28. Intentional Marketing with Nelson Jordan

Burhaan Pattel  0:00  
Hey, welcome to the marketing stack podcast. And in this episode, I'm talking to Nelson, who is actually a guru. He's he's definitely one of the one of the people that I look up to in terms of marketing, and just having more intention in terms of how he says things, how he works, how he does things, how he just interacts with me on the on the podcast, and I think you're gonna enjoy the episode as well, because we cover quite a lot about intention, we cover quite a lot of marketing trends and things that are going on right now in the industry. So with that being said, enjoy the episode.

Burhaan Pattel  0:34  
Nelson, thank you so much for doing this interview with me, the podcast is going well, I've had some very interesting people. And I think you're gonna bring a lot of value to the audience as well, just to introduce you quickly. So you've been working with ecommerce businesses and SaaS businesses on content strategy, conversion, copywriting, digital marketing, and a whole host of other things. And now you have, or you started the podcast for working from home or called working from home podcast, I'm excited to get into the episode and actually jump into a little bit of your story, what you've seen gone on over the last year or so. And just get to know you a little bit and hopefully provide some value to the audience.

Nelson Jordan  1:18  
Yeah, definitely. Let's do it.

Burhaan Pattel  1:19  
So Nelson, thank you so much again. And so give us a little bit of a backstory tell us where you started, how you actually got into the work that you're doing and the value that you're giving to your clients. And then we'll talk about COVID, obviously, because it's topical, and it's challenging, and it's a whole host of other things.

Nelson Jordan  1:38  
Sure. So I suppose my story starts kind of 10-11 years ago, I'm not going to bore you with all of that. But just essentially, I've been involved in digital marketing and some guys or other for 10-11 years now. I've got a master's in marketing, after which I went to work for Hitachi as kind of an in house marketer. And after just under a year, I left there to move to Birmingham to become part of a digital marketing and PR agency, kind of I got my start within paid and organic social, which just kicking off at that time, really starting to get big. Then I moved into PPC and SEO and finally conversion rate optimization.

Nelson Jordan  2:25  
These days, actually, as you said, rightly that I'm more involved in content strategy, content creation and conversion copywriting really, for SaaS and ecom businesses. But when I first started freelancing, which was a few years ago, now three or four years, I think I was actually kind of just working on the paid social side. So I worked mainly with ecom businesses, managing paid spends between well, up to kind of 150 or 200,000 a month, mainly on Facebook, and Instagram, had a great time doing it. But eventually, I kind of found like my passion for the actual execution and the tactical side was slightly waning. That kind of brings us to to COVID, right.

Nelson Jordan  3:16  
So in about, I think, April, or may 2020, my biggest client at the time, because I was running it very much as a freelancer rather than an agency, my biggest client fired me, which was bad at the time for a couple of days, but actually was, was fine and actually really needed to happen. I wasn't enjoying working with the client, they had had some really tough times with COVID, because they were an event space business. So you can imagine how badly they were hit. And they were just letting go of kind of everybody that they they could to, you know, to do the right thing basically to stay afloat. I hated working for them. Absolutely hated it.

Nelson Jordan  4:04  
But, you know, the the money that I got from It was great. My wife and I were living in Valencia in Spain at the time, I had to work very, very few hours. So you know, I could make a decent salary, you know, for Spain, while working between one and two hours a day basically, and still make a good enough salary, not to save anything. But you know, to live the lifestyle to enjoy the tapas to kind of live that outdoor life that the Spanish love. So it served its purpose, but it was really kind of almost like a kick when this news kind of came in, but I'm so glad it did because it kind of forced me to reevaluate what I was enjoying and on what I wasn't and I was really enjoying the lifestyle, but I wasn't enjoying the work I was doing at all.

Nelson Jordan  5:00
So I made the decision that I was going to get a few clients on to replace that. And luckily, and it was just luck, I managed to replace kind of two thirds of that income within about three days. It was just somebody reaching out through through my website. So that's why SEO is important guys. So I managed to replace that income, which definitely took the pressure off. And I made the decision that actually, when I was going to build this backup, I was going to do so in the form of a small agency that actually didn't involve me much in the day to day. So we've got kind of two freelancers that I work with, and kind of like additional people that we bring in for design and stuff like that as well.

Nelson Jordan  5:47  
But actually, I, you know, we've got three or four clients now. And I do probably an hour a month on each of those clients. So I probably work three or four hours on the kind of agency business, which is called the e commerce profits if anybody's interested. And that's just e com only. Facebook and Instagram just paid ads, basically. But that's a great business because it pays me the equivalent of a salary. And I only have to work three or four, four, kind of hours a month on those, which is great. And that really freed has freed me up massively to concentrate on the stuff that I actually really liked doing. So I kind of looked back on on my journey, when I was kind of had this moment where I was like, wait, well, if I don't enjoy this, what am I actually going to do.

Nelson Jordan  6:38  
And the one thing that I found that was consistent throughout my journey was content. So whether it was when I was involved in SEO, or when I was involved in social content was just something that was just there, you know, throughout the whole thing, and I really enjoyed doing it, I had a lot of experience in keyword research, I had a lot of case studies and things that I could point to, you know, like people like Pyrex, I'm not sure if you're familiar with them, I worked with them. And the work that I did was responsible for more than a 50% increase in organic search, which was great for an already established brand.

Nelson Jordan  7:18  
So I had all of these case studies, you know, that I could point to, and kind of things that were just kind of given me the inkling hang on I can do this. And I can do this on a high level. And what I found is that because I've been the person who has actually been implementing these marketing campaigns for e commerce businesses, for SaaS businesses, I could almost leapfrog a lot of the other people doing it. And, you know, almost cut out the first year or two of freelancing in that particular genre, or industry, and jump straight to commanding quite decent prices.

Nelson Jordan  8:01  
And obviously, I've increased an increasing increase. But actually, I was able to skip a lot of those steps. Because, you know, would you rather hire a content strategist and a writer who only knows about this stuff through research? Or would you hire one who has ran these campaigns themselves, that has owned their own e commerce business and sold their own e commerce businesses as I have? And the answers like a pretty resounding while we'll hire the person who's actually done that, and is basically just writing about what they've done versus, you know, has to approach it like a writer, like I approach it as kind of a tactician, I suppose.

Burhaan Pattel  8:42  
Yeah, I'm a, I'm a big believer of practical application, and selling, selling a skill once you've got some experience. Not, you don't necessarily need a whole lot of experience. Because they, you know, I think clients understand that there's a form of experimentation, especially clients who have, you know, a more mature business or, you know, going into that maturity with a, they understand that marketing is all about not throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what works, but, you know, educating yourself in calculating, or using best cases, from data that's available that's accessible online. And it's, it's, you unpack so many things there, but I want to focus on sort of, in my mind, this two camps, when it comes to marketing.

Burhaan Pattel  9:35  
It's the guys who are organic, and the guys who are paid, and you've, you've got experience on both ends. So maybe talk a little bit about that feeling because you've spoken about the advantage of it from a client point of view. So, you know, positioning yourself and saying, well, you've got experience on both sides. You know, what works on both sides, but how does that feel, you know, like, cuz this is a passionate industry, right? The the guys are in either one camp or the other. It's kind of Apple versus Samsung, right or Android versus Apple. It's, it's, it's the end, you've crossed both sides. So tell me a little bit more about how that happened. And sort of what you see in the industry today with regards to that.

Nelson Jordan  10:25  
Sure. So I'm going to push back a little bit, I think it depends totally on where you are, whether you think there are like these two distinct camps, like paid versus organic, that's much of a muchness for me. On a tactical level, you're probably going to be doing one or the other as the bulk of your, your job. And then you kind of get into this thing of like, Okay, well, you only see the benefits of what you do, and you don't see the downsides. And you don't see the benefits of the the other one. Actually, it very much depends on what your goals are, and what kind of timeline you're thinking on, as you need to kind of start with the goals in mind and almost map backwards.

Nelson Jordan  11:13  
And I know very, very few businesses that succeed at the top level, the sort of scale of businesses that I'm thinking of in my head, that don't combine both of them really, really well. So let's take a couple of examples just to make it concrete. So if you're a SaaS business, and you're VC funded, and you've been given some incredibly ambitious growth targets to meet, and you need to, I don't know, forex your growth in six months, you're not going to be doing a whole lot of organic work, like you might still be creating content, but the content that you do create is going to be used elsewhere in the funnel, it's going to be used in your paid campaigns, or it's going to be used in the back end campaigns in email, and things like that, you know, his upsells and ways to grab people and pull them into demos and things like that.

Nelson Jordan  12:12  
So you're not going to be fussed about organic when you're thinking on a six month timeline. And the bulk of your spend is going to be on paid probably performance marketing. And it's going to be on your PPC, it's going to be on your social. That's just that's just the lay of the land, right. Versus if you're still kind of a startup in the SaaS space, but you're bootstrapped, I think you're going to be more likely to want to kind of make that balance a little bit kind of more even. You're still going to want to have an element of paid marketing in order to bring users in, because the more users that you have, the quicker that you can test, the quicker that you can get feedback. And that feedback can be brought back in to then improve the product.

Nelson Jordan  13:03  
So you need an element of that coming in, or referrals or partnerships with other businesses that that kind of talk to your your key audience and have that connection with them. But you're likely to do more of the organic stuff, right. And the reason for this, and the reason why content is so important to SaaS businesses, is because anybody who has run paid campaigns for SaaS businesses knows how crazy expensive they are, especially something like paid search. Like for some of these terms, you could be talking 15 or $25 per click. So because the products are so expensive, the customer lifetime value is a lot higher than kind of a one off purchase through like an e commerce business for example.

Nelson Jordan  13:54  
If I sign up to I don't know, something like ah refs, which is the keyword research tool that that I use, it's like 99 or $120 a month. So if they get me as a customer, they're going to make well over a grand from me in a year versus an e commerce business that wants to sell me a T shirt is the T shirt probably costs 20 $30. And actually the margin on that is quite small because then you have to factor in logistics and delivery and that sort of thing. So it's very much working backwards from those goals reverse engineering what needs to happen. And also thinking about the internal and external pressures from from things like stakeholders, what else is going on in your business to kind of determine what's the right mix for you? It's it's never really a my eyes, okay, we'll just do paid or just do organic, and you're missing a lot of opportunity there if you approach things in that way.

Burhaan Pattel  14:54  
Yeah, most definitely. And, you know, campaigns that I've run, both on Facebook and Google there's always an uptick in organic, while the paid campaigns are running, because people sometimes screenshot, you know, the ad on Facebook, they make a note of the link. And then they come to the come to the site organically, either directly, or they're searching in it and using the link in a Google search. So that does happen. But there's also a third leg, and it's customer referrals. So you mentioned sort of customer lifetime value, and you know, how long people are clients of yours, or how long their stay as clients or as customers.

Burhaan Pattel  15:37  
And so, you know, that's the piece also that I think a lot of companies miss is, from a marketing point of view, when you paying 50 100 $200, to get somebody into your funnel, and become a customer, you want those people to rave about, you share the experience with other people in their network, or friends or whoever. So that that kind of pays for itself, then your lifetime, customer value goes up for each customer, and then your cost per click or your cost per acquisition actually reduces. And a lot of people are not thinking that far into the future. And I guess like, from an SEO point of view, obviously, you spoke about the long game, and it takes longer to rank and, and all of these things, it's a lot more effort over the over time.

Burhaan Pattel  16:27  
But talk about that. So you know, in a world where we're sort of surrounded by apps where everything is short attention span, we've got three seconds to make an impression seven times that we have to hit somebody, before they actually decide to do anything with us. Tik Tok videos are like super short, and they're just, you know, mindlessly people going mindlessly through the feed. And then here we've got this long term strategy where if you really want to grow up a brand, you've got to think long term. And that's to talk to him about from a copywriting and a conversion point of view, how do you handle that? And how do you approach it?

Nelson Jordan  17:10  
So I think actually, this myth about short attention spans is that, you know, it's it's not true, it is a myth. What actually happens is people have short consideration spans, which means that you only have a few seconds to actually impress somebody or intrigue them or pique their interest to get them to continue to pay attention to you. Actually, what you'll find is people have massive attention spans, that's why people listen to hour long, two hour long Joe Rogan podcast, right? Like, don't try and tell him that people only have like this six, seven second, you know, goldfish attention span, it's just not the case. It's why we binge on Netflix and things like that for several hours after we should have stopped watching.

Nelson Jordan  18:04  
So I feel like thinking like that almost gives yourself an excuse, and an owl to almost say, well, it's just the customers, it's just the consumers, they don't have this attention span, I think they don't have an attention span for, for perhaps the products that that person is selling. So that's the first thing that that I want to get out the way. It's one of the one of the things that I think that has saved me less pain, since kind of going into content strategy. And it's because of previous pain of working with those clients, is I very rarely take on clients who haven't already had some experience of content, have put together kind of a strategy themselves, have worked with writers before, have had experience of managing those teams, or at least seeing what those teams have done.

Nelson Jordan  18:57  
Because it's a big kind of it upfront investment for those people. Because you need to put the process in place, you need to do the keyword research, you need to actually create all of the different content assets, whether they be, you know, blogs, or white papers, or podcasts or videos, or, you know, tweets or whatever that looks like, it is a big investment. It's not the same as you know, back in the day I when I was kind of in charge of PPC for the agency, all I would do is I can have a campaign up and running in the next hour. You know, pick, pick the keywords very, very quickly, and then write a couple of ads and then get things running and it will be serving by the end of the day.

Nelson Jordan  19:43  
Content Strategy does not work like that. It's very much like let's let's get in it for the long term. Let's kind of create this content to position ourselves as either the thought leaders or let's pick pick a particular angle to, that we can be thought of within the market, particular positioning and stuff like that. So what you tend to see is that when most I, when I work with most companies, they've either got kind of a low or a medium domain authority. So I don't want to, by the way, I don't want to get stuck into talking about content strategy just in terms of content that ranks but a lot of people are familiar with kind of SEO. So it's easier example.

Nelson Jordan  20:31  
Actually, content is a lot more than that. But we can touch on that in a minute perhaps. But for for that sort of content, actually, it's about kind of mapping out which parts of the funnel you need to create content for, and based on the customer journey, and there's a lot of understanding that even goes into that before you even start writing content.

Burhaan Pattel  20:55  
Yeah, 100%

Nelson Jordan  20:56  
Does that go some way into answering the question?

Burhaan Pattel  20:59  
Oh, yeah, you went deep. I mean, like to go, just take a step back. And in terms of attention span, I really like what you said there, because I think a lot of marketers, maybe bad marketers, or not so good marketers have used that as an excuse to their clients to say, Oh, it's the, it's the clients fault. Not looking at the content, not looking at the structure of the content, not looking at, oh, we actually didn't plan the content, to match that audience to grab their attention. And I think a lot of companies like Netflix, are winning at that game, because they know their audience really, really well.

Burhaan Pattel  21:38  
And they're looking at, you know, which thumbnails are getting clicked on, you know, which episodes which types of, you know, and serving, putting in the feed in front of you, the appropriate stuff for you. It's all recommended. And, you know, there's this huge debate about personalization and privacy and, you know, as being tracked online, but there's no doubt that the AI whether it's Google or Facebook, which are the two biggest ones are definitely serving as content that's relevant. They wouldn't be huge companies if they didn't.

Burhaan Pattel  22:24  
And so, you know, it's, it's kind of and I, we're kind of going into, like the privacy territory right now. But from a, from a content point of view, like how else would it be done? Because if we're not getting the content we enjoy, then kind of, what are we going to watch? You know, like, how are we going to consume stuff, and they probably is another way and in the future, they may some may, something may come up. But it works for now. And it's proven that it's, it's functional, even on the advertising side?

Nelson Jordan  23:01  
Sure. So one thing I want to say is that for most companies, you really shouldn't be thinking about personalization, yet. Most companies that I come across, and I'm, I'm not talking kind of like mom, or dad, or mom, or pop or whatever the American kind of call it stores. You know, I'm not talking about people that are doing a couple 100,000, or even like low millions, I'm talking about people that are doing hundreds of millions a year in revenue, like even these companies are missing out so much of the low hanging fruit. You wouldn't believe kind of the amount of when I'm doing competitor research, for example, and looking at the kind of keyword strategies that they're using.

Nelson Jordan  23:47  
You wouldn't believe how many, like large companies just don't really have a strategy, which sounds bizarre. But you know, they, they might have kind of got big through performance marketing, for example, and relied on kind of one main channel and never really considered this, like they've written blog posts that rank, but not for like the right keyword terms. They don't like rank for any kind of high customer and intense sorts of keywords. So I think kind of to personalize or to not personalize, is an argument that far fewer people or a debate the far fewer people need to be having. Because there are so many things that you're just not doing that will have a much, much bigger impact typically.

Nelson Jordan  24:36  
Of course, for this, this sort of thing I have to talk. You know, I have to pick the media and I have to pick kind of the average case and the average, there's so much more that you could be doing before you even get into that. Privacy is a really interesting one. Now, again, like the cost companies like Google companies like Netflix, have gotten so big because of this flywheel effect, because they've been able to see how their, how their products have been used, how their services have been used by customers. And then they've been able to trial, lots of things, whether that's manual or manual, kind of a b tests, whether that's kind of algorithm updates, whether that's kind of machine learning has lots of it is now they've got some sort of feedback loop that pulls back into the product that then informs the next thing that they do.

Nelson Jordan  25:33  
Now, it's, I'm not sure necessarily everybody realizes this. But we all have access to those tools. Without even getting into the like privacy debate, you can still retain an element of anonymity when you're doing this. And it can be something as simple as, okay, well, what I'm going to do is look at my pages that are ranking on my website, currently. And I'm going to look at the different click through rates that I have. And it's super simple. You just go to go to Google Search Console. And then you look at, you know, all the different pages and how they correspond to click through rates. And you go, Okay, why is that one doing really well? Why is that one doing really well? What? Why isn't that one? Okay, let's open that one up. And let's see what everybody else is writing there. Let's see what the intent is on that search engine results page. Okay, I see why it's, it's not like that.

Nelson Jordan  26:34  
You know, that's still feedback, you know, you're still using data. It's just you're using kind of anonymous, mass, almost blanket data, rather than, like individual this person. You know, person x is doing action y. The same with like emails and open rates, and like, click through rates on paid social ads, and looking at how like different angles of your social media messaging. This is all stuff that we can incorporate into our own flywheel without getting into advanced things like machine learning.

Burhaan Pattel  27:11  
But Nelson, that stuff's not sexy.

Nelson Jordan  27:16  
like making money is sexy, isn't it? Do you want a business that's here in a year's time or not?

Burhaan Pattel  27:21  
Of course, I mean, everybody, everybody wants sort of the gold pot at the end of the rainbow. But this is the kind of work that, you know, you've got to get into, to figure it out. Because, like you said, so. So these are the low hanging fruits that you're you're talking about just basic analysis, or simple analysis. What I found in working with companies over the years is a lot of them don't actually know about Google Search Console, a lot of them don't know about the keyword planner in AdWords, which is free to do research on keywords, you know, even Uber suggests, or AH refs, like, they're not their SEO tools. But they're easy enough for just a normal person to go and put in a keyword and figure out what's a good blog post to write? Or what's a good headline for a page? So, you know, it's, the question I can ask you is, why do you think they're not doing it, apart from not being sexy.

Nelson Jordan  28:21  
So I tend, I try and take quite a generous view of this. So when you're an I'd like I've run my own businesses, I have several businesses now that I run consecutively. So I get it, like, I'm in a very different place, because I have this marketing background, because it is almost my natural go to above and beyond product or above and beyond logistics, or above and beyond operations, you know, I tend to go to marketing first, when I even when I'm running my own businesses, they have a lot to do. You know, like, when you're a business owner, or you're an MD, or you're a CEO, depending on the scale, you might be totally kind of absorbed in other things you know.

Nelson Jordan  29:13  
Like, if you're a startup founder, that's that's reached scale, then maybe 80% of your job isn't actually to do with marketing, you know, or actually, the vast majority of your job isn't to do with marketing, actually, like maybe at that time 70 or 80% of your job is actually just hiring, which sounds bizarre, like nobody really tries to start a business, particularly a startup that scales because they're super passionate about hiring, but actually what you find when you talk to these people, is most of their job is putting the right people in place, you know, so you need a basic understanding of marketing but a lot of your job is putting the right marketing people in place, when we're talking about bad job within a marketing context, of course, they've got a billion other things to do.

Nelson Jordan  30:08  
But so I try and take quite a generous view of it. Like anybody that wants to wants to grow their business, or even just sustain their business knows how important marketing is, they might know more or less about certain channels, because they've either like traditional channels that they've grown up with, maybe it's a channel that they use personally, you know, if they're a big Twitter user, they might see the value of community there. Whereas if you're, if they're not a Twitter user, for example, they might just be like, oh, Twitter, is that still a thing? So like, our personal experience, plays into it a lot isn't just like a data like, we're humans, we're storytelling machines. So we don't ever look at things like that rationally.

Burhaan Pattel  30:54  
Sure. So let's talk a little bit about the last year, what you've seen changes, obviously, with COVID. We're in 2021 now. And so just a little bit of what's happened for you, and what you've seen in the industry, and where you think we're going to go over the next year, two years in terms of marketing.

Nelson Jordan  31:16  
Sure. So let's talk about e commerce first, and then SaaS after that. So e commerce, if you don't already, anybody that's listening has experienced like a massive, massive growth. And people are talking 5-10 years growth within six to nine months, which is just insane. And it's because we can't go out to shops, it's because we have more. In general, the average person has more disposable income, because they're not spending it on on going out there not spending it on commuting. And the need is there as well. You know, if you need something, you don't necessarily want to risk it to go out to get surf, particularly if you're like the UK is right now, which is like stage four tier for quarantine, we're not supposed to be going out for anything other than, you know, if we're key worker, or to go to a hospital or see a doctor or to to get food, like so we still have needs over and above that if you think of kind of Maslow's hierarchy, there's still lots of other things that we would one that can't be met through the normal traditional route of going out.

Nelson Jordan  32:32  
So ecommerce is just spiked, and I think it will continue to grow. What's quite interesting there, though, is that, like, on Facebook, in particular, and other platforms have matched Google have done so as well, but less to the less kind of aggressively as Facebook. But what we've seen is that, like cost per acquisitions have gone up through Facebook. It just costs more to get a customer and like for e commerce, that's bad. So you're seeing these two things happen almost in tandem. You know, there are more people online, but more more people buying from Ecom, but that has increased demand, which is an increased kind of competition, which has, you know, Facebook, I'm not going to pretend that this is just the result of e commerce because every year pretty much without fail, you see CPAs go up on Facebook.

Nelson Jordan  33:33  
And that's something that e commerce kind of owners have to think about right now they have to think about, okay, well, maybe we can't just make all our money on Facebook, maybe we need to pay more attention to, to kind of email. How do we use email, for example, to turn somebody from a single purchaser to a multi purchaser, somebody who has bought from us time and time again. And what we're finding these days is like the people that are successful, know how to take somebody from facebook, how to use Facebook as a cold traffic engine, and warm them up. And through retargeting and things like that. And as soon as they possibly can get them to turn into an email subscriber, you know, that is really where the money lies. And using it as a cold traffic engine, you can still make a lot of sales there, of course, and hopefully they'll still be profitable sales.

Nelson Jordan  34:34  
But this journey into kind of thinking about customer lifetime value. And there's there's people that I'm working with right now actually an app provider on Shopify, that are kind of solving these problems to two guy, two guys who are ex LinkedIn data scientists, and they work for a company called trestle. If you want to try it out. They're making this kind of calculations, this data analysis because that stuff is hard. It's not just a case of putting it in Excel. There's real complicated data analysis that goes on behind that. I want to compare that to SaaS, which hasn't had as much of an impact in terms of the paid side that I've been able to see. Now, that's mainly I think, because of availability, availability bias, actually, I'm involved in the paid side of e commerce, and I'm involved in the content side of e commerce in SaaS, but I'm not involved in the paid side of SaaS. So I'm not sure if like I can actually rely on my, my instincts, or what I've seen there, I think it's just quite a small sample size.

Burhaan Pattel  35:52  
Interesting. Well, I mean, obviously, like Shopify, Zoom, all these companies have grown as exponentially because of it. And, you know, in my mind, like, we were expecting Facebook to increase the prices anyway, like, it's just the natural progression of how PPC advertising works. But I think it's much higher this year, or in the last few, like, with one of my clients we're running an event. So it's webinar based ads. And the CPAs doubled over December to November, like from November to December. And so that was really like a bit of a surprise. I mean, we didn't expect it to double because obviously, Christmas sales, etc.

Burhaan Pattel  36:39  
But I think we got to sort of critical mass towards the end of last year, where everybody was like, Oh, so events and consulting, and sort of this industry is still gonna carry on. And because of the situation with COVID, it's just gonna be here for a little longer. So let's just carry on doing what we're doing on on Facebook and pivot into more online stuff, because that's what we have available right now. So it has been interesting, it's been challenging too. But at the same time, like sales has been good too even event or virtual space. So

Nelson Jordan  37:20  
I think like the one thing that I didn't mention there, that probably plays into it, because it's just happened as the apples changes with iOS 14. So for those that don't know, Apple basically stripped out a lot of Facebook's ability to, to gather data on on on key things that they weren't gathering before. So that means that the Facebook kind of algorithm, I suppose that kind of ads engine doesn't have the data that it did do. So there's no way that like, I think that CPAs aren't going to continue to rise, because it's now that Facebook, have less data to make their decisions on. So actually they have to their sample sizes have to increase. And, you know, I if you if you don't think that's true, then just kind of ask yourself, why Facebook, put up such a complain about this and have started like a big media campaign around it. Like, companies don't do that, unless they're worried it's going to affect their business model?

Burhaan Pattel  38:30  
Well, I think, yeah, so there's a lot of, I guess, fear from Facebook's, and because they've got a huge investment in Instagram, and Facebook, in terms of making this work, in terms of the way it was working. But if you look at it from a business owners point of view, you know, you're trying to sell sneakers or t shirts, or, you know, just sort of ecom items without any upsells without technology, like the company that you were talking about where they're trying to solve that you just, you know, like a mom and pop shop, trying to get your product out. Even if you're selling pizza, like, you know, it's the same, because you can't upsell a second pizza in the same day, right? So it's a situation where now all of a sudden, you have to have a bit of a budget. And Facebook is open about this on their landing page where they're talking about this issue. And they're talking about like 50% reduction in conversions, which means half of their data is unusable. And that's, and it affects Google as well. But Google hasn't said much about it. I guess they're trying to figure it out.

Nelson Jordan  39:43  
Google, Google are in a much better position when it comes to comes to this change. Because essentially, when you're on Facebook, a lot of it is about like browser behavior. So when you're on Facebook specifically, and I know I'm well aware that it kind of affects website behavior. But it's slightly different. You're just browsing, you know, and Facebook can see that you're interested in something when you click on it, and then you go to this site. But like stripping out kind of third party pixels, and all of that don't, don't need to go in there, just the the difference to be pointed out, is that a lot of Google's profit, like, the vast majority of Google's revenue actually comes from the search engine use, right?

Nelson Jordan  40:28  
So where Facebook has to guess what you're interested in Google knows exactly what you're interested in, because you've searched for it, you know, they can literally use your search behavior, your the queries that you type in, and I type in T shirt, they go, Oh, great, Nelson is really interested in it, and a T shirt. Whereas I, you know, on Facebook, I might click on an ad, some fashion store, and I might click through on their site and things like that, that's not anywhere near as clear a signal. As you know, that's maybe like, I'm kind of interested in clothing, versus, you know, that's kind of really on top middle of the funnel behavior versus this buy T shirts now that I've just typed in. Not that anybody types that but you know what I mean?

Burhaan Pattel  41:23  
And that goes back to the intent, right? goes back to the intention that a person has based on the platform, and I use this in one of my other interviews. You know, talking about Netflix, you're expecting to watch something longer form because it's Netflix, because you've opened that app versus when you open tik tok even though you don't intend being you know, in a wormhole for three hours, you're watching short videos, and you know, it's short until you're okay with that. So, Nelson, this has been amazing. Thank you. I learned some stuff too from you. So thank you very much for that. Where can people check you out? Where can they listen to your stories? Your website give us a few places that they can find you.

Nelson Jordan  42:11  
Yeah, so you can can find the website it's nelson-jordan.com or you know, if you're in England like I am, that's nelson-jordan.com You can get me on Twitter. I am wfh podcast host. And if you want to listen to the working from home Podcast, where I interview entrepreneurs, freelancers, non traditional workers, essentially anybody who works from home in some capacity either because they wanted to or these days they were forced to just search for working from home podcast with Nelson Jordan, and you'll find it on iTunes, Spotify, Google podcasts, wherever you listen, it will be there.

Burhaan Pattel  42:51  
Thank you so much. I appreciate you

Nelson Jordan  42:52  
Thank you for having me.

Burhaan Pattel  42:55  
So thank you for listening to the episode or watching the episode. Depending on where you're consuming this content would really appreciate if you subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast channel. And if you're watching this on YouTube, hit the subscribe and the notification bell so you don't miss another episode. I'll be publishing sort of podcast episode or guest interviews on this channel fairly regularly as often as I can. And with that being said, I really hope you enjoyed the episode and comment below and let me know how you are going how things are with you in terms of marketing, and just share your comments about the episode as well. So thank you so much. I look forward to seeing you in the next one. Bye for now.