Intro: [00:00:10] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Woodstock, Georgia. It’s time for Cherokee Business Radio. Now, here’s your host.

Sharon Cline: [00:00:26] And welcome. It’s Friday at three, which means it is time to listen to Fearless Formula on Cherokee Radio X, where we talk about the ups and downs in the business world and offer words of wisdom for business success. I’m your host, Sharon Cline, and our guest in the studio today started in marketing almost 20 years ago, and she is a published author. She attended Google University to get certified in Google ads and she began her business big social marketing nine years ago. She and her staff create focused campaigns for clients on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, business, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, all the things. Please welcome Celeste Simmons to the show. Hello. Hello. Nice to meet.

Celeste Simmons : [00:01:08] You. Thank you for having me.

Sharon Cline: [00:01:09] You’re welcome. I appreciate you coming in. I didn’t know you could get certified. This is how little I know about marketing. You can get certified in Google ads. Can you tell me something about that?

Celeste Simmons : [00:01:19] So years ago when I first started, Google seminars came through Atlanta, and that was when I went. That was when I first went to their classes. But of course, now, like everything, it’s all online and you don’t even need to have much of a background in like website design and things like that. You can get Google certified. That class is very deep. The last time I took the test it was 150 questions on. It’s timed and they’re really difficult.

Intro: [00:01:47] You know, it’s.

Celeste Simmons : [00:01:48] It’s, it’s kind of a hard test but yeah that’s how you get certified. It’s it’s an online test. Do they have study guides on Google but it’s all about Google ads. It’s YouTube ads, it’s listing ads, things like that. All of the little Google products and especially now it’s changing because Google is changing. Google is changing all the time. It does updates all the time. So it’s it changes the questions year to year.

Sharon Cline: [00:02:13] Oh, my gosh. Do you remember a question? I mean, are we talking like metrics and things? There’s so much I don’t know.

Celeste Simmons : [00:02:19] Yes. A lot of metrics, a lot of analytics and try and it’s questions like how to determine if your campaigns are successful and then how to determine how to set up a campaign the right way, how to set up the budget correctly. So it’s it touches on all of those areas. It’s a lot of it’s a lot of analytics and tracking and things like that.

Sharon Cline: [00:02:41] Everyone think if I’m thinking Google, I’m just like, well, I need a plumber, you know? But I’m not thinking so much about how much behind the scenes is happening.

Celeste Simmons : [00:02:49] And yeah, are so many options now. And Google also updates, Google ads, the AdWords platform. So it’s it’s important. It’s an industry where I have to constantly stay up to date because nothing is the same. Even on Google AdWords from when I started almost ten years ago, the platform to design ads and to set up ads looks totally different than it did ten years ago.

Sharon Cline: [00:03:12] It’s like something I wanted to ask you about is like, what? What are the how has the industry changed? I mean, I’m sure it’s changing every minute. Like we were just talking a second ago before we went on air about tick tock and how how huge that is in terms of ads, too.

Celeste Simmons : [00:03:25] Yeah, tick tock is really shaking things up.

Intro: [00:03:27] That’s that’s a whole.

Celeste Simmons : [00:03:29] Nother subject with Google, for instance. So you YouTube is owned by Google and it purchased it years ago. But that’s one of the things like say that you want to do you want your product videos to appear on YouTube so that someone who’s searching for that widget or whatever, that the cooking product that you sell, that you want to put it on YouTube, you have to go through Google ads to set that up. So even if you do produce a video, you can tag it with keywords. But if you want it to be seen by people that are likely to buy your product, you have to you’re going to have to do a YouTube ad. And you you set that up through Google AdWords.

Sharon Cline: [00:04:06] So I was reading a little bit about this and how there are ways that you can do this apparently free, but it feels like if you’re really serious about your business, you need to invest a little bit, at least not even it’s not thousands of dollars, but I think you were even talking about hundreds of dollars in order to encourage these keywords to bring up your your business. How does that work?

Celeste Simmons : [00:04:29] Right. So there’s that’s kind of almost a difficult question to answer. So it determines it’s based on the fact it’s based on what do you sell and who your market is, that that’s the first determining factor of where do you need to be? If what you sell is a consumer product and it’s under $300, you might want to do Facebook and Instagram and maybe TOK ads that might be your niche and that might really work. But if what you sell is in the higher price point, you probably might want to focus on YouTube and Google ads, and you can also do Microsoft ads. But if what you sell is a higher price point, you have to cast a wider net and you’re going to have to put a little bit more dollars on it. You know, if what you sell is $1,500 or more, you’re going to you’re going to have to spend some money to advertise it, because you’re going to have to you’re going to have to find the people that have that kind of money to spend on the product. So it’s now there’s so many settings in Google. There’s so many, so many. I mean, you can do an ad for as little as 300. Dollars a month. People get scared about Google ads because the Google ads of ten years ago, that was when people would spend thousands accidentally because they didn’t know how to do it.

Celeste Simmons : [00:05:36] But you don’t have to do that anymore. When we set up Google ads, I can I can adjust it. Like if you just wanted your ads to show between two and 4 p.m. between Monday and Thursday, I can do it. No kidding. You just wanted, like, just certain phrases and keywords to be tagged according to your product of what you sell. Those are the keywords that you turned on. And then that way you can track what people are clicking on, and you can also track how many of those clicks are coming into a purchase. And that becomes analytics. There’s ads, but then you also get analytics, which is the tracking, and it kind of tells more about the buyer. I have one client who is he owns a body shop. And for him, his ads are his ads are on Google. But he wanted to do a very tight radius, as you can imagine, because if you’re in a body shop, that means you’re probably were just in an accident. Right? Right. So you probably don’t want to go with that without five miles of your home. So we had to set up a really tight radius and then we we tightened it up even more. We made it just within his business hours.

Celeste Simmons : [00:06:41] And then we went down again and he said, okay, I don’t want to spend more than 2000 months. So we set that budget up no more than 2000 a month. And then he also wanted to make sure that it was just specific phrases that people would click on. Now also, one of the funny things is I can track, I can set up the device. So with his ads, as you can imagine, people were finding him 99%. We found out we’re clicking on a mobile device. So we just didn’t even put any money on desktop units. We put we put it all on a mobile device. So his ads only show up within a five mile radius of a shop and on a mobile device. And because that’s where everybody was clicking, that was the highest conversion rate for him. So so things like that, it gets so specific. I mean, I can we can write the text, of course, we can pick the terms that people want to advertise on the time of day, the dollar amount. I mean, it just gets so deep. You Google will make you money based on how much you spend. It’s I always tell people the rule of thumb, it should return back to you about four times what you put in.

Sharon Cline: [00:07:49] Wow, that’s a lot.

Celeste Simmons : [00:07:51] Yeah. And Facebook ads is good, like I mentioned, for consumer ad products. But with Facebook ads now, Facebook ads cost less, but they’re also going to get a a smaller conversion rate. But they let’s say that you only have $100 to spend and you do have a consumer product. Well, you can put that $100 on Facebook ads and you’ll probably get you may get as much as 5 to $1000 back from your $100 spent.

Sharon Cline: [00:08:19] Do they have the same kind of analytics? Facebook?

Celeste Simmons : [00:08:24] Not really. Some of them are similar to what Google gives you. Facebook is is always it’s always riding Google’s coattails, in my opinion. I mean, Google Google just started earlier. They’re leaps and bounds ahead of Facebook. But Facebook is pretty good for the person that just wants to spend a little bit. If you just want to put your ads on Facebook and Instagram, which now you can join them together because of Facebook and meta Facebook meta put Instagram and Facebook business pages together. So now you can do kind of like two for one and you can get a wider audience cast out that way. But yeah, you can definitely limit your where you advertise to. You can limit to the types of people. If you’re if you’re a business owner and you’re trying to determine where should I put my money? The biggest determining factor of if you should do Facebook and Instagram ads or YouTube and Google is based on who is going to see your product. But the other thing about Google is that Facebook ads are run based on who is likely to purchase from you, who they’re on their behaviors, their purchasing behaviors and what they’ve looked at in the past. So in other words, they may not be looking right now. It’s just something that they’re likely to do. That’s how Facebook ads work. But Facebook ads are much cheaper. But Google ads, that person is currently on their phone. They’re currently in front of their computer. And they have just typed in that particular phrase that this person set up in their account. So Google ads will convert higher. That means they’re going to click to your website or they’re going to call more often, but it’s also going to be four times the price.

Sharon Cline: [00:10:03] Do you feel like there are people out there who, okay, let’s just take me because I have the smallest business on the planet. A voiceover business. Okay, let’s say I wanted to just do it myself. Like what are the mistakes that people tend to make? Like, I imagine I would want to come to you and say, I don’t know enough about human behavior and if people are looking for voiceover artists at two in the morning or whatever. So. How how what could how would you help me?

Celeste Simmons : [00:10:29] So I would even even as the smallest.

Intro: [00:10:32] Business in America, as you said.

Celeste Simmons : [00:10:35] I would tell you to not just only focus on social media. So social media is great. It’s a great springboard for when you’re just getting started and you don’t have much of a budget because, I mean, social media is free. You could be on all of them. Tik Tok, Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook. You can go across the board, which is great because the more social media sites are on, the higher likelihood that someone will find you. And then you have more opportunity to spread the word because people, you know, you have people that don’t like Facebook and they might be on LinkedIn. So you want to be on LinkedIn too, or they might be on Twitter because they think Facebook is annoying or whatever. So you want to make sure you’re on all of them. So that’s the number one tip is don’t just don’t just concentrate on just like Facebook and Instagram only make sure you spread out and other and now remember that that’s all organic. But remember that when it comes to be, to be and like for you, for instance, I would definitely say to be on LinkedIn and to focus some of what you do on LinkedIn, because that’s where the business owners are going to find you and that’s who your market is. And so I would really focus on B2B.

Sharon Cline: [00:11:41] Thank you.

Intro: [00:11:42] You’re welcome. It’s a free tip. Thanks for coming in.

Sharon Cline: [00:11:46] So what are some of the low cost marketing options for someone who’s a small business owner?

Celeste Simmons : [00:11:52] So they’re actually there’s a good bit of low cost, so you can still make free videos. So don’t forget about YouTube. To set up a YouTube channel is totally free. Now if you don’t want to have your face in a video and I know a lot of business owners are like, Oh, I don’t look good on camera. I don’t want to be on there because we hear that all the time. You can you can buy like stock video footage and you can make a stock video footage out of your product or service. You don’t have to be in the video. So remember that YouTube is free. The other free opportunities are like newsletters. If you have a newsletter list, just go through your email list, go through your list of connections on LinkedIn and then turn that into an email list and then use MailChimp or constant contact email. A newsletter list can be like $100 a month. I mean, and that, you know, that you can turn that into several sales per month every time you turn into a newsletter or you send it out. And then the other thing is also text messaging ads. Text messaging ads are really affordable. They’re very popular now. But if you have phone numbers, let’s say you don’t have a good list of emails that you’re confident in, but you do have client phone numbers from past appointments. You can use that phone number list. Let’s say you came up with 300 phone numbers and you want appointments for meetings or appointments for, let’s say, your massage therapist or something like that. You can send out a text alert and that’s only a few hundred dollars. The text messaging campaign is really, really affordable and it goes direct to people’s phones. So think about it. Those text messaging campaigns has a 96% open rate. Wow. Right. So, I mean, those get really good conversions. I really like text messaging campaigns for saving money as well as just getting appointments. It’s it’s a call to action ad every time because it’s it goes right to their phone.

Sharon Cline: [00:13:40] Wow. It’s it’s interesting to you. There’s this the aspect of it is human behavior, right? So I don’t think I’m learning right. And I’m like a baby in terms of marketing. I have not done much marketing of my own. Like I said, I always just hope people hire me and I’m so happy when they do. But the notion of looking at trends of how people behave, like you were saying, with people who would potentially have had a car accident, they’re on their phones immediately, probably next to their car. You know, how do I but it’s so smart to think this way. And so there’s such a human aspect to to business. Can you talk a little bit about what that’s like?

Celeste Simmons : [00:14:19] So we do try to consider like when somebody comes in and gives us a call, we do we always consider what type of business they’re in as well as what who their customer is, what age their customer is, and what kind of things where do they where does this customer shop? What are their activities? You know, if you are if you sell to the upper 5% income level, you have to go in places or market to places where those those type of people with that kind of income hang out. And so that’s a little bit tricky, like with Facebook ads, but that’s how it determines it’s based on their habits and their interests. So if they’re at the golf course, well, then that’s the one of the interests or the behaviors that you target if you’re trying to find maybe people with more income because what you sell is more expensive. If you’re trying let’s say you’re a consultant and your your perfect client is another business owner. Well, you would want to type that in like Facebook ads. You would want to make sure and pick that interest that they are interested in. Be to be and they have. They have their own business or they have a small business. Those are key words that you can find as far as picking Facebook ads. But based on, you know, we have a we have a like a questionnaire that we give all of our potential clients and we have them fill out the questionnaire so that we can figure out who is your perfect client, who is your perfect buyer. That way we can find out where they are because we don’t we don’t want to waste money either. And I know they don’t.

Sharon Cline: [00:15:51] Of course. Sure. Has there ever been a sort of a campaign that’s kind of surprised you, how well it’s done or how well it hasn’t done? I know that’s kind of an out of left field question, but I don’t assume I know answers anymore.

Intro: [00:16:05] Where.

Sharon Cline: [00:16:05] I can’t predict what I think is going to happen. Like I’m a lawyer and I’m going to ask you a question and you’re going to give me the answer. I think I know. I mean, I’ve been so surprised even just doing this show and having people answer in a way I just did not expect. So I’ve kind of opened my mind into just believing that I, I have just a very little bit of knowledge. I’ll do the best I can with where I’m putting my money, but I cannot predict how something can turn out great or not great. There’s only so much I can contrive, if that makes sense.

Celeste Simmons : [00:16:37] So I guess I have two examples of that. One, I had a customer one time that had her own line of cosmetics, and she specifically wanted to do Facebook ads. And it was it wasn’t it wasn’t an inexpensive cosmetic. It was it was a little upper price. So it was it ended up not being that great of a Facebook campaign because she picked her interest. Now, when we said, you know what, let’s try one more time, let us let us set up an Instagram ad for you and let me pick different cities, because she chose she was Internet based so she could go anywhere in the US, she could sell anywhere. So we chose the cities, we picked the interests. But that one surprised me. The Instagram ad did better for her on that particular face serum that she was selling. It was upper price, but she allowed us to help her rather than the customer coming in and saying, This is my client, this is where I want to go and this is what they like. I think her net was just too broad the first time. And so the second time when we did the Instagram ad, we spent less money, but we were very particular in what we chose to try to find that particular client for her. And the second one worked better.

Sharon Cline: [00:17:49] That’s so interesting.

Celeste Simmons : [00:17:50] Yeah. And that was a good lesson, I guess.

Sharon Cline: [00:17:53] How many clients come to you assuming they know how it goes, how it should go?

Celeste Simmons : [00:17:58] Most of them really ask for help. But this particular woman, she wasn’t new in business and she had done a Facebook ad in the past that did work. But the problem was she was comparing a Facebook ad that she she did for a $25 item. So when it came to doing a Facebook ad for the $300 item, that was different. That’s a different audience. And so that same audience that’s going to buy the $25 thing versus the $300 thing, that’s not necessarily the same people and they’re not necessarily in the same area. So we had to kind of fix that audience and those interests just because this was a higher price point, this was not going to be. She tried to use that same list that she did the first time so that those same people would buy again. But, you know, that doesn’t necessarily fit their budget because the people that she chose just didn’t line up with the $300 product. So we try to be particular with where we set it up and and how we set it up.

Sharon Cline: [00:18:55] Well, if you’re just joining us, I’m speaking with Celeste Simmons. She is owner of Big Social Marketing.

Intro: [00:19:00] How much? How? How?

Sharon Cline: [00:19:04] Gosh. Okay, here’s what I want to say. I get ads on Facebook and Instagram where I swear to you, I was just thinking about something I’m not and it has not gotten out of my mouth yet. And I hear comes in at how does that work? It just is the trends of the things that I like. If I’m a new homeowner, it’s going to assume I may need a new water heater at some point.

Intro: [00:19:28] No.

Sharon Cline: [00:19:28] How does it know I’m serious, though? Because I promise you I will not have spoken about anything. And all of a sudden something pops up where I’m like, Oh, my God, I was just going to look into this.

Intro: [00:19:37] Right.

Celeste Simmons : [00:19:38] So you have a lot of cookies on your computer as well as your phone, and there are these little tracking things. So even if you did click on a house and you’re not even looking for a house, it may show you that realtor ad next just because you clicked on a house. And so it tries, you know, Facebook gets paid big money for figuring out these interests. But again, it goes on interested things. Now, that’s where Facebook ads can be, can be a winner, but they also might be a loser. Let’s say that you were interested in like a piece of exercise equipment and but you were looking last week. And so now it comes up on your feed today. Well, you already ordered one last week, so Facebook doesn’t necessarily know when you’re done and you’ve already completed that purchase. Gotcha. So it just might keep showing you exercise equipment ads just because that’s what you were looking at a week ago.

Sharon Cline: [00:20:28] So, yeah, it’s funny. Amazon does that to me. I’ll buy like a blender and then they’re constantly asking me if I want another plant, but I just. Okay, thanks.

Celeste Simmons : [00:20:37] Sometimes they don’t know when to quit. Yeah.

Sharon Cline: [00:20:40] What do you think? I wanted to ask you, what do you think some of the biggest what is something that you are challenged by in in your in your business specifically? I guess I was trying to find a better way to say it, but like, what is the biggest challenge you experience?

Intro: [00:21:00] I guess I wasn’t even prepared for that question. Oh, no, that’s okay.

Celeste Simmons : [00:21:06] I guess the biggest challenge is to let’s say that we run a really good campaign for somebody, and it’s the first time they’ve ever used us. And then we just knock it out of the park and it’s great. And then they go, All right, that’s really great. Let’s do.

Intro: [00:21:22] It again.

Sharon Cline: [00:21:25] That would be terrifying for me.

Celeste Simmons : [00:21:28] Yeah, sometimes it is because I’m like, Man, they’re got.

Intro: [00:21:31] Really great results. How can I do this? How can I replicate it exactly.

Celeste Simmons : [00:21:35] So that becomes it. I guess that’s our constant strive here is just if we have something and we get great results, well, we want to do it again. So what we try to do is let’s say that we ran a great Instagram ad and we got really good results. Well, we might navigate over to Facebook so that we can try a different platform and get other results. Or we might go over to maybe YouTube ads and try to get those results there just from a different angle. But to try to mimic those results again, just to try to reach a different audience, but with the same kind of sales results.

Intro: [00:22:11] Wow.

Sharon Cline: [00:22:12] That must be an enormously daunting I mean, you can’t force someone to buy some something. But I also think I mean, there has to be you’ve got metrics behind the decisions that you’re making so you can back up why you’re doing what you’re doing. And I would imagine a client would understand why. I mean, that’s why they’re hiring you to do this.

Celeste Simmons : [00:22:33] Right? We always go through the metrics after the ad has run. And and of course, we have a long discussion before the we even set up ads to make sure that we get the interest right and the audience right. We we really try, you know, we don’t want to make any mistakes. Again, I don’t want to waste their money. And then, you know, Facebook also, they want their ads to work. So we just try to be we do. We set up as many specific things as we can. I’ll tell you one thing that we found recently. So I really am a good proponent of Google ads. I know that they work because I get tracking, I get analytics. But one of the things that I saw recently, we started doing Microsoft ads. Now Google has a little button on when you when you set up Google AdWords and it says, do you want to be on partner networks? And it’s just like a little switch. You turned it on and one of those partner networks would be being in Microsoft ads. But we never we always allowed Google to be on partner networks, but we never controlled it until just about six months ago where we started just doing Microsoft ads as well. Wow. Microsoft is still about 17 to 20% of the Internet search. And it’s still important to put a little bit of your budget. If you’re going to do Google ads, you should totally do Microsoft being ads as well. The platform is very similar, even if you think, well, I’m only getting 17 to 20% of that audience, but you’re getting it for a 10th of the price, 1/10 of the price. Wow. So that’s about the same cost as Facebook ads. But Microsoft also offers those tracking. So rather than just being on Google, I would say throw a little bit of the budget towards Microsoft also because it does offer that same tracking and it is getting customers over to those websites. We’re seeing that happen and it’s so much cheaper.

Sharon Cline: [00:24:22] Are you finding most people are using their phones? How how does that work statistically? Are they desktop or mobile phones mostly?

Celeste Simmons : [00:24:29] So it changes based on the business. Like if it’s a B2B based business, then it’s very desktop oriented. Then it’s it’s more like, let’s say 60% desktop if it’s a B to B business, like a professional item that they would have in an office or office building. If it is a consumer item, then it’s very it’s like 80% mobile devices. No way. And I have seen that change over the years. You know, when when mobile devices just became an everybody’s hand. I mean, I could I could almost log in every month and I would see the ratios going up and up and up. It’s almost I mean, 80% to 89%. It’s it’s really high. So Google allows you to gauge the money based on whatever device. If I just wanted the ad on a tablet, I could put it on a tab.

Intro: [00:25:15] I know. That’s amazing. I can’t believe that’s even an option, but it is.

Sharon Cline: [00:25:20] But I imagine that market is kind of smaller. Right.

Celeste Simmons : [00:25:23] And then people really and you know how I iPads were such the rage when they came out. Now people are just using their phones so much more. A tablet is just a blip on the radar. It’s just it’s in there. As far as your analytics of how many people are looking at your ads on a tablet versus a desktop versus versus a phone? But yeah, the phone is higher across the board, almost in every business, the mobile phones.

Sharon Cline: [00:25:49] What was it like prior to having Google or having that become such a huge part of marketing? What was it like? Before that. What were the main ways that you would mark it with people?

Celeste Simmons : [00:26:01] Oh, that’s a really good question. Blogs were the thing. If you remember in our industry, it was the big phrase content is king, and that came from blogs. It was all organic. With blogs. With blogs, that was a way that you could put in certain phrases that you wanted to be Google for. Now, blogs are still a thing. I’m not knocking blogs. We do them and we upload them for clients. But it’s not as important as just having your having all of your things spread out across the Web. That’s one thing. One big tip I would give business owners in particular is to not forget. You really do have to scatter the web with what you do. You want to be on all those social media platforms. You do want to blog. You do want to do Google ads or Microsoft ads just like you would diversify your financial portfolio. Think of that as what you would want to do for marketing. You don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket if you’re a business owner that really likes Facebook. So you love putting things on Facebook about, you know, like let’s say you have a t shirt shop and you put pictures of what you sell. That’s great. But don’t forget to put them also on Twitter and put them on LinkedIn and to put them on Tik Tok, because all of those things collectively help drive traffic to your website. Just don’t get stuck on just one or two platforms. You’ve got to scatter it across the web because Google sees that and Google, it’s almost like a point value that Google gives you for every social media site or every organic marketing like a blog, it gives you like a little point in your direction so it can give you more opportunities to bring the audience to your website. The more places that you’re on the web.

Sharon Cline: [00:27:43] The more you spend. Let’s say I do a search for a microphone, the more I spend. Does that does that bring up someone else’s ad above mine if they spent more money? So did I ask that correctly?

Celeste Simmons : [00:27:57] You did. So in other words, let’s say that somebody spends $500 on an ad and then your competition is spending $1,500. So the $500 ad is still going to show when the person with the $15 ad what they do. What Google does is it rotates spots. So it still gives the guy with the $500 budget an opportunity, but he may only have two chances a day where the guy who spent 4500 might have five chances a day. So that’s how it works. It just means that the $500 ads budget will run out, and that means his ad will be shown less.

Intro: [00:28:36] Got it.

Sharon Cline: [00:28:37] Did was your business affected by the pandemic at all?

Celeste Simmons : [00:28:42] It was. We did have some clients that just couldn’t afford to market anymore. Most of them just said, hey, you know, I don’t want to spend this much on Google anymore. Can you dial it back? Which that’s instantaneous. If you don’t want to spend whatever dollar amount you’re spending, you can turn it off, you can pause it or you can just dial back the numbers. That’s that can be done the minute you call. So most of them most of them said, I don’t want to cut it off. I just want to dial it back. Because if you just all of a sudden stop marketing, I mean, your your place on the web will fall if you just stop. Your voice has to be heard. It has to be put out on the Internet. Otherwise you will lose your place on the web. It will just kind of disappear. It’ll get covered up by other people.

Sharon Cline: [00:29:25] So it was financial?

Celeste Simmons : [00:29:26] Yeah, most of them were financial because they just couldn’t afford the big Google AdWords budgets. Or if they have consistent Facebook ads running, then they just said, Hey, you know what? Can we just pause this for a little while? And that’s true. I feel like everybody’s back. Almost everybody called us back. I had two people that closed. One of them was a restaurant they hated to lose. But, you know, restaurants had a particularly hard time. Yeah, but yeah, one of the benefits from the pandemic for us was that people were okay with letting us work from home. And whereas before we were we were we tried to go to the office 3 to 5 days a week so that we were there for people if they called. But now they’re okay with us working from home. Which, which I appreciate.

Intro: [00:30:13] I know.

Sharon Cline: [00:30:14] I had to, like, get dressed.

Intro: [00:30:15] Today. Right. I’m all spoiled.

Sharon Cline: [00:30:18] What do you think about the impact of advertising that’s on tick tock? Like people will say, oh, I just went to I did a whole at the makeup store and these are the things that I like and not like. Do you do you track any of that kind of impact?

Celeste Simmons : [00:30:32] So I really.

Intro: [00:30:33] I like to talk.

Celeste Simmons : [00:30:34] I think it’s crazy how that came out. You know, it was just that was also something that came out in the pandemic, you know, because we’re all home. Tick tock, tick tock just became crazy popular because we’re all on our.

Intro: [00:30:46] Phones because everybody nobody was working. No one wanted to talk to each other. Right.

Celeste Simmons : [00:30:51] So it just came it just became crazy popular. But yeah, that was something that I kind of hesitated to go, a market that I hesitated to go into. But we do have several clients on with tick tock campaigns. It’s affordable. I can say that it works based on what you sell, based on the price. Once again, I would you know, it’s one of the platforms that we might suggest, like I’ve got one client, they’re on tick tock, but they don’t sell their they have a very strict market because of what they sell is like they have to own the market in certain states. So I can’t advertise for them nationally. So we don’t put money on their TikTok videos and yet they’re still on TikTok. So there’s still ways around it. Like based on your your sales area, if you can’t be on TikTok, then you can still do it the freeway. You can still just get your name and they just put some videos out there and just see what happens. Yeah, they offer tracking also.

Sharon Cline: [00:31:49] They do. It feels like such a young market.

Celeste Simmons : [00:31:52] Tick tock. It is.

Sharon Cline: [00:31:54] Yeah. Although I see lots of people. Like some lady showed up on the TikTok that I don’t really officially have. It’s like the Facebook.

Intro: [00:32:00] Version of TikTok because I tried to.

Sharon Cline: [00:32:02] Get away from it and I loved it too much. So she talks about real estate and but but it’s kind of interesting because it’s like a the the notion is that I’m going to just give you a little snippet of what my life is and what I experienced today. And I can’t believe how much that influences the way I think, you know?

Celeste Simmons : [00:32:21] Yeah, yeah. Tick tock. I like hearing people’s opinions and people’s experiences from those different areas of work and from the different careers. I think it’s really interesting because it’s, you know, it’s like a day in the life.

Sharon Cline: [00:32:35] Yes, a day in the life. There is somebody that I just saw talking about the day in their life as being a trucker. And I was like, what is your life like? And the next thing you know, it’s been like minutes.

Intro: [00:32:43] It’s just one time. It pulls.

Celeste Simmons : [00:32:45] You in.

Sharon Cline: [00:32:46] It does. But it’s interesting, I think. And you do kind of see, like you said, a snippet of humanity a little bit. I know it’s kind of a you know, it’s not exactly. It’s like almost a little ad for what their life is like. Not everybody’s going to show every single aspect of their life, but I was wondering how important, like I saw a TikTok about a woman who was comparing different makeups, like the premium brand and then the kind that she got at Target or whatever. And I thought, Man, this is so powerful because people are really going to listen to this woman who doesn’t have a dog in this fight. She’s just curious. And then she’ll do either side of her face. Obviously, that’s what’s on my TikTok, right? It’s like makeup.

Intro: [00:33:22] Stuff.

Sharon Cline: [00:33:24] But, you know, those that’s like nothing that they’re not this company is not saying, please promote my my business, my product. They’re just she’s just genuinely going out. But I’m sure there are people who will promote a brand or something, right?

Celeste Simmons : [00:33:39] There are. And what gets me the most on TikTok is the ones that really are advertising. But you don’t know it first.

Sharon Cline: [00:33:46] Oh, I’m sure I’ve swallowed that whole thing whole like, oh, she’s not she doesn’t have a dog in the fight, but secretly she’s got like a huge bank account. I don’t know.

Celeste Simmons : [00:33:54] One that was circling and it was what’s the biggest scam on the Internet right now? And then it cuts to its insurance companies and this lady talks about car insurance. But if you look at the bottom and you look at who the account is, and then it was like auto brokers and you’re like, no.

Intro: [00:34:11] It’s a commercial.

Sharon Cline: [00:34:13] They’re sneaking it in.

Intro: [00:34:14] Exactly. So you have to.

Celeste Simmons : [00:34:16] Kind of look for who is doing it, because if it’s like a company, then, you know, I’m not saying it’s not authentic, but if you’re looking for the real, true, unbiased opinion, you always have to look at who who did the video.

Sharon Cline: [00:34:28] That’s interesting. I don’t do that. I just take everything.

Intro: [00:34:31] Fake like.

Sharon Cline: [00:34:32] My TikTok is going to blow up at this point with everything. So what do you think if someone out there is listening and they’ve really not considered doing using a marketing company to really help them with their social media? What would you recommend they do?

Celeste Simmons : [00:34:49] So I would say if you have I guess my rule of thumb is let’s say that you’ve got $500 a month to spend on marketing and you just don’t know what to do with it. I would say that’s room enough in your budget to find us a small business focused marketing company. Like you.

Intro: [00:35:07] Yeah, like.

Celeste Simmons : [00:35:08] You. Big social marketing could possibly.

Intro: [00:35:11] Yeah.

Celeste Simmons : [00:35:12] Shameless plug. So if you are if even even on a $500 budget, things can be done. It just. We just have to determine what’s best for you and your audience and what’s best for your budget. But if you’re firm on whatever dollar amount you want to spend, it can still be done. I mentioned the free stuff. Let’s say that you want to be on all the social media sites, but you just don’t have time to create that presents. Well, that’s where people can come in. That can help you. If you just hate posting on Facebook and you don’t even want to open it, you still need to be there and you still need a business presence. Let’s say that you did do those Google ads and you did bring in that audience. They’re likely going to check you out on social media to social media. May not. Influence them to purchase, but it may influence them to purchase later. So think about it like that. They’re just they’re going to do their background checks. If you look at the percentage of people that are looking at Google reviews and then how much that influences the purchase, it’s like 75%. What? Yeah, that’s.

Sharon Cline: [00:36:12] A huge percentage. So I can see how if you have a bad Google review, how impactful that could be as well.

Celeste Simmons : [00:36:18] Yeah, and I know that the bad reviews really make business owners mad. Sometimes there’s things that you can do about it and get it taken down. It just depends on what was said. But that’s also another almost ignored avenue of a free one that business owners can do is Google business. Your Google business page is tied to your Google Maps and that is tied to your reviews. So it’s very important for you to manage it because if you don’t, this stuff is just out there about you. You have to look at it and you need to be responding. You can also post on Google Business just like you do Facebook and it goes up on your Google Maps. People can see it. It’s on the web. So if you don’t post, then there’s nothing there. It’s just your map and your reviews. But if you fill that space in with, Here’s what we’re doing and here’s our latest sale, or here’s our latest update, then that little square will appear. If you don’t post there, then nothing is there.

Sharon Cline: [00:37:13] Interesting. It feels overwhelming when I think about it, but I know that that’s why you’re an expert with a with a Google Degree. Did they send you a certificate? I’m just.

Intro: [00:37:23] Curious. I have not done it for 2022. But yeah, they do send you a certificate like a graduation diploma.

Celeste Simmons : [00:37:33] Yes, they do. They they make those questions worth it.

Intro: [00:37:36] Well, it.

Sharon Cline: [00:37:37] Feels like, though, I would want an expert in my corner helping me. I wouldn’t want to waste my. I mean, every dollar I get, like, just such a gift.

Intro: [00:37:45] Right?

Celeste Simmons : [00:37:45] You know, and it is overwhelming because there’s so many marketing options. I mean, I’ll I will definitely agree. It’s hard to know what to do, but like some of them, certain business owners don’t need to bother with. Like if you don’t have if you’re not selling like retail consumer oriented products, you don’t you probably don’t need to be on Pinterest. If you’re a like if you’re a consultant, you don’t have to be on Pinterest, but you might want to be on LinkedIn probably. So. So and the same thing with Twitter. If you don’t really have anything that you feel like you can offer or you feel like you can’t say something of value within that short amount of spaces, because Twitter, you know, it’s just a couple of sentences and you have to you’re done. So if you can’t say anything of value in that short amount of space, well then go to Facebook and go to Instagram, go to LinkedIn. But yeah, and if you’re comfortable with videos, then you want to go to YouTube and Tik Tok and then of course Facebook and Instagram do videos too. Now all the networks are doing videos. So but that should also kind of speak volumes of how important video is. It’s just this beast is not going away. It’s just growing and growing. So even if you’re a business owner that hates being on video, you need to find a way to to get videos made.

Sharon Cline: [00:38:58] It’s interesting. I am supposed to be doing more like I even got a what is it, a little tripod that I can use with my phone and a selfie stick, which I never thought I would own for one second. And I mean, that was a goal of mine is even before this show to be able to do a little video and put it out there. But do I do it? That would be no, I don’t know what it is about it. It just feels so me. Look at me. And I don’t I don’t know why that bothers me so much, but because I’m not going to be able to compete.

Intro: [00:39:23] If you don’t look at me, I get it. I totally.

Celeste Simmons : [00:39:27] Get it. And, you know, maybe it’s just the mentality of we feel like it’s self centered and it’s self serving. So again, if you can’t do it, then make a video of images of you and then do a voiceover that’s.

Sharon Cline: [00:39:42] Okay.

Celeste Simmons : [00:39:43] For you. That way you don’t have to have an actual video, but if you have moving images or scrolling images, you sync it up with music and you sync it up with a voiceover. Nobody’s going to fuss about that. That’s excellent. So same thing for other business owners. If you just really don’t want to be on camera or you’re like, Gosh, I hate video of me, how about just this picture? Well, then you can use like a slideshow video, or you can take video footage of whatever you sell, or you can use stock video footage and then put it maybe with the last screen of you as the picture sitting at your desk with your logo or whatever.

Sharon Cline: [00:40:15] All photoshopped. Beautiful, right?

Celeste Simmons : [00:40:19] Yeah. You are in control of video, so you think of it that way rather than just going, Oh, I’m never going to do it. Never, never, never. Well, think about it in a different way. Think about what would it take to get you to do it.

Sharon Cline: [00:40:31] But you know what? I really appreciate these tips because it is a different world for marketing, especially for someone like me who’s older, who, you know, this is not my natural thought process is to take a picture of what I’m eating and talk about everything lots of people do, and that’s fine. It’s just not how my brain works. So I think I’m like really slow on the uptake of how to get myself. Thinking this way. So I really appreciate your coming in and giving serious tips on the best things for people to do to to help their businesses grow the way they want. And if people wanted to reach out to you and find more information about you, where can they go.

Celeste Simmons : [00:41:06] So you can email me directly? It is Celeste. Celeste at Big Social Marketing. Or feel free to check us out on the web at Big Social Marketing.

Intro: [00:41:19] Yay, Celeste.

Sharon Cline: [00:41:20] Thank you. I know we didn’t talk so much about fear today, but I’m afraid of social.

Intro: [00:41:24] Marketing, so that’s.

Sharon Cline: [00:41:26] The best thing I can.

Intro: [00:41:27] Come up with today.

Sharon Cline: [00:41:28] But you make me feel less afraid. So I really do appreciate your coming in and giving me some.

Intro: [00:41:33] I hope so.

Sharon Cline: [00:41:34] I hope lots of people out here listen to to just your wisdom. I mean, in your experience, it’s very valuable in this world.

Celeste Simmons : [00:41:41] Thank you. I appreciate.

Intro: [00:41:42] That. Sure.

Celeste Simmons : [00:41:43] And don’t be afraid of social media. There are no there’s really no rules. If it’s your channel, own it own what you want to say. And if you don’t want your picture on it, then just put other just put other things. Like you can make a picture out of a testimonial. You can make it just a really good product picture. There’s so many other options if you just don’t want to show your face, but it is important to be there and some capacity.

Intro: [00:42:09] All right.

Sharon Cline: [00:42:11] You’ve convinced me, at least for this minute.

Intro: [00:42:15] No, I.

Sharon Cline: [00:42:16] Really appreciate it. Thank you again for coming in. And thank you again for joining us on Fearless Formula. And this again, is Sharon Klein reminding you with knowledge and understanding, you and all of us can have a fearless formula. Have a great day. And we’re.

Intro: [00:42:41] All right. How was it?