The thing with digital marketing is you have much more scope to kind of approach people at various points, right? I think it's fair to say based on years of experience in SEO that you cannot provide SEO and you cannot supply digital marketing. We don't have a product. We have a process.
The idea is if you can't afford to hire an agency like us, then don't worry, we're going to tell you exactly how to do what it is we do. I mean, we are frontline, active digital marketers. Day in, day out, we're figuring things out. We're helping businesses. We really are at the coalface and that's what we'd like to achieve with this podcast. So we are starting out our journey, podcasting. We're a digital marketing agency based in Scotland with clients all over the place, all over the world, which is great. And we enjoy digital marketing, but we are really aware that a lot of people in digital marketing or a lot of people who think about digital marketing are not immersed in it like we are, are confused by it and probably get further confused by some of the practitioners. So I'm Dave Robinson.
I started Red Evolution back in 2003 and I'm talking with ...
Alex Bussey, a CRO expert.
Oh, there he goes already. A CRO—
Expert. Oh no. We've—
Got to explain digital marketing to people who don't understand digital marketing. Straight away drops the CRO bomb.
Right. So I work in conversion rate optimisation, which is helping you turn customers into ... Well, no, that's wrong. That's wrong.
It is. But this is our first podcast. So basically CRO — it makes sure that poor webpages become great webpages by making them better, by understanding how they're being used, watching people using them, carrying out experiments, and making a webpage that maybe generates a lead or at least helps the company achieve something.
And I think that's a really interesting thing that you've just done, right? So I said something very jargony and you took it and you explained what it actually does. And that's what our industry lacks. That's what nobody else will really do. I think most SEO agencies, most SEO practitioners out there kind of rely on that kind of jargony smokescreen to put people off, I guess, or to keep what they're doing seeming more valuable than it really is maybe, or at least so they can charge whatever they like for the work that they do without really explaining what it is that they do.
That's right. And I think the important thing that we're going to do with this podcast is it's going to be from the coalface. We might even call it "From the Coalface" or we might call it "Digital Marketing De-Composed." I'm not really sure. We've got some ideas what we might call it.
I like decomposed. Yeah.
I kind of like the idea of de-compose as well. It kind of works, doesn't it? But the idea is if you can't afford to hire an agency like us, then don't worry. We're going to tell you exactly how to do what it is we do because we're totally transparent anyway. There's no secrets. It's not hard. It's hard work. So we're quite happy to tell people how to do what we do. If you can afford to hire an agency, whether it's us or another equally brilliant agency like us — there are one or two around — then at least listening to this podcast will help you understand what you're buying, what you're getting into maybe.
And hopefully what you'll take away from it as well is that maybe paying less for an agency is more trouble than it's worth, because what you're not getting is anything like the level of expertise or experience that you actually need to move the dial.
Well, like most things in life, I guess, buy cheap, buy twice. So like this first podcast, we're going to sort of talk in general terms about what digital marketing is. And I think I want to start by saying that I've come to digital marketing as a second or third career, I suppose. I mean, I'm an engineer by profession and I was probably one of those people that sort of looked at the whole marketing piece and thought, oh, fluffy nonsense. And now as a chartered engineer, I now spend most of my time involved in digital marketing and work with a lot of engineering companies maybe as a result of that. But I really enjoy this stuff. I love it. I find it fascinating. And you know what I really enjoy is helping other people understand what it's all about and how we can help them grow their business.
I mean, and I know that sounds sickly sweet — "Oh, Dave wants to help people, isn't he a great guy?" I don't mean that. I mean, whatever I've ever done in life, whether it's ballroom dancing, playing the drums or whatever it is, I've always been enthusiastic about it and tried to get other people interested by helping them. And I'm the same with this stuff.
But he's not, for the record, a particularly nice person all of the time.
Ha ha. Oh no, I feel really hurt now.
And I guess in a way I'm kind of like the perfect counterpoint, right? Because I did come up doing nothing but digital marketing. I, for a long time, bought into all the fluffy bullshit and thought that's how you had to talk about this kind of thing. And I think freelancing for people made me realise that actually the kind of fluffy language you peddle to people in an agency isn't necessarily what they need to grow their business. So yeah, I guess I'm a reformed bad marketer.
Yeah. Good. Good that you reformed. So I suppose if we start at the beginning — in your words, Alex, what is it that we do this for? Why do we do digital marketing? What are we ultimately trying to achieve?
We can edit in some ka-ching noises, some money raining from the ceiling. Why do we do it? It's a puzzle. You take a business that is maybe doing okay, but not fantastic, and you find a way of amplifying them, of making them the go-to business for whatever it is that they do. And that process of taking a business that maybe doesn't really have a brand, that isn't making an impact, that doesn't — to use a wanky digital marketing term — have a digital footprint, and to turn them into something that people think, "Oh yeah, think shoes, think Nike." That kind of thing.
The story about how they got their logo, which was developed by somebody for 25 quid or something, I find quite fascinating. But yeah, I mean, you're right. For me, I'm interested in helping businesses — on our website we say we help businesses thrive online. And it took us a long time, believe it or not, to arrive at that very simple statement. It was about six months of workshopping and trying to figure out what we're really about. And what we're really about is helping businesses find new customers and grow.
That's what we've done. We've found new customers and grown our agency by using digital marketing. And going back to the reason for this podcast — we're not like one of these people that for 50 quid a month will give you all the secrets of digital marketing but don't actually do it. We are frontline, active digital marketers. Day in, day out, we're figuring things out. We're helping businesses with their paid search, with their organic search, with any number of things, and even this podcasting stuff we're doing now — we're actually working with some customers on that as well. So we really are at the coalface and that's what we'd like to achieve with this podcast: really get down to the nitty gritty.
It's not just about that. It's about establishing a presence, isn't it, in whatever market they're in, I suppose.
I think that's exactly it, isn't it? It's got to be more than just transactional. We're past the point where we're just here to try and find new customers. We're at the point where we want people to think of us as the friendly, helpful guys that'll help you with your web marketing. That's our brand, that's who we are. And I guess ultimately at the end of the day, that's all you can really hope for in that space — to become known for something.
Yeah. So I guess one of the things that's worth exploring is what digital marketing isn't, because I think like many industries, we suffer from a bit of navel gazing. We suffer from a plethora of acronyms — whether it's SEO, PPC, CRO, CPM, CPC — and people find that impenetrable. And not only that, they then sort of hang their hat on something. Typically companies will come to us and believe that their SEO — it's usually "their SEO optimization," which actually means "search engine optimization optimization," which always tickles me — is broken. "Can you fix my SEO? And then suddenly great things will happen and we'll start getting found by potential customers in Google." And digital marketing isn't that. SEO can be broken as in it hasn't been done properly or it's been done badly, but it's rarely the case that their SEO is broken, and it's never the case that you fix something and everything then magically works.
So it's not about fixing something technical. That's part of it. Technical SEO is a thing, but it's—
It's the surface, isn't it? That's the thing. Why are you fixing the technical SEO? People come to us and they say, "Oh, people aren't finding my articles online. I'm not ranking for these keywords." But even if they were ranking for those keywords, the content that would be served up is still poor. And their prospective customers are still going to look at it and think that's crap. And I think that's the problem, isn't it? We've reached this point in digital marketing where people are more interested in the end goal than how you actually get there. They want their webpage in position one for X search term in Google. No thought goes into what they're trying to rank for, what they're going to do with the people that get onto the page once they've ranked.
It's this whole kind of oversimplification of the model that's happened. I blame things like Moz and platforms like that. They have these basic beginner guides to SEO and it abstracts the problem. It turns it into something that it's not at all. It's not about chasing rankings for the sake of rankings. It's about growing your business, and it lacks any of that nuance.
So if you peel that right back and try and understand what Google's trying to do — Google is effectively trying to make its users, people carrying out searches, happy. It's trying to give them information, help them solve the problem, and it's trying to do that as efficiently as it can. And its driver for doing that is: by doing that, people stay wedded to the Google brand, and if they stay wedded to the Google brand, they click Google Ads, and that's where Google makes its billions.
It's not complicated.
Right. You say "I'm going to Google something" instead of "I'm going to search for something" because Google offers the best possible results every time you search something. So nobody remembers any of the competition anymore. And that's fantastic, but like you say, it's important to remember that that is their MO and you always have to be kind of working towards that. You have to be helping Google provide the best content for their customers, otherwise they're going to stop helping you.
So Google's reason for being is to serve up accurate, meaningful search results. And let's face it, they get that wrong a lot, don't they?
An awful lot, yeah. But how often have you done a search and the stuff you get back is absolute garbage? All that means is that they've still got a long way to go. And credit to them, that's what they're trying to do. They're always working to tweak and refine things, but that's not to say that it's perfect by any stretch of the imagination.
No. I mean, you always hear about the big Google updates like, "Oh, Google have done this thing, which is going to kill a lot of websites."
Name them after animals or some sort.
The Panda update wasn't actually named after a panda. It was named after, I think, Navneet Panda, one of the engineers. I don't know if that's the same for Penguin. But they're like the headline things. Behind the scenes, Google's making four or five hundred tweaks and changes every year, maybe even every day. And I think that's one of the things that people have latched onto. A conversation we often hear is: "I realise that I need to change my pages all the time to keep Google happy." And it's like, no, you don't — that isn't the case at all.
I read a thing in Search Engine Journal two days ago that was literally like, "Does moving the links around on your page help your content to rank better?" And it's this whole idea that there are people out there right now stressing about that. Do I move the picture up or down? Do I put a link in? Is six links too many? And it's just completely missing the woods for the trees.
Well, that's why if you pare it all the way back to what Google's trying to achieve and think — somebody searches for, I don't know, blue widgets. Google is first of all going to try and understand: are they looking to buy blue widgets? Are they researching? It's trying to understand intent. And as a result of that, it then has a best guess at which pages are going to help you. So how does Google take the squillion pages that are talking about blue widgets and decide which of those pages should be at position one and which should be buried at position thousand and one?
Yeah. I mean, this is the puzzle, isn't it? Google say there are thousands of ranking factors. There are probably more than you could ever possibly think about, but I guess ultimately at the root of it all is this whole idea of — Google started out and made a name for themselves by focusing on PageRank, which is how many links point to your page. They used to publish that as well. They used to let the world know how much they trusted a page.
Until they realised everyone was going to game it horribly and use it to get ahead of the competition.
That's right. So at the very beginning, it was literally just: how many links point at my webpage? How many times do people talk about it?
Citations? You've done it again!
Links, hyperlinks … how many? Well, you know when you're on a webpage and one of the words is a different colour and it means you can click it? That's a link to either another page on the same website or a page on a different website. So the pages that link to your site help Google understand how important your pages are. It's like a popularity contest in many respects.
So is that what Google's doing when it decides which page to show at position one and which page to show at position 1,001?
That's how it started, right? And then Google realised that actually there are millions of different things you can look at. You can look at how long people spend on a webpage and use that to evaluate how good a user experience it is.
For a long time, there was a load of debate about whether Google was measuring how long people were spending looking at pages in order to figure out whether the page was a good user experience. Is the jury still out on that or do you think that is the case?
Yeah. So I think this is one of the kind of embarrassing behind-the-curtain moments with SEO, right? Everybody in SEO is making a best guess at how Google looks at webpages. We can test things — we can put up two webpages and shunt visitors to one and have them spend three minutes on the page, and shunt visitors to another and have them spend a minute. And if the one where people spend three minutes ranks better, we say, "Oh look, Google measures engagement statistics." But they're not perfect tests. So there's always an element of: this could actually be really wrong. Like in science — you think the Higgs boson is the smallest particle until you find a smaller one. We're making best guesses at thousands of different ranking factors.
I guess all we really know for a fact is that links matter — because Google have told us that — and all of the page speed insights stuff matters. We know that the speed at which your webpage loads—
The technical stuff really.
Yeah. How fast does your webpage load and when it does load, how static is it? Does it move around a lot? Do adverts pop up? Again, because Google is trying to look for the best possible user experience for the people using the platform. And really beyond that, everything else is kind of guesswork. We know that the number of keywords on the page kind of helps — Google reads the text.
Keywords, Alex? Keywords?
One thing I'm learning very quickly is that I'm so immersed in this that I don't even realise how inaccessible it is. So: you're trying to rank for a search term — blue widgets, like you said. If you mention "blue widgets" a lot on the page, Google looks at that and thinks, "Oh, this is a page about blue widgets." At a very basic level, that's all Google really can do to understand the context of a webpage. A lot of people think if you put 6,000 versions of the keyword on there, that's bad. If you put three on there, that's bad too. You have to find the perfect middle ground. And again, you get into this whole prescriptive black magic thing where people give you percentages of keyword density. We know that Google looks at the words on a page and uses that to decide—
So here's a question for you. Should we write our pages for Google or for people? Bit of a leading question.
We should write them for people. When I first got into SEO, around 2012, there was a valid school of thought that said we should write them for machines. It worked at the time. You could just churn out a page with 600 iterations of "blue widget" and it would rank and it would work. Fortunately for the state of the internet, Google got wise to that and now they look at so many contextual clues that it's kind of a waste of time to try and write for them.
You have to write for the user because that's all Google cares about. Are you providing the user with a good experience? So in a way they've kind of removed themselves from the equation completely and made old school SEO — where your job was to try and out-manoeuvre an algorithm — redundant.
Yeah. I mean, I used to say: you can try and out-manoeuvre Google, but you're basically trying to outmanoeuvre some very clever software that's being constantly evolved by a room full of people with PhDs in making very clever software.
And it's not even just a room anymore, is it? I don't know how many thousands of people Google employ, but the engineering that goes into that search algorithm is far beyond the capacity of any one agency.
That's an interesting point because when people have said to us, "Google is constantly changing and we have to keep changing our pages," my answer is usually: Google is constantly tweaking its algorithm to try and get rid of the people who are gaming the system. So if you're not doing that, if you're genuinely trying to create fantastic webpages that deserve to rank because they're great and they're genuinely answering questions and providing useful information, then you kind of don't need to worry. You're doing the right thing. And it'll ebb and it'll flow.
A private blog network means there's a series of websites — sometimes thousands — where you can put your content with links back to your website, which in theory helps your website rank. A lot of these private blog networks are fairly inexpensive to join. But when they get found out—
Everybody in the chain ends up blacklisted.
I mean, there is a school of thought that says, look, do it. And when they find it, all that will happen is that those links and that gain will disappear, but then you just go and try something else. And you're constantly looking for these kinds of ways to beat Google.
There are some very prominent figures in our industry that make an entire living out of this. They spin up a site and do what is known as Black Hat SEO — trying to game the algorithm.
I mean, there are people who now would call themselves White Hat — who talk openly about what they did as a Black Hat SEO. I think that's now kind of above board and they share their expertise.
Yeah, absolutely. I think the point is: there's a school of thought that says that's okay if you can do it, but it's just exhausting. And the really big problem is that most brands are tied to one website. You can't afford to, when you accidentally tank your rankings, just ditch it and start again. Big established companies can't afford to just rebrand.
I mean, some big names have screwed up in the past. BMW did something and they got taken out of Google's index — only for a while, obviously. And there's a famous case in America of a big chain store that tried to game the search engines and Google said, "We're not going to put your site in our search results anymore."
It can happen. I don't think it happens much now, do you?
Well, I think the thing is with most of those big brands is they're massively kind of insulated from all of that, right? Because when Google's looking at the big picture of your website, if you're a huge brand, you have so many natural links coming in all the time that Google aren't really going to notice if you've been doing anything naughty.
And just to recap — the reason I was talking about those links is because links coming into your website is one of the things we know Google is using as a measure of your authority. You can think of authority as how much Google trusts you, and if it trusts you, it's going to put your webpages in search results more.
Yeah. And I think the thing about links is they're also one of the easiest things to game. Link building services where you pay somebody to build your links — every single day there are emails from people saying, "I own these 20 websites, they're all trusted by Google, and I can guarantee you good rankings."
It's not. And this is one of the reasons why this industry is mistrusted. It's one of the reasons why we have to spend so much of our time helping, educating, and trying to let people understand what's really going on — and also help them understand how to avoid the bullshitters.
Because we've had clients approach us and say, "Look, I've paid somebody to build all these links to my site and now my site has been de-indexed. It's disappeared from Google. What have I done?" And that's kind of where the foundation for ideas like this podcast come from, right? We deal with these problems day in, day out. We see people making the same mistakes over and over again. It's no skin off our backs to say, "That's just not the right thing to do and here's why."
And ultimately, link building is one of my biggest bug bears with the whole industry because it's made out to be the crème de la crème of SEO tactics — you build links and then your content shoots up the rankings with no other effort needed. But there is no reliable way of effectively building links.
Yeah. I would imagine that Google puts an inordinate amount of time and energy into trying to figure out how to sort the good from the bad when it comes to links, in order to make sure that its search results don't become utter crap. And if it becomes crap, then believe it or not, people will turn to DuckDuckGo or Bing or any of the other search engines, because people are busy and they're just trying to solve problems. And if Google doesn't solve those problems for them, they will go somewhere else.
Yeah, that's exactly it. DuckDuckGo is a really good example because they are biting at Google's heels. Once upon a time, it was complete garbage. They just didn't offer a good user experience. Nowadays, there are entire communities on Reddit dedicated to getting people away from Google and onto DuckDuckGo because it's almost as good and it doesn't have any of the same problems with privacy. So yeah, I think Google do have to be very careful to make sure they're always offering the best possible service. I do think they spend an inordinate amount of money making sure that they can look at a link and say, "Okay, this is good" or "No, this is garbage. You bought this for a tenner off Fiverr."
So moving away from links, because it's a subject you can talk about for a long time. We were talking about what digital marketing is — it's about trying to get exposure for the business so that people know about you, so that people start to trust you, so that people then might reach out, engage, pop you an email, pick up the phone, jump onto a live chat: "Hey, I've got this problem. It looks like you can help me. Can we have a conversation?" Just like marketing has always been, really. Marketing has always been about trying to tell a good story and get people to buy into that story and to reach out. And it's no different, is it really?
No, I think that's exactly it. I think marketing's been through a couple of huge seismic changes where everything was digital all of a sudden and everybody thought that meant they had to come up with a lot of technical terminology for very simple things and massively over-complicate things. But I really do think it just comes back to those basic principles — tell a good story and make sure that when people think, "Oh, I really need a blue widget," you're the people they think of because you're the blue widget experts. That really is all there is to it. Obviously getting to that point is an uphill struggle, and you do have to put in a lot of hard work, but the point is: let's not get distracted with all the shiny bells and whistles.
Let's not spend X amount of money on technical SEO for the sake of it because somebody told you you need better technical SEO. You need better marketing, full stop.
The technical SEO is something that you're in control of and it makes sense to get it right. Because you're not really in control of who links to your website — which helps your authority — and you're not in control of how your content resonates. You think you create a great piece of content like we're creating this fantastic podcast just now. You know what? Maybe three people will listen to it if we're lucky. But getting the technical stuff right, using tools like Sitebulb for example — a great piece of software — is important. That said, a site can have pretty awful technical SEO, it can be slow, it can be a bit rubbish generally, and it can still rank. Because if the content's popular, if people link to it and share it and love it and visit it, it's hard to beat that just by creating another site where the technical SEO's perfect.
Right. This is exactly the point, isn't it? Big brands that build websites on Magento, for example — Magento is horrendously slow and it's not very well optimised at all — still flourish because ultimately, while technical SEO is important and it is part of the picture, it's not the entire picture. If you have shortcomings in one area, you can easily make them up in others. You don't necessarily have to do everything perfectly. You just have to do some of the things better than anybody else.
Okay. So over different episodes of the podcast, we're going to talk about some of those things in more detail. But in big picture terms — we've got Acme Engineering Limited. They employ 30, 40 people. They're turning over five, ten million quid a year. They're not generating any business online. They've got a website, it's got 10 pages of content. A homepage which says "we are great." An about us page which says "we are great and we've been around for 10 years and we were started by Fred." A contact page with an address on an industrial estate somewhere. And their products and services. Where's the starting point for that very ordinary engineering company?
You're just attacking most of our clients.
Don't say that.
No, I mean, I think this is the thing, isn't it? The first principles are simply: what is the story here? Why would I buy off you and not somebody else? What is it about your business that sets it apart from the competition? What is it that makes it unique? We talk about unique selling points a lot, but really at a fundamental level, there has to be something that your business does that nobody else is doing. And once you've drilled down to that—
What about businesses who do exactly the same as a million other businesses? And there's plenty of them.
Are there? Example?
Okay. I've just bought some e-bikes. I bought two of them off a company called Tredz. Great experience. I enjoyed buying the bikes. And then I bought the other one — because Tredz didn't have the size I needed — off a company called Balfes Bikes. Again, equally great. They both sell bikes. They both sell the same bikes at the same prices. And the only reason I bought off Balfes is that they had the size I needed.
Right. But that's the point, isn't it? You bought off Tredz to start with. Why? Maybe great product selection is a unique selling point. I mean, I think on a certain fundamental level, a lot of the stuff is happening subconsciously. We gravitate towards certain brands. We see a logo that we like, a picture that resonates with us, something somebody said on social media, and for whatever reason we think that's who we're going to buy from. I have a friend who produces metal albums and he spends a phenomenal amount of money on recording gear. He only buys off three or four brands. He says, "Oh, they're just the ones I trust." He can't tell you why he trusts them more than any other brand.
But there's something happening at a fundamental level. They've implanted this idea that they are more trustworthy. And doesn't this come down to the whole idea behind marketing — that it's trying to tap into people's emotions?
Doesn't this come down to the whole idea behind marketing that it's trying to tap into people's emotions? Because we don't know why we trust that particular supplier or partner or brand, but we do.
Right. And even in the example of Acme Engineering — even people buying motors for industrial applications — they're still making decisions based on emotion. They're still preferring one brand over another. And sometimes it's as simple as the logo colours, but I think a lot of the time it's a really complicated mishmash of factors. It starts with things like — in the example of this website with 10 pages — if you manufacture motors and you start writing guides on how to pick a motor, how to know which motor's right for you, how to not get ripped off when you're buying a motor, those are all things that instantly make a potential customer think, "Those guys are trustworthy. Those guys helped me out."
Okay. But how do I even find Acme Engineering in the first place? Acme make electric motors — but so do loads of other engineering companies. How are Acme going to put their offer in front of somebody who needs to buy electric motors with a website that says, "We're Acme, we started in 1973 when Fred started the business and we're on the so-and-so industrial estate."
No, of course not. And this is the point — you have to understand what phrases the people searching for your electric motors are using. But instead of keywords, we need to understand the problem that the person who needs the electric motor is trying to solve. It might just be, "I need a two kilowatt electric motor." Or it might be, "I desperately need to upgrade X, Y, and Z. How do I do it?" There are a multiplicity of ways you'd search for a problem. When you were looking for electric bikes, did you just type in "electric bikes"?
Not at the start, no. I was basically looking for information about what would tick the boxes that I needed ticked. So it was research. I was looking for YouTube videos and reviews … how can I do exercise without pedalling up hills? And then even when I found the brand, part of me was like, "Aren't rally bikes a bit rubbish?" And then I'm doing research: "Are these bikes any good?" And as it turned out, they're actually really good and it's a company that's going somewhere. And suddenly it all started to make sense.
So I guess the point we're kind of coming to in a roundabout way is that you have to be aiming to reach people while they're trying to discover whatever it is that you're selling. You have to be solving a problem. You have to be doing something to help people.
Well, that brings to mind the book They Ask, You Answer. It's a good book and it's still relevant today. The author built an entire business — pools, above ground and below ground — by trying to understand all of the problems that his customers have and all the questions that they ask. And it's a phenomenally successful business. He's even built a digital marketing agency on the back of it.
Yeah. And to be fair, that is the exact template that we take to most of our clients. How can you help people solve problems? How can you position yourself in such a way that when somebody thinks "Oh, I'm really hot and it's summer," the answer is swimming pools?
What do we say to the business owners? Fred who started Acme Engineering back in 1973 might say: "Why do I have to go to the expense and take the time and trouble of providing all this information, giving people all this amazing free advice? I'm giving away the crown jewels. Why should I do that?"
That's a good question. But the honest answer is that is the only way to set yourself apart. And also you don't really lose anything from doing it — because all your competitors are doing it anyway. If you're not doing it as well, you're just going to miss out.
There are no secrets anymore. You can find any information online about anything. It may as well come from the horse's mouth. It may as well be you sharing that information, because people are going to find it whether you want them to or not. The only difference is that you have the opportunity to be the one providing it — and providing it in a way that's more accessible than other people. Because that's an important part of the puzzle as well.
Yeah. And it's fair to say that trying to get clients to understand that is a big challenge. Stop smiling.
Yeah. Every damn day. This is the problem — it's persuading people that there's real value in the knowledge and insight they already have, that there's a value to sharing it with people. And that's really what we do: we facilitate that transfer of knowledge. When we work with clients, we get them to help us write the content. We get them to help us share their knowledge and experience with their audience.
That's why when we speak to customers in the early stages — when we're trying to figure out if we're a good fit — we really hope they use the P word: the partner word, as opposed to the vendor or supplier.
Because, based on years of experience in SEO, you cannot provide SEO and you cannot supply digital marketing. You can work with somebody to make their digital marketing work. We don't have a product. We have a process. And I think that's a really important distinction to make, because a lot of people come into these things thinking, "Oh, I'll go and buy SEO and it'll cost me 2,000 pounds a month and I'll get out of it X, Y, and Z." It's a transaction. But that model doesn't really work. What we find is that we work with clients very closely, and what they get out of it at the end is the knowledge of how to take what they already know and turn it into something that works for — and grows — their business.
That's right. So our Acme Engineering people — they need to dig into the problem that they really solve. They'll say, "Well, we sell electric motors." Well, yeah, you do, but people don't buy an electric motor. They actually buy a solution to a problem. And you've got to understand that. And usually our clients really deeply understand those problems — because they are the subject matter experts. Teasing that out is most of what we do.
Yeah. Working out what problems they solve better than anybody else and how to really hone in on that. In the example of Acme Engineering, the problem doesn't necessarily have to be "I need a 12 volt motor." It can be "I need a 12 volt motor tomorrow." Or "I need a red 12 volt motor." There's a lot of nuance and a lot of space to make sure that whatever your company does better than anybody else in the world is the thing that you become known and found for.
Do you think digital marketing is more about persuasion than traditional marketing ever was? Is it more nuanced?
Yeah. The thing with digital marketing is you have much more scope to approach people at various points. There's nuance and persuasion involved when people are first researching a product, when people are deciding which 12 volt motor to buy, when people are deciding which brand to buy. Digital marketing is the only channel that gives you the capability to reach people all the way along that journey. Traditional marketing — you rely on getting people into the shop in the first place. You have a big billboard or a poster, and when they think "Oh, I'm going to buy a bike," they think your brand. But you can't get to them when they're thinking, "What should I buy? What type of exercise should I try next?"
Because choice has changed so much, hasn't it? When I left school in 1980, if you were working in engineering, there were certain trade publications. You'd advertise in that publication and that's where your target audience was — dead easy. Whereas now everybody's going to go to LinkedIn, to Google, to YouTube. And so as a company, you just have to try that bit harder to be where your audience is.
Yeah. Do you remember the Yellow Pages? I think that's a really good example. When I was a kid, if you wanted secondhand toys or whatever, there was only one place in the world where you could go. And when you opened up the Yellow Pages, everything had the same sized box. No company was bigger than any other. They had one opportunity to reach you, right there in a sixteenth of a page. Whereas now there are so many steps to that same process. You can't just hit people in one place. You can't depend on them arriving at one place and looking for you. You have to be everywhere at once.
Yeah, that's right. Actually, I've lost track of time. I think we've been talking for quite a while, so I think for—
That is the story of digital marketing.
Yeah, that's right. I mean, we could probably keep talking for the rest of the day, but we'll bring this one to an end now. As we move on to the next podcast, we'll probably talk more specifically about very clearly defined subjects. But I think for this opening one, just having this rambling kind of brain spill was okay.
Yeah. It's setting your stall out, isn't it? This is what we're going to talk about. And if you're still listening at this point, you'll probably be interested in what we're rambling about next.
Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Well done.
