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Episode 10: The Unsexy Guide to Off-Season Marketing · The Same Side: A Digital Marketing Podcast Rooted in Human Connection

• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: Hey there.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to The Same Side, a digital marketing podcast rooted in human connection.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Jonathan Dance, Director of AdOps and Analytics at Digital Relativity, a full service marketing agency.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: You can find us and our ideas online at digitalrelativity.com.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: So last week I was at MACON, which is the marketing AI conference put on by Paul Reitzer and Mike Caput in Cleveland, Ohio.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: And that was going to be the subject of this tenth episode of The Same Side.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: Woo, give it up for the tenth episode.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: The plan was to have Pat Strader, our chief innovation officer, and Aaron Gooden, web developer and adopts and analytics, all round good guy, joining me.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: But fate intervened, our schedules didn't quite align, and I happened to bring back a nice case of Concrud with me, which is why I can talk in my midnight jazz DJ voice.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, it's the fun things that we do that make it all worthwhile.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: The good news is this episode is about heading into the off season, so it's timely, especially here in the great state of West Virginia, where the rafting season has more or less ended with the coming of Bridge Day last weekend.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: Bridge Day is the largest single-day festival in the state of West Virginia, or it was at one time.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: It may not be anymore, I don't know.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: But uh Bridge Day commemorates the completion of the New River Gorge Bridge in 1977.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: At the time, it was the longest single-span steel arch bridge in the world.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: I can say that because I did as a river guide many a day.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's still up there, the bridge.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's literally up there.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's still one of the longest ones, but new bridges have been built since 1977.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: I know it's shocking.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: At any rate, Bridge Day is a great time.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: You can go out and walk on the bridge.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's about 3,500 feet long, and you can watch base jumpers fling themselves from the bridge to the river or preferably the land about 900 feet below the bridge while you're gobbling down a funnel cake and getting powdered sugar all over your chin.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, what could be better, right?
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's funny though, this time of year, even though I've been out of the rafting business for a long time, it always brings a bitter sweetness to it.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: The days are getting shorter, and back then it was a relief to have the hustle and bustle of the season behind me and have the opportunity to reflect and also rest.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: Much rest.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: But then there was also the long dark winter ahead, waiting, looming, where our job was to figure out how to get more people to come rafting the following year.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I'd be lying if I said I had all the answers or that it was easy.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: So let me start with a story.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: In 2007, I was heading into my second offseason as owner operator of a whitewater rafting company.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: The previous year had been lean and our margins were pretty thin, which is not unusual for rafting companies, outdoor companies, outdoor adventure companies.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: So we were trying to stretch our marketing budget and we relied heavily on email marketing.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: And remember, this is 2007, so we didn't have all these awesome platforms.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: We used Google and Yahoo Search.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that was the same year that we decided to transition from a multi-page brochure, which cost a ton, to a trifold with the idea that we would still mail our customers, but we would send them to the website for all the details.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: And we were targeting our existing customer base because it's easier to bring back customers that you already have than to find new ones and all that.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: We were using the Thunderbird email client because it was free.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: And our winter staff was cut to three people, which wasn't unusual.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: We had seasonal river guides who would come and raft and then go about their lives.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: But in the summer, our staff was about 30 people.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: So it was our office manager, our river manager, and me.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: And as I mentioned before, I did most of the marketing not well, but I did it.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: It was cold, like space heaters under the desk cold and quiet.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: All three of us, I'm pretty sure we're crossing our fingers, but not where anyone could see.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's interesting.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: In preparing for this episode, I wondered if I had made the wrong decisions.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: I in fact, I think I had convinced myself that I had, that I had sabotaged the season to come by not doing heavier marketing, maybe not going with a full brochure.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, in the dark days of winter, it seems that much worse.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: But I went and checked Google Trends for relative search volumes for whitewater rafting terms.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: Now keep in mind, these aren't absolute quantities or volumes of whitewater terms, just more or less popularity scores.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: And the cool thing is that Google Trends goes back to 2004.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: So I was able to see, and if I'm being honest, breathe a sigh of relief 20 years after the fact, rafting searches peaked dramatically at the same time rafting visits were peaking.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: And the cool thing is that this kind of tracks with my experience in terms of the phones weren't ringing off the hooks, the website wasn't getting a ton of form fills, we weren't getting a ton of leads from the local CVBs.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: At that point in the rafting industry in West Virginia and probably nationwide, things were changing.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: There was a sea change happening.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: In some respect, it coincided with the rise of the internet and people's fractured attention spans, and also kind of an awakening of all the other stuff that was out there in the world.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: It was becoming less of an identity or a lifestyle, Whitewater rafting was.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: And the numbers had been steadily dropping.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: At the same time, here I am in this business and trying to figure out, well, how do I reverse these trends?
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so bringing it back to 2007, I really didn't have a plan for moving into the season besides the things that I had mentioned: paid search, cultivating CVB leads, email inquiries, mailing brochures.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: And keep in mind that social media advertising, social media marketing wasn't a thing yet.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: And display ads were never that successful for us.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: It seemed to be more like a black hole to throw money into, but that was probably also because we weren't very sophisticated about how we used it.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: Most of the options that were available at that time that felt like would move the needle were direct mail things or high-priced print ads and magazines.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: And so we didn't have the budget for that.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: I relay this story to you because I know that it's not singular to the rafting industry.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: Many small businesses deal with this, especially seasonal businesses, and that's what I'm focusing on here today.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: And seasonal businesses can be just about anything.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: Most businesses have an ebb and flow.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't necessarily have to be weather related.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're a tax accountant, you know the ebbs and flows of the tax seasons.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: If something happens from an economic standpoint, that can change the landscape for how people buy or spend their leisure time.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: In the education business, colleges, they have their seasons for applications and acceptances and all that good stuff.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: So there's ebb and flow for all industries for the most part.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: If your organization or business is getting ready to head into the offseason, I've got a few things that might get you excited for the slow times.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: If you've listened to any previous episodes, you know this won't be a magic bullet to solve all of your marketing problems.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: What I'm going to talk about is decidedly not sexy.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's like the super steady, significant other who is stalwart, always there when you need them, no drama.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: The kind that you probably want to end up with.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: This is the stuff that you build off of.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: The stuff that keeps you up at night if you aren't doing it, but know you should be.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: So tip number one, super basic, but very important.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: You want to keep the lights on.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: If you're a small business and you've just been wrung out, there's probably a temptation to just, I'm going to turn off the lights, go on vacation for two weeks, a month, or maybe just stay home for two weeks or a month, it doesn't matter, and just take a breather.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I know that temptation is super strong, but keeping the lights on means having some sort of presence and the ability to respond to inquiries.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: So just because most people aren't planning their summer vacations in the wintertime doesn't mean none are.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: Another anecdote from back in the early 2000s, we noticed that people were booking later and later.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: And again, I think some of this has to do with the availability of weather information wherever you were.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: You could just look and see and go, well, I'm going to wait.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, hey, it looks like it's going to be a nice weekend.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: Let's make a rafting reservation.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: Because very few people wanted to raft in the rain, even though they were getting wet the whole time.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: So basically having the lights on, it's a nice way to pick up some additional bookings.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: If you're close altogether, you won't get those.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: I mentioned above how we did that at Wildwater.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: We manned the phones, we kept up with emails, we kept up with leads.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not saying it's a panacea, but you can't make bookings if everyone's gone.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's simple.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: In today's digital marketing era, this is easier on so many levels with tools like chatbots and autoresponders, and you can go basic like call forwarding or email forwarding, and all those things, you can go wherever you want, and you could still man your phone.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have to be tied to a desk in an office.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: Even if you're on the go, you can manage that personal touch that despite what we're told, people do enjoy when they're conducting business.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: So you can do that during the quiet times.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: The other nice piece of this is that you can be running digital ads and search ads during the quiet times at lower budget.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: We always talk about always on ads.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: Having something on at all times is very good because of the fractured attention spans, we want to make sure that people remember that we're here.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: The big switch would be, of course, as you wind down the season, is maybe dialing back the channels you're on, which ones convert the best.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: We see very often that meta display or video ads and Google search are usually a good combination for minimalist digital advertising because if you have your conversion pipeline set up, those are the ones that generally convert the best.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: Another sleeper could be YouTube, where people are searching all manner of things and you can reach them where their interests and your business intersect.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: Step number two is benchmarking.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: If you've listened to previous episodes, we talked about benchmarking, the royal we, me, talked about benchmarking, and that was in episode seven.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: And the idea behind benchmarking is that you have an understanding of how your website is performing, say in organic search or how your ads are performing compared to the industry norms.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: But the best benchmarks are the ones you create yourself using your own data.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: So the slow times are a perfect time to look back.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: Run some reports, your uh acquisition reports in GA4 and see which channels were driving the most traffic for you to get an idea of what percentage that looks like.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: You can look at your paid media in GA4 and see which one's converted best for the last year, and you get an idea of conversion rates, and you can have that so you have something to base future ad campaigns on.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: Whatever you decide to benchmark, it's probably a good practice to put that information into a spreadsheet, one that you can add a new column every year so you can build on it year after year, and over time you'll be able to see trends and know if stuff is working the way you want it to.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: And also you might be able to identify just how things have changed in terms of user behavior, in terms of new technologies, all that kind of thing.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: So to keep things relatively simple, because you're probably like, well, what should I benchmark?
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: I would start with on the advertising side, click-through rates, what you would expect your normal click-through rate to be, and if you're tracking it, and hopefully you are, conversion rates and cost per conversion.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: This is on the ad platform side.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: So I would probably do this by ad platform, but also I would do it by media type if you're running display and video, if you're doing search, just because you'll want to know not only how Meta performs compared to Google, but how does display perform compared to video on Meta, or how does search compare to YouTube videos on Google?
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: And these benchmarks will help you know where to put your dollars or at least which media to emphasize next season.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't have to be all or nothing.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: One tip about benchmarking: make sure you're comparing like periods when you're doing your benchmarking.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: So compare this January to last January, not last July.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: I've seen it time and time again in seasonal businesses or with DMOs where people see numbers and it's like, oh my gosh, you know, even like 30 days over the previous 30 days, and they're like, oh no, it's terrible, we're doing awful, or oh my gosh, something happened.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: Why are we up so much?
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: And it's really just a seasonal fluctuation.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: So a perfect example would be from May in the rafting industry.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: If you compare your June numbers to May numbers, you're probably gonna be killing it in June compared to May.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas if you compare your August numbers to your July numbers, your August number is gonna be way down because school started and it starts, it'll probably start in July before we know it.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so just make sure you're doing year over year for these kinds of benchmarking uh exercises.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: Step number three, testing.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: So with your benchmarking in place, you can use the quiet times to also test.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: You can do small ad spends, so you don't have to spend a lot of money to do tests, which is really cool.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: And you can do them in very short runs because generally you should have a pretty good idea of how things are performing within one or two weeks.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: And you can test different creatives to see which ones resonate more with people.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: You can test the same ads against different audiences.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: So you can segment if you want to do men versus women or if you want to do different age ranges.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: You can use a third-party landing page A B test platform.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: We like to use Stellar here at Digital Relativity.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: There you can take an existing page, you don't have to know how to code, and you can make an alternate version of it right there in the third-party platform and test your landing page.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: Say you want to move the form higher up on the page, or you want to swap out an image or change the call to action.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: And then you test just one variable at a time, does it lead to an improved performance?
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: You can test forms.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: Do people fill out a shorter form more than they fill out a longer form?
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: That sort of thing.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: And landing page testing, just as a quick aside, is super important.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: Even though your ads might be sending a ton of traffic, if your landing page is a hot mess, you might be missing out.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a good idea to test that as you can.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: And the slow season is nice because you're not under the gun with all the craziness that happens at peak season.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so testing doesn't cost a lot of money to get really good intelligence on what optimizations will drive better performance, whether it be on the ad platform side or the website side.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: In the tourism space, obviously, having a handful of qualified leads coming in is always better than having a ton of junk leads.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: So when we're talking about conversion rates and conversion numbers, the leads are important, but it's kind of a vanity number.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_00: You can drive a lot of leads because you might be getting bot traffic, you might be getting lonely people who love to fill out forms.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: Well, whatever it is, the key is to see what that means in terms of actual bookings.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: That's where the real information is.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: So who cares if you got 6,000 leads if you only got six bookings?
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: Although that is also information you can learn from two.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why you want to test.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: Even negative information is useful information.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so probably the most important thing about testing is to just pick a few variables and try those first, usually one at a time, see what happens, regroup.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I should mention when you do a test, you should have a hypothesis.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: You don't want to drive yourself nuts and overthink it.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: So you create a hypothesis.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: And an example might be that maybe this past year you used this one kick butt image of a close-up of two smiling faces that were on premises that year.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: And you use them for the previous season, but you're like, man, I kind of think a scenic landscape would kill it.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe it's just that you're tired of looking at it, which often happens, and it's another thing to guard against.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: Just because you've seen it day in and day out doesn't mean that people out there in internet land have.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: So be careful of that, that bias.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: But at any rate, so you have this hypothesis.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: You're like, I think the landscape might do better than the smiling faces.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: So you test that.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: You let the test results determine whether or not that's true.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so you have a hypothesis, you test it, and then you move on to the next variable.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_00: Another thing to be aware of when you're testing is to make sure that the two things that you're testing are sufficiently different.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: So, like the two faces versus a landscape, or as another example, testing whether your form gets more submissions at the top of your landing page versus at the bottom.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: They need to be noticeably different because if they're not, most people probably won't notice either.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: We did a study recently where we had all these images, and up close, you're like, yeah, they're different, but looking at them in uh the meta ads platform, you know, they're small like little thumbnails.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: And at that distance, it's like, wow, they all kind of look really similar.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: And not surprisingly, they perform pretty similarly.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: So make sure that your elements are different enough so that if someone saw them quickly, they would immediately spot the difference.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: All right, next step building and refreshing ad platform audiences.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this one might sound a little techy, and it can be, um, but it it is not rocket science.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: And during the offseason, you can futz around with it until you get everything working the way you need it to.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: If you don't know what your ad platform audiences are or how to build them, usually what we do is when we get a new partner, we make sure that on their website they have, and I've talked about this in previous episodes, but that you have a pixel.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's just a bit of code that goes usually in Google Tag Manager, which is on your website.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, it's a tag that's on your website that fires when people visit it.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: And every time that tag fires, it'll store a cookie in the person's browser usually, or it might be coming through a conversions API.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: It builds this critical mass of people so that you can see what people are doing when they click the ads and go to your website, but also you can build audiences in the ad platforms with those.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: So every time a person clicks, they get added to that audience.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: And you might be thinking, well, it's the off-season and traffic is lower on our website.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: And that's true, but this is also where you're making sure that everything's working the way it should.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're running test campaigns and that sort of thing, you do have the opportunity to still build those audiences.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: If you've never placed ad pixels on your website or haven't had anyone do that for you, I highly recommend it because it's a great way to retarget people as well.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: And basically what that means is when those pixels fire and that cookie gets stored in someone's browser, you can then serve up ads to those people on the platforms where they go.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: So if someone visits your website and then they go to Facebook and you have retargeting set up on Facebook, you can send them ads.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: And ideally, if you're promoting early season specials, you can that can be the follow-up ad.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: So they've hit your website, maybe they didn't see the special, or maybe they did, but then you serve it up again and you're like, hey, 20% off if you book early.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: You generally want to have some sort of incentive in the retargeting ad, or you're giving away something.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: So it could be a free guide, but something that piques people's interest.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you get that set up in the off-season, you can have that running all year long.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: And so even though you might be in the slow times, if people are just browsing around and they hit your site and you have retargeting setup, you can serve them those ads, both during the slow times and later on throughout the year.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: So you keep your company front of mind for them.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: And like I mentioned, you possibly offer a discount or some sort of incentive.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_00: And also within ad platforms, you can create audiences from first-party data that you've been collecting.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_00: So if you have a robust email list, you can feed that into, say, Google, and then Google will match IDs that it recognizes.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so if you're collecting newsletter signups, that's usually where most people build their email lists.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_00: You're collecting emails when people book.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: You want to make sure that you have an opt-in for that.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: So probably a checkbox that is automatically checked so that when the user fills out the form, they can see it and go, yeah, I guess, yeah, just opt me in for future marketing.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_00: And they can uncheck it if they don't want to.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: But anyway, we want to make sure that we follow those rules so that our lists are on the up and up.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_00: You can feed these email lists into Meta, you can do it into Google, pretty much any ad platform will have that functionality to it.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_00: And the match rates for the different platforms are hit or miss.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so having a good size list is advisable.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm talking 2,000 or more, but you can always try it and you'll find out if your list is big enough or not.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_00: And if you already have these lists in there from or you already built these audiences from email lists in the past, you can update them with these new lists because inevitably emails go defunct and fall off.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_00: And eventually, if you don't do anything with with your Audience list from first party data, it'll shrink over time.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: The last thing I'll say about the first party data is that each platform probably has its own format that it wants the list to be in.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: But because we usually just use email addresses, and again, the one thing I also want to point out, these are hashed, so it's not like you're just dumping your email addresses into the internet.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um, when you upload them to Google or Meta, those that data gets hashed and so it can still connect the dots with the IDs, but it's not like those email addresses are actually living in Meta or Google.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's the there are privacy requirements that don't allow them to do that.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's just a way of trying to match up identities online so that you can serve ads to people who probably want to see them since they've been on your website.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: And the final tip is housekeeping, which if we look back, this probably all sounds like housekeeping.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: But um, Justin and I talked about website performance improvements that are easy to implement in episodes eight and nine, and that overlaps nicely here.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's not unusual for things to change over the course of the year, for systems to get deprecated, whether it be on your hosting service or on the theme you're using for your website, or maybe your favorite plugin.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_00: I had a site recently that hadn't been updated in five years, and so it had fallen so far behind that it had to be put on a park domain because the whole thing just crashed.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_00: It was showing all the back-end code.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, it was the PHP that hadn't been updated in so long.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's just like deferred maintenance on your house or your car.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_00: It'll prematurely age that property.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: And the same thing happens in the digital realm as well.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: So make sure your website is up to date, check those plugins, check your theme, make sure your PHP is up to date if you're using WordPress.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it also is not unusual for things to break for unknown reasons.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_00: So on your website, maybe you have links to other websites and they just go to dead pages because the pages were taken down or the company isn't in business any longer.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_00: A quick walkthrough of your site, testing links and menus to make sure everything is working, that'll go a long way to making sure that your users, your visitors have a good experience.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_00: If your site is out of date and things are broken, people might make the same assumption about your business.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so like I said, none of this is rocket science, none of this is super technical, except for maybe the pixel stuff.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_00: But if you're, say, a DMO director sitting in front of a board, if you're the admissions director having to talk to your college president, whatever, having to explain why marketing dollars are going out the door during the exact months visitors aren't coming in, I know how hard that conversation can be.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_00: And it's tough to justify keeping the foot on the gas when everything's quiet.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: You can run lean during these months while still keeping the lights on, right?
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: You can maintain a minimal presence and do the foundational work to prepare for next season.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I think most importantly, if you can clearly articulate what it is you're doing and why you're doing it to whoever you report to, the efficiencies you're leveraging and how the outcomes can positively impact the next go-round, you're pretty likely to get buy-in.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_00: Anyone who's worked in marketing for seasonal businesses or organizations probably has similar stories of trying to do more with less.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_00: If you can build that coherent plan using the right tools, you can boost your spirits, which is always good, right?
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_00: I always feel better when I have a plan.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_00: That's it for the landmark 10th episode of The Same Side.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_00: You know, thanks so much for listening.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you heard something that speaks to you, something that will put a spring in your step as you head into the offseason.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll see you next time on the same side.