Episode 87: Mastering Local Ads with Hannah Zora Strong

Oh, baby. You're listening to the Marketing Dribble Podcast, the sexiest marketing podcast around. Hello and welcome to the Marketing Dribble Podcast. I'm myself, Rob Boyle.

I'm my co-host, Johnny Kenyon. Hiya, Johnny. How are you today? surprisingly good actually thank you rob how are you not too bad not too bad excited very excited for a guest and one of my favorite subjects at the minute well for a long time actually as you know local marketing so who's the guest johnny no small talk no no small talk the reason we recorded in 2026 the reason i'm not doing small talk is i've told you before no one's interested in you john they all skip past that yeah fair i've had i've got four month old twins i've got loads going on new job tons of stuff i can talk about you don't want any of it no fine all right let's move on let's move on so today on the show we've got hannah zora strong and i'm not doing intros anymore i used to do intros i pulled off chat gpt but i'm gonna let you introduce yourself welcome to the show who are you and what have you come to talk to us about hello my name's hannah i'm based up in newcastle i am a freelance advertising consultant i specialize in local ads there you go enough said brilliant look at it oh i hate to get involved favorite topic even though he's rubbish at it and i pivoted out of e-commerce and into b2b and a lot of b2b sass so getting people to physically go places is not really my bag so i'm genuinely really interested to get stuck into this topic and and learn where it's come from.

We were just talking offline. I was saying like 10, 12 years ago, when I used to work with Rob, we went to a conference, an e-commerce conference, and someone mentioned a bit of tech where if you walked past a shop, it would text you and say that thing you were looking at online, it's in store next to you. And I didn't hear anything since. And I was really excited to hear if it's still a thing, but apparently I'm a bit outdated, am I, Hannah?

Yeah, it was a bit of a flash in the pan sort of marketing piece of tech that was out, like you say, 18 years ago. Everyone was so buzzing for it, but it was basically if you had to Bluetooth enable, then it gave you message permissions to kind of get in touch with that person. But then I think with GDPR and everything else that's kicked off in the years since then, the tech was quickly voided. So that's how up-to-date Johnny is with his e-commerce.

He still thinks it's a thing. Just for whoever's listening to this, that's my knowledge levels on this, yeah. But I think you go to the conferences and you see all this latest tech and then you wait for it to kind of trickle down into the real world. And then you're like, that sounded like a cool thing.

Where was that? Yeah, Johnny's still waiting for that one, aren't you? Bring it back, bring it back. But yeah, GDPR has ruined a lot of things for us marketers, hasn't it?

But let's not dwell on that. So let's get stuck in. You work with a real mix of e-commerce and lead gen brands, but you've kind of got a bit of a focus on local customers. Why did you choose that?

What kind of drew you into this niche, I guess? Well, I've been, I feel like quite an OAP of PPC, as I call myself. I've been in the game for like 14 years and was head of department or two agencies in the Northeast before having kids and then going freelance. And I know a lot of consultants double down into B2B like yourself or e-com or just one platform like just Google, just LinkedIn, just Meta.

But I like the variety of working across multiple accounts. And I thought, well, I don't want to choose an industry in case it goes a bit south. Like during COVID, obviously, hospitality was a bit of a challenge and various industries have their peaks and troughs over the And then I didn't want to be pigeonholed into a certain KPI either. I just liked the variety of working across multiple accounts.

So I think for me, the best campaigns, my favorite campaigns, the best performing campaigns have always had a local slant. So that's why I thought, well, I feel like all of my career has been building up to this. I do have the choice of what I double down in. But I think it's important for agencies and freelancers to kind of say, draw the line in the sand, this is my specialism.

Yes, I can work across multiple, but this is my preference. Because it's easier to market yourself then. So it just seemed the most natural fit. Yeah.

And obviously local, it can be UK-wide, there's lots of local businesses. Do you find a lot of them are actually local to where you are because they like the fact you're near them? Or does it not matter and it's just anywhere within the UK? I've got a real mix, to be honest.

Most of my clients have come through referrals. So it's either been clients that have moved to a different company and then they've called me up or ex-colleagues have gone freelance and they've kind of got me into support when they've done the SEO and I've done the PPC. So I do work with a wide range of clients across the UK. I actually work with the Newcastle Council, a business support program.

So any kind of small businesses from Northumberland down to County Durham can apply for like 12 hours for free with me. And that's fully funded by the government through the BIPC. So I am working with a lot of local to the Northeast clients through that scheme. But a lot of my bigger clients are nationwide.

That's really cool. Well, Greg's, if you're listening and you're up in Newcastle, get in touch. You can ping when they've got pasties in stock next time. Oh, back in your thing.

Yeah, pasties on offer as you walk past the shop. That's the troll that you were thinking about earlier. Johnny's still waiting for that ping. So some of the next questions I think is really interesting for me because Google ads I know quite well.

LinkedIn ads I don't. I know nothing about them. So what I'm interested in is, what does a business sort of genuinely need? Do the business actually need LinkedIn ads or Google?

Is LinkedIn ads a waste of money for them, especially when they're local? Or is there kind of a mix between the two? I always say to clients, if there is demand for your product or service already, like people know what it is, then Google's always best because the system is completely designed to capture demand. You know, people search on Google for something and then an ad is the answer.

so I always recommend Google first but if it's a challenger brand if it is a brand new product or new service you have to kind of drum up that demand first before you can expect people to know what it is to search for it LinkedIn it's generally recommended for B2B clients and if they are super clear on their ICP like their ideal customer profile and they have a certain kind of job title in mind. They know which industries they work with. They know which company size they work best with.

Locations, it can be a factor, but it's mainly industry job title, member skills, member groups potentially. So for example, I'm working with a spinoff of the Heineken brand called Star Pubs at the moment, and they are recruiting landlords because they've got 2,300 pubs in the UK. Some of them handle landlords at the moment, but some of them don't. So we got campaigns designed to try and find new landlords So we targeting bar managers restaurant managers people who are like maybe managing and running the operations but not quite owning a pub yet And we're sending them an email and we're appearing in their LinkedIn feeds to be like, hey, could running a pub be your next step?

And it's something quite attention grabbing. The call to action is to download a guide. So it's really light touch. And then from there, they can kind of chat and find out more.

So it's really for kind of white papers, for guides. I do a lot of linkedin ads for conferences as well so if they've got you know free tickets to give away in certain to certain job titles um we can exactly pinpoint who they are pinpoint the decision maker get in front of them emails are pretty good they've got like a 40 to 60 percent open rate as well so the app from like a cold email so it's quite quite good compared to having to like buy data um get an apollo list and all the the kind of ddpr oops we're back again yeah to jump through but um yeah it's definitely worth doing i think that johnny when when ai takes our jobs over then that's it become landlords i think that's the next step for us to what do you think i'll go at the pub i said before i'm going to become a park ranger i'm really excited although drones will probably do most of that yeah so we'll see we'll see let's not get on to that rob you've got your ai question in later so save it um okay i'd love to dig off and talk about all the different social paid platforms, but I'm not going to stay on track.

We can maybe talk on the end if we get time. But what are the differences then of using the local service ads versus traditional Google ads? Because I don't know. So if you ever use local services ads, it is like Google's poor cousin to Google search.

It's really like neglected. You wouldn't think it comes from the same corporation, honestly. It's designed for kind of tradespeople, people who work out of home. So it could be like handing people.

It could be locksmiths. It could be moving services, flooring fitters. Anyone who works within a radius but is out of their own home going to clients. The platform itself, you don't bid on keywords.

You don't have ad copy. All you're literally saying to Google during the setup is, this is my business and you link it to your Google business profile. So that's where kind of good SEO on your business profile comes into play. You can tell Google which services you offer, what your budget is, which areas you cover, and then you kind of set it away.

In terms of kind of optimization, it's really just playing about with either a cost per lead target or like a really budget target. because if you're searching for kind of locksmiths near me, then you'll find it's a local services outpack that comes up. And the way you get in touch with people is either like a message or a call. So you don't even visit the website.

You literally just get the option of calling them or messaging them. And then as a business, you get the lead via email to say someone's been in touch and then you can kind of message them through the platform. Interesting. So you say it's sort of designed for those people.

If someone came and used you and paid you, what types of businesses should be using these ads? What type of businesses can? Which ones shouldn't, I guess? Who do you feel like it works well for?

I think it works well for anyone that is a tradesman that trades people because... Sure. And ideally, one or two people businesses because I've worked with clients before that have like, They're a removals company, for example, and they have three locations and they have three different Google My Business profiles. So trying to get those set up and then once the leads come into the business, they're funneled out to various teams.

Whereas the system is really designed for kind of one locksmith with one owner and one person doing it because the lead just comes straight to that person and they can answer the query. So it really is targeting smaller businesses. You know, Google did set up a similar campaign format called Smart Campaigns. I mean, nothing smart about them does make me sick.

And it's supposed to be more of like a plug and play sort of option for people that don't know or don't want to be in Google Ads all the time. I mean, it's my bag. It's not everyone's. And the idea is that it's really simple to set up.

You can just tell the system what services you do and what you cover and then off you go. So it is great for if you want like a really light touch lead feeder. but it requires you to have like a decent Google by business profile, lots of reviews, good pictures. Yeah, all of that needs to be updated and looking pretty fresh.

But within that, how... You love Rob, don't you? I just wanted to know, like, is there a way, can you track how well it's doing or how do you know how well they're performing? Is there some metrics?

So every time you get a lead or a phone call, you get an email. So any email address that's attached to the account, it'll say oh like customers tried to get in touch with you so you just get their phone number but if they call you obviously you'll get the phone call if it's a message you'll get it through the local services ads platform and you can just message them back yeah good so my friend is a builder he does a sort of tried a foray into ads social ads and google ads and it didn't go so well he just brought me his phone one day in the pub and was like joddy i've spent hundreds of pounds don't know what i've done wrong here and had a quick look so you probably see a lot of people making mistakes on these um i think your mantra is kind of never set and forget always test learn and scale but if people get hold of these themselves and like you say that it's like local plumber kind of having having a go what what kind of mistakes do you see when they end up coming to you and saying help me sort this out sometimes i'll find that they haven't actually linked to their google business profile um and that that isn't really helpful i find that a lot of people don't actually know this ad format exists.

Google don't promote it that well because it's a bit archaic. Like I said, it's not really worth promoting. Bless it. But a lot of people will have tried Google search, probably got burnt because they've whacked everything on broad match and haven't understood location targeting.

They've just sort of, you know, spent a ton of money and not had conversion tracking set up and it's kind of gone a bit south. So the whole point of this, the real benefit of local services ads is you only pay for leads when you get them like it's cost per lead not cost per click um and again because it's using the google search algorithm people are searching for plumber near me handyman near me you know window cleaner newcastle you know it's only when people are actually requesting that service that they get the ad so it's a no-brainer that conversion makes way better what's the what's the cost like on these kind of channels because obviously LinkedIn is so expensive to get in front of these targeted people.

I guess this is more, like you say, capturing that bottom level demand. How is it obviously for smaller businesses with less budget to spend? Is it, I don't know, is it an accessible platform? It is.

It is definitely. It is quite cheap to be fair. But the challenge is with like traditional Google search, you could obviously use Keyword Planner to understand the search volume in your area and get a cost per click and then apply a conversion rate to get kind of a rough CPA before you've even launched a campaign. Whereas with the local services ads, you have to go through building your account first and then when you select your services and you select your locations covered Google will suggest a weekly budget and a target cost per lead for you And it's based on the demand in that area and the amount of other advertisers in that area.

So if there's loads of builders in Manchester and you're also a builder, then it's going to say your cost per lead might be like £40, £50. Whereas if you're operating in Newcastle, then there might be lower demand or it might be lower competition and then it will completely change. So it's really hard for me to say to clients, oh, here's like a rough finger in the air of like budget or cost per lead until we get into actually building the thing. Yeah.

That makes total sense though, doesn't it? Yeah. Demand is, it's the same on advertising for all sorts of products. If you're advertising on e-commerce, like on marketplace, like Amazon or something, the demand obviously goes up and there's no demand for it.

Yeah, it goes down. So yeah, it makes total sense. I am into my AI question now. Look at my...

You're still a reddit theory. I'm so excited about AI. This is the only question I've been waiting for. I also want to come back to the LinkedIn.

I also want to come back to the LinkedIn because you said it was expensive. No, it's finished. LinkedIn's over. It's finished.

AI. You've got to have my AI question. Chatbots, like ChatGPT and all the others, are now showing, when you search something and you're asking questions, local recommendations, local businesses. you know you can ask it a question of who's good a bit like the sort of like your questions you might ask in google you know i need to find something near me and a car ballot or something bring you different ones up this is reasonably new and i want to know is how do you think it's going to impact local businesses and then how do they take advantage of this type of search um i know it's going a little bit away from the paid thing but i just know i think so chat gpt and the rest of them i'm expecting ads well chat activities already launched ads they're in beat them in the us at the moment so within a matter of months or years they will be rolled out to the rest of the world and so i think there will be an opportunity for local business to appear on multiple platforms i know google's not going to be the dominant monopoly that it has been forever obviously microsoft exists bless it but there will become more competition for google so i think yeah it's only an opportunity for local businesses to spread out and get leads from different sources i think it's an opportunity as opposed to a threat um one thing that i think the chat gbt and the ai kind of agents will do quite well in is at the moment you can search for like local drummer or plumber near me on google and it's fine it'll give you some plumbers whereas because ai is more conversational if you ask for like best plumber near me or like highly rated or like yeah i can more like how you'd ask the human it's more it's a more personal approach instead of just having here's a list of potential answers that you do on google that ai result will bring in kind of trust pilot reviews it will look at review it will look at fifo it will look at if you're looking for best it knows that it'll need to look at reviews and it will give you one answer based on these multiple different sources and i think that's how it's going to be a real challenge to google because I know there's an AI overview, but it's not going to be as popular forever.

No, that makes total sense. And I love the fact... I don't have any follow-up questions. No, no follow-up questions, but I love, like you say, where it brings an interview.

It's giving you the whole picture at once. So, you know, like you say in Google, a plumber near me, and you get like a list of five plumbers. You probably could go off yourself and research them and do each for each one, but it's almost whether people are trusting it or not. And again, this is...

Use what the best one or the cheapest one or the fastest one. Yeah, or what's it going to be or... Yeah, yeah. So it's, like you say, it's that conversation.

So you can have more of a conversation. Which one's going to suit me doing this? Or I want a new boiler or whatever, whatever it might be. Yeah, I think that's going to be really, really powerful.

I can see Johnny just like closing his eyes and going to sleep. You need to keep up. I was like, do we go on a tangent or do we do a separate episode on that? Well, it's like you can't beat him, join him.

You know, because I think, you know. You've got to get on board, Johnny, or you're going to be left behind. And like people ask me, like, are you going to run? Because obviously there's like LinkedIn, there's Snapchat, there's Pinterest, you know, Reddit.

ad platforms and everyone's like oh what's going to happen like will you launch gbt ads i was like well yeah if my clients are promoting products and services that will be found using gbt ads or gemini ads or whatever then you have to move with the times you do that's another episode rob and i would i would like to dig into that so if you're listening you think you want to come on and talk to us about i guess those kind of ads then then come on um i'm going to pivot a little bit So I think we've covered local services pretty well there.

I'm going to send this to my friend Matty, the builder, and he can learn how they work and what to do with them. That makes a lot of sense. And it's been very interesting, I think, to get caught up on that. Like you said, I didn't know it was like a totally separate thing.

And you just don't, I guess, unless you're using these kind of platforms. But obviously, when I was in e-commerce, I've talked about those physical stores and getting people into those. If someone had a physical store, What kind of options are available for them or what would you recommend they do? So I work with a couple of e-commerce clients and usually they offer, you know, anyone from around the country, you know, to buy.

You can run your standard shopping, your standard Performance Max campaigns to capture the e-com element anyway. But if you want footfall traffic, then really the only ad format available to you is Performance Max. because when you use Google's campaign builder and you select your objective as footfall, Performance Max is the only one really that can optimize for that. And it's also the main format that will launch ads on Google Maps because the way people have searched even five years ago has changed.

You know, when you were in the middle of town and you might have searched for like coffee near me, you always used to put near me or coffee and then city name whereas now because of gps and google knowing where we are at all times as long as you've got that setting enabled then you don't need to put near me or the city you can just type coffee if you go open google maps type coffee and it'll give you all the cafes around you won't it it doesn't need that near me or location signal anymore so So what happens is when someone's searching for restaurant near me or coffee near me, they will be in Maps, search for that.

And then the ads will appear in Google Maps. And then when you're on my desktop, for example, you'll see sponsored ads at the top and then all the organic listings underneath. Or if you're on mobile, you'll see a promoted pin. And it's only performance maps that can give you a promoted pin.

So if you open maps now, don't even search for anything, you will find some square pins. If you see the square ones, they're promoted. If you see a round one, it means they will go. Didn't know that.

Interesting. There you go. Tip there. There you go.

Yeah. Because obviously footfall is declining. Look at, you know, maybe you should have gone with the BHS 10 years ago or so. Yeah, they could have gone with it.

Or Debenhams RIP. Yeah. Gosh. So do you think more physical stores should be adopting these kind of things Do you think P is a good thing Do you think they should football and like football like if you know if they were going to their board it like let try and do it or is there yeah it the point i don know yeah for sure like i work with a everyone knows the hospitality industry is like facing real challenge at the moment with like wages increasing and that and lower people like number of people eating out this sort of i found this sort of performance max footfall sort of campaigns to be a game changer because you can see how many people have searched for steak restaurant how many people have then clicked the ad and then visited and in that instance you can say right we know that on average people spend 200 pounds on the expectation that 3.

4 people dine on average you know you can put a real and comptifiable value on running this activity. And not a lot of channels can do that unless you have like a coupon redemption sort of system where like there might be a Facebook ad where you'll be like, oh, 10% off for a free drink or whatever when you share this code and stuff. But if you're a small business and you don't have that capacity for like a more advanced POS system, then this is the main way that you can drive people to your store for cheap and really measure how well that's going.

um i say measure because i do want to caveat something and this isn't a me problem this is a google problem google are very vague with the sort of eligibility criteria to set up in store tracking yeah there's no like minimum spend or minimum clicks minimum of impressions it's based on how many other people are around your store because it's about data i'm gonna say this word anonymity no how anonymous the data is i'm just going to say that i'm thinking the word in my head but i know if i tried to say it out loud it's not going to work yeah i was like i need a better way of saying this um yeah it's like it's how anonymous the data is so for example i've got a client um who operates out of a trading estate they spend like six grand a month promoting their flooring um but because they're on a trading estate there's not a lot of footfall to that location so there's not enough data enough people visiting to make that visit data anonymous whereas i've got a restaurant client who has um you know a couple restaurants in glasgow and aberdeen and they're spending a grand a month but they've got tracking set up because the amount of people who are in glasgow city center in aberdeen city center means there's enough people to make the data anonymous.

So it's really hard for me to say to the client, like, how much should I spend? Or how many clicks do I need? I don't know because Google don't have a limit or a threshold. It's just whenever the data becomes anonymous enough.

There you go, for sure. This is why I love these episodes where I just don't know much about a topic. Sorry if it's been painful for the listeners with my rookie questions, but like I've learned a lot And I think this would be really good for someone who's just looking to start out or just didn't know this existed. And like, you know, I think this is, yeah, I've learned a lot.

And I love these kind of episodes. So I think to finish on, you might have another point, Rob. I just want to get one more really hot tip. Like what's your hot tip that like every business should be doing right now?

And I'll keep it brief about everything we've talked about. Just, I guess, what should they be doing, in your opinion, to attract more business maybe? Other than hiring yourself, of course. I mean, my interest is obviously local and I see so many businesses getting that wrong or it's an optimization area that is really overlooked because people obviously look at if you run in e-com campaigns, it's your product feed.

If you run in any other search campaigns, it's you're keeping out any keywords and you search query report and everything else. but the number of times that I've seen like the location settings set to presence and interest as opposed to just presence it's wasted spend from around the world it's a really it's a quick fix and it's really painful when I'll go to audit an account or even do a screen share with a potential client I'll say oh just click here click here click here and you can see like hundreds if not thousands of pounds wasted just because the wrong settings being toggled on so I don't want to come on and say something completely whiz bang when it is just the foundation sometimes that people need to get right um I had a client come back to me actually and I worked with them about four years ago for a couple of years but then they left me to go to an agency that specialized in financial services because they're a mortgage broker but they came back to me we had like an audit call again in December and to see that oh they'd spent 12,000 pounds they'd driven kind of about 350 leads over the course of the year but none of them have converted i was like that's impossible like how can you drive that many leads and not have a single sale but then when we looked into the account they were this this kind of client specializes in northumberland tining way in county durham and instead of just targeting those areas and excluding the rest of the uk this agency had targeted the uk and excluded those locations oh the wrong way around and we discovered that we discovered that on the call because i was literally doing a screen show with them and i was like oh click here click here and then like my face dropped when i realized that like all of that time all of that money is just the opposite of what they want so it just got to show like scary and that's a good tip good tip across everything to be honest because even in b2b you see that a lot like you talk to people and they're just they're not putting negative keywords in so there's so much wasted spend and it's like i think getting things right from the offset or tracking conversions right people might just be tracking like a page view as a conversion or something do you know what i mean like so it's just getting all that initial setup i think it's just a really good tip and obviously people might the sort of people you'll be working with on the local service ads just wouldn't have a clue on this kind of stuff so i think yeah get it checked by an expert because you could save yourself tons of money in in the process if you get it right at start, you know, things are working.

Get your foundations right. Good tip. That was a great tip. For sure.

All right, Rob, you got anything to add? Anything you want to ask? I'm going to stay otherwise and wrap it up. AI related, so I'm banned from that.

I'm only allowed one question per episode, so I'm sorry. But yeah, I could go on. No, no, that's been really great. And I think you've been very, very generous with your time.

But if people have listened to that and they've enjoyed it and they want to work with you or they want to follow your stuff, like where can they go? so i am on zoramarketing.co.uk produce regular blog content on there with and what i've been up to and obviously optimization tips if people manage their own accounts and otherwise i am just on like linkedin um my kind of url slug is hannah-strong-ppc i can search for hannah zora because there's not many of those and i'll be the same chatting about all things local and what I'm up to on there as well.

Good. I'll be following along. Really looking forward to the updates. And Rob, do you want to lie to all our listeners again and say that you'll link these in the show notes and link it in the social post?

Yeah, I'll link it in the show notes and link it in the social post. Brilliant. Look forward to seeing that definitely happen. But no, like I say, I've really, really enjoyed this.

Thanks again so much for coming on. Yeah, that's it for me. I'll see you on the next one. That's all right.

Yeah, it's been a pleasure. Thank you guys. Thanks.