Tina Maddock (40:29):
Which is why they're serving up AI.
And they have this weirdtension.
It's the same with theplatforms, they have this weird
tension because what drivestheir business growth are people
who are advertising on theseplatforms, and now they've got
people mad at them about that.
So it's so strange, but you'reright.
(40:49):
You they want people to stayput, just like we do.
Like all the people that we'rehelping advertise for, we want
them to stay on your platform.
Dan Kraus (40:59):
Absolutely.
Tina Maddock (41:00):
So yeah, it's it's interesting and it does change
regularly.
Those are a few of the changesI've seen from or from an
organic standpoint.
Dan Kraus (41:11):
Yeah, I mean, the the market, the whole marketing
technology field, all of ourdifferent media choices, um,
it's pretty crazy in terms ofthe sheer number of choices that
we have to promote ourbusiness.
And if you flip that around andyou put yourself in your
consumer role, think about allthe different ways that people
(41:32):
have to get a hold of you.
Right.
I mean, I get unsolicited text,I get unsolicited WhatsApp
messages, I get things onMessenger, I get every single
possible way so that somebodycan hunt me down, they're going
to hunt me down.
Right.
So it's And I hate it.
But it it's unfortunately theworld we live in because
everybody's trying to figure outthe best way to get a hold of
(41:54):
you.
Um they've got something tosolve a problem for you.
Um and um you know, it's notthat advertising makes the world
work go around, but it isprobably the second oldest
profession, right?
Tina Maddock (42:06):
So yeah, anything else, tips or tricks um that you
have discovered since we'vebeen working on retail?
Dan Kraus (42:18):
Um, I I think your your point that you made about
picking a category, picking aspecific product's really
important, right?
Because especially inprogrammatic, but in advertising
in general, you have suchlittle time to get somebody's
attention.
You have so few words, um, it'svery hard to do that with a
(42:42):
mushy message, right?
You need to know exactly whatit is you want to promote and
why.
Because a lot of times you'vegot 10 words or three seconds,
right?
Can you grab somebody'sattention in that amount of
time?
And if you're trying to promotea brand that isn't really well
defined, that doesn't work.
Speaker (43:02):
Yeah.
Dan Kraus (43:02):
So um being narrow, being specific, both are really
beneficial.
Tina Maddock (43:08):
Yeah, and I think um one of the things you
mentioned to me the other daywas uh can they call the store?
Speaker (43:17):
Right.
Tina Maddock (43:18):
Is this is this the right time to do a call to
the store?
So we're constantly likelooking for ways to make these
more effective um and testingthem out and seeing like, does
this work?
Does this not work?
Is it turning into money or isit just turning into more work
for people?
Dan Kraus (43:36):
Right, yeah.
All of the above.
Tina Maddock (43:38):
Yeah.
And so we're asking a lot ofthose questions as we're putting
these together, um, thecampaigns and watching them.
Um, and thankfully you've beena great partner to work with to
like make suggestions, watch theticker so that I don't have to
or the store doesn't have to,but that I can correlate with
(43:59):
different messages and um, youknow, sales data to see like
what are we doing, or evenwebsite data just to see are
like coming to the content, arethings happening.
So um it's been a pleasure umwork doing work like this.
And I think that we havefigured out some real things.
Some of the examples that wegave today about getting niche,
(44:22):
making sure it's somethingthat's working in your store
already, if if you want thequickest results and then
layering in other things whereyou get more interest and you
start to build relationshipswith people, but starting
narrow, being very focused,pulling people in for something
you're already really great at.
Um, that I feel like that's areally great place to start.
Dan Kraus (44:41):
Yeah, absolutely.
So appreciate it.
Thanks for the time.
Tina Maddock (44:45):
Okay, so I just want to like circle back to the
reason that we had thisconversation because we
definitely went down the findthe consumer, pull them in and
increase your sales um road.
But really what we were talkingabout, and and this came up
when I was at Soho with peopleum talking to me about like,
gosh, it's been really difficultto find a good employee to come
(45:10):
in and work on the floor that'sgood at customer service and
can also help understand theproduct itself.
And so I think it's a reallyunique way of getting in front
of possible employees withoutspending a ton of money
recruiting.
Dan Kraus (45:29):
If you know, if you know where you want to recruit
from, it's a great place to doit.
And that can be, you know, itcan be competitors, it can be
people that are adjacent, it canbe schools.
Um, if we can isolate them, wecan reach them.
So that's that's the goal.
Tina Maddock (45:42):
Yeah.
So if you're having thattrouble finding the right person
for your team, or you want totry out some of these customer
acquisition tools that we'retalking about today, um, let us
know.
Info atnaturalproductsmarketer.com.
We can help coordinate withDan.
Obviously, we understand thenatural products market.
And um, Dan's the win whiz onthe um the programmatic ads and
(46:08):
helping get those set upcorrectly and watching them to
make sure that they'reperforming well.
So contact us, let us know.
We can help you get set up.
Even if you don't contact us, Ifeel like these are the right
strategies for doing digitaladvertising today.
So hopefully you learnedsomething, if nothing else.
Dan Kraus (46:26):
We're always learning.
Always take.
Tina Maddock (46:29):
All right.
Thanks for coming, and we'llsee you on the next episode.
Thank you so much for joiningus for the latest episode of the
Natural Products Marketerpodcast, where we're here to
help you grow your business soyou can serve more people and
change more lives.
If you have any questions thathave come up during this episode
or others, or there's just aretail challenge that you're
(46:50):
facing today, I would love foryou to reach out to us at info
at naturalproductsmarketer.com.
We're here to answer questions.
But most of all, if you have aquestion, then another retailer
probably also has that question.
So we can bring experts ontothe podcast to give you the
information that you reallyneed.
And if you liked what youheard, give us a thumbs up or
(47:13):
give us a review on uh YouTube,Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you're listening today.
All right, it was great to seeyou.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.