These proven eCommerce ad strategies will boost your service biz

Jeffro (00:01.165)
Welcome back to digital dominance. Today, we’re bridging the gap between two seemingly different worlds, DTC or Direct to Consumer Ecommerce and service based businesses. My guest is Nikki Lindgren, founder and managing partner of PENEC who has managed over $100 million in digital media and is an expert in scaling beauty and lifestyle brands through paid ads and SEO. Nikki’s strategies for growth are razor sharp. And today we will explore how service based businesses can adopt some of those techniques that have made so many e-commerce brands thrive online. So thank you for being here, Nikki.

Nikki Lindgren (00:34.098)
Yeah, Jeffro, so great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Jeffro (00:37.974)
Absolutely. Now, Nikki, this podcast is designed for service businesses, as you know. So I’m excited to see how we can take a page out of your DTC playbook and learn from your vast experience in e-commerce. So I thought we could start with your specialty, Beauty and Lifestyle brands. These brands often have very visual campaigns. Should service businesses try to create similar campaigns that are hyper visual and engaging in that way? What do you think about that?

Nikki Lindgren (01:03.188)
Yeah, I think so. I I guess I would back up and try to understand where the service-based business thinks their customer is hanging out, right? So we actually work with about 15 different med spas throughout the country. So we do have some service-based businesses in our portfolio. And for them, we’re always focused on getting the lowest cost per lead. That is the highest quality lead that we can bring them. And oftentimes, that will come through Google Search App.

So in Google search ads, you can now have a lot of graphics and visuals, but the main gist of what you’re doing is going after, you know, keyword and search queries on Google. So for our MedSpot clients, I’d say like 70 % of our budgets are truly on Google with very limited creative uplift. And then the other 25, 30 % of what we’ll spend for them to grow their business is on social platforms, be it TikTok or meta ads and for that, yes, it’s very visual and it’s ideally the lowest lift visual. So we’ve been partnering with some AI solutions that can kind of make creatives more beautiful more quickly for us.

Jeffro (02:12.974)
So I know since that’s health, there’s three different main categories, right, of services and products. There’s health, wealth, and relationships tend to be the main three. Obviously with health, and even it kind of spills over into relationships, that is very visually driven. What about ones that are maybe more in the wealth category? Like maybe an accounting firm, they’re helping you save money or not waste money, or something that’s just a product that might, you just need it for your house, a window shade or something.

Nikki Lindgren (02:30.505)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffro (02:41.387)
I don’t know, not even a window shade, just like a window latch or something. Is that kind of stuff able to be visually presented in the same way that you would for these other approaches?

Nikki Lindgren (02:45.779)
Good.

Nikki Lindgren (02:53.672)
Yeah, it’s hard to answer like a definitive black and white answer here. I would say what I do like about social platforms these days is there is no quantity limitation to how much text can be on your asset. So there could be a way to visually show the ad, but the visual being a lot of words anyway, just in a more aesthetically pleasing way, at least in the meta landscape. TikTok is releasing…

static image ads as well as carousel ads. So there could be a way to tell your story or show your latch on a window or whatever it is on those platforms. But I think ultimately at like these moments in time, user generated content and creator generated content is working so well that should they have local customers who would share something, that would probably go a long way for social paid media over something the brand makes themselves.

Jeffro (03:50.337)
Yeah, that makes sense, because they already have the audience in their own way of presenting things. And so they can just incorporate it into whatever they were going to do already.

Nikki Lindgren (03:59.109)
Exactly.

Jeffro (04:00.032)
Now you mentioned TikTok. Have you noticed a drop in users or engagement ever since the whole like band TikTok thing took place?

Nikki Lindgren (04:08.86)
Yeah, we, I can’t say we’ve been spending a consistent amount for any single brand from that moment in time till today. So I actually wouldn’t have the best source of truth for that. Most of what we’ve been doing on TikTok is a little bit more geared towards a product launch or a promotion or something that’s not necessarily evergreen. I think that cost per video views remained pretty consistent and like the video completion rates haven’t changed that much, so the efficiency doesn’t seem to be that much different, at least on the paid side.

Jeffro (04:45.238)
Now, kind of in that thought, as we’re talking about the types of videos you’re going to post, whether that’s highlighting promotion or just kind of building a brand, a lot of DTC brands have kind of storytelling embedded into what they’re doing to connect emotionally with the customers. And we’ve talked about the importance of storytelling and marketing on other episodes of this show, but I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the role of storytelling in your marketing campaigns and how you guys use it.

Nikki Lindgren (05:11.036)
Yeah, I mean, I think the story goes a long way, especially when you’re talking about using the story as a creative outlet, not just like a text outlet from like comparing it to like Google search ads or even SEO. So I would say anything that really kind of compels the story of like why the founder came together to start this company and pulls at heartstrings is definitely better received than just marketing speak for the sake of converting a new customer. So I think the authenticity of storytelling and crafting, whether it’s a before and after, I we recently got new shingles on our roof. We got some new solar panels and stuff. even a photo of a before and after of what it looked like before versus now. The aesthetic nature of the improvement is something that I think would work well for any type of local, physical appearance, like service-based business.

Jeffro (06:08.396)
Do you find that leading with that story about the founder and things is still effective? Because I think a lot of brands want to know, or not, if people want, they’re not going to care about the brand until they already know, like, is this something I’m going to actually investigate and potentially buy? Then I’ll watch them about us. But if you’re running ads just about that, does that still get through?

Nikki Lindgren (06:31.238)
I think it kind of goes back to like the nature of whomever is in the ad. So if I’m an accounting firm and I’m just in it because my dad told me to do this when I was 17, 18 and here I am as like a mature adult still as an accountant, like probably not, right? But like if my story is a little bit more complex and take some dips and turns, like I think that that’s something people can respond to. And people want to be sold to people they want to spend time with, whether it’s you as the owner or a bunch of people on your team. I do think if it can come off authentically, it should be done. Now, if it’s going to sound inauthentic, then I would not be pushing that marketing team to do it. I’d be thinking of hiring like a whip smart young professional out of college who really understands social and how to connect and have that person try to convey the story on behalf of the brand.

Jeffro (07:23.967)
Right, potentially I’d say in the earlier videos, you kind of sneak in references to the story and then the more people engage with your stuff, you can get into the details and backstory and all that.

Nikki Lindgren (07:34.992)
Exactly. And that’s really how we put together a paid media funnel for social ads is like we find some educational and entertaining asset for the top of the funnel. As soon as someone’s watched X seconds of the video or X percentage of the video, then we get to bring them a little bit along the direct sales journey and a little bit more about like maybe third party credibility. So it’s really kind of thinking through that person who’s never heard of you before.

How are you to hook them and entertain them and engage them the whole way through until they convert? So I think the other thing we think about as an agency a lot is that path length. Like how many touch points does someone need with your brand across any type of placement, organic or paid, before converting? And then how many days is that? And are you kind of intercepting them at the right moment to create that recall?

Jeffro (08:28.81)
Have you seen that number of touch points increasing over time as people are more more used to just life with a smartphone in our hands?

Nikki Lindgren (08:36.902)
Yeah, the data I believe suggests it went from seven, which already seemed like a decent amount to 12 over the last couple of years. So I do believe that that’s true. think that’s the reality of where we live in just because like the attention span is so short. And if you think about some of the ways in which ads and assets are pushed forward, like sometimes are counted before anyone’s even, you know, recognized whether or not.

Jeffro (08:44.713)
Hmm.

Nikki Lindgren (09:04.52)
there was an ad in front of them. And so some of the data might be a little bit gray because it might be counting things that you and I might not say was an impression of the brand or the business.

Jeffro (09:15.976)
Yeah. Well, I think it’s also good to remember this for business owners who are looking to start doing some kind of promotion. You can’t just like, step your, you know, dip your toe in the water and be like, that didn’t work. You kind of have to be committed to do this for X period of time to get that number of impressions, even see if your ads are worth it. On the one hand, it’s a little more intimidating because you’re committing upfront something that I don’t know how it’s going to work, but it is a long-term strategy and you’ve got to decide.

We’re going to either do this or we’re not. There’s no in-between.

Nikki Lindgren (09:48.625)
Exactly.

Jeffro (09:50.132)
So since we’re talking about this, let’s talk about customer acquisition metrics like marketing efficiency ratio and ROAS, which is return on ad spend for the uninitiated. But can you talk about how you set those targets and how you make sure you’re moving toward those targets?

Nikki Lindgren (10:05.35)
Yeah, so we like to really lean into the data pretty heavily. So we’ll take the business’s historical data, ads or no ads, right? It’s just kind of like what’s happened with your business holistically. If they have been running ads, how much have they been spending? What was the return or the cost per lead or whatever main KPI we’re going after? And so that gives us a way to project out the future. So if the client’s coming to us and they’re, let’s say they are a MedSpawn, they’re like, we need 50 new leads a week because we know we convert 25 % of them and we’re trying to open to a second location. So now we know what we’re up against and what we need to spend because we have the whole way of the landscape. How many are going to come in organically through word of mouth? How many are going to be really big customers? So that’s going to allow us to map out a future and be articulate about how much we want to spend based on the data and really kind of get that buy-in from the brand owner, the business owner early because We’ve got the data model to prove it. When we get to that point, then the main paid media KPIs are going to vary a little bit based on the type of business it is. So for us in the direct to consumer space with beauty and lifestyle brands, it’s generally return on ad spend and we’ll set that again based on the history. So if the brand’s historically done about a 4X, we’ll kind of look at the average last rolling four months and see what new promotions they have coming up or new assets we’re planning together to say how much better or worse it’s going to be. And that’s kind how we build out the model. Sometimes we’re looking at year over year comps compared to month over month at a time like Black Friday, Cyber Monday is a good example of where we’re probably not looking at October’s averages. We’re looking at last November and December averages to figure out how those holidays will do. So we’ll take kind of into consideration their high purchase timeframes, their historical data to build these models.

Jeffro (11:49.064)
Mm-hmm.

Nikki Lindgren (12:01.468)
And then for us, you you think sometimes a third party vendor would be like, well, I just want to look good. So I’m going to low ball all of the expectations that I can pat myself on the back. like, it’s, it’s just like, it’s not even fun to do that anymore. Right. So like with brands, we’re really trying to stretch and improve performance. so there were times where we’ve had like much more efficient cost per leads than we, than we thought we would. And so then we start reflowing everything to be more realistic to the last four months as opposed to like what we thought six months ago and maybe a relationship started or something. We just had a call this morning where a med spy I think in Florida was we thought we’d do like an $80 lead and they’re coming in at like $27 right now. Great promotions, but like very it’s like why would why would we even talk to them about $80 and say like how much better we are? It just makes us look like we had a really bad model there, right? So that’s where we kind of like re-up.

Jeffro (12:47.729)
Nice.

Nikki Lindgren (12:58.928)
and re-establish expectations rather than just say we are way more efficient than we thought we would be.

Jeffro (12:59.111)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffro (13:05.573)
Yeah, well that’s a good position to find yourself in, better than the other way, right?

Nikki Lindgren (13:09.638)
Exactly. Yeah. Which sometimes we’re like, you know, there’s that game of like, if you’re not looking at their backend data and like, where they keep their CRM and customer insights, like, you could drive really efficient CPL, but they could be the worst customers for them ever. And their conversion rate of 25 % could go down to 2%. And then it’s like, can you really pat yourself on the back and be like, well, the weeds were cheap, so just take it. So we really try to like have those candid conversations with our clients every week or if not two weeks.

Jeffro (13:33.137)
Yeah.

Nikki Lindgren (13:39.144)
to look at their data versus our data and match up to make sure. There are cases where we would rather pay more for a lead to make sure it’s the right lead than continue to be as efficient as possible if it brings down their conversion rate.

Jeffro (13:54.183)
So when you’re doing this and trying to optimize those and obviously bring down the cost per lead, are there signals that you’re looking for that tell you, okay, maybe this isn’t a creative problem that needs a different headline or different image. Maybe it’s the offer that we need to split test and try something else. How do you decide what to switch around?

Nikki Lindgren (14:11.444)
Yeah. And I think this is like the strength of building the relationships with the business owner is really important because we want to learn early on, what, what range we have to give them feedback, right? Like we don’t want to say like, you gave us a 10 % off promo and that’s all we can use ever. And no one likes it. And so like your business isn’t succeeding because your promo is bad. So what we would then do is be like, okay, well, we know the take rate of 10 % off is blah we think we could have a better success rate, like give them examples of other clients or other things we’re seeing in the industry of $200 off or whatever the equivalent dollar amount is of 10%. Like, do you mind if we test it both ways? Can we go 15 % off? Right? So that’s when we’re kind of looking at that level of stagnation where we’re like, okay, this is the most efficient we can go. So do we want to continue trying to grow that efficiency or are we all okay with these numbers?

So that those are usually like the layers in which we’ll test and I’d say after our first three months with any brand is when we’re really starting to test more aggressively because now we have like a good benchmark in terms of what the reality can look like and how quickly we see Ad fatigue and all of that

Jeffro (15:25.414)
And is there a consistent breakdown between video ads versus image versus text? Are you always doing a little bit of all of them, or does it just depend on the customer?

Nikki Lindgren (15:36.518)
It really depends a little bit on the product and the customer. Like we work with CBD brands, we work with sexual wellness, like things in those lanes you can’t be too visual about and you actually have to be like a little cagey about what the products are in some cases to get them approved by the ad platform. So we’ll take a little bit into account how they’ve been restricted in the past if they have, and then like what their creative team is actually capable of doing and come up with the best solution there.

I mean, I won’t lie that in past years, like so many of the downfalls came from not great assets from brands, but now with AI leaning in, like we use a platform called Bestever, which is really awesome at creating augmented assets. It’s not going to create something for you from scratch. And so just like using those paid tools to enhance quickly the look and feel of your asset, whether it be video, static, or just text is really helpful in just moving the dial quickly and not having the back and forth and like the bottlenecks that we’ve experienced in years past.

Jeffro (16:42.939)
Right, well know with video ads there’s more that goes into creating it, right? And you usually do need someone to record it and there’s a little back and forth with the editing. So it’s more of an investment to create a video ad than it is for an image ad, for example. But I was curious if you see across the board, if it’s worth it, to do that, do the video ads get a better return consistently? And so then maybe we should do more of

Nikki Lindgren (17:06.9)
It’s interesting because if you asked me in early 2024, I would have said like, absolutely, like that was everything we did in 2023 and in early parts of 2024. But I think in more recent time, like video has or sorry, static has performed super well, especially for these big offers and promotional moments. And it is the text overlay asset. So brand colors, but huge fonts, like take up the whole real estate with words.

works well. So I think the algorithms and the platforms are starting to favor static a little bit more than they have in the past. And like, maybe we’ll see that coming around is like, people do start to tire of real or fake testimonials and things like that, like creator generated content might be coming to a little bit of you know, like it’s plateau here. I mean, kind of hopefully, right, like we’ve maybe been oversaturated by them, but at this moment in time, we’re still looking at a little bit of a mix of the creator generated, proper static and video made in-house by the brand or business as the mix. It’s like a part of each.

Jeffro (18:16.143)
Well, it’s interesting as you’re talking about that, I was thinking how it’s not just over saturated. Maybe it’s also we’re overstimulated, right? We see all these videos constantly. Our brain has to work hard to pay attention to these cuts every couple seconds because that’s what all the viral video courses teach you, right? You got to keep the attention. And so maybe the static ad is just a reprieve. And we’re like, huh, I could take my time on this one. It’s a little less overwhelming.

Nikki Lindgren (18:36.403)
Yeah.

Nikki Lindgren (18:39.762)
Yeah, I love it. Yeah, I mean, there’s probably something too. wasn’t it, wasn’t it 2024 the Super Bowl ad? Was it Google or Calm or someone just had like an aesthetically pleasing like, you know, nature view. And it was like 30 second commercial spot of just like, take a moment. And I was like, my God, that hit me so hard.

Jeffro (19:01.453)
Yeah, it’s amazing. And it’s, don’t think about it when we’re in it day to day, but when you take a step back, maybe you can see these things sometimes. So when we’re talking about these paid ad campaigns, how long does it take you typically to get a paid campaign up, running and profitable? I know that’s a very, it’s going to change completely, but what’s your process for taking someone through that from A to Z?

Nikki Lindgren (19:09.278)
Mm-hmm.

Nikki Lindgren (19:25.5)
Yeah, so generally when we start with a new business, we’re first looking at to make sure they have the ad account set up properly, that we’re going to track the thing we said we wanted to track. Usually Google’s a little bit more straightforward for Google Ads. It can connect really seamlessly into GA4, et cetera. So should that be the case, we’re usually live with new Google search ads and performance max ads within seven business days. I’d say like five to seven business days, and that’s getting client approval for all the assets being used, as well as copy being shared. Meta usually takes a little bit longer or TikTok because we’re trying to figure out the asset play. So should they have assets that can go live right away? It would be the same timeframe. When we need more assets, it’s sort of the back and forth of when can we get them? Do you want us to produce them as the client producing them? Do they have a consultant? So usually I’d say social ads are live within three to five weeks depending on like how we’re working with every brand and client. Now the question about when will you see results? It’s a little bit difficult to say across the board because it’s going to level a little bit based on how much you spend and what we’re expecting the cost per acquisition to be. So I would say for brands that sell something that’s like a couple hundred dollars, they’re probably going to know within 14 days whether or not said campaign creative initiative is going to help them. If it’s a higher consideration, higher touch point play, it might be five to six weeks till we even know if that strategy is gonna work, let alone, yeah, if it’ll convert or not. So I think it kind of goes back to understand your customer’s purchase journey with you and knowing how quick after learning about you the first time they’re gonna convert.

For us, we do our own ads for our agency because we’re in the paid media game as a business to grow our business. And we generally don’t know if a new strategy is gonna pan out for five to seven weeks.

Jeffro (21:33.431)
Well, and just for those listening too, if you’re not doing this all the time, I want to remind people conversions on the ads is not the same as conversions on your landing page, right? Because your agency might come back and say, hey, we launched your campaign. It’s looking great. Your conversion rate is way up here. This is awesome. And you’re like, it seems like cricket’s over here. I’m not getting all these meetings or sales. What are you talking about? And that’s because it’s a separate problem that you need to solve. So I don’t know if you guys help with that at that point and actually point it out because

Nikki Lindgren (21:55.892)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffro (22:00.586)
A lot of agencies don’t and they do a disservice to their clients when they’re just like, well, it’s working on our end. And then the clients are just sad.

Nikki Lindgren (22:01.118)
Yeah.

Nikki Lindgren (22:07.462)
Right, I mean we even see that in-house sometimes, right? Of all the leads we get in a given month, a handful of them are garbage. And it’s like we’ve cleaned up as much as we can, but like when an SEO back-linking company wants to like do back-links for me, and I’m like, well we do SEO ourselves too, like why would we hire you? Like it is what it is, I can’t, there’s no way I can like, you know, force them not to leave data on my website to say they’re interested in working together. So that’s where it becomes really important to make sure.

what the ads platform is tracking is really what’s meaningful for your business. So there’s moments where pixels break and tracking breaks. I think there was a week where, you know, the platform, Google ads in this instance said we have like three times the number of leads we had. it’s like, cool, I really wish that was true, but that’s not what the reality is. So then my team and I go back and fix those components. So I think it’s really important to like make sure you trust your partner enough to share with them.

whatever you can share with them about the back end of your business so that they can validate when there are anomalies that it’s good for your business or that something broke technically on their end. And yeah, it’s you really want to hire people who know the type of business you’re in well and like the platforms you use well so that they’re solving your problems, not just like finding a different thing to put a bandaid on that ultimately isn’t.

Jeffro (23:33.548)
Yeah. So as we’re talking about this, I know it can sound complicated for someone who hasn’t done paid ads before. What would your advice be to a service business owner who hasn’t done ads? Maybe they’re thinking about it, but they kind of feel overwhelmed by how crazy it sounds or even what the cost might be.

Nikki Lindgren (23:50.96)
Yeah, there are so many different ways in which you can approach paid. And so like, can’t say that there’s any ones that are necessarily wrong, but where I would say I found most new emerging local businesses and even e-commerce businesses fail is they’ve set up ads with the goal of impressions or traffic, but their ultimate goal is a new customer, right? So it’s like, okay.

Sure, you can spend four weeks building your awareness and then flip to traffic and then flip to a conversion objective. Like if you know from the beginning, you want to focus on getting a new customer, set it up properly to do that out of the gate. You can hire someone on Fiverr or Upwork to put the pixel in place, should it be complicated, probably 50, 100 bucks. So sure, there’s an investment, but it doesn’t have to be big.

but I would say like where you’re setting up to just say like, ran traffic campaigns or I ran awareness and my business didn’t grow. Well, you weren’t incentivizing the platform to help you grow your business. were incentivizing the platform to, you know, pay to show people your brand and you know, there’s room for that, right? I’m a marketer. get it. Like we have to do all of those bits, but if ultimately you need a customer, don’t run an awareness campaign, Run either full funnel, is awareness traffic and then conversion or just run conversion campaigns because with all the machine learnings of the platforms these days, like they’re, they’re all kind of one in the same a customer as a customer. Like that platform is going to help you find who your best customer is for you.

Jeffro (25:34.207)
I think that could be a whole other episode in itself. So we’ll save that for another day. But before we wrap up, did want to ask, you we talked mostly about paid ads today, but how big of a role does SEO play in the success of the DTC brands that you work with? Can you talk about that just briefly?

Nikki Lindgren (25:51.22)
Well, I feel like this last year, year and a half, has really kind of changed so much with AI coming front and center for general consumers like us. And so the data now is 60 % of Google searches end without a click. People are getting their information on Google. So if you’re in the space where you can educate someone without having to force them to your website, that’s not necessarily a loss if they can remember it came from you.

So I would say in the landscape of ads and SEO, the complementary features of the two have not been stronger. And I think for brands that are a little bit cash strapped for marketing in general, doing better with SEO has been a longstanding solution because then you don’t have to pay for that click you would have otherwise had to run a Google ad for. So I would say, you know, our

Brands that do SEO well are getting 50 % of their revenues from SEO. It’s usually still not higher, but that’s because they’re kind of running a little bit of full funnel, full marketing platform marketing, meaning like their organic social does okay. Their email marketing does okay. So I would say, yeah, gaming for SEO to be a big part of your business, but not the only driver of the businesses.

important and when you get to that place you can spend less on ads or reallocate ad spend into kind of like the new niches and corners that you’re trying to build.

Jeffro (27:28.17)
Yeah, but I mean, 50 % of your revenue from SEO, like that’s huge. mean, that just demonstrates it works. You can get that traffic and that’s nothing to sneeze at.

Nikki Lindgren (27:37.864)
Mm hmm.

Jeffro (27:39.136)
Well, thank you for joining me today, Nikki. I really appreciate you sharing your expertise and your experience with us. For those of you guys at home, if you’re listening to this and you know someone who has a startup consumer packaged goods brand, Nikki’s company Pinnock is providing qualifying CPG brands with a choice of 10K in ad spend or a full quarter of SEO services for free. This is a great deal for those who meet the criteria. I have one last question for you, Nikki. If you had to give one piece of advice to a service business owner looking to just overall step up their digital marketing game, what would it be?

Nikki Lindgren (28:09.95)
Hmm. If they like the traffic coming to their website, it would be doing something to optimize an action on their website, whether that be email signup or a lead fill. think making sure to capitalize on who’s there and get something from them is so valuable, especially with the cookie list future coming where all this data is going to be anonymized. So like the more information you can gather from a visitor.

So I would say try to tweak tweak something on your website to get more people to sign up.

Jeffro (28:45.385)
Yeah, makes sense. Great advice. Well, thank you again for being here, Nikki, and thanks to all of you guys for listening. If you thought this was valuable, please leave a review for the show on Apple or Spotify. Now take care and we’ll see you next time.

Nikki Lindgren (28:55.828)
Thank you, Jephra.