<strong>Jim:</strong> Hey everybody. Here at jewelry marketing guy, I am always looking for the best solutions to market our jewelry stores. Whether it’s the most affordable or whether it’s just the best. And I think I found the best. I’m on the phone with my buddy, Jeff Arnold, from 4 Spot Marketing. And Jeff is a specialist in Google AdWords. Now, I know you’ve been going to trade shows for years and people have started to talk about how important it is for us to get involved in Google AdWords. But I could tell you from my own experience, it’s pretty technical. It’s pretty involved. And I know most jewelers are busy enough running their jewelry stores to not become experts at Google AdWords. And so, I’m glad to have Jeff with us right now to explain a little bit about what he can do, the problems he can solve for us. And, first of all, Jeff, welcome. But tell us, why Google AdWords? Why is this thing so great?

<strong>Jeff:</strong> Well, thanks, Jim. I’m happy to share some information on how the whole process works and why it’s beneficial because I know that the whole realm of what advertising is the best to use is definitely confusing. One of the big benefits to Google is the ability for you to have it turned on immediately. You can go in and you can say, I want to start a campaign tomorrow. And you can have a campaign up and running tomorrow or you can be on Google tomorrow. You can also turn it off when you want to. So, unlike mass media where you could put a billboard up and it could run for two or three weeks past Valentine’s Day, for example, and you’re paying for all that dead time, with Google, you can start and stop campaigns whenever you want to. So if you’re running them for a specific time frame, a specific sale, a specific event, you can turn them on and off at will.

So the other major benefit to Google Ad Words is that you can really narrow down and target the audience that you want. So we run some campaigns that are highly targeted just for guys so we don’t bother wasting our potential clicks on females because this ad is run directly for the guys. And then we also have people that can go in, we have customers that will target certain areas. So if they know that one area of town is an older demographic, they’ll focus on doing some anniversary band things there. And if they know that there’s another part of town that has a younger demographic, they can focus doing engagement ring sales in that area. So it gives you a lot of flexibility and a lot of mobility.

<strong>Jim:</strong> Sound like it makes a lot of sense, especially for jewelers perhaps in larger markets that can’t afford traditional advertising.

<strong>Jeff:</strong> Yeah. I mean, the traditional advertising is extremely expensive and you’re kind of stuck with whatever their going rate is. Whereas with AdWords, you have the ability to choose the budget that you wanna spend and you have the ability to make that fluctuate. So we have a lot of customers who will go and as we get closer to Christmas, they will sometimes double their budget for Ad spend because obviously that’s when jewelers are making hay. And then as they get outside of Christmas, they’ll tone it down. As they get closer to Valentine’s Day or Mother’s Day, they’ll ramp back up a little bit for those specific holidays. And then turn around during the summer time and go with a much lower campaign that’s really designed to be more of a branding campaign for them as opposed to really aggressively looking for sales.

<strong>Jim:</strong> Okay. Well, how easy is your program…like I said, we’re busy jewelers, we’re busy doing everything that it is to run the jewelry store. How easy is it to implement with your program?

<strong>Jeff:</strong> The beauty is that we take all the pain away from the jeweler. We are experts at AdWords. We have been working with jewelers for probably over seven years now, so we are experts in the jewelry space. And we know what they’re looking for. So what we do is we’ve about a 15 minute phone call to get started. We wanna find out really what your focus is. Are you really focused on custom jewelry, are you an engagement ring shop, are you branded shop, are you a custom brand shop? So we wanna find out kinda how you approach things and then we look at figuring out which type of advertising we want to do.

There are two types of ads that we can do inside of Google. One is gonna be your traditional search ad, which is a text based ad. So when you go to google.com and you type in, diamond engagement ring, that’s gonna be a search based ad and the text ad that shows up on Google search page. The other type of advertising that we have too is within the re-marketing realm of AdWords. And re-marketing are those ads that like once you visit a website, those ads seem to follow you around the Internet. Well, we can do those for a client but inside of that division are some really cool tools that we, we’ve learned over the years. And we have what we call our ninja re-marketing. And with that, we can actually target and display your ads to people that we know have visited your , websites. So if you know you’re going after somebody who has searched for jewelry and been to a jewelry website already so you know that you’re really hitting a hot market.

<strong>Jim:</strong> Wow. That sounds fantastic.

<strong>Jeff:</strong> Yeah. That’s some really cool stuff.

<strong>Jim:</strong> Because you know they’re hot. They just may not know who to go to. That’s awesome.

<strong>Jeff:</strong> Exactly, exactly.

<strong>Jim:</strong> So does this cost a thousand bucks a month or what does this cost?

<strong>Jeff:</strong> We have a flat admin fee. Our admin fee runs at 295 a month and then you can spend whatever you want on top of that for advertising. Quick caveat, if you’re gonna spend over $2500 a month then we might get a new different pricing plan. But most of our customers, on top of the admin fee, they’re looking at between three to five hundred dollars a month in their actual ad spend. So that’s the money that we’re physically spending with Google to pay for the ads that they’re running. So…but that can be anything from $50 to $50,000, if they want to. I mean, it’s really flexible.

<strong>Jim:</strong> But from what I understand, the neat thing about that is it’s not guesswork spending. You’re buying people that are actually clicking and you’re buying eyeballs, looking at what you want them to look at, right?

<strong>Jeff:</strong> Exactly. You’re not paying for anything until somebody clicks on your ad. So you know that somebody has taken an action before you’re actually getting charged for it.

<strong>Jim:</strong> All right, fantastic. Do you have any success stories of customers that you’ve worked with.

<strong>Jeff:</strong> Yeah. I mean, I won’t use names but we have a customer that we’re working with. And she’s in Virginia and we started her campaign. She was nervous. She was like, I don’t have a lot of money to spend on advertising and I don’t know if this will work, I never did it before. And so we ran her ad campaign, focused 100% engagement rings, that was it. And, within two weeks she gave me a call she just, hey I just need to let you know that I just I just hit a $2700 engagement ring sale and they found us on Google. And I’m like, oh that’s awesome. I think she was spending about $300 a month on ads. So great return on investment there.

We have another customer in Georgia who’s been doing pretty aggressive on the AdWords side and we’ve been doing their campaigns for a couple years. And I got within a period of time of about three weeks, I got three separate emails. And the first was, hey just wanna let you know I just sold a $10,000 anniversary band in X part of town and the only advertising they do in that part of town is the Google AdWords for the anniversary band. So he knew that that came directly from the ads that we were doing. The next week I got an email saying, hey I just hit a $5,000 custom piece and the only custom advertising he’s doing is by way of AdWords. And then next week later he came up with like a $3,000 engagement ring sale in another part of town and that is the part of town where we’re focused our engagement ring advertising. So definitely getting some really good results whenever people are out there and they’re doing their searches and driving people to the website.

<strong>Jim:</strong> Right. It sounds like a beautiful solution for jewelers, like I said before, that can’t afford traditional media in their market, the big, big markets. But also like you said, this one lady that called and she said I just want to try this out. Sounds like you could try it out for $50 or $30.

<strong>Jeff:</strong> Yeah, exactly. We don’t have any type of long-term commitment or anything. You can do it for a month if you want to and then if things are going well, which obviously they are, continue on and go from there. So it definitely gives you the flexibility. And as I mentioned with, you mentioned about trying it out, I mentioned flexibility for the budget. We have people that are on for an entire year and they’ll graduate their budget based on busy times or during the summer they’ll kind of slow down a little bit because that’s obviously a downtime for jewelers. But as they get closer to Christmas then they’ll ramp up pretty aggressively.

<strong>Jim:</strong> Very, very nice. Well, I tell you what, thanks for spending this time with us because, as I said before, it’s kind of a…it is kind of a conundrum. And I’ll be honest, I’ve gone and done some Google AdWords courses myself. And I looked at it and I said, I just wanna be a creative guy, I don’t want to get into all these. This is too much.

<strong>Jeff:</strong> Right. Exactly, and a lot of people…and real quick, just one thing. A lot of people do is they’ll still jump and they’ll try to do AdWords on their own, which is you can always try that. But what happens is they go in and they actually throw out a bid and say, I wanna be number one. So they throw out this bid to be the number one position. And they end up wasting lots and lots of money because what people don’t realize is that whenever you’re working in the AdWords space–using totally hypothetical numbers–but you could be paying $10 a click to be in the number one position, $5 a click to be in the number 2 position and maybe only a dollar a click to be in the number 3 position. So, what we do and where we add a lot of value to this process is that we actually monitor the clicks spend that you have, your click ads on a regular basis. And we’ll go in and make adjustments on a keyword based level to really optimize your campaigns so that you’re not hitting the number one spot, you’re actually hitting maybe the two or two and a half position. So that now if you had a $500 ad spend instead of only getting 50 clicks at $10 a click to be a number 2, now you’re getting 200 clicks at 250 a click because you’re in the number like 2 and a half position. So huge benefits there with what we can do as far as managing your campaigns.

<strong>Jim:</strong> Very, very nice. Well, I’ll tell you what, I’ve got Jeff’s information right down here on the screen. So we’ll put that down there. So just an e-mail or a call to Jeff at 4 Spot Marketing and get going on Google AdWords. It’s important, it’s the wave of the future. And it’s not even the future, it’s the now. There are companies out there that I’ve seen from Purple Mattress, for example, Duluth Trading, other big major companies that this is all they’re doing. And so it can work for jewelry stores with half a million dollar volume or $300,000 a year volume. It’s whatever you determine that spend is gonna be. So thanks, Jeff, for spending the time with us and give Jeff a call, for crying out loud. Give Jeff a call.

<strong>Jeff:</strong> Thanks Jim, I appreciate the time.

<strong>Jim:</strong> See you guys.