00:00 Introduction.

Martin Henley : [00:00:12] Hello there. My name is Martin Henley. This is the Effective Marketing content extravaganza and if you’re new here, you won’t yet know that I’m on a mission to give you everything you need to be successful in your business. Providing of course, what you need to be successful in your business is to know more about and be implementing more enthusiastically sales and marketing in your business. So I’m here giving you everything I know about sales and marketing through the What The series. We bring you the marketing news every other week and we speculate wildly about what that might mean for you and your marketing lives. I am reviewing the very best and the very worst of marketing content on the Internet, and whenever I can, I bring in anyone I can find with experience that will help you to be more successful in your business. That’s what today is about.

Martin Henley : [00:00:55] Today is Talk Marketing. So if that sounds like it could be interesting and useful, if you’re looking to grow your business, then please take a second to like share, subscribe, comment, get involved, because that’s the motivation we need to keep us on this epic mission.

Martin Henley : [00:01:11] So today is Talk Marketing, so we have a guest. Today’s guest has sales and marketing experience going all the way back to 2009 when she was selling classified advertising space on the phone. We have something in common. She has a first-class degree from Coventry University in advertising and media. I never got a first-class degree. There was another media sales role before she worked her way up through two digital ad agencies, Periscopix and Croud. She is currently co-founder at House of Performance who help ambitious brands by identifying opportunity and revolutionising performance. What you may not know about her is that she is an intermediate-level pole dancer. She was introduced to us by the quite wonderful Abigail Dixon. Today’s guest is Kat Sale. And I’m sorry, Kat. I didn’t actually ask if it was okay to call you Kat. Is that cool? Are we friends?

Kat Sale: [00:02:11] Yeah we our now friends, that’s perfectly fine. Thank you.

Martin Henley : [00:02:14] Excellent. Fantastic.

Kat Sale: [00:02:15] Well, great intro.

Martin Henley : [00:02:16] Thank you very much. I quite enjoy doing those intros now. Quite enjoy writing them and putting them together and people are quite enjoying them. So I think that’s cool. Thank you so much for being here. It’s taken us a little while to get this together, but we have got it together. So thank you so much for your time. It seems like you are quite busy in the performance marketing space, but before we talk about that, we should probably talk about what qualifies you. How do you know you’re an intermediate pole dancer? What do you have to be able to do to be intermediate at pole dancing?

Kat Sale: [00:02:49] So I’ve been doing it just over three years, and to reach an intermediate level, you have to be able to do something called an aerial invert. So basically an invert is where you can swing yourself upside down from the ground and then you’re hanging upside down on the pole. An aerial invert is climbing up the pole and then going upside down, which is much harder. So I’ve pretty much been working on that all year and finally made it recently, so now I’m technically in an intermediate level.

Martin Henley : [00:03:27] Fantastic. Well, well done. You do you have like a pole in your home or do you have to go somewhere where there is a pole? How does it work?

Kat Sale: [00:03:38] I go to classes. I definitely would never get anywhere without going to classes. But I do have one at home to practice as well. Yeah. Just got to get on it as much as possible, basically to get any progress.

Martin Henley : [00:03:52] Good, because pole dancing has become much more accessible, hasn’t it, in recent years, like it was, there was one time you had to be a professional pole dancer to have access to a pole. But now lots of people are doing it.

Kat Sale: [00:04:06] Lots of people doing it. It’s much more mainstream. My husband always jokes that, you know, men won the war on feminism when pole dancing was invented as a fitness activity, but I actually don’t see it that way at all. I just see it as a really empowering, fun way to keep fit.

Martin Henley : [00:04:25] Yes.

[00:04:25] And it’s a great way to unwind. I love it.

Martin Henley : [00:04:28] Excellent. I like the sound of your husband. Mickey Finnegan said to him, the war of the sexes was a little bit like England at the 2010 World Cup in that men didn’t really turn up. So I like this idea that we might have actually ended up with something completely by accident. That would be perfect.

Kat Sale: [00:04:47] Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah something like that.

Martin Henley : [00:04:51] Something like that. Okay, cool. Well, the truth is, when I actually hear to talk about pole dancing, we’re here to talk about your specialist subject and your specialist subject is performance marketing. So you know about the five questions, you’ve had the five questions in advance, we’ll remind everyone. What we’re interested to know is how you’re qualified to talk to us about performance marketing, and we’re interested to know who you work with and how you add value to their lives, your recommendation for people who are looking to get better at performance marketing, what people should read and I’ll need you to throw two people under the bus who might be interested, who might enjoy or maybe just endure to have a conversation like this with me. So before we do all of that,

05:34 What is performance marketing?

Martin Henley : [00:05:34] We should probably explain to people what performance marketing is. And more importantly for me, we should think about why all marketing isn’t performance marketing. What sort of marketing that gets away without performing?

Kat Sale: [00:05:51] Hmm, what a question. So to me, performance marketing is any marketing that can be directly managed and measured, usually online, pretty much everything is online now anyway, isn’t it? So in my mind, performance marketing is something that can be activated in a platform, money can be spent on it and it can be measured very, very quickly, like maybe within the same day. So that would be things like PPC, paid social, really, and I would say email I guess as well, email marketing. There’s a wider kind of remit to performance marketing with things like SEO, but I would say that’s a much more longer game play. You can’t implement something in SEO now and expect it to work tomorrow. Not that often. What I love is that marketing that you can really measure and change things on, in the moment almost, or certainly within 24 hours. Yeah.

Martin Henley : [00:06:59] Yes. So this is interesting. This has all been afforded by digital, hasn’t it? So before digital, it was largely guesswork. There was a guy who said 100, 200 years ago, I know 50% of my advertising is effective, I don’t know which 50%. This is actually the revolution that has powered digital marketing. Now I teach digital marketing, and what that affords me the opportunity to do is to paint people a beautiful picture that really doesn’t bear much relation to the truth of digital marketing.

07:35 Is performance marketing like driving a car?

Martin Henley : [00:07:35] What I tell people is digital marketing should be like driving a car, you have all the instrumentation in front of you, you can take all of the actions. It should be like driving a car, but is it quite like driving a car? I mean, we’re talking about paid, you’re talking about ads, PPC and social ads. Yeah. So is it like driving a car?

Kat Sale: [00:08:00] No, because you can get an instruction manual, you can follow the instructions and it can completely, you know, blast things out of the park or not go to expectations at all. And it’s completely different for every business and every platform and every moment almost. So, no, it’s not exactly like driving a car now. You don’t know what the weather’s going to be like for example, things come in and change it.

Martin Henley : [00:08:31] Okay? Okay, good. All right. So we’re getting carried away with the conversation I want to have, but we don’t yet know if you’re qualified to talk to us about this thing. So that’s the first thing we need to establish.

08:43 How are you qualified to talk to us about performance marketing?

Martin Henley : [00:08:43] How are you qualified to talk to us about performance marketing?

Kat Sale: [00:08:49] Well, I’ve worked in it for 12 years. I’ve built a business that specialises in it specifically. What we do is we help clients navigate that journey in the car. We help clients improve whatever they’re doing in performance marketing, and build on it, and learn more about it. When I was preparing my answers, I was thinking a lot about TikTok because TikTok is becoming a major platform for us and many people. I then got to the answer of, qualified is a really funny word because lots of platforms, including TikTok, are so new and changing all the time that being qualified in it; you could take the exams, does that mean you’re qualified? No. Have you done it for a long time with lots of different clients and learnt lots of different things and help them achieve results? Yes. That means you’re qualified. So would I put myself as qualified? Yes, I think so. But I’m open to always learning, definitely, and everyone should be.

Martin Henley : [00:09:55] Okay. So I think like you might be intermediate qualified if you can do the equivalent of an inverted upside down, whatever it is you’re doing on your pole. If you could do that, I think you’d be qualified. I think that doing it successfully for customers is the qualification that I’m interested in.

10:19 Do the various performance marketing platforms care about the success of advertisers?

Martin Henley : [00:10:19] The problem is I’ve got issues with these platforms, I really have, it feels to me like they’re not particularly, let’s say, what I really think, they don’t care about delivering value for their customers at all. We can see that, the proof is right now, there’s a recession coming and they’re all busy laying people off. I don’t know what TikTok are doing, probably not laying people off. If they were delivering value for their customers, advertisers, then they should be leading us out of this recession. So that’s how I feel about it. How do you feel about it?

Kat Sale: [00:11:01] Um, I. Well, yeah.

Kat Sale: [00:11:05] No, these platforms do not care about your performance, really. They care about making money, of course, and they’re designed to make money. But Google has led the way, and I do think that the others are following suit by making it so strong performance is accessible, it’s not impossible. So if you can achieve strong performance, you will spend more. So it’s a win-win, right? So that’s a really wishy-washy answer. My answer is no, they don’t care at all. Yes, they’re making lots of staff cuts to stay afloat in theory or to become more profitable, whatever. Fine. But they obviously do care about their advertisers in terms of that’s how they will stay afloat. So I think that more and more the platforms are spending time and money making things easier for customers to spend. Yeah.

Martin Henley : [00:12:08] Okay. I don’t think that at all. I think that they should, they’ve always driven this performance angle I suppose. I’ve only come across this performance idea in the last three, four or five months I think. You obviously came across it before that because you’ve been running your House of Performance business for the last two years or whatever. The point of that is I wish that they would just deliver value because then, you know, it would be, the world would be a much better place, people would be much more successful. They would, you’re right, retain their customers much longer and small businesses, which is what I’m interested in, would have the opportunity to be much more successful. I think agencies like yours need to exist because Google is in the business, Google, Facebook, all of them are in the business of fleecing small businesses. It reminds me a little bit of the restaurant business where the average lifespan of a restaurant business is six months. So the whole industry is geared up basically just to extract as much money from these start-up restaurants as they possibly can in the first six months, because they’re not going to be around much longer than that. That’s how I feel about it. You need to be careful. I’m just a bag of issues. That’s the problem. You’ve got a very serious face on.

Kat Sale: [00:13:40] I agree that they’re there, obviously, the platforms are there to make as much money as possible. 100%, obviously. What I would say is Google and now the others have paved the way for very small businesses to reach a larger audience than ever possible. TikTok is a really good example. I was watching some lives at the weekend where people are selling stuff, it’s kind of like an online boot sale, almost a marketplace, and they’re all over the world and they can reach an audience anywhere in the world that potentially could buy from them. That is incredible. In what world could you get that without these platforms? So I just think that, yes, they’re there to make money, obviously. Yes, they could make it cheaper, Google in particular, obviously could do a lot, they don’t, they do the opposite. They increase their cost per clicks all the time. But I do think that they’ve created a platform that allows, even if you take a small restaurant, a restaurant can do a very targeted small campaign in the local area. So anybody in the area searches restaurant near me, they can actually be number one, which is incredible. Without that, they’d be doing Yellow Pages nowhere near as effective or TV ad don’t have the budget for it.

Martin Henley : [00:15:07] Yes, I’m 100% with you. I mean, the thing is and I think the thing is I don’t do it anymore, so I don’t have to worry about it, you know? I mean, but if I did have to do it, I’d be worried because I’ve done it with enough clients to know that your budget could be gone in a second. If you gave Google the opportunity, they would take your money. So ridiculous things like, what am I thinking? Ridiculous things like PPC, let’s take PPC, Google PPC as a for instance, is based on like a bid, but they are suggesting the bids and they’re collecting the money. Clearly that’s not going to be fair for the for the bidder. Then other things like for years, like always, like a KPI for me was where you’re actually ranking, where your ad is being shown and then they just took it away like two or three years ago. So you’re paying to be in a position you don’t even get to know anymore what position you’re in. So these are the things. I think if it were as transparent, and I started this in 2006 when it was like turning on a tap, like you would run ads, your phones would start ringing, it was insane. I’ve seen it get progressively worse in that time. So maybe I am a little bit disaffected like that and I think I’ve got the biggest mosquito in the world in here, which is a bit annoying.

Kat Sale: [00:16:43] It’s unfortunate, huh?

Martin Henley : [00:16:44] It’s unfortunate. I think Google sent it. I’ve seen it get progressively worse. I’ve seen it get progressively worse. So the idea now of advertising, actually I don’t like it. I wouldn’t recommend that to ever to a client. Obviously, it works, but you have to be religiously fanatical, I think, to get it to work. That’s the sense that I get from you, is that you are driven by, and this is what I tell people. If you’re going to do PPC, you have to be prepared to put in the hard yards because if you’re not, Google will clean you out.

Kat Sale: [00:17:21] Yes, 100%. Yeah.

Kat Sale: [00:17:24] So we get brought in when clients have that uneasy lack of trust feeling that you’ve got and when they’re spending, it doesn’t that be significant amounts of money, but a sizable portion of marketing budget and they don’t know or trust in what they’re doing.

18:48 What efficiencies can be achieved through performance marketing?

Kat Sale: [00:18:48] We get brought in when businesses need to understand more about what they’re doing in performance marketing and make efficiencies. For example, we just did a really big project with a holiday park company in the UK and they brought us in to look at how much they’ve spent on Facebook and Google basically this year and whether it was the right choices, sensible. Did they spend on the right keywords, the right targeting and what should they do in 2023? They already had an agency running it, but they brought us in for an impartial view to see whether they could make a lot of improvements and they can. We found that something like 49% of their spend was wasted this year and it could have been put to better use. That is because the intricacies of managing campaigns are so detailed and easy to get wrong. You could put a keyword in and think it means one thing, but then of course, once you start looking at what people are searching, it could mean something else. Holidays is a really interesting one because people look for all sorts of things, right? I wouldn’t say it’s accessible to everyone to run in terms of anyone can do it like driving a car. But what I would say is if you work hard at it, anyone can get good performance if they work really hard and have a dedicated, qualified team.

Martin Henley : [00:20:29] Yeah, that’s what I think 100% as well, is you have to be prepared to put in the hard yards because you have to drive the value really hard because the value isn’t obvious or immediately accessible. It definitely isn’t. his is the thing about the qualification. You can sit the exams, but all you’re doing then is taking a certificate on how to extract money from your clients and give it to Google that’s what those exams are about. And the other thing I want to say is like, it’s not just about the vagaries of a keyword I think Google makes it hard. If you phone Google and you say, I’d like my ads to be doing better, they will just tell you to up your budget, up the number of keywords, up the geographies up whatever. y experience is exactly the opposite is true. Fewer keywords, fewer landing pages, higher conversions is true. So I thought I would market this podcast. I thought I’ll just do some PPC, get some YouTube views. No, it’s not easy to do that. It’s really not easy to do that. I’ll tell you how hard it is. The people, the people who are employed by Google and sit in offices that look like they are phishing offices in India, don’t know how to do it either, because I’ve spoken to them, they’ve got no clue.

Kat Sale: [00:21:57] Yeah, we don’t really use Google. We only use Google support if like a client’s account is down or disapproved or something and we can’t figure out ourselves.

Martin Henley : [00:22:08] Yeah.

Kat Sale: [00:22:08] Otherwise we wouldn’t really rely on them. Same for all the platforms, to be honest.

Martin Henley : [00:22:13] Yes.

Kat Sale: [00:22:14] Yeah.

Martin Henley : [00:22:15] But Google 100%. Those people are being paid commissions. Their motivation is to get you to spend more money, not be more successful. Yeah.

Kat Sale: [00:22:22] Yeah, of course.

Martin Henley : [00:22:23] Yeah. Yes.

Kat Sale: [00:22:24] Yeah.

Martin Henley : [00:22:25] But we say, of course, but aren’t these the platforms that have been telling us for 15 years, like give value to your clients, like be wonderful to your customers, be wonderful to your staff, all of this stuff and they’re not really, are they?

Kat Sale: [00:22:45] I mean, I can’t comment on that really. I don’t work for them. I wouldn’t work for them for a reason. I just use their platforms to get the best out of them. Yeah.

Martin Henley : [00:22:54] Yes.

Kat Sale: [00:22:55] I mean, yeah, I could have worked at Google or Facebook, obviously, but no, not for me.

Martin Henley : [00:23:01] No, not for me either. I don’t think. What’s the thing that I want to say about it? I mean, I am pushing you because you’re allowing me to talk about this thing. I want to talk about this all the time. But normally people who do this, like they don’t want to have the conversation. The other thing I want to say is about this performance marketing. Who on earth is spending money on marketing in 2022 that isn’t performing? I don’t understand. I don’t understand that kind of logic.

23:37 What is the issue with agencies charging on a % of spend?

Kat Sale: [00:23:37] Yeah, so many people. I think the problem is every business has different nuances, every website, every campaign that is built, performance can vary so much. People that work in marketing are very good at spinning a story. So it’s quite easy to have some performance numbers and then find reasons or excuses for it, the platform changed this or yeah, it was really bad last week these are the reasons. We come across clients every day that have wasted budget definitely. Probably underpinned by the industry’s got a real problem with agency contracts being built on a per cent of spend model. Clients will pay the agent, they will have their marketing budget and then the agency fee will be on top of that. The fee will be driven by the budget because it’s a percent of what they’ve spent. That’s quite an old, I would say that’s an old, old school traditional way of budgeting and working with your agency, but it’s still really common. So of course, the agency’s motivated to get you to spend more because they’re going to get more fees. And they might even get a kickback from some of these platforms like Google or Facebook, because those still exist as well. So it’s win-win for the agency and platform and lose for the client because the motivation is about spend, not about efficiency and performance. So we just would never entertain a percent of spend contract. All clients need to really look at what they’re contracted to with their agencies and think about if it is like that, change it 100%, put them on a performance model. So if they hit your ROAS, they get a bonus. Perfect.

Martin Henley : [00:25:35] Yes. Perfect. Okay. That is the last thing that I wanted to say before. It feels like we’re segueing into who you who you do business with, what you do.

Martin Henley : [00:25:44] Our proposition always, if it was PPC, was we will halve your spend and double your return and we never missed. You know, it’s really easy to look at or it was really easy to look at a campaign and just say, Look, all of this is just completely wasted. You know, just stop all of that. It’s never done anything for you. It will never do anything for you. Stop that. Put it into this fraction of it that is working. So we never missed like that.

Martin Henley : [00:26:10] Okay, good. So and I think as I’m remembering now, some of the emails that we’ve exchanged over the months and we did say we were going to talk about TikTok advertising, but that’s cool we can talk about that as well, I think. I’m just interested in this idea of performance marketing. Here’s my thing, which kind of leads us into the thing; people don’t know what marketing is. This is why I’m on this mission to let people know what it is and how they should be doing it properly, and that this is the only way to be successful in your business. But then when the penny drops and they go out into the market, they also get fleeced. It feels like a lot of the marketing industry is only interested, maybe they’ve taken their lead from these platforms, but also not interested in delivering value necessarily. It feels like they don’t have the first clue how to do what it is that these businesses need them to do, which is not even leads, but sales and not even sales, but profitable sales. That leads us into, then obviously you’re not one of those agencies.

27:15 Who do you work with and how do you add value to their lives?

Martin Henley : [00:27:15] Who do you work with? How do you add value to their lives? That’s the question.

Kat Sale: [00:27:22] Yes, we work with we don’t have a specific industry or vertical that we work with. We work with any business that wants to improve on their performance marketing. The specialism is PPC and paid social. The business type could be any. So we’ve done work with insurance websites, we’re currently working with an online florist and we’ve worked with supplement health brands. It’s a real mixed bag. We’re doing some work with an investment brokerage as well right now, so it’s all completely different. I would say the clients that benefit from our service are people that want to take a really close look at their marketing and improve it obviously for the better and are really, really interested in that, which not everybody is. So yeah, those are the that’s the range of clients.

28:19 How do you know if you are going to be able to deliver value for a performance marketing client?

Martin Henley : [00:28:19] How do you qualify a client in how do you know if you’re going to be able to deliver value for them?

Kat Sale: [00:28:28] Yeah, great question. So when a lead comes in, we had one yesterday, for example, someone said that they’re doing all these Christmas campaigns and they’re not sure if what they’re doing is going to hit their targets. Could we have a look? So normally what we would do is we’d have a call with the business. We’d ask them some questions about how things are being run, what their goals are. Then we go away and have a look at their accounts, see how those align with what their goals are. Number one challenge can be if the goal is just too unrealistic for where they’re at, if their conversion rate is really, really low for example, there’s a lot of work they need to do on both the campaigns and the website and then we’ll we’ll talk to them about what they need to do to hit that. Then we’ll take it on, help them if we’re having a nice partnership vibe, realistic conversation. If the client gives you the feeling that it’s going to be a partnership and they’re really going to action what you suggest, really important, obviously, if they’re going to just challenge and disagree on everything, well challenge is fine, but like not work on all the stuff you suggest. That’s not a fulfilling contract. We won’t take it on. Then a realistic plan. If someone says, I need to sell all this stuff for Christmas, but I don’t have a website yet, obviously we can’t help. You know, there’s a mountain to climb there.

Martin Henley : [00:30:03] Yeah. So I think that is the biggest issue with being a marketing agency, I don’t know how the issues stack up, I don’t know what the actual fault is, but clients are difficult. It used to frustrate the hell out of me that they would see me talk somewhere and get really excited, invite me into their business, and I would blow their minds with the opportunity and they would engage us and then we’d go back and they don’t want to do any of the things that I’ve proposed or that we propose. It felt like you’d spend 90% of your time trying to convince them to do the right thing, and then you’d spend about another 50% of your time doing the thing, and he’d be back there for like another 50% of the time trying to justify what little you’ve managed to get done. That was the big frustration. So I think in terms of qualification, yeah, 100%. You need to know that they’re on board, that they are genuinely interested in doing what you know is going to be useful if they’re going to be successful.

Kat Sale: [00:31:10] Yeah.

Martin Henley : [00:31:11] And then the second thing you said was, do you remember what the second thing you said was it’s completely gone out of my head already.

Kat Sale: [00:31:18] Well, it’s a combination of realistic expectations and trust, I would say having a partnership where you trust with all of our current clients, we’ve got a great relationship where we’ll give them a report on how things are going they’ll tell us a bit about how things are from their side, and then we’ll have a conversation about what else we can do. It’s very open and transparent and easy, really, in that sense. Where it goes wrong is if the trust breaks down and so many agencies have this. This is why we built a business on auditing, really, because so many clients don’t trust the campaigns that are running and they and they don’t know the right questions to ask or they don’t believe the agency. So building that trust, first of all, is key.

Martin Henley : [00:32:12] 100%. The thing about that is they’re probably right not to trust them. If you’re encountering campaigns every day that aren’t effective or efficient, then they’re right not to trust them. There’s a stat I don’t know if it’s old, but they reckon the average lifespan of a digital marketing agency customer is three months. So it feels a little bit like that restaurant business where it’s just got into the churn and everyone is like, okay, get in, get as much as you can for three months and then expect them to leave because you can’t deliver what you probably can in ads. You can deliver some kind of value in three months.

32:53 How long does it take to deliver a benefit with performance marketing?

Kat Sale: [00:32:53] But yeah, but it’s hard to get enough traction really because it takes, you know, first month you’re really getting to know the business and the client and looking at what is or isn’t working. You make changes, but you’re getting the most from your agency If you’ve got that relationship peaking at three months, I would say so. I don’t want to say the longer the better with agency relationships, because once you get past the sort of two year mark, actually, it’s quite easy for an agency to get really stagnant in their approach with a client if they’re really comfortable and, you know, they think, Oh, I tried that once, it doesn’t work, I’ll leave, I won’t try it again. Whereas a fresh pair of hands on the account can really make a difference. So I feel like there’s some kind of sweet spot between one and two years working with an agency where it’s still new and exciting. There’s lots and lots to learn and do, but they also do get to know you really well. Just working with an agency for a couple of months is not going to. That’s not sustainable. I wouldn’t say.

Martin Henley : [00:34:01] No. But I suppose the good thing about your market is that it’s people who are in the business of investing in marketing already, you know, So it’s not like they have to be convinced of the value of marketing, like they are already spending money. They know that something should be coming back. They’re just not happy with what is coming back. And the nice thing about that is you also know that more should be coming back. Okay, that’s good. How do you decide then what is appropriate for a customer if they already decided they want to be doing PPC or they want to be doing Tick Tock or they want to be doing Facebook?

34:40 How do you decide which performance marketing is going to work best for a client?

Kat Sale: [00:34:40] Yes, that’s a conversation quite early on, so we’d ask what they’re running already, we’d look at that. Then we might, if we took them on, we potentially would quite drastically change the channels. So for example, we’ve been working with a supplement brand called Indi supplements. They do essentially really, really nice natural products that help you get much more range of vitamins and minerals in your diet. So when we took them on, they were running on Google and TikTok, they wanted to run a bit on Facebook and then we started managing everything and what we found that everything was spread really thinly between lots and lots of targeting and lots of products that they have. So nothing was working that well. So what we’ve done is we’ve actually talked to them about reducing the number of channels and the range of targeting and focusing more specifically on Google Shopping right now. We’ve pulled back on what they’re doing in terms of breadth, but we’ve gone much more specific on shopping and it’s really showing better results already.

Martin Henley : [00:35:50] Okay, fantastic. Maybe I’ve been out of the game for a while, but I think with these platforms, there’s a very big difference between search like PPC from Google and social advertising. But then I understand that Facebook did get super targeted and now I’ve been that that door’s been closed by Apple. So where is the balance? What kind of value should you be expecting from each of these different platforms? What kind of outcome should you be expecting?

36:28 What outcome should you be expecting from the performance marketing platforms?

Kat Sale: [00:36:28] Yeah, it really depends on what you do or sell. So if you sell, if anything, B2B, for example, Google is going to be much more effective for you definitely, because people search something, you give them the answer. If you sell something that’s more of an e-com product that someone might not even know that they want because they might not even know it exists, socials can be amazing for that. With this supplement brand, what they’ve done and spent a lot of time doing is marketing the brand on TikTok, telling people about what it does and the benefits. You don’t get that opportunity so much in search in Google. The first year of their marketing was really focused on videos on TikTok explaining the benefits of their supplements and how they can help you. That worked really, really well for them. The other thing to consider is that with social price point is less of an issue. So if your product is not necessarily the cheapest social’s going to be more effective, because when people look at your ad, they’re not shopping, they’re not comparing, you’ve got a chance to sell them the benefits without them comparing the price against others. Whereas on Google, especially Google Shopping, if you put in, I don’t know, black hoodie, there’s going to be 50 hoodies that come out with all different prices. You’re going to go for the cheaper one, probably. So if your price point is not competitive, search is going to be hard.

Martin Henley : [00:38:07] Okay, cool. So I think of it in old media sales terms. The difference between classified and display advertising. So if it’s classified, somebody is going to have to be there going through the listings because they are looking for a particular product or service. Whereas display actually you get to communicate your value proposition to somebody who at some point in the future might have a need for or desire for your particular products.

Kat Sale: [00:38:36] So I would say that is definitely still true. Google was always there for direct response. If someone’s specifically searching for what you offer, if you can give it to them, conversion rate is going to be high, right? Whereas on social people were not there to buy, they are there to look at their friends’ stupid cat video or something. But I do think in the last 12 to 18 months that’s changed quite a lot and social media is, they are shopping platforms now. Particularly TikTok. I’ve got friends that have consistently got items in their TikTok basket that they’re waiting for payday to buy. I do think it’s changing a lot. Similarly on Facebook, you know, you can buy directly within now it’s so easy. People are much more open to that than they ever were.

Martin Henley : [00:39:25] Okay. I didn’t know that TikTok had a basket. That’s how much I know.

Kat Sale: [00:39:36] Yeah, it’s a recent thing. It’s so interesting.

Martin Henley : [00:39:41] Now is that because people are searching with Tick tock. I’m sorry.

Martin Henley : [00:39:44] Yeah. No, you give me an example.

39:48 How does TikTok algorithm work?

Kat Sale: [00:39:48] Yeah. So, like, recently? I don’t know. So I don’t know if you know how TikTok works? You go on there, you can tell it what you like and it will serve you content around that. Or if you don’t tell it, it will just serve you content it thinks you might like and then based on what you watch or scroll past, it will then find more content that’s relevant to you. So when I first started using TikTok, I got loads and loads of videos about cleaning and tidying. It was really tragic and boring. I don’t know why, I guess woman thirties they just thought, Oh, that’s what you like. So I had to teach the (TikToK) algorithm, I’m not interested in how to efficiently clean the floor. So I started looking at lots of other things, basically all different kinds of things. Recently what I’ve been shown lots of and I don’t really know why this is, is people selling, doing live videos, not video, but live right now in the moment, marketplace videos, selling wigs. So literally, I’ve seen loads of these videos now where there’ll be a woman wearing a wig and then behind her on the wall is like 10 to 15 different wigs on stands with a number nd she will try them on, liv sell it to you. People write in the comments what they like and what wig they want her to try on and then you can buy the said wig directly from that video there and then. They’ll say stuff like, right for the next 10 minutes, it’s 20% off. Use this code. It’s incredible. They’re making so much money. It’s a whole new world.

Martin Henley : [00:41:32] It’s a whole new world. But wasn’t this happening at one time on Facebook where people were selling psychic readings or I want to say like crystals or whatever?

Kat Sale: [00:41:42] Allsorts. Yeah. Yeah. All kinds of stuff.

Martin Henley : [00:41:47] Well, I think you’re right. They do make a lot of money. Yes. If somebody came to me and said I’m going to start a business selling crystals. You would just imagine that there wasn’t any market. But there are these people out there making all of this money, aren’t there?

Kat Sale: [00:42:07] Yeah and this is the beauty of performance marketing is that you can access people anywhere in the world pretty easily. Yes it’s very easy to waste money, you need to be careful, obviously. But it does enable this whole world of e-commerce that is just, I would say, unprecedented. To think that yesterday I was watching a video, I don’t know where it was shot, maybe in China, probably. I was watching a live, I could have bought that wig there and then and had it sent to me and I’ve seen it be tested out. It’s a bit like the shopping channel on telly, but it’s live and in the moment and you can feed back. I could have commented Oh wig number 13, I really like the look of that one. Can you try it on. Can you tell me more about this. You can ask questions there and then, which is amazing.

Martin Henley : [00:43:00] Yeah. Do people not have different size heads?

Kat Sale: [00:43:04] I don’t know. I don’t actually know much about wigs or have one, by the way. It’s just been served to me. I don’t know why.

Martin Henley : [00:43:13] Okay, good. So then these people, your friends who are filling up their TikTok shopping cart, are these things that they’ve searched for or these are just things that have been served up.

Kat Sale: [00:43:25] Things that have been served up. So you might watch three or four videos and then you’ll have an ad. It’s quite hard to tell it’s an ad apart from it’ll say hashtag ad, but.

Martin Henley : [00:43:34] Right.

43:36 What ads work best on TikTok?

Kat Sale: [00:43:36] People that are doing well on TikTok are giving you ads that don’t look like ads. That’s the main thing, I would say. So they look like user-generated content that is specifically built for TikTok and you’re just scrolling through videos and if something catches your eye and it’s someone selling, massive for beauty and fashion, then you can just buy it then, it’s amazing.

Martin Henley : [00:44:02] So there’s a buy now button or something on the screen or you have to interact with them or buy now button.

Kat Sale: [00:44:08] No. So you can just Yeah, the button you can just push buttons. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. If you’ve saved your card details to TikTok, a couple of clicks, you’ve done it. Same with Facebook and Instagram.

44:20 Is it over for Facebook and Instagram as performance marketing platforms?

Martin Henley : [00:44:20] Yes. Apart from Facebook and Instagram seems to be going away.

Kat Sale: [00:44:29] Hmm.Why do you say that?

Martin Henley : [00:44:33] Well, because Apple has told them that they don’t want them to be productising their customers anymore, and they’ve given all of their users the option to not use the tracking. This is what I’m hearing. I’m not testing it, but this is what I’m hearing, that basically Apple are now looking after their customers much better, so all of the iPhone users and I saw a stat recently, it was something like 70%, originally it was like 20% of people opted out of Facebook collecting their data and now it’s gone up to something like 70 plus percent. So people are being given the opportunity not to be tracked and they’re taking the opportunity.

Kat Sale: [00:45:13] So, yeah, let’s unpack that a little bit more. So what you’re talking about is the iOS 14 update. I cannot actually remember when it happened because it was during COVID and everything is a blur, but it happened in the last few years. Apple have done that, not specifically to Facebook. What they’ve done is they’ve made the setting on your phone that any app that would track you outside of the app, what I mean is when you stop using the app and your phone and go somewhere else, the Internet or your email, Apple basically asks users, do you want this app to track you outside of the app usage or not? As you said, a lot of people said, no, this is really affected Facebook because Facebook used a lot of data on people when they’re not in the app, right across their phone. You think about your phone. It’s got an incredible amount of information on here about you, it’s ridiculous. Because people then declined to have that information tracked outside the app. Facebook has to rely more on its in-app data, of which there’s an abundance. There’s still loads, but it means that if you, say I go on Facebook and I get served an ad, I can talk about one of our clients. We work with an online florist called Flying Flowers. They’re part of the Inter Flora group and basically say, I’m on Facebook and I get served an ad for a nice bouquet they’ve just launched. I look at that ad, but I don’t do anything. I carry on scrolling, then later I go on Google and I do a search Flying flowers and I go on their website and buy Facebook can’t track that connection because it’s cut off from the app. That makes sense?

Martin Henley : [00:47:08] Yes.

Kat Sale: [00:47:09] Whereas before they were. So that is really damaging because, of course, Facebook started that path to sale, didn’t they? Because Facebook showed me that ad and that made me think, Oh, I’ll go and get that later. But that whole journey is now broken because of the tracking being switched off, essentially. So, you know, Apple was very clever, they did it to enhance their own data that they have, which I’m sure they’re doing amazing things with. I don’t know if they did it, I mean, maybe they did, it’s not specific to Facebook, it affected TikTok, for example, as well. But it really hurt Facebook because their advertising relied so much on that journey outside the app. It makes it really difficult for people like us in marketing because clients will say to me, well, should I be spending this budget on Facebook? You know, it doesn’t really wash its face as well as, say, Google. But you have to take that into consideration. Say it’s saying a ROAS of like 0.5 in platform in Facebook, actually, that could be quite a bit higher if you were to be able to fully attribute properly across. But there’s no way of doing that.

Martin Henley : [00:48:33] Yeah.

Kat Sale: [00:48:34] Does that make.

Martin Henley : [00:48:35] Sense? It does make sense, yeah. So we’re talking about attribution, but are they not still able, Facebook, they call it the Pixel, didn’t they? They’re not still able to put the pixel, the cookie wherever on your browser so that when you turn up on the website it recognises you does that still happen?

Kat Sale: [00:48:55] That still happens. Yes. It’s just that app-to-app bit that’s broken so they can still track sales. The Pixel is really important, tracking as much as possible. Still really important. They just lose, I think it’s on average, 50% of that data is lost because of the way the tracking is now not working.

Martin Henley : [00:49:16] Right. Okay.

Kat Sale: [00:49:18] It’s really difficult. Yeah, it’s like we’ve gone backwards. We went a lot further than we ever thought and now we’ve gone backwards a little bit to, you know, you said earlier, I know 50% of my advertising budget is wasted, but I don’t know which.

Martin Henley : [00:49:32] Yes. So we can’t be back to that, are we?

Kat Sale: [00:49:38] No, we’re not back to that. But I do think that I mean, Facebook’s released its own predicted impact modelling, where it will give you a figure that it believes, and it’s pushed this onto everyone, you don’t opt in or out, you’ve just got it. It gives you the opportunity to see what it could be, but it’s really difficult. You know, it will be overinflating its performance to reality.

Martin Henley : [00:50:09] Okay, so. So that also affects Google but they are a little bit immune because if you haven’t got the browser open, you’ve probably got maps open or you’ve got Gmail opener, you’ve got something open all the time.

Kat Sale: [00:50:23] Yeah.

Martin Henley : [00:50:23] So that is less affected. Yeah. I do think Mark Zuckerberg upset Apple. I think that’s why, not the whole reason, but part of the reason. I do think Apple will come through with some kind of performance marketing platform of their own that will be really exciting.

Kat Sale: [00:50:45] Yeah, it’d be good.

Martin Henley : [00:50:48] It’d be good for you.

Kat Sale: [00:50:48] Who knows? Facebook, I think, is in for, well, yeah, I think Facebook is in for a rough ride. They already are, but they’ve saturated their ad platform. They’re struggling with the data. Performance is not as good as it used to be for a lot of clients. So I think Facebook need to work very hard to keep up.

Martin Henley : [00:51:12] Yeah, and I think more than that, he’s taken his eye off the ball. He’s decided that he wants to be the metaverse and they’re not investing in their bread and butter. That’s what I think, that’s what I see happening. So that’s interesting. So B2B, Google, PPC, what kind of businesses do better on TikTok or Facebook or what sort of businesses that you’re working with are having more success in those places? Yeah.

Kat Sale: [00:51:44] So I mean, TikTok, I would say any business where… you’ve got to get creative with it and you’ve got to really invest in it and this is where clients struggle. I see a lot of ads where it’s like a really crappy video and then it’s automatically translated by robot. Have you seen these? Automatically translated by a robot and they’re just dreadful and you just skip everyone skipping them. Definitely. So there’s a tip of what not to do, I guess. Types of clients that are doing well from it are clients that invest in content that, it’s called user-generated content, but you know, it’s an ad that looks like it’s been made by a user specifically for TikTok that is so important. So, you know, like I said about that supplement brand, working with them on content where someone is explaining the benefits and they’re a user, so they’re using the product and they’re using TikTok. They’re not just here to I mean, they are there to sell you, but it doesn’t feel like they’re selling to you. Does that make sense?

Martin Henley : [00:52:49] Yes.

52:51 What sort of business do well with TikTok and how?

Kat Sale: [00:52:51] Yeah, they’re there to. I think the thing with TikTok is to remember that people are there to enjoy funny videos, to be surprised, delighted they’re not there to be sold to. So if you put any content out there that makes them feel like it’s a hard sell, it’s a no. But if you can put content out there that really shows them the benefits, maybe makes them laugh, actually, they probably will buy from you. I’ve been watching this trend, so there’s a song by Meghan Trainor, and it’s a song called I Made You Look basically, and two girls took that song and they made their own TikTok video of dance of it. Obviously that is where TikTok originated, it was all about doing funny dances, wasn’t it? So they made a dance from it, it went viral and loads of people have made their own version of this dance to the song, including Meghan Trainor, who saw it and loved it and has also made her own version now with their dance. Amazing. What I’ve seen is advertisers pick up on that and make their own one. So, for example, have you ever heard of an Oodie?

Martin Henley : [00:54:04] No, sorry.

Kat Sale: [00:54:06] No, that’s okay. So basically an Oodi. No, it’s fine. It’s basically an Oodie is like a massive, massive hoodie. Like a hoodie sleeping bag kind of thing.

Martin Henley : [00:54:16] Okay.

Kat Sale: [00:54:17] But it’s big. It’s big in the winter. So this woman is selling Oodies that she makes. What she did is she made a video wearing an Oodie, doing the dance to that song to make people laugh because it’s on trend at the moment and then, of course, at the bottom, there’s a get your Oodie here, buy now. We don’t work with this client, but I’m sure she’s doing well from it. I thought it was really good.

Martin Henley : [00:54:40] Yes. Yes. So this feels to me like it’s all got much more social again, that it’s actually about virality again and it’s actually about trends again. Because if I look at Facebook, for example, or Instagram, where it went wrong for them is where they decided better than you that they know what you want to look at when they bought out the algorithm. There was a time where I would sit down and scroll through Facebook until I started reading stuff I’d read already, and that might take me 40 minutes. Now I won’t look at it for three weeks and I’ll read something that I’ve read again already. Do you know what I mean? So it seems to me that that’s why what TikTok has done.

Kat Sale: [00:55:28] It’s not as good.

Martin Henley : [00:55:29] This is the thing about Facebook is that they could just go back to that in a second, but they won’t because he wants to be the metaverse or whatever it is. But Facebook was an unbelievable model because they had at 1 or 2 billion contributors who weren’t they weren’t paying a penny to who were writing about the things that we were all interested in, you know, which is us. It’s insane that they lost that but it feels to me like TikTok has got that back. So the question then is, if the ads don’t look very different from the content, the user-generated content, then why invest in ads? Why not just be producing the content?

Kat Sale: [00:56:14] Well, I wouldn’t see them as two different things. Not necessarily. That’s a really good point. So, you know, start with the content that you want for your brand and then make sure that some of that content ends focused on selling, but not in a salesy way and then we can use that as an ad. So you’ve got to flip it around, you know, if you think people made ads for TV now it’s got to be make content for TikTok and then use it as an ad.

Martin Henley : [00:56:49] Right? So you can actually effectively test it before you even start spending on advertising.

Kat Sale: [00:56:55] Yeah. Yes and I would do that. I would start with the content and that’s where people go wrong. You’ve got a lot of big businesses that are thinking, Shit, I keep hearing about Tik Tok, I should probably get on there. Can we just do some ads? That’s not going to work. You need to build a profile on TikTok, start building content, and then start doing some ads and build it that way.

Martin Henley : [00:57:18] Yes. So the next question then is who can you reach on TikTok? Because we’re just about to start clipping up these and all of our content and we’ll make anything that’s snappy enough available on TikTok. Are there, and I do get a sense that there are, because I reviewed some TikTok content, are there people interested in marketing there? Are there people interested in metal there? Are there people interested in I don’t know, baby clothes? Who’s there? That’s what’s interesting to know.

57:58 Who can you reach through TikTok?

Kat Sale: [00:57:58] Yeah. Traditionally it’s always been younger generation. It started as a platform where people put funny videos than making a dance. But it’s so much more mainstream now. For example, this supplements brand that we’re working with, their product is aimed at age 35 plus women, which you wouldn’t necessarily think are on TikTok, but actually, it does really well on there. I would say the demographic data is skewed, it’s heavier on the younger generation, but the older generation are actually there and a mix of demographics. So I think that any business could gain some traction on there if they invest in the right content and getting creative with it.

Martin Henley : [00:58:48] Okay, good. Yeah. Do you think my marketing chats are creative enough?

Kat Sale: [00:58:57] I think you might be lacking in music. That’s the.

Martin Henley : [00:59:00] Problem. Okay, well, you know, there’s.

Kat Sale: [00:59:01] Might have to do a dance at the end.

Martin Henley : [00:59:04] Maybe. Okay. So the other benefit then, of advertising has always been that you the targeting. So if you do if you do it in a content fashion, if you do it in an organic fashion, you’ve got no idea who’s coming. If you’re targeting, if you’re running ads, then you get to target who you want to see it. So what is the targeting look like on TikTok? Is it? Yes. How does it compare with something like Facebook or other platforms?

59:32 How does ad targeting on TikTok compare with Facebook or Instagram?

Kat Sale: [00:59:32] It’s a bit more basic than Facebook so far, but you can still do demographic age and location. So you can do all of that and then you can layer over hashtags. Targeting specific hashtags or specific interests, like someone into football, for example, or the World Cup specifically. Stuff like that. So I say it’s not as advanced as Facebook just because Facebook has got some incredibly detailed audiences that you can tap into and TikTok’s just not quite there yet, but it does have a lot you can do and then you can also do obviously your retargeting and then your lookalike audiences as well, which is where I would start usually.

Martin Henley : [01:00:25] Okay, good. Excellent. So it just it’s like it was Black Friday. We’re going to do the news tomorrow. So every two weeks we do the news with Melanie Farmer in Australia we talk about marketing news. Feels to me like we have to talk about Black Friday. I don’t really like Black Friday.

Kat Sale: [01:00:46] Yes.

Martin Henley : [01:00:50] Because I don’t think Black Friday is a good enough reason to buy something. I’d much prefer that people were buying products from me because they saw the value in them or they wanted them. Do you know what I mean? Not because it’s whatever Friday, the last Friday in November, is that what it is? So I don’t particularly like it. How does this tie in with what we’re saying?

1:01:19 What effect does Black Friday have on performance marketing?

Kat Sale: [01:01:19] I would say Black Friday. No it’s fine. I would say Black Friday, it’s not a day anymore. It’s Black Friday week or even month, it’s ridiculous and customers are saturated with it. We’ve got a few clients that have really, you know, planned all year for Black Friday and pinned a lot of hopes on shifting a lot of stock on that one day and I think that that is risky. People do wait for deals. We definitely saw a slowing down in conversion rates in the weeks running up to it and then an increased conversion rate last week. That’s quite annoying because obviously, if you’re shopping for something, if I’m shopping for something two weeks ago, I’m not going to buy it until Black Friday because most things will reduce or at least look like they are reduced. So you feel like you’re getting a deal, but it’s not great for the industry at all. We can’t change it or stop it now. It’s the way it is. But I don’t like Black Friday either. That’s what I would say.

Martin Henley : [01:02:27] Yeah. I think that is exactly the issue. If you’re a business and you’re pinning your hopes on something amazing happening on this one day of the year, that’s the real danger. If you were rather investing all your energy in coming up with products and services that people actually took value from, I think that would be a much better idea. Now don’t they do these single digit days or something? So it’s the first of the first, the second of the second. So there’s one of these happening every month maybe on a different scale.

Kat Sale: [01:02:56] Yeah. It’s just constant, isn’t it? No, it’s constant nd I think it’s really easy for clients to think I’ll just put a sale on and I’ll get more. Buty that is not a long-term sustainable way, is it? You have got to focus on your brand proposition and your product and what actually is going to help customers long term. I’m not a massive fan of sales and discounts.

Martin Henley : [01:03:22] No, I really hate it. Honestly, I spend all my life trying to convince people to put their prices up all my life. Because why wouldn’t you just do that? You know, you should be the Rolls-Royce in your industry. I think that’s much better.

Martin Henley : [01:03:34] Okay, good. Do you have a particular instance, maybe, of something where you’ve been able to because you talk about revolutionising performance? That’s the other thing that gets me. Somebody said to me once I’d just start talking about a revolution and Martin will be there. I really do like a revolution.

1:03:55 Do you have a particular instance where you’ve revolutionised the performance of a customer’s marketing?

Martin Henley : [01:03:55] Do you have a particular instance where you’ve revolutionized the performance of a customer’s marketing.

Kat Sale: [01:04:04] I think the best example we’ve got to date with quite young business, don’t forget, is last year we did a project with our insurance comparison website and this business was spending a lot of money on Google. Google is very expensive for insurance. The cost per clicks are like £20 to £30. They had a team in place. The board didn’t know what questions to ask the team. They didn’t know if they were the right team for what they needed. They had a lot of data they could use, but they weren’t using it in the right way and their conversion rate was in decline year on year. So performance was going down, really harming the business. So they brought us in to revolutionise performance.

Kat Sale: [01:04:54] The first thing we did was an audit of everything they were doing. We reviewed all their campaigns in detail what they were doing, and we also looked at the teams and what was their skill set and how are they using their time, and was that right for the client? Long story short, none of it was set up optimally, obviously so we took over and we actually managed it for them over an eight-week period, and we did a lot of training with their team to give them the skills to really work properly with Google. We then did a project to help them integrate their data into Google and basically bid to a longer-term return on ad spend rather than a short-term CPA. I can’t remember the numbers now, there is a case that on our website, that did revolutionise performance. So much so that they were getting much higher quality leads their call centers were full and basically busy all the time because they were getting more higher-quality leads they were spending longer on the phone with them. So they actually opened another call center to cope with it. So yeah, I would say we revolutionised it for them.

Martin Henley : [01:06:05] Yeah, fantastic. I think because of the way the market has been set up and people’s attitudes to marketing and agencies attitudes to their clients and the whole situation we’ve got into is it’s not difficult to see how it can happen. Everything you say, you have to understand exactly everything that’s gone on and then put in the hard yards to make sure that you’re wringing every bit of value out of every penny you spend. That’s what I think. Okay, cool.

Martin Henley : [01:06:36] That brings us then to question number three, which we are going to put on TikTok, whether you think it’s a good idea or otherwise. So it needs to be really brief and snappy and if you could be dancing as well, that would be really, really useful.

1:06:54 What’s your recommendation for anyone who is looking to either get better at performance marketing or maybe they’re looking to start out with performance marketing?

Martin Henley : [01:06:54] What’s your recommendation for anyone who is looking to either get better at performance marketing or maybe they’re looking to start out with performance marketing?

Kat Sale: [01:07:08] Just be really curious and always looking under the hood at what’s going on. Don’t leave any stone unturned. That’s what I would say.

Martin Henley : [01:07:18] 100%. That might be snappy enough. Now, there’s still 15 seconds for a dance. No dance.

Kat Sale: [01:07:25] I can’t It’s Monday morning.

Martin Henley : [01:07:28] Okay? All right absolutely no problem.

Martin Henley : [01:07:30] Okay, then. Question number four. What should people read or what content should people be consuming if they want to be doing better with their marketing in general, Their performance marketing specifically?

1:07:47 What should people be reading?

Kat Sale: [01:07:47] I would say LinkedIn. My main source of industry updates and movements is actually linked in. Finding people that post updates on whatever platform you’re using, is nine times out of ten going to be the quickest and best way to learn about how it’s working and what’s new and what else you could be doing. So I invest a lot of time in LinkedIn and I learn a lot on there about, particularly Google, there’s so many people posting about things they’ve tested that you can then take and implement. So I would say LinkedIn to him, which is not you know, it’s not your traditional work.

Martin Henley : [01:08:27] No.

1:08:28 Does LinkedIn have a role to play in performance marketing?

artin Henley : [01:08:28] On that subject, we’ve just spoken for an hour and 10 minutes about performance marketing, and this is the first time LinkedIn has come up as LinkedIn not got a role to play in performance marketing.

Kat Sale: [01:08:41] Well, it does and we do run ads on there. The problem with LinkedIn, it’s just quite expensive. You said earlier about platforms fleecing people. I would say LinkedIn is quite expensive for the engagement you get and that’s a platform that needs to do more work on its advertiser offering, definitely, because they have got so much rich data but it’s not that easy to get it out. It’s not my go to platform for paid.

Martin Henley : [01:09:10] Okay. I tried to market my LinkedIn course on LinkedIn and they charged me £17 per click for something like 17 clicks and when I looked at the analytics, only three of those people have made it to the website and they’d all left inside half a second. So yeah. I also don’t rate LinkedIn.

Kat Sale: [01:09:29] Yeah, it’s a shame. LinkedIn for posting organic stuff, amazing.

Martin Henley : [01:09:36] I think especially if you are being interesting and useful, I think LinkedIn is amazing. All these people with their gentle brags about the charity work they do at the weekend, I don’t think they’re doing so well.

Kat Sale: [01:09:50] Yeah. Yeah.

Martin Henley : [01:09:51] Right. So that brings us to the last question. There’s a tropical storm just kicked off here, I’m not hearing you great. I don’t think the universe has been with us today. What I’m interested to know is how have you found your experience of being on the Talk Marketing show?

Kat Sale: [01:10:13] I’ve loved it. Yeah, it’s been really good. Really interesting. I feel like we’ve covered a lot of ground.

Martin Henley : [01:10:20] I feel like we have as well. Yes. I’m dreading the day that someone says This has been awful. Martin, don’t ever darken my door again. That could happen. Okay, good. The reason I’m checking in is just to find out, because now the expectation is that you throw a couple of people under the bus.

[01:10:39] Who do you know is the question, do you think whom I endure or maybe just or maybe even enjoy to have a conversation like this with me?

Kat Sale: [01:10:51] Yeah, definitely.

1:10:53 Who can you recommend who might enjoy to appear on the Talk Marketing show?

at Sale: [01:10:53] The first person is a guy called David Manheim, and he’s firstly a friend, a friend of the business, friend of mine. He is an online personalisation expert. He built a business in UX and CRO and sold it in 2020, I think, or 2021. He’s now has a book on online personalisation and he’s just fascinating. I think you’d have a great conversation with him.

Martin Henley : [01:11:24] Fantastic. I think I’ve heard that name before, but I don’t think I’ve met. What was his book called? Do you remember? That you didn’t recommend a minute ago?

Kat Sale: [01:11:34] Oh, I can’t remember. That’s dreadful, isn’t it? It’s not out yet. He’s nearly finished.

Martin Henley : [01:11:39] It and I can’t.

Kat Sale: [01:11:40] Read what it’s called going to be called.

Martin Henley : [01:11:42] Alright, Excellent. Okay, cool.

Kat Sale: [01:11:44] It’s coming out soon.

Martin Henley : [01:11:46] Yeah. Okay. Fantastic. Excellent. Is there somebody else?

Kat Sale: [01:11:54] I would also recommend a guy called Kevin Joyner. I used to work with Kevin at Croud and he’s an expert again in the online world. Fascinating guy.

Martin Henley : [01:12:12] You’d have. Fantastic. Excellent. Now, it seems like the the the delay is enormous. It might be an internet line has just been blown down somewhere between me and you. Okay, cool. So are you able to make a LinkedIn type introduction to these people? Could you do something like that? I’m sure Abigail would have done something like that for us.

Kat Sale: [01:12:36] Yeah. Yeah, happy to.

Martin Henley : [01:12:38] Excellent. So the good news is then, are you ready for some good news?

Kat Sale: [01:12:42] Absolutely.

Martin Henley : [01:12:43] We got to the end. All the trials and tribulations, they’re all behind us. So what we’ll do is we’ll say goodbye for the benefit of anyone who’s still watching, and then I’ll stop recording and we can say goodbye like normal human beings.

Kat Sale: [01:13:02] They’ll be great.

Martin Henley : [01:13:03] Thanks. Excellent. Thank you so much. I’ve thoroughly, thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. It’s interesting because there are so many people playing the game the platforms way and so people don’t let me go on in the way I do with my issues about these platforms should behave better. It’s really refreshing to find someone who actually, I don’t even want to condescend you at all, because that’s really not the intention but somebody who is doing the dance with them and really understands and appreciates what has to happen if you’re going to get value from it. So I think that has been really useful. I’m sure people will take value from it. Of course, the number one recommendation is if they want to get better with their performance marketing, they should reach out to The House of Performance. And I’m sure you guys is there a House of Pain reference? No, it’s not a House of Pain reference.

Martin Henley : [01:13:59] Actually. Okay. In future, you could just say it is. That’d be good. But I have had a thoroughly wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much.

Kat Sale: [01:14:13] Thank you. I really enjoyed it.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?