Check out episode 3 of our podcast, where Adrian Spencer joins us from Hanbury Wedding Barns.

This week, we speak to Adrian Spencer, Director of Hanbury Wedding Barns about his journey with PPC and how it helped to evolve and grow his business, even through the pandemic.

Full episode available on Spotify here.

Jason: Hello, welcome to episode 3 of On The Same Landing Page. I’m Jason, the Marketing Manager at Web Presence and I’m joined by co-hosts Paul and Astra. Guys, would you like to introduce yourselves?

Astra: Hello, I’m Astra. I’m the Advertising Manager here.

Paul: Hi, I’m Paul, I’m one of the Directors here.

Jason: So we’re a Web and Marketing Agency based in Macclesfield and we help businesses grow with Inbound Marketing.

Today, we’re joined by Adrian Spencer, the Director from Hanbury Wedding Barn to talk about how the real life impacts of paid advertising affects small and medium sized businesses. Adrian isn’t your typical director and without a formal marketing background, he really knows his stuff. Before joining Hanbury Wedding Barn as a Director in 2018, Adrian owned a Wedding Photography business for over 14 years, and managed to rank position one for his keywords solely through his own Search Engine Optimisation.

We’ve invited Adrian to talk today about some of the marketing successes and failures along the way, so that our listeners can learn from his mistakes, and pick up some useful tips for where to invest when it comes to growing your business. So without further ado, let’s move on to the first segment of the day. 10 minutes with the director with our guest, Adrian Spencer.

I’ve covered a little bit about your experience in your current position, Adrian. But you want to give us kind of like an overview of your day to day, and also your involvement with the marketing.

Adrian: Absolutely. Thank you for having me on. And so, I think as any sort of new business owner sort of finds that, sort of a man of many hats on a day-to-day basis, you know, everything from kind of bar pricing to wedding fayres to actually sort of being a wedding coordinator and delivering a wedding. And I think that level of involvement in every facet of the business is invaluable, because it really gives you a sense of kind of what’s going on and what you and your customers are experiencing.

Really, though my primary day to day focus is on marketing the barns and sort of the journey of couples from first discovering us to that inquiry to the show round to the booking that’s really on a on a day-to-day basis where I spend most of my time and energies.

Jason: And what have you found… we’ll obviously cover it off over the time you’ve been there. But have you found sort of works the best in terms of advertising if you were just to keep one part of your advertising and promotion of your business. What would it be?

Adrian: I think the numbers speak for themselves so that the Google paid advertising has been invaluable to us. As a new business, you know, you’ve got this wonderful sort of product, we’ve got this great thing that we’ve all worked so hard on as a family, and so all believe in, and you want to get out there and you want to get in front of people. Really, Google advertising is an easy lever to pull to get that kind of energy to get that information out there. Albeit not a cheap one. I think it’s fair to say.

Jason: It might be worth as before we go into that, and what kind of advertising you do Astra, if you wanted to kind of give us a very quick overview of what kind of Google advertising covers what is included within that?

Astra: Yeah, so in its most basic forms, Google ads, works on search results. So, one of the most common types of campaign that business owners use is a search campaign.

So based on keywords that users enter into the search browser, that adverts will display either at the top or the bottom of the page, depending on a number of factors. Each click costs them money, obviously, and goes through to either website or dedicated landing page, and ultimately drives traffic to the website in its broadest form, but we can optimize different algorithms and machine learning to encourage valuable actions on a website. So, in Adrian’s case, we can drive people to check out the availability calendar, book dates, enquire about weddings, etc, etc.

Jason: And just from my experience of it well, we typically use Google ads as a good starting place because it’s the as you say, it’s at the most bottom of the funnel kind of people are already ready with intent-based searches. And it’s a great place to prove advertising works and prove the success of having some good copy, a clear course of action, and that can lead you to generate new leads. And then we kind of work backwards up the funnel from there to try to generate an inbound marketing campaign. 

What about Adrian, your journey on this? How did you start getting into the different types of marketing? And what can you talk me through? Like, what if there’s any kind of key learnings you had along that process?

Adrian: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, as all these things that there’s a lot of trial and error at the start. We began, from a marketing point of view, we really took lessons from my wedding photography business. That actually sets us straight away down the wrong path as a wedding photographer, Facebook was by far my most useful advertising source, it was a pretty much guaranteed return, you could pump money in and sort of churn weddings out, we then carry that on to the wedding barns. But I don’t know whether this is a reflection of the change of Facebook’s kind of position in the markets. Or if it just doesn’t work as well, for wedding venue. It just wasn’t cost effective. Way back at the start of 2018, we put a lot of money into Facebook advertising and it really got us nowhere. So, at that point, we then started experimenting.

As a wedding photographer, I didn’t find Google advertising to be particularly cost effective, because there’s so many competitors in the market. And the return on investment is nowhere near as good. Where as [for] a wedding venue [Google Ads] has proven to be absolutely invaluable. We sort of started it in house, in a kind of what we lacked in experience were made up in an enthusiasm sort of way, and kind of muddled along were reasonably successful.

But then when we kind of turned it over to an agency that really kind of knew what they were doing is when we really saw the great results from that advertisement spend. Wider than that, though, you want to sort of try and be as diverse as we can in our marketing. So obviously, we do still maintain a presence on Facebook, a presence on Instagram, as well as kind of wider sort of bridal sites both like hitched and bride book. But really, when it comes down to it, it is the Google AdWords that really, really drives our business.

Jason: And what was the journey for the user? When you were with the wedding photographer business? What kind of what were you trying to get them to do? And how does that compare with what you’re trying to get them to do now? I.e. where they go from the adverts to your website… like what kind of actions are you asking?

Adrian: The principles are the same that unlike, let’s say you searching for something, that you you’re looking for a specific product, you see, an advert takes you to Amazon, and you buy the products… done. Thats sort of the end of the transaction. As a wedding photographer, and a wedding venue, the purchases isn’t that immediate.

So really with the advert you’re trying to get people to engage with the website, see what you can do and what you can offer, and then you sort of try to entice them to enquire at that point. So really is the first kind of step towards the sale, rather than taking you directly to a sale. So really, our kind of flow for couples is that they’ll discover us, they’ll hopefully come to the website, really liked what they see or enquire.

Then they’ll come for a show round, which is sort of the second major step where we’ll discuss things a lot more detail. And then that will help you transition onto a booking. And by comparison to wedding photography. Wedding photography was a simpler process, but a similar one.

Jason: Do you do any Facebook advertising still now even though it hasn’t been as successful as Google ads? Are you running any like retargeting or anything like that?

Adrian: We just having a play with Instagram at the moment. We’re just sort of dipping our toe in the water, and just seeing how it works out for us at the moment. And I keep sort of glancing at Tik Tok and going, maybe? is that me? I mean, maybe I’m getting past it now. All the kids seem to be on that.

So, I just think there’s a huge amount of experimentation to be done, and finding out what works and what’s cost effective.

Jason: I think as long as you’re experimenting, you’ll be doing okay. And that sees something that you’re quite clear on. I think the other point that you brought up a lot was that cost effectiveness, knowing where the break even point is so important, like because it’s can be very easy to see all of the eyeballs you’re getting, all the impressions you’re getting, from the clicks, and just feel good about that. Because it feels kind of good that people are like engaging with the website. But then if, if it’s at a cost that, you know, after your margins and paying for staff to kind of fund these weddings and everything, it doesn’t pay off, eventually you’re gonna hit a wall on that.

Adrian: Absolutely. That’s one of the metrics that we follow very closely. Like we know on average, it takes 52 visitors to our website to generate an enquiry. We know it’s sort of every 2, 2.5 enquiries results in the show round and every 2, 2.5 to 3 show rounds results in the booking. So, kind of from that you can really see the pipeline very clearly, we need, I think it’s about 450 people to visit our website equals a booking. So, you can really kind of monitor the flow and sort of see how it’s working on that front.

Paul: That’s so important. All of those numbers you just pulled out because when you compare multiple things and you run experiments, it’s easy for us, because we talk about them all day to kind of glance over, you just pull those off the top of your head.

That’s exceptional, I don’t think most people can do that in the business. So, if that knowledge enables the experiments, enables the trial of different channels, because you can take all the opinions out of it. No egos need to come in. It’s “is this better or worse than our baseline performance?” I love that I think that’s really good to have so easy to hand.

Astra: While we’re on experiments, as someone who advertised on Facebook, Instagram, previous to iOS 14 and saw limited results, and someone who’s just begun analysing again, have you noticed a shift in any of the metrics? I know it’s still early days for you.

Adrian: Not, not yet. No, it seems very good. I suppose it’s the difference in the nature of the advertising.

Instagram seems brilliant at getting your advert to lots of people. Fantastic. But the flow through the pipe in terms of people that actually click on the advert, engage, and then enquire seems far less. And I personally think that’s down to the fact that when Google delivers an advert, people are looking for a wedding venue. That is why they’re in front of their computer.

Whereas when someone is browsing Instagram, they want to see what the friend had for tea. “Oh, there’s a wedding venue. Ah well I’m not interested now.”

I think that slightly more passive approach to delivering the adverts is responsible for slightly less worthwhile engagement that you see in their advertising.

Astra: Yeah, and I guess in terms of your customers, there’s a specific window in there, if you’d like to call it a marriage journey, whether, you know, there’s sort of like a four-week window where they’re like, okay, I’m really looking now, as opposed to if they’ve already decided they’re not going to click on your ad kind of thing. Unless they’re going to get married twice, which maybe happens, I don’t know.

Jason: I always tend to think that your Facebook and Instagram, and this isn’t always true because retargeting is quite bottom of the funnel, they’re really good at educating people as to like, a different way of doing something which has not been done before.

It’s one where you can say

“Hey, if you’re thinking about this, then you need to start thinking about it in this way in this sense, and then start that journey.”

But it’s when they get to Google, they’ve already done enough research. And it’s like, that’s where you’re kind of, yeah, you’re just taking what, taking someone that’s already been qualified as someone who wants that product.

That’s why it can be quite, it’s a good place to start, as I was saying at the beginning. I think it would be interesting to know if you were to like, if you’re, if you’re mate owns a business and he’s not sure about advertising in general, he just knows that there’s a good chance that he could spend a lot of money and get nothing back and he hasn’t got loads of cash flow at the moment. What would your advise be to him about going about that process?

Adrian: My, my advice, those very early stages, then will be to kind of leverage personal contacts to try and do things as inexpensive and organically as possible. It’s hard to answer that without knowing really what sort of business they’re in if they’re sort of business to business, or if it’s more general. But certainly, as a wedding photographer, you started out used to relying on your friends and shares, and that kind of general, very organic growth.

I also remember back in those days, early days, as well, that competitions was really effective, a great way of driving traffic to your page and getting people engaged with you. Moving on from that, when things do get a bit more established, and yeah, I suppose my advice would be once you can afford it, to look at that kind of Google advertising because it is an outlay. But it does have a really good track record of giving very cost-effective returns.

Jason: And to add to that, my advice to your friend who’s starting a business would be to get in contact with an agency. I happen to work for one. And just get us to do some forecasting, because it’s fairly easy to

• Do some really basic forecasts to work out what your average cost per click would be for certain keywords.
• To work out what kind of audiences you’re working with, if you know who your target audience are on Facebook and Instagram
• And then you can just work backwards from perceived conversion numbers.

It’s very easy to do that little bit of work, and then work out what kind of budgets you might need before you can invest in worthwhile in these advertising.

I think we actually are going to offer that to anyone listening to this podcast, if you would like to go through that process with Astra, she’ll take you through to basically ask you a few questions about the keywords you’re looking for. Or looking to be found for when someone searches them, and also what your target audience are.

And we can do that kind of experiment for free. So please let us know. That was my little plug. Sorry, shameless.

Can I ask a bit of a more wider question about how your industry is doing now? As you start to recover from the effects of the pandemic?

Adrian: You know what? All things considered very well. The challenge.. We were in a very unusual position in March 2020 when this all started happening. We at that time, were a very, very new business, we actually did our first wedding in June 2019. We had a big second tranche of construction, that all happened early 2020. And then obviously, things just shut down.

And that really put us into hibernation mode. I mean, remember saying a few times, particularly during 2020, the barns felt like a museum, they felt like something created to do something that will never happen there. It was, it was very peculiar. We really survived that period, on new bookings.

We were lucky in a way because we have flexibility. So, all the couples have 65 Weddings booked for 2020, originally. And we were able to reschedule those forward to 2021. And I think we’ve got a handful left this year, but not many, the vast majority, we’ve now you know, luckily enough, been able to, couples have been able to have the wedding day.

And what that has led to though, is a backlog of couples wanting to get married who have just held off planning and quite understandably, quite rightly. But they’ve held off planning and committing deposits until they knew that it was going to go ahead. The last thing they wanted to do was drop 1000s of pounds of deposits on photographers and venues for those businesses to potentially go under. And you know, several wedding venues did go under during the pandemic.

And so as soon as things started to ease, and this was sort of June last year, when we reached that peculiar stage where you could have unlimited numbers of weddings, but you couldn’t dance indoors, that really opened the floodgates for us. And we have this huge rush of couples desperate to get married as soon as possible, desperate to get married in the next sort of six, eight months. Whereas normally couples are looking at like an 18-month, two-year kind of timeframe to plan the wedding.

Even now, our kind of average booking time is all over the place. I was literally speaking to a couple this morning who want to get married with us in March. But equally we have just taking bookings for 2025. So the impact of COVID really has put shockwaves through the entire industry. And I strongly suspect we probably won’t level out I think for another year or two.

It really will just keep echoing. I think it’s, it’s been great for us, because it means, we’ve sort of, as soon as we could, we really hit the ground running, which obviously is wonderful for the cash flow. But like I say it’s made forecasting/projecting much, much harder. Because like I say, it’s just all the rules have gone out the window.

Jason: How does that impact your strategic planning? Has it impacted how you make decisions for investing in things like well, like marketing and things like that?

Adrian: Absolutely. Yes. So, the big thing we’ve always wanted at the barns was accommodation. And the financial outlay for that just even to get to the planning application stages, things like that. Right from 2017, we knew it was going to be kind of a cornerstone to the barn service offerings, because so many couples want the ability to stay over at night.

We had to put a pin in that and so many other projects through 2020, 2021.. Because we just weren’t in position to commit to investing that sort of capital until we knew that the weddings were happening and that revenue was coming in. So, we’ve had to put a lot of things on hold.

Gladly now they are by and large going forward. Our accommodations infrastructure at the moment, or the major projects like the use of air conditioning and heating system is all in and completed. But there’s still a lot of things we want to do that we just let’s pay for these. And then we’ll get the next ones done.

Paul: That’s so cool to hear cos I think we we did actually our first podcast episode was around uncertainty was the theme. Everyone has a different challenge, but all of those challenges are bought in by the same thing that’s happened to us all. It’s always interesting to hear about, of all the things that have happened over the years like the air conditioning system still needs to go in, it’s not just like big strategic stuff that you have challenges with.

Adrian: No, no. But it’s all these jobs that we knew we wanted, we knew would really add value to the barns, but we just daren’t commit to until we knew the cash flow was secure.

Astra: I suppose in that sense that you and the couples you’re servicing are the same. They don’t want to commit to their wedding until they know it’s going ahead as you can’t commit to your air conditioning.

Jason: Yes so there’s an air conditioning company director saying the same thing to someone else. Basically.

It’s interesting. You’re doing… your paid ads are working really well, with Google ads, you play around with Instagram. Is there anything else that you’re any other channels that you’re toying with? It might be SEO, email, or anything else that you’re thinking about over the next year?

Adrian: Yeah, so we’re certainly SEO is the next big one. We think that kind of, we certainly want to diversify our marketing. As fantastic as Google Ads has been, you know, you look at the situation with Facebook, and Apple, and Apple make one change. And suddenly, Facebook’s marketing… 10 billion wiped off Facebook’s market capital seemingly overnight.

So we’re very conscious about being over reliant on a single kind of advertising strand. So, diversification for us is the next step. Certainly, the first stage of the journey I was discussing before… SEO, is we think another big kind of string to that in terms of initially, couples learning about our existence and taking that first step to engage with website to learn about us.

We also want to do a lot more kind of to help towards the second step that conversion from for show rounds to enquiries and enquiries to bookings. Things like wedding fayres and kind of further investments actually in the barns themselves, just to really raise their sort of wow factor and profile when couples actually come and see us for the first time.

I think the temptation of digital marketing is, it’s, it’s a lovely, big, easy-to-pull lever. It’s great, because you can pull the lever and you can see immediate results. I think you’ve got to remember at times to maybe look a little bit past that as well, to the less obvious and less immediately gratifying sort of sources of marketing and give them some serious consideration.

Jason: Yeah, it’s a form of, is the word residual income Paul? Is that the word? With paid advertising, you’re always putting in a bit of effort to get a bit back. But when you start looking at SEO, you can put in a lot of effort in the beginning. And then you don’t have to continually spend a pound to gain five or whatever it may be. So, it will keep coming. It’s just a bigger outlay at the beginning, isn’t it?

Paul: Yeah, well, we pitch them as like an asset versus an expense. So, Google ads would fall in the expense column. So, you put me in when it comes out. But then you do that for 10 years, turn off your ads, and everything stops. Like you haven’t actually moved the business’s web reputation on forward. Things like having strong social media channels for email list, and very strong organic, SEO presence. That’s an asset. That’s something you can leverage to get value out of for a long time.

Jason: I’m going to go for, I’m gonna ask you a question now Adrian and that is we ask everyone that comes on on podcasts. I’m going to ask you, if you had to order the following marketing channels in order of importance to you and your business, with the first being most important and the last one being the one you might get rid of, which order would you put them in? So I’m going to give you four and you tell me which one is kind of the most important. So we’ve got PPC, I’m guessing that might be up there, social media which includes organic and paid, email marketing and SEO.

Adrian: For us at the moment, as like you said, you’d probably guess PPC definitely at the top for us. SEO I’m hoping will become a close second if not direct equal to that. At the moment our experiments with social media… it’s great for people who already know you exist on social media, people that have already engaged with you, have been to the barn to maybe already booked the wedding with us. They love the social media, they can see what’s happening at the barn, they can see the weddings that is going on, they can be in touch with ideas and questions. I still, I’m yet to be convinced social media can ever really be for us a marketing tool for that first step that people learning our existence.

Personally, for us, I put email marketing at the bottom, purely because as Astra mentioned before although we could potentially capture many people’s email addresses, the actual useful window of an enquiry is probably quite small. So, you know, something like 70% of all couples’ book with us within three weeks of enquiry. So, within those three weeks, they will enquire, they will visit the barns, they will have conversations and will go ahead and commit. I imagine that that trajectory is very similar for most wedding venues, which means, after three or four weeks, most of our emails that we’ve captured that don’t want to book us, they probably already chosen another wedding venue.

So, at that point, there’s not really a lot of use for us to keep emailing them

“Hey, look, we’re still here, we’re still breathing”

Because they’ve already made that decision.

So, it’s certainly in terms of us engaging with couples that have booked or maybe former brides, absolutely email marketing, but in terms of actually attracting new business I think I’d firmly put that at the bottom..

Paul: Can we take just a quick break to celebrate PPC making the top of the list.

Astra: The first guest on the podcast who hasn’t put it last, Adrian. So, thankfully, you single handedly supporting my job here, so you can come again.

Adrian: Anytime. Anytime.

Paul: And then also just a note, like so, it’s really good to see somebody really understand every part of their sales funnel, their marketing for how many weeks it takes, the percentage of people that didn’t convert is really kind of a you don’t, don’t get come across a lot. So, it’s quite good to have someone has that much business knowledge about their company. On that point, on a scale of 1 to 10 how confident are you in your current marketing strategy?

Adrian: If you’ve asked me three weeks ago, I would have said 8, I would say after everything that happened with Apple and Facebook, I’d probably say 7 now.

My worry is as we move quite rightly, I feel towards more data protection. Could something happen to Google’s advertising/paid advertising? Where somebody somewhere makes a change. a change in the law or a change of policy. And suddenly their main kind of, their ability to deliver these adverts to potentially, you know, worthwhile customers is muted in some way. That’s my kind of underlying worry at the moment.

It’s already happened, it’s happened with Facebook and Apple, I think it could potentially happen again, maybe. So that’s really, I’ll be a lot more confident when we’re a bit more diverse in our marketing. So, we’re not totally reliant, I wouldn’t say that we are utterly reliant on paid advertising, but it’s certainly the main plank in our marketing at the moment.

Jason: We’ve gone away over on the first section, but it’s just, there’s so much I could carry on talking to you about, but we’re gonna, I think have to move on to the next segment. I desperately need to cough. So, I’m going to go on mute and I’m going to ask either Paul or Astra to do this one.

Astra: Paul, you can haven’t introduced a segment. So, I feel like you should take this one.

Paul: Okay, so, with this segment, if you’ve seen 8 out of 10 cats, it will make a lot of sense. So, we have three statistics that Jason’s put together I believe, two of them are true. And one of them is a lie. And it’s up to us to figure out which one is the lie.

So the three facts we have are

• As of 2021, Google owns 92% of the global search market share.
• SEO generates twice the number of visitors compared to PPC.
• On average in America, small and medium businesses invest between 3000 to 4000 on PPC each.

Those are our three stats.

Astra: Difficult.

Adrian: My issue with the first one is why it’s probably more of a question. Didn’t Google leave the Chinese market?

Astra: They’re not in the Chinese market anymore. And also, I have another data fact that I think Yahoo owns seven. So that would only leave if it did own 92% That would leave 1% of the market share. So.

Adrian: I mean, don’t get me wrong.

Astra: Yeah, all of those other search engines are available, guys. So yeah, I think I think the first one is fake.

Paul: Are you going with the first one?

Astra: Yeah, that’s my hat in the ring.

Jason: Remember you’ve got to give me the one true one.

Astra: One true one?

Paul: Oh, wait, okay, I got this the wrong way round. There’s only one true one and there’s two lies. Okay. I see this is why they don’t let me introduce things. Okay, so one of them is true. I see. Okay.

Adrian: With the prevalence of ad blocker. I could well believe that [SEO being double PPC] to be true.

Paul: I mean, yeah, we have some insight on this. So, I would actually, because if you average out SEO so that you’re talking about the people who are on page two as well. Right skew the figures back? I know a good ad you’ll get between 5% and 10% click traffic. And number one organic result be between 25% and 50%? Yeah, the traffic. So, I actually I think that’s a low estimate. So, I think that was a lie.

Adrian: We could be like cuz it’s too low. Right? Okay.

Paul: Potentially. On average in America small and medium businesses invest between three and four. I’ve got absolutely no idea..

Astra: Yeah, I think that depends on the size of how do they define a small and medium business. We are people for data. There’s not there’s not enough numbers here.

Adrian: Give me one, give me your final answer monopoly of minds.

Astra: I think the true one is number two.

Adrian: Okay, I am inclined to agree as well. Yeah, number two is true.

Paul: Yeah, go on. I’ll peer pressure in… number two.

Jason: Everyone believes that SEO generates twice the number of visitors compared to PPC.

According to a report in 2021 from Techjury.net and we’ll put this link in the notes the show notes, it’s actually the other way around PPC generates twice the number of visitors compared to SEO, so that’s A false, that’s a fake fact that one.

The other fake fact was that on average in America, small and medium businesses invest between 3 and 4k on PPC per month, its actually closer to six between 6 and 7k a month that they invest. Which means the first one is true, actually. As of 2021, Google wins 92% of global search market share.

Adrian: Wow. Well done Google.

Paul: I know I was going to say I didn’t want to spoil it but I’ve advertised on Bing and it felt like about 1% of the market.

Jason: So, last segment of this this podcast is strategy analogy, where we’ll put out a random word from a random word generator and try and link it back to some of the things we’ve covered in this podcast or why more widely just marketing in general.

So, I’m going to use this random word generator tool. I’m going to find a single word noun and the word we’ve got is ‘writer’. Does anyone have one out of the gate for writer.

Paul: I have one, I have one. I’m gonna go first, just because I don’t want anybody else to say the one I’m thinking of because I don’t have a backup. 

I’m in the process of talking to lots of people who are writing books right now. And there’s a really good alignment analogy to marketing in that. I think a lot of people look at marketing and think of it as this kind of art art / science skill, where you’re either good at it or you bad at it.

And I personally feel the same about writers, because they, when they produce a book, fiction, nonfiction, whatever, it’s just this impressive skill that I couldn’t possibly do. What I’ve learned is that they are following a framework and set processes that are very well known and taught. I think that’s a perfect analogy for marketing, solid processes, and known ways of doing things is how to get the results, not just being incredibly skilled out the gate.

Jason: And all of those are based on how to keep and hold someone’s attention in the same way as well, isn’t it?

Paul: That’s mine.

Jason: Very good. That’s gonna be hard to follow, but mine is gonna be. So, when we put ads out, we obviously you have to write them.

Paul: Okay let me get comfy for this one, it’s going to be Jason tenuous links.

Jason: No, that’s it mate, so you’ve to write them. So, it’s like writing, because you have to write the ads.

Astra: I think I have one based on placements, or so when you’re a writer, you generally have one form that you’re really good at, or is your niche.

You might try writing plays, you might try writing novels, you might try writing articles. But you’re not going to sell your novels in the foyer of the theatre. You sell the plays right?  So, you’ve got to position your writing or your ads, in this case, in the correct market in order to get the biggest return on investment.

Paul: Oh, I like that.

Astra: No pressure, Adrian.

Adrian: I’m about to say, I’m on flummoxed here now, I’ve really, I’ve actually going to go with one similar to your one Astra, I suppose it doesn’t matter how good you are as a writer. If you don’t, you know, market it properly. If you don’t get people to judge a book by its cover, then it’ll never be read.

And yeah, it’s probably not just about how good you are at writing. It’s about how good you are at actually presenting your writing to the right people, that is what counts. Which is basically what you said, but not quite as eloquent.

Paul: You’re totally right. You’re two are the winners on that one. Know your audience.

Astra: if you don’t mind, I’d like to invite you back to be the fourth co-host, because all you done is back up my opinions, it’s been great.

Jason: To add to that as well. It’s such a good point in terms of do we found that like very rarely, we put all this effort into making these like really good piece of downloadable content, which normally sort of, you know, come up as eBooks, which again, links to the writing aspects, or white papers and whatnot.

And sometimes they do a really good job of generating leads which then turn into work. But so often they don’t ever get opened, they get downloaded but never opened. If you actually track how many times people sort of complete a lead form on Facebook and on the toilet perhaps and then just never go back to their email and open it.

But it doesn’t matter because you kind of got the job done. It’s almost like it doesn’t really matter what the quality of that is. It’s about how well you’ve promoted the challenge and connected that to something that they need to solve, so yeah, so that was really good.

Really good round apart from my one which was quite half arsed, as you could tell.

Cool, I guess I’ll just leave you Adrian… if you’ve got a message or anything you want to talk about with regards to your business. Then, here’s your spot.

Adrian: Okay, well if we are gonna be out there, I appreciate this probably isn’t the place to market a wedding venue but I’m gonna do it anyway. If anybody out there is looking at wedding venue at the moment, Hanbury wedding barn, we’re just based outside of Burton on Trent. And the barns have been a huge family project a huge labour of love for us all. And yeah, please come down and check us out for a very relaxed rustic informal setting for hopefully an amazing wedding day.

Jason: Awesome. Thank you, Adrian, and on our behalf, if you are looking to just look dip a toe in the water of advertising, we are like a free forecasting session with myself and/or Astra then please just let us know, get in contact and we can look at your business, look at your keywords and your audience and help you just get an idea of what budget you should be looking at.

Yeah, okay, that’s great. Thank you so much for coming on. Adrian. You were brilliant. Absolute pleasure.

Adrian: Thank you for having me.

Jason: Thank you, guys. Bye

Written by: