I chat to Kaity Griffin about Google Ads for small businesses and those building a personal brand.

Kaity teaches us how to look after our own Google Ads and pulls away all the jargon making it manageable for you and I to tackle it on our own without costly agencies.

Find Kaity here.

Keep in touch and send me your questions.

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You were listening to personal branding, exposed with my favorite human Megan MacNeill. Each episode, we’ll explore a different area of personal branding and how you can build, maintain, and leverage off your own personal brand. Let’s put it together. Here’s Megan. Hey guys today, I’m talking to Katie Griffin.

She is a Google ad specialist and she is getting rid of all the gobbledygook around Google ads for us. She wants to help small and medium businesses to reach their goal through Google ads. And she actually teaches you how to do it instead of actually doing it for you, what she will do for you as well, if you want.

And she’s going to supercharge what the world knows about your business and what your products and services are through Google ads. Hey Katie, how are you today? I am good. Thank you so much for having me. No worries. This is pretty excited to be chatting to you face to face here. Yeah, well it seemed Zim to Zim, Oh yeah, I think that’s the new normal though.

Isn’t it at the moment? I think, sorry. I think that’s what everyone’s learning to deal with as the new year. The new norm. Yeah. No, definitely. So Katie, I want, um, my audience to learn a little bit more about your personal brand. So I’ve got a couple of quick fire questions for you. You ready? Go for it. All right.

So where would we find you online? Most of the time? Oh, goodness. I think I would just have to be a social media app. Oh, just whatever you hang out with the most online. Probably Instagram. I haven’t got to hang out anywhere online, but I’m more of a Looker and not a poster as much. So, so I’ll be usually lurking and watching other people and not necessarily doing that myself, but Facebook I’m really active on.

I have a, I have a big community of students on Facebook. So I teach a course and run that’s facilitated through Facebook. So I’m on there every day, all day. During course time personally, though. It’d be Instagram. Yeah. Instagram for me too. I just get lost one minute. I’m looking at dogs the next minute I’m in the moldy.

So it’s like all over the place. Just wishful thinking. Like, well, every time I log into my computer just now, because if you’ve got a Microsoft, you know, it has like a, um, a scenery picture before you log in. So, so every day when I will log in, it’s this other really awesome place. And I’m like, Oh, it’s another place I can’t go to just now, first of all, it’s called.

So where in the real world would we be most likely to find you? Well now at home all the time, but to be honest previously at home, always too. So I am home buddy. I aye. I love to hang out at home and I work from home. And so I’ve sort of, I’m always at home if I’m not I’m out and about with the kids, which isn’t a reality at the moment.

So, uh, at home you’ll find me at home all the time. So that was pretty awesome because a lot of people are struggling with this whole working at home situation at the moment. But if you are say up and ready it’s business as usual, I guess. Yeah. I feel like I was talking to my husband the other day and I feel like our life hasn’t changed too much, which is a really privileged thing to say.

Um, he still has to he’s classified in essential service. So he is still going out of the house, working as normal six days a week. I’m still working at home as normal as normal ish around the kids, but. In terms of our day to day life, that hasn’t changed a lot. It’s more of the extracurricular stuff with the kids and going out.

So I think that I hadn’t had too much of that hard transition staying at home. Um, but again, that’s a really privileged position to be in that I can still work from home and, and make a living that way. So I, I acknowledged how grateful I am for that. Oh completely. Are your kids homeschooling age or are they a little bit younger?

No, so I have a five year old, but she just turned five. So she’ll be going to school next year. And then I have a one-year-old. So she’s definitely not at the homeschooling age. Yeah. So I, um, I were very fortunate that we have, um, a great family daycare educator, which it’s just my kids and her kids. So I feel very comfortable, still sending a next it limits our exposure a lot.

Um, so I’m able to get, uh, two days of work in without the kids around, which is, I mean, Hats off to those parents that are trying to do the homeschooling and the working all while having the kids around. I don’t know how you’re doing it. Oh yeah. Look hats off to them. Cause I’ve, I’ve got a few friends that are like that, and I do not know how they’re finding the time in the day to still be working and doing the homeschooling and entertaining kids.

Like I can hardly look after myself. Just now. I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. So Katie, if you had to eat only one meal for the rest of your life, what would that meal be? That one’s really easy. One for me. I love sushi and it would be a Japanese, any Japanese meal. So, so Sashimi or sushi? My husband, when I was first started dating him back.

White long ago, ages ago, his family thought I was Japanese because of the amount of times we went out for Japanese food. So yes, it would be sushi hands down. When I had my second baby, who’s now one, um, in the park immediately post labor was tray of sashimi waiting for me because I just had missed it so much.

That’s awesome. Um, what is your favorite book? Okay. Sorry. Favorite book of all time? That would probably have you read the book a little life. Nope, that book. Okay. So it’s a long one and it’s grueling. It’s heartbreaking, but I love that it’s. Um, it’s probably one of my favorite books of all time. I have, I am at the moment reading the Elton John biography, which I’m really enjoying because I recently saw him live and that’s a really good book, but I think a little life would be my favorite or anything by Jane Harper.

Who’s an Australian author. I also really like her. Oh, yeah, we’ve done a couple of Jean Harper books and my book club. She’s fantastic. So that’s a good one. Yeah. What was one word that your friends and family would use to describe you? Oh goodness. What would they use to describe me? I would say if it was my husband, he would say messy, uh, and friends.

I would, hopefully they would say funny. I think funny would be a word that I would like to think they would describe me as, but, um, yeah, funny or, or silly would probably, probably be the word, but definitely my husband would say messy. Well, based on the content I’ve seen of yours so far, I would say funny would be, we’d be up there.

Definitely. Thanks. Yeah. I like to think of myself as funny, but you know, I think I make myself laugh more than anyone else and that’s usually a pretty bad quality to have. So who knows? No, right now that’s a great quality to have. We need to keep laughing after a hundred percent final question. What word do you overuse?

I think a hundred percent I’ve been getting into that lately. I think I got it from my husband at AB that ally. I think everyone overuses that, but a hundred percent is something that I have just stopped to say probably the last six months. And I think I’ve just, I’m running with it. It’s funny that you say like is one of them as well, because the last person I interviewed, he also said like and he said, Oh, I think it’s a California thing.

I was like, no, I think it’s a generational thing. It’s because I’m Scottish, you’re Australian, he’s American. And we’re all about the same age and we’re all. What we’re using, like, I think so. I think it’s just something that uses it kind of as a replacement. Um, I guess just as a con as a sentence filler or, or a thinking pause or I don’t know.

Yeah. We’ll just go with it. That’s fine. So that’s a bit more about you, but tell us a bit more about the problem that you solve for your clients. Yes. So I am. In the Google ads game and I teach small businesses or medium sized businesses, how to use Google ads profitably. Um, my passion is really teaching that to businesses because, um, I’ve had about seven years, six or seven years experience now in Google ads first running it for my own eCommerce business.

And then I sold that because I was so passionate about AdWords or Google glasses called now and moved to an agency. One of. Uh, the world’s really biggest or most successful Google has agencies and worked there for a number of years, um, and then had my second baby. And you know how that always causes you to reevaluate your life.

And, and I decided to then start my own business, which is what I have now called Sunday digital, where I have the done for you arm of my, of my agency, where I work one on one with clients running the ads for them. And then I’ve got my teaching side, which is what I’m most passionate about, where I have a course that teaches.

Businesses, how to profitably use your lads to run their own account and that why they don’t have to go with outsourcing an ads manager, which can be really expensive. And then it. Hello becomes profitable. And the passion for me lies really in that one of my main frustrations, I guess when I was working at my old agency and even now is I often get clients that have had three or four really bad account managers before, and they’ve been running the ads for them and just wasting their money and doing really, really bad job.

Um, and not only has that left the clients with a business with really. Pull results from Google ads, but it’s also cost them money. Cause I’ve had to outsource that. And there’s not a lot of really good people that know how to use Google ads. So my, um, my focus is sort of bridging that gap so people don’t have to outsource and they can kind of be empowered to run their own, um, profitable ads and.

Yeah, that’s kind of where my, um, my focus is at the moment. Does that give you enough of an overview? Oh, I think that’s super important because I’m similar to you working for companies. I’ve always outsourced the, the Google ads component. And now that I have my own business, I’m obviously looking to see what I can do to myself, which is how I ended up.

I am finding you. And I sat in one of your classes. And if anyone who’s listening to this is thinking about the whole Google ads thing, and you don’t want to go the agency route and check out Katie, because I mean, you just debunked a lot of it for me, that was the biggest thing, because it’s the terminology.

It’s all the different words that you kind of go up. Don’t have a clue. And once you get your head around that, and you understand what each of them is for, that makes it so much easier for you to be able to actually start doing it yourself. And if you get big enough, you can have Katie still do it for you, which is great.

But yeah. Sorry to interrupt you there. I was just gonna say, and that’s where I. I get really passionate about is that I find in a lot of the students that I teach now, they’ll have been, I was talking to a student a little while ago and she had, um, an account manager running her ads for her for years.

And the first week that she started running them herself, you got after going through the course, she got more sales in that first week than she had in the previous year with her agency. And it’s a unique situation, because one, doesn’t not a lot of people that know what they’re doing with Google ads, but the person who’s often outsourcing knows even less.

So it’s really easy to get the Whirlpool dot your eyes because someone can say a bunch of statistics or a bunch of metrics and you think, Oh, they must be doing a really great job where. My goal is to kind of educate just a little bit. So you have a little bit of an edge when you’re talking to either your ads manager or someone who’s looking to run your ads for you, and you can have some level of education about, well, how, how do you actually know if someone’s doing a good job?

And I don’t think you do know that until you’ve got the knowledge yourself. Um, so yeah, that’s, that’s really important to me. Oh completely. I think it’s, it’s a different language and that’s the biggest issue there. Um, can you talk a bit about some of your clients that have used it to be able to build up their businesses and their personal brands?

Because they’ve been able to hone in on those words that are specific and there’s a lot of trial and error as well, obviously. Yeah. So it was a lot of testing. Um, I work with a number of different businesses, both in the eCom space and also in the lead generation space. So e-commerce people that are wanting to get people to buy straight away from them.

And then lead generation would be someone that’s getting to opt in, not on your mailing list. And there’s different strategies you go about for both of those. But I think the main thing for me, and probably something that you can. Um, you’ve experienced as well as you really need to know who your ideal customer is, because if you’re trying to run paid ads, you’re laying money down on the line and you need to actually have some sort of strategy behind that to reach your ideal client or your ideal customer.

And what I teach is that. The same words that someone who’s 20 types into Google is not going to be the same words that someone who’s 60. And if you’re trying to reach everyone and target everyone is going to fall flat and you’re going to end up with nice aisles and our lanes and you would have wasted your money.

So I, the first thing I sort of. Recommend before even going down any sort of paid ads path would be just really take the time to not down your ideal customer and try and niche that down. And that can be really overwhelming when you’re trying to get really specific. And I know I come up against this now, when I think I’ve really got to go even further into who that ideal client is, or the ideal customer is because.

If you’re trying to serve everyone, it just becomes too hard. But also in your mind automatically, you’d be like, yeah, but everyone, if they knew about me would want to buy from me or want to work with me, I’m great for everyone. So you have to really overcome that mindset and really think, okay. If there was one person that I wanted to sell to who would that be?

And that can involve talking to your past customers or past clients and. That would be my number one recommendation would just to get to know who you’re actually trying to reach with your ads and the rest will kind of build off that. Yeah. Cause I guess when you’re trying to serve everyone, you’re actually serving no one because you’re just, it’s too diluted now.

Obviously I’m, I’m interested particularly in personal brands, so I’m always trying to get my clients to leverage off their names and be able to build, um, what that is. Whatever their niche is around their name as well. Now, obviously, if nobody knows your name yet, you wouldn’t be putting that into Google ads, et cetera.

So for someone who is trying to build a business around their name, as opposed to initial, you know, Megan’s marketing, so maybe do marketing, whereas it’s more your, your name, what would your recommendations be for people that are trying to do that? So even if no one knows who you are just yet, they are still no.

Hopefully about the services that you offer. So my kind of filter processes, Google ads is the right thing for your business. Is, are you a known product or service? And if you are, and I don’t mean brand name known, I just mean does what you offer is your service known, then think of what. Keywords could be used to search for your service.

So don’t worry about thinking very, a very small amount of traffic will be direct to your particular name, or even now with my clients who have really big names, it’s a tiny percentage of the budget that actually goes to their company or business name or their brand name. It’s the majority. Cause what we’re trying to do with.

With Google ads is actually cold traffic acquisition. So to go after people you’re, you might have an audience covered that knows who you are, but we don’t keep advertising to them. We want to advertise to the people who don’t know who you are. So it’s about thinking, what terms is someone going to type into Google, to search for my.

Service or offering or business and not necessarily your brand name, if that distinction makes sense. Yeah. And I suppose it comes back to not what you know, and what you are going to search for for yourself. Cause you know, everything obviously, but what your potential client would actually be looking for.

And I think that’s the hardest part for everyone is to try and think what would people actually say about me or be trying to look for, to find me because you don’t think that way, which is that’s interesting. And that’s why it’s really important to get into the head of that idea of a customer, because then you can start to understand and do keyword research.

There’s Google have a great, great free tool called the keyword planner, where you just have to have a Google ads account. You don’t have to be running any ads or putting down any money. It’s free to create free to use. And you can start doing some keyword research where Google will return, how many people are searching for those keywords each month.

And you can start to say, okay, well, that’s not really something that people are typing into Google, um, and, and build off that. No, that’s fantastic. Can we touch quickly on voice search? Is that something that you are now working in as well? A little bit, not a whole lot. It’s still very much in the infancy and it’s not something that I cover in my, in my course, or my training, my training, and not to be honest, a huge part of my client accounts either.

It’s so new that there’s such little amount of information on it. And the amount of uptake as well is, is not huge. Google still can return ads for someone that has like typed in or sorry, someone that’s. Voiced something. They also were trying to ads based on that you don’t have to have separate campaigns for that.

So you still show ads, whether someone touching or spoke it into their phone, you’ll still return ads. This sort of noticing delineation between the two within, within your account. But I mean, it’s only going to increase the amount of people that are. Using their voice to, to search cause we’re lazy. Oh, completely.

I mean, we’ve got, um, we’ve got a couple of Google homes in the house, which I was kind of against, but my partner thinks that they’re awesome. And you know, I ask it the way they are and I ask it the date and the time and stuff all the time now, which is ridiculous. But then when I’m out and about, I feel like I’m okay, Google and she’s not there.

So yeah, I’m getting quite lazy and enjoying it. So I feel that that’s going to be okay. Oh, there’s my Google note talking to me. Sorry. Um, so I feel that that’s something that’s going to, um, increase, but I know I just wondered if you were playing a boat with it and if you were enjoying that side of things.

Yeah. I’m excited to try that more in the future. I think that have you started getting ads served to you from your, from your okay. Google? No that I’m aware of yet. Yeah. So they’re not rolling it out just yet. They do it on the phone, but they don’t, I don’t think they do them on okay. Google yet or whatever, Google home, whatever it’s called.

Um, but it definitely be interesting. Well, I know I have music playing in the background because of Google. Sorry. Well, thank you so much, Katie. That was really interesting. I mean, Google ads is still way over my head, but, um, I enjoy watching your 12 and consuming your content to try and get a little bit better understanding of, um, of that side of things.

So can you tell us where we’d be able to find you. Of course. So I am still working on my Instagram games. So you can follow me at Katie Griffin underscore that’s K E I T Y G R I F F I N underscore someone has Katie Griffin. It’s an inactive account and I just can’t manage to Snagit. And also, uh, you can visit my website, which is Sunday digital.com that I use.

Jump on my mailing list. I’ve got a, I’ve got a free me up there, free guide you can grab. And then I pure periodically announced webinars or must classes that I’m running from there, which everyone’s more than welcome to join. Fantastic. Thanks so much, Katie. I’ll put all your details in the show notes as well.

And thanks again. I’ll speak to you soon. Thank you so much. Thanks for tuning in guys. And if you’re. Still a little bit confused about Google ads, head over to Katie’s website. She has got so many amazing resources on there and she’s pretty active on social media too. So there’s always great things happening on there.

If you enjoyed this episode, please listen to another one. And I would love if you could leave me a rating or a thumbs up wherever, it would mean a lot to me. Thanks so much. And I’ll chat to you soon.