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Ep 34 - Mastering Audience Targeting: Insights & Strategies Podcast and Video Transcript

[Disclaimer: This transcription was written by AI using a tool called Descript, and has not been edited for content.]

Dave Dougherty: All right, welcome to the latest episode of Enterprise in Minds. We have a good episode for you today mostly because I know that we will be able to go on and on and on about this topic.

Defining and Targeting Your Audience

Dave Dougherty: So, we're going to talk about audience targeting, sort of first off defining an audience and how do you get those insights these days and then also targeting them actually, like where, where to do that, how to do that, what considerations to factor into your thinking.

So, the genesis of this question came because I've been talking to a number of colleagues and marketing friends recently, and we've been thinking about how much things have stayed the same as they've changed drastically, right, especially with the advent of AI. And everybody's talking about how things are changing.

You know, best practices with that. And is Google broken? You know, all those, those fun questions that get thrown around the internet, like confetti but ultimately in my mind, it feels like. We are largely where we were like 20 years ago before thing before social came up before everybody was You know tricking the algorithm or at least attempting to you have Your paid media platforms that you can launch ads on you have email newsletters where you can Sort of own the relationship and own the customer data Where they've actually, you know said yes to you and your company and what it is You think and serve and you know do all those things And then there's good old fashioned PR, which everybody forgot about because it's hard and it takes relationships and you actually have to define your audience instead of, you know just uploading similar audience, you know, charts to your ad platform.

So, Alex, as, as the resident media guy here, why don't. Why don't you get us started off with your, your thoughts. Do you accept the premise? Do you resonate with it? What were you going?

Evolution of Media and Advertising Platforms

Dave Dougherty: I think you're right in terms of

Alex Pokorny: things are, haven't changed a lot over time, but I think the avenues and channels.

Change over regularly. Like if we talk about too far back, you're going to hit my space and then it became Facebook. And then, I mean, Instagram didn't even exist at that time. So, it's like, some of those names have changed over, but honestly, it's still, you're still advertising to these various same markets, similar markets.

Uh, the prominence of LinkedIn, right. Something I think is always kind of an interesting one, especially in the B2B space that was always like a super expensive, but not great place to throw ads. Even Let's say 2010, 20, maybe even up to like 2015. It was kind of questionable. It was getting better, but like especially in the U.

S. You're talking like a cost per click. They're all cost per lead of Oh, 30 to 50, you get it down to like maybe 17 on a good day for your word. Give you always overinflated numbers because they really can't understand that. It seemed like their monthly active users worth anything. So, their numbers that you give you on volumes for a joke, if you're trying to budget off of it, it was like, take that and then maybe drop it by a third or maybe even half.

And that's actually what you're going to be able to spend like. I don't know. And there's always a tiny market. And of course, it's gotten smaller. So, there's a lot of split like that that's happened. I think it depends a lot on the type of industry that you're in. So, retail media has picked up like crazy.

So, if you want to advertise on target.com, Walmart, Amazon, all the rest of those, that's a huge powerhouse that has a massive amount of budget being thrown toward it. Not as much if you're in the B2B space, B2C, absolutely B2B, not really. So, I think that targeting and finding your audience is similar to the way it was back then.

I don't really think it's changed a whole lot, especially when we get to an idea of like first party versus third party data. The third party was this hope that if you mash all the data together, you'll come up with audiences that may or may not be actually there and may not exist to the size that they do.

They will be. And that's proved out true. That's those numbers are sometimes good. Sometimes bad can be typically very overinflated data points though. So, I do want to get down to this though, in terms of like from a search standpoint, a keyword from a You know, SEO standpoint or paid search standpoint, there is a huge difference between what Google's keyword tool gives you and the actual traffic that you can ever expect to show up on your website.

And I think that's one of those early digital marketing, digital marketer kind of mind breaking thoughts of you saw 720 volume, monthly volume. Well, first that's an average bucketed figure. So that's, that's, you'll never see 721. You'll never see, you know, 719. You'll always see only 720 because of the way Google buckets things.

So that's not even a true figure to start with. Plus, seasonality. Plus, that's the total volume looking how many people are actually going to click versus how many people are going to convert your funnel. Your funnel looks way different once you start actually working those numbers out.

Dave Dougherty: Right. And that's why when I've communicated up the, the chain and, and around whatever organization I'm in, I will tell people keyword volume data is a lot like looking at stocks.

There's going to be some seasonality to it. There's going to be a lot of noise in it, but what you're looking for are trends, you know, because especially as you know, like slower, slower moving, larger companies, if you did keyword research five years ago, well, the language has changed quite a bit. In five years, the way people search has changed the, you know, the demographics and the language within those demographics also changed, right?

Language is a constantly evolving thing. And you see that in the searches. So, the keyword that would have worked for you a while ago may not be Even valid now you know, especially when you're talking the consumer things, right? You you're going to burn through those a lot, a lot faster, but maybe not so much with, you know, the highly regulated ones where you have to say the right thing at the right time, all the time, right?

Challenges in Audience Sizing and Targeting

Alex Pokorny: I think when we get to, there's kind of a distinction between audience sizing and audience targeting, and the first one, I think it's skipped over. All the time. And we immediately go to targeting because we assume that there's a target for this particular product or service, which is not a safe assumption.

And we assume that it's an ever growing, ever gigantic, ever stream of potential customers that we just need to somehow get into our site. And then we can always have more. And there's always more. There's always more. And I don't think that's true at all, especially when we start looking like B2B is one of the starkest examples of that, because you have, yeah, it's a great invention for a mechanical engineer in this very, very particular industry.

And they really, really like that particular kind of item and they really need it when they first build a factory. It's like, okay, so we have a very particular type of mechanical engineer who happens to be in this very unique situation, which they don't do every single day. And in fact, they're going to do it maybe every day.

Once every how many years quite a few years. So that's a really, really small market. Actually, it gets smaller and smaller and smaller.

Case Studies and Real-World Examples

Alex Pokorny: One of my favorite stories of this is I was once a part of an agency and we were hired to do some SEO work because I swear someone saw it on the cover of Forbes or something, and that's, they wanted that CEO.

So, I started asking them, okay, tell me about your product. It's an industrial product. Okay. Very specialized. Okay. That's fine. Let's work through some of the details. I don't really understand it. Like, like let's teach me so I understand what kind of keyword research I should do. And I got down to it. I was like, okay, so potential customers, country targeting, translations, let's get down to it.

What are we looking at? Well, there's six. It was like six, what? Six potential companies who would ever buy our product. You want to rank number one for no, just call them show up. I don't even care who you're going to grab lunch or dinner with. Just take them out to eat, figure out your product either has something wrong with it or they want it.

And you start at the relationship from there, from a very sales standpoint, because you don't have the volume that takes. Search and that's that audience sizing total miss. I mean, that's a very stark example of it, but

Dave Dougherty: it's true though. I've, I've had those conversations with product marketers a lot actually where I say, okay, what do you want to try to do?

And they're like, well, we want to do search. I'm like, why tell me, you know, tell me about you. Yeah. Why? Yeah, tell me, tell me about what it is you're doing. What's the market? I'm not familiar with it, you know, to the level you are, so, you know and then they'll start talking. It's like, okay, you're, you want key account marketing, right?

You don't want search, right? Like, but if you decide to do this, here's how you would, you know, change your expectations, right? The types of content you create. different. It's not the mass communications, you know, typical blog style content. It would be to your point, tailored to the specific companies or use cases that you would actually want to do.

So, you know, case studies immediately come to mind. Um, and you should do that. You should do that because that's going to be. You know, a better bang for your buck, you know, and it's these, these other things too, of the knowing certain things, like in the U S people live within 50 miles of their employer, typically.

Okay. That allows us to do some very basic geo fencing, you know, like if we're going to promote our, promote our ads on LinkedIn or you know, Google ads or YouTube or whatever, like, great. Let's, let's target these people. Within a 50-mile radius of this headquarters or this particular event that's going on.

That's an industry event, unless it's in Las Vegas, then forget it because everybody's flying in trade show capitals world. I swear. Yeah.

Alex Pokorny: Yeah, that's a really good point because you can think of it like let's think about it almost like an email campaign because you build out. Different campaigns for different purposes, but you also, your day one email looks a lot different than your week 17 email, right?

So, and if you think of that same kind of flow. And think of all of the different marketing tactics as just a part of that same flow. You're probably a lot better off than narrowing in on a particular tactic like search and saying, let's start there because as it its married beginning is who we are.

It's the awareness campaign, the let's introduce ourselves sort of thing. And maybe that tactic to introduce yourself is paid search. Maybe it's SEO, maybe it's a PR campaign, maybe it's a billboard in a particular metro area that you know is the one you're trying to hit. I mean, something like that. And then you don't have those expectations that you're going to get lead gen out of a billboard.

You can have expectations that people will know your name and that suddenly changes like that whole shift and all the way down, it's like, okay, well week 17, it should be a salesperson calling them. And we don't expect a billboard to do that job at that point.

Dave Dougherty: You know what I found interesting? Last summer I was in San Francisco, and it happened to be when one of the Google events was going on and I'm stuck in traffic getting, you know, yeah, exactly.

And I was fascinated by all the billboards that are around because, you know, a, they were all analog, which, you know, Silicon Valley, you expect everything to be digital or like holographic or whatever else, right? Yeah, exactly. Um, but I, as I was sitting there, I was thinking to myself, okay, how many of these are vanity plays?

You know, for all of the, the little, little guys that just got the venture funding, but then the other part of it too, is if you are constantly stuck in this traffic and you are targeting people in the tech industry, this could be a really smart play because. You might actually get more exposure on that billboard than you would a typical billboard because, you know, the traffic is so slow for so, you know, so often that might actually be one of the smarter plays instead of trying to compete on the digital spots that are more easily ignored.

Yeah,

Geographic and Cultural Considerations in Marketing

Alex Pokorny: no, that's definitely a good point about that because that's like that, that better level of targeting piece, we can kind of switch over to that conversation to about there's something you mentioned ahead of the podcast was thinking about the different economies and where, if we're going to focus on particular economies and metro areas as well, and we'd said forget countries for a region for a moment and just think about metro areas.

I don't want to share the stat, but if you're looking at the top 15 economies of the world, some metro areas actually kind of pop in there.

Dave Dougherty: Yeah. So, the, the story behind that for the, for the listener I was in a discussion around targeting, and they wanted a strategy, the high up wanted a strategy for

top, Tier countries that, you know, a global organization would want to go for. And my comment back was, okay, so you want to do like G28. And he said, no, give me something for the top 15. So, being the smart ass than I am, I said, what do you want to do about California and Texas? And, you know, it was a joke, but at the same time, it's a valid question because if you look at the top economies in the world as of May 10th, 2024, California and Texas are, you know, numbers 11 and 15.

So, if you actually think about the cultures between California and Texas, even on like a very surface stereotypic level, you probably should handle them as separate entities, separate countries, because the cultures are very different. And the messages that will resonate will most likely be very different.

Um, you know, again, depending on, on the industry and, and whatever else. So, yeah, I mean, that, that definitely comes into play, especially with the global piece of, you know, what do I know? What do I, you know, what do I need somebody local to, to tell me about, you know we've, you know, you and I've joked about how trying to market in Europe is a lot like.

Picking your favorite state in the U. S. You know, once you get out of the idea that, okay, a country is a large, you know, group of people, well, not necessarily, you know, the United States is third popular, third most populous. Can you fact check me in real time? Yeah. So yeah, I mean, you know, do you have a separate Georgia strategy to Tennessee?

Probably not. Unless you're doing something with like college football, then yes. You know,

Alex Pokorny: Number three, you're right. China, India, the US, Indonesia.

Dave Dougherty: Yeah. Cool. So yeah. And.

Tools and Techniques for Audience Insights

Dave Dougherty: You know, one of the things that I've been playing around with that, that influences this discussion ultimately too, was you know, the, the three of us, I think I can, I can speak for the three of us are fans of.

Rand Fishkin and what he's done with Moz and what he generally talks about online. And I was using his SparkToro tool, audience tool, when it first came out. I thought it was great, but it was very limited to just Twitter data. And, you know, then Elon bought it, and they had a You know, oh, crap moment where, you know, the APIs were being shut off.

And now all of a sudden, your tool is kind of useless because you don't have the right data there. And what they've done with the second version of spark Toro is really interesting to me in terms of finding your types of audiences, and I'll just say from the get-go, we have no affiliation with them other than just putzing around with the tool.

Um, but they're bringing in Reddit data and LinkedIn data and click stream data and keyword data so you can actually parse out people who have these words in their bios or people who visit these types of sites fall into what categories? What are the other sites that they hang out in? Right. And like all of these types of things for, you know, my communications background really comes into developing the content, developing the targeting, developing the word choice, even for how I'm going to, you know, target these people.

Um, because yeah, to your point, if you're going to target on Facebook, you might. Have something like, you know, recent moms or something like that. I mean, you used to be able to do this. I don't know if you can anymore with all the privacy stuff, but for the most part but then even within that, there's a subset of recent moms with what particular issue with what particular problem with what particular need.

Right. So yeah, that's what got me, that's what got me thinking.

Alex Pokorny: Yeah. And I. I've really enjoyed the tool in terms of also trying to help develop, you mentioned about like kind of component word choice to like get into that point of persona based targeting, I think is can be a tripping point for a lot of organizations because they get too far into it and they start to really believe that these are the only personas that we are going after.

They're believing all the specifics which you kind of just throw in for fun to kind of build up the character, right? But tools like that do help in terms of okay. What kind of sites are we looking at? They're going to you mentioned Simon Sinek Ted. I mean like Ted talks like okay We're kind of looking at a tier here That's probably fairly well educated or it's an individual who is interested in learning a lot We can maybe make Two assumptions on that one.

So, we probably want to target them a little bit differently than other groups. And if we're doing more of a sports related products, we want to make sure that we're basically bringing in terminology that makes sense and will resonate for that audience. But I'm not too sure about sports analogies in that first audience.

Like, you know, you might have some play over that, and I don't want to bring in too many generalizations and assumptions into it, but the more data you can get around your audience to try to get a better feel for them. I think it's useful, especially when you're writing that copy and trying to really kind of emotionally connect with someone.

Dave Dougherty: Well, and that's the other thing too, right? I mean, with good copywriting or good marketing, you have your set of assumptions and then you write your ad copy and your social posts and your everything else targeting that assumption. And then you write the second batch,

Alex Pokorny: right?

Dave Dougherty: That is your, you know, your test batch to see if You know, the weird, wacky ideas actually work, or maybe they're not interested in X, Y, Z.

So how does that change the copy? Yeah, it's not just, I feel like there's such a check box attitude recently. Like post-pandemic, I think everybody's so fried that is just get it done. You know that we've forgotten the good marketing. You know, we had a really good conversation in the Age of Average show, if everybody hasn't listened to that one, that's probably one I'm the proudest of.

So, I'll put a link in the. Put a link in the show notes for that one. But yeah, just taking the time and thinking and doing the personas or even like. Developing the persona is a problem enough, right? Because you hear the feedback from sales going, well, it's, you know, I only talk to these people within these organizations.

Okay, great. But as you know, job titles are just as made up as Yeah. Anything

Alex Pokorny: else? So. And the decision maker might be someone entirely different than what you're thinking of too. Might be a person who's the end user of your product, but it doesn't mean that's the person who's actually going to be deciding, finding it, purchasing it.

Those are probably very different job titles actually from the one who's using it.

Dave Dougherty: Well, yeah. And in certain industries you end up finding the decision maker is out in the field, out of the office. And the purchaser is. The secretary in the office taking the phone call to say, I need X number of these things delivered to this site.

Right. And if you want to compete on price,

who

Alex Pokorny: do you need to talk to? Second one. Yeah. Yeah. No, the, the needs thing is interesting. There's been a number of studies, especially in the B2B world, about how the, the increase in number of decision makers has grown basically every single year. I think we're up to like 14, 15 for large B2B purchase decisions.

Crazy. I mean, you have to have your sustainability stamp, but the end user doesn't actually care about that, but some do. So that's a part of their purchase process. So therefore, that information has to be present somewhere on your website, easily available to that particular audience. So, they can quickly find that, and you can stay in the running during this decision making process because you're going through decision making, you know, Round after round that your service or product is being brought into just like you decide on other people's products.

You got to think that your product isn't just this instantaneous decision on a website. There's a whole process to it, especially these really large-scale purchases. And having all those elements of really understanding your audience, really knowing your audience. I think you do get down to it. That's, I think you're right, Dave, that post pandemic.

It seems that we're so focused on quick decisions and like email turnaround. Then really good, smart decisions. It might take some time. It might take some conversations and might take a friend, you know, random mix of maybe different types of facilitation to really kind of get those good ideas out of there.

But you have to understand your market before you start targeting your market. And that it's so easy to start up a campaign. I think it's easy to skip that step and say, yeah, we are spending money towards X activity. And the moment it doesn't work, oh, this type of activity doesn't work for us. I can't tell you how many times I've heard that.

I'm sure you have as well, especially with the agency life of, oh, we tried fill in the blank social search SEO email in the past and it didn't work for us. Therefore, we're going to just write it

Dave Dougherty: off. It's

Alex Pokorny: like,

Dave Dougherty: did you do it well? Or you get the flip side of it too, of I don't necessarily believe in this tactic, so I'm going to hire an agency, see what happens, and if it works well, I get to claim credit for hiring this agency.

If it doesn't, very fireable. Yep. Yeah. And you get that, that political bend too, which, yeah so, many war stories at that one. Yeah, that one gets cool.

Valuing Clicks and Budgeting for Campaigns

Dave Dougherty: So, I mean, in, in a previous conversation and a previous episode, you did talk about your figuring out pricing or price targets for your advertising.

Do you want to cover that? One more time. You have to refresh me a little bit more on that. So that was you know, working backward from what is your, like, is 250 per click? Oh, sure. Or the margins on the clicks, right?

Alex Pokorny: Yeah. So, there’s kind of two pieces there. One is, well, I'll hit that first because it's very relevant to our conversation.

So sizing and appropriate assumption kind of building big piece about that is basically is let's say we can look at, instead of using direct keywords, we'll talk about the entire topic of a particular product. So, everything that's related to it, this versus that, you know, just the. Products, you know, category by itself, pricing, reviews, add in all those different keywords.

You get a bunch of different volumes; you get a pretty big volume size. That doesn't mean that's your size of your audience because it could be one person searching 10 times in a row and they'll hit 10 of those different keyword volumes. So, keep that in mind. That's not audience sizing. That's just search volume that you might be targeting and might be targeting because the tools and the seasonality to that should, you got to kind of take that with a grain of salt.

Let's say that's a huge number. I don't know, 10, 000 searches a month. How many people actually going to click on you with your paid versus organic listing? If you're in the top three versus the bottom, you know, instead of 10, you're going to get a lot more volume if you're in the top three. Right? So, let's say you get 30 percent of the clicks.

If you're in position number one, you used to back in the day, it's not so true today, but Whatever, 15 to 30 percent will figure that. So suddenly your large figure just suddenly got dropped down to 15 percent of that figure. That's a pretty small slice. Those landed your bounce rates, let's say 50%. So now you just lost half of that.

So now you're down to as much smaller figure, those ones. Maybe one to 3 percent are actually going to convert after they visited your site. So, what's a 3 percent of whatever that tiny figure is, is now your expectation on a monthly basis. So, start to do that math with any of your product types of product categories.

And you'll realize very quickly that yes, there may be an audience out there that's large, but how many of them are actually in need of your product and searching that one particular month is a very different figure. And how many of those will actually end up on your website? It's also a very different figure, much smaller figure.

And how many of those will you actually end up being able to talk to is a tiny fraction of that figure. So, Keep keeping that in mind. The second point is talking about valuation. So how do we value one of those clicks so that we can get an ad campaign running because we're paying, we're, we're paying for every single click that goes there and half of them bounce.

That sucks. It's a lot of money that you paid for. Maybe those people are now aware of the site. Maybe you can, you know, claim something off of that, but a lot of them probably landed on the wrong side and click back or they're not interested. And if they're not interested, they're probably not going to remember the name.

So, let's be honest, not great. So how do we value that? Click is a key piece of when you start figuring out your budget and your targeting from your advertising standpoint, because now we're putting out bids to get that traffic. How high should we set that bid? Is it worth it? And you hit that number. And I think that's where it gets down to the value game, which I call it a game because all value is, is a belief that it's worth something.

And that's it. It's a belief. So yes, you can figure out a customer lifetime value. And if you're in a perfect e commerce scenario where everything is trackable down to the penny, yes, you can figure out basically a cost per value of a particular visitor. Which is still averaged, you know, across the board, there's a lot of different averages that are really playing a part in any of those equations and results.

So, you kind of have to still take that greatest help because still you're going to end up with traffic, still going to bounce, still not going to buy. You just have an average value, assuming those people who haven't bounced or do bounce. So still quasi there. So instead of liking to play this game, which is basically, is this you sit down across from your salesperson, marketer, whoever you say, if I can get you a Whatever it is, webinar viewer.

I was loved that one because I have no idea what the value of webinar viewer is. And I don't think anyone actually does, right? If I can get your webinar viewer on this particular webinar and I can't claim the value of who this person might be. Some, you know, 11-year-old who randomly decided to go watch a random webinar.

I can't tell you who this person is, but they filled it out. They joined. And I can get that for you for 500 bucks. Would you buy that? And they say, that's kind of expensive. Okay, fine. 200 bucks. Maybe. 150. Yeah, I'd probably do 150. Great. We'll start there. And that's good enough. And they, I was getting nervous at this point because they suddenly feel like they made a big decision.

But. You have to tell them, no, you didn't, because what we're going to do is we're just going to target that for like three weeks, not even a full month. We're just going to do that for a couple of weeks. And especially if it's a longer campaign that this works out a lot better webinars. Sometimes there's short campaigns.

You've got to meet with them earlier than that. And then you sit down and say, okay, you've got a bunch of leads. If they're crap, I'm going to assume that you're, you don't want to pay one 50 anymore for them. And so, you'll only pay 75 for them or 50 bucks for them. And that's okay. Now we're going to change our campaign.

So now we target a much smaller audience and we're going to tighten our target and tighten our budgets up and try to change, become a lot narrower in our focus. And we'll do that. Or you say, these ones have been great. I'll raise it up. I buy anything you can send me for two 50 and I'd say, great. I'll increase my kind of my spread and start targeting a lot more different keywords, not broader audience.

Maybe I'll move up the metro area, targeting whatever it is kind of targeting them doing, and I'll increase it to basically get more. And so, we find the point where we started seeing the quality drop again and kind of just keep on meeting because if you keep those meetings up, you're building trust and relationship and you're proving that you're working towards their goals, which is getting value for the money.

And that's it. That's the belief of value of a visitor.

The Reality of Attribution and Tracking

Dave Dougherty: And it's while you were going through that, I was thinking to myself. As digital marketers, do we suffer from the belief that everything is trackable? Oh yeah. And everything is trustable because if you look at trade shows, you spend thousands of dollars per square foot. And that's before you even set up anything, you know, so how much do you, you know, if you did a one to one, how much do you have to sell from the trade show?

To equal out versus your online digital stuff. Can you even track it to that extent? You know, because how much of the, the trade show is just getting in front of people, collecting the names to then call the next week, you know, you’re gauging interest and then you, you have that kind of medium warm lead that you can go chase after, but that's about it.

Alex Pokorny: Yeah. And then you also get skipped over all the time. Attribution again is another belief-based system because great example of it. Jeff Sauer, he has a lot of analytics information. Great guy to follow. He's actually a former manager of mine who kind of went out on his own thing and is kind of blown up from it.

So, he's done really well. He had a great story about attribution, and he said once, so he was in Germany. He had this white wine that was recommended by the bartender, and it was fantastic. And it was from this vineyard that was in, I think, Washington state in the U. S. Later, he has some friend who is interested in trying to find a place for a marriage ceremony in Washington state.

And this vineyard basically came up as like one of his searches and it was like, oh, you should check this one out and see if it's good. So, I ended up, Jeff ends up being there also with his, I think then like fiancé or then girlfriend. The friend does the wedding, they see some sign that says they got wedding venues as well.

They ended up talking to the owner of the vineyard who gives them on this personal tour. They really love the story behind it. They really fall in love with all the rest of it, especially the time of year ends up being perfect for the location. So, it looks beautiful, this outdoor location to rent.

The venue is very expensive. I'm going to say, I don't know, 30, 000. So, some large figure to, I mean, it was really quite a reasonable or quite a large value to put on this thing, right? Right. The friend has his wedding. It's great. It goes well. It happens to be good weather that day. Jeff does, I think, is there.

Great. Then becomes the question, what sold that menu that day? Was it the bartender in Germany? First touch attribution. Was it the friend's wedding? Last touch attribution. Was it the combination of all these different events and scenarios that somehow basically all created this emotional connection to this various location and ended up being perfect for their friend?

If we were events and timing and family who have to be located in the area and friends who have to be located in the area, and then it made sense. And so flying people in, like, there are so many aspects to these decisions. So, then it gets down to that trade show. Maybe the first touch to that trade show was paid search or SEO or billboard.

Right. And the last touch, what does that handshake that was done at that trade show with that business card. That said, let's wrap up the deal that we've been talking about. We're going to sign today and maybe you're going to sign on the day of a trade show, which would be amazing. Usually it's leads instead, but then I still am going back to that email campaign view of every tactic has this value and you're building up this funnel and building up this traffic funnel that basically leads you down to this sale.

I can't claim that that trade show was awareness. I can't claim that that trade show was anything on that board, but it was a part of the process. And it did help if the trade show you feel was successful and again, feel what's successful. Maybe you feel that it's worth it. But yeah, tracking, you can throw a QR code on anything, but good luck.

Numbers never match. I don't know that that's also seems to be a hidden dirty secret of digital marketing. The numbers never matched how many clicks, how much traffic, how many visits. How many people have JavaScript turned off or privacy blocking, cookie blocking? I mean, all the rest of this stuff, all the way through down to the final sale, the numbers do not match and to try to think that you can track someone absolutely perfect.

100 percent of the time is a lie.

Dave Dougherty: Like, well, that's even with the scenario 000 search volume and then click through. You have no idea. Yeah, at least a third of the click throughs that you get will be, you know, tracker blocking. So. You know, two thirds of whatever it is that you, yeah, actually got the click for.

So, you know, yeah, yeah,

Alex Pokorny: yeah. Which gets down to your point at the very beginning of this podcast though, is marketing just like it was 15, 20 years ago, before we had all this tracking supposed data and all the rest of these things that we're doing. And we just had still had trade shows, still had emails, still had all the rest of these things.

Has it really changed that much? And quite honestly, at the end of the day for the business, no. It hasn't. We have various tactics that change names, and they have new fancy features and new promises. But really, we're getting down to the day. It's people and people making relationships and making deals. It doesn't matter if you buy a pair of shoes or You know, steak dinner, right?

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Dave Dougherty: Well, that's a perfect spot to stop. Hopefully this was beneficial. I definitely enjoyed the conversation. Let us know what you've run into recently with targeting.

Alex Pokorny: If you agree or disagree, like

Dave Dougherty: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, give us the feedback likes like rate review, subscribe. The reviews really do help us expand, expand the reach and help us understand what it is you like, what and, and where we might improve.

So have a great couple of weeks. We will see you in the next episode of Enterprising Minds. Take care.