Digital Marketing Chat With Alex & Dave – Episode 103

Yeah. I mean, as an agency, you have to get to know a business really well in order to do good digital marketing, whether that's paid search, organic search, social content production, website builds, um, website redevelopments, you know, first and foremost, you need to really have an intimate, deep understanding of that business. And what that then does is it helps you from the outside looking in, give the business owners a different perspective sometimes.

Which is also weirdly, this morning I had a big meeting with a client and that was sort of the what do you mean a big meeting? A bit long, do you mean. I mean a long meeting. I mean, it was really productive meeting, but that was sort of the feedback in there as well that, you know, that we were bringing a completely different perspective that they lacked and that we were sort of helping them to see things that they hadn't seen.

So what we thought we'd do is we'd sort of take the coalface idea a bit literal and just talk about the week that we've had and the stuff that we've been doing. Okay. Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. It's been a two or three weeks, hasn't it? We've been a bit rubbish, haven't we?

Well, I went on holiday and I think things just sort of fell. No excuse. Yeah.

I've been busy as well. So we haven't got any podcasts recorded. What we've decided to experiment a bit with. And this. Well this could almost certainly just fall flat on our face.

Certainly will.

Almost certainly will. Um, but um, what we've, you know, this podcast has always been about digital marketing from the coalface and we've taken a semi, um, semi-structured approach to finding subjects and guests and kind of saying, right, we'll do one about this and we'll do one about that and that's fine. We'll probably do more of them. Um, but you know, given that we're over one hundred years old now, um, well, no episodes, sorry, not years. Uh, as we're over one hundred episodes old now. Um, we thought we'd maybe, Maybe just this once. But if it works.

Just relax a bit.

Yeah, just just sort of chill out a bit. And, um, and it's, it's Thursday kind of heading towards close of play on Thursday. So maybe Friday would be better for recording these going forward. But once again, you're on holiday tomorrow. Yes. I think it's amazing that, you know, you find the time to squeeze a bit of work in. I think it's we're always grateful when you show up. We never know when you're going to show up, you know, whether you'll be around or not. But we're always grateful. Alex is here. Alex is here. Rejoice, rejoice.

You're gonna go on holiday next month.

But yeah, but what? What do I do when I go on holiday? Alex?

Pretend to work for half a day. Oh, my internet connection is a bit spotty. Oh. I'm fishing.

There's no reason you can't fish and do digital marketing stuff.

Yeah, it's pretty chill.

Absolutely no reason at all. Yeah. So what we thought we'd do is we'd sort of take the coalface idea a bit, a bit literal and, and just talk about the week that we've had and the stuff that we've been doing. Now, you know, for any clients who listen to our podcast, um, first of all, you shouldn't be go away.

Yeah.

But if you do listen to our podcast, don't worry, we're not naming names. We're not, you know, everything we talk about will are anonymised because that's the right thing to do. But we thought maybe we'd sort of like, just maybe try and chew over some of the things that we've been working on through the week. And, um, and some of those conversations might be moderately interesting and some of them might not. But I think the whole idea is just to make it more of a sort of conversational, less structured thing. And then if it doesn't work, we'll go sort of screaming back to having a bit more structure.

Back to the safe haven.

Yeah. I mean, all right, it's not structureless in that we will try and talk all this stuff that's going on. Well, that's what we thought. We thought that like talking about things that we've actually been working on very much coal face type things. Um, there's bound to be stuff in there, which we've talked about before. There might be new stuff that that comes up.

Um, we'll inevitably touch on subjects that warrant explanations that we've given before and stuff as well. But look, you know, at the end of the day, if you're listening to this, hopefully what you get out of it is a, what an agency actually does day in, day out. And B, what sort of things, you know, you could be doing for your own marketing, I suppose. Okay.

So, um, how did you, how did your week start off? I, I seem to remember that. Why did I miss. We had a meeting pencilled in for ten o'clock on Monday morning when we were going to do some red evolution content chat.

Did I were you spraying water on a fire? I think you might.

I might have got a shout. Yeah. I can't remember exactly what it was. Oh that's right. I, we spent, I spent two hours.

Actually had three meetings scheduled for that morning. Didn't want to go over a client of ours who we've just set up a PPC campaign and a landing page for him, um, a couple of weeks ago and it come time to sort of review all of the, the sort of inputs again and see how it was doing and whether it was generating business.

That's right.

Yeah. Which it was. Um, we had to sort of persuade him that it was, if I remember correctly.

Yeah, I think so. I think he was, um. Yeah. I mean, it's still a work in progress, like most paid search, paid search campaigns. Um, okay. So I mean, the, the whole idea with, with reviewing, um, the paid search campaign. And I think, you know, I think we've spoken at length about this before, people tend to set it and forget it and hope for the best. Or they use something like P max or, or do they do they do they still have that other one that they used to have, like Google Ads Express or whatever it's called?

It does a weird thing. If you set it up and you're brand new to Google ads, you can get into sort of like a baby mode, um, like express wizard or something where it will sort of set up a very rudimentary campaign for you that yeah, it's a little bit like pmax, I suppose in some ways. Okay. Um, but yeah, the idea being that obviously we'd sort of set it all live and then we were coming back to review it sort of regularly to make sure that all of the keywords that were getting clicks were relevant to him, that it wasn't driving traffic from completely irrelevant Yeah.

That's right.

And also with him. So he's a client who works internationally. So another big part of that puzzle was figuring out, you know, were the countries that were generating all of the traffic actually relevant to him and sort of good prospects and that sort of thing.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So I mean, certainly when, when we're working on paid search, because we don't really do B2C, you know, we don't do this like programmatic squillions of searches and billions of budget and all that kind of stuff. It's very sort of highly specialised B2B stuff that we're working on predominantly. So we really do kind of double down and we'd recommend everybody does this really double down. On looking at the campaign every day for for the first few weeks and making sure you're eliminating all those clicks that you don't want to get so you're not wasting money, see what's working, what isn't working, and really monitor it closely and fine tune it to the point where you might not be getting many clicks with the clicks you get are actually potentially good leads.

Yeah, I'd say if you're not adding a couple of negative keywords a day, you're probably letting yourself down, probably wasting money. Um, and then yeah, the other flipside, the other part of that puzzle, sorry, that's really important is to make sure that it's actually generating leads and not just clicks, right? Because in AdWords, everything can look really rosy and you can look at it and see, oh, okay, you know, I'm getting fourteen percent click through rates and everyone seeing my ads and clicking them and going to the page. And it's brilliant and there's loads of traffic. And then when you actually look at conversions, there's none. So it's just really important to make sure that it is actually working and that, you know, there isn't a sort of disconnect between the traffic you're attracting and the traffic you want to attract. Yeah. Okay.

Enough of that drivel. Um, what about, um, what else happened? I had a conversation with, uh, one of our US clients, um, towards the end of the day on Monday, and he was basically just asking a kind of geeky techie question about, um, how to improve a performance issue on their website, which we, we don't, um, we don't do this work for them. We provide them with advice and they do it themselves. So they had a performance issue and he found a solution to it. Or rather, the automated tool had said, do this thing. And he couldn't do what he needed to do because of the way they'd built the website. They built it using WordPress and one of the page builder plugins called Elementor, which our devs are not huge fans of because it kind of, it's great if you're not a dev, it locks you out of all the horrible stuff. But if you are a dev, you want to get your hands all over the horrible stuff to make it less horrible. Um, so he, I had that conversation with them and I think I did actually get a dev involved, um, following day because he was, I wanted to dev to have a look at it and he wasn't in. So, um, I think on Tuesday morning, he kind of confirmed what I'd thought that the problem was because of the way the website was built. Um, so that was a, yeah, a fairly typical day on Monday dealing with um, paid search, analysing some paid search campaigns, talking about our own red evolution's content plan, um, which, which was, uh, I miss most of that conversation, but you caught me up as our American friends would say, catch me up. So, so you did. And that was all good.

Um, it's interesting though, that that piece you were just talking about, about the performance issue. Because first question is, was it a problem in the end, the performance issue that he was wrestling with?

Yeah. I think what they're doing is they're obsessing around something that doesn't matter. And instead of working on the hard stuff and doing stuff that does matter and will move the dial and help their website perform better in terms of generating leads and business for them.

Because this is not the first time this week actually that I've seen, you know, somebody complaining about site speed and metrics like that, that an automated tool has told them about and just ending up, you know, down this rabbit hole of, but I must have a, you know, a green tick next to my site when I type it into PageSpeed insights and losing sight of the fact that, yeah, like you say, your website's actually designed to generate leads. Yeah. So increasingly common thing, I think.

That's right. Yeah.

Okay. Um, so so Monday came and went and on Tuesday I had a regular catch up with, uh, one of our clients, uh, from down in London, which was, which was good. Always a good chat that we have with them. Uh, and that was great. And then I kind of, I don't know, I got on with something or other. I know what I did. I, yeah, there's an aspect of their business and it's not really related to digital marketing, but it kind of gives an insight as to the sort of work that we might do here at Red evolution, whereby there are some, um, sort of bigger business challenges, kind of almost, well, not almost very much strategic decisions that need to be made or a, a different strategic direction is required, um, for the business. I will sort of put my brain onto that,

Yeah. Which is interesting, I suppose, isn't it? Because technically that's not our remit to make, you know, to help them make business decisions. But it does often seem to be a place that we end up in as people sort of digital marketing support. And then after a few years more generally just sort of their support and sounding board, I guess.

Yeah. I mean, as an agency, you have to get to know a business really well in order to do good digital marketing, whether that's paid search, organic search, social content production, website builds, um, website redevelopments, technical tweaks and improvements, etc.. You know, first and foremost, you need to really be, have an intimate, deep understanding of that business. Yeah. Um, and what that then does is it helps you from the outside looking in, give the business owners, um, a different perspective sometimes.

Which is also weirdly, this morning I had a big meeting with a client and that was sort of.

The, what do you mean a big meeting.

A big long do you mean, I mean a long meeting? I mean, I mean, it went on, but it was really productive meeting. But that was sort of the feedback in there as well that, you know, that we were bringing a completely different perspective that they lacked, and that we were sort of helping them to see things that they hadn't seen. And I think that's quite an interesting thing because.

Did they, um, did they see the light?

Um, no.

No.

No.

There was no hands on heads and all that kind of weird noises and. No.

No. Sadly not. I'll try harder next time.

Oh, matron.

Um. Um. No, it's it's just an interesting thing, I think, isn't it? Because there'll be a lot of people listening to this, I guess, who have digital marketing agencies that are sort of purely vendors, you know, they just sort of supply a service. I think that's very different to the way we work. I think probably the way we work means we spend a lot more time having those conversations with clients about the sort of future of their business and where they should put their priorities and that sort of thing. But it's it's much more interesting like that. I suppose we had a lot more value.

Yeah. Okay. Very, very good. Um, I was, um, sorry, Julie's sort of slacking me while I'm, while I'm recording. And it's quite. Yeah, it's it's just it's quite amusing what she's sent me, but it's not for the podcast. Um, later on, on, on Tuesday, we got a nice enquiry came in over the weekend actually. Um, and you know, being the nerd that I am, I responded over the weekend and, uh, arranged to have a conversation with the, with the person who'd made the enquiry and spoke to them on Tuesday towards the end of play. Uh, and it was a really interesting conversation. It's interesting what they do. They work in the not for profit sector. And it's interesting, um, the stuff that they're doing and basically she was looking for some help, uh, sorting out how they are dealing with, um, enquiries, how they are sharing information amongst the team inside the organisation. And it's all a bit kind of spreadsheet y and maybe a teams chat and a bit of a wing and a prayer. Yeah. Um, and you know, to her credit, she recognised that and um, I think she searched for something like HubSpot agency Edinburgh because she realised she needed a CRM and she'd come across HubSpot before and so looked for HubSpot specialists like like us, like what us does. And then, and that was, uh, a nice conversation. Uh, hopefully it will lead to an engagement and, um, you know, an ongoing piece of work for us. And, um, I think it would be good fun working with them. It's interesting that the work that they're doing, but, uh, that conversation was good. It was good finding out about what they do about the challenges as they're growing. And I think this is one of the things that people miss a lot. You know, a lot of people think about, uh, customer relationship management or CRM system think it sounds horribly complicated. It'll make their life harder. And, and why do they need it when they've got a spreadsheet? You know, the truth is that it will give you, um, much better insight into, um, what's happening from a business growth point of view. Who are you talking to? What are you talking to them about? But it actually streamlines the whole process and makes, um, you know, managing enquiries and more importantly, or as importantly, possibly more importantly, managing existing customers and making sure that you're delivering great value to them and making sure that everyone in the organisation knows about the conversations that are going on and what you're doing for them and what you're proposing to do for them and everything else. And it really isn't complicated. A customer relationship management system. It's kind of something that I think businesses of any size can benefit from. But it was good that they'd kind of looked at the way that they were operating and thinking like, gee whiz, you know, we cannot carry on like this. We need to do it. We need to do it in a better way. So that was kind of how, um, how Tuesday finished up. Um, well, it didn't actually finish up there because I, um, I played golf on Tuesday night because, well, I couldn't on Monday, I went for a run on Monday night because it was absolutely pouring down. I thought, what can I do? I don't mind running in the rain. I quite like it jogging, really not running. So I went for a run on Monday night because Monday the weather was appalling. Tuesday it kind of booked its ideas up. So me and my mate Colin went and head greenkeeper Colin Harrison.

Hit some.

Balls. Former club champion Colin went and hit some balls and, uh, it was good. It was quite good. It's a nice way to finish the day. How did you finish your Tuesday off?

Yeah, I was just gonna say you must have to play right down. If he's a champion and go round the course with you. Slows him right down, I'd imagine.

Well, you know, it's very satisfying for Mr. Idiot. Here is a fourteen handicap golfer. Is that, uh, generally speaking, I can outdrive him. And he still plays off about three because I'm not very good at golf. But I can hit the ball a long way.

Lots of passion. Yeah, yeah. Not much control. Um.

Tell me about your Wednesday. What happened? What did you do?

I spent quite a lot of Wednesday, um, head down in, uh, our new project management system, trying to work out whether it was going to work for us and setting up clients and all that kind of.

So tell the ladies and gentlemen what we're going to buy.

We're going to buy Monday, which probably most people will be like, oh, that's ancient. What you do not know.

Talk about ancient what we're using at the moment.

Right? So like the very oldest version of.

The very first version of Base Camp, base Camp Classic, which is fantastic. I still think it's fantastic.

Yeah. I mean, yeah, it doesn't look very pretty. And I find it maddening to, to navigate. But yeah, I think it's just one of those things, isn't it? If you're used to something. And that's one of the things we're doing with Monday was trying to get more visibility and set things up in such a way that it was really easy for everybody across the team. And we're not a huge team. There's eleven of us, but I think there's eleven of us, aren't there? Yeah, but it's still like, you know, the complexity of the projects that we manage sometimes.

Just made me realise something. I wonder if we need to buy a license for Phil as well. Caron was listening to this in the upstairs, I assume. So we might have to need to buy a license for Phil as well. Uh oh.

Um.

More expense.

But the point is, you know, even even with a small team like that, it's still really easy to lose visibility of stuff and to miss things. And so we're trying to set Monday up in such a way that we could actually all see what was going on all the time and sort of be across the things we needed to be across.

Yeah. Okay. I've, I went on to my Betfair app and I put a tenner on. Six months from now. You're not using Monday dot com anymore. You just didn't. You didn't adopt it, you didn't use it, and it just fell flat on its face. You think I'm going to write.

Something about your unrelenting cynicism?

I've only ever heard good things about it, and we've come across it when clients have been using it. And yeah, it kind of makes sense after using Basecamp since two thousand and seven or something like that, six or seven, thereabouts, very early adopters of base camp, and the whole idea of these web based project management tools, but it makes sense to kind of change things up and, and yeah, we'll see how we get on with this new tool. So you've spent quite a lot of time.

Quite a lot of time.

Speaking with Caron and figuring stuff out and making sure that it could definitely do the stuff that we wanted it to do. Yeah. Well, speaking of web apps, what else happened? I think it was either Tuesday or Wednesday because we've got an internal system, we call it the MMS. Oh yeah. Um, which we use for making sure that we're across all of our projects and retainers, um, exactly what we need to be doing for each of those in a given time period. For us, it's usually month to month. Yeah. Um, we made some enhancements to that, didn't we?

We did some enhancements to that. We did. And just generally cleaned it up.

Which generally cleaned it up.

Yeah. It's one of those things that you don't realise how much time it takes, but you do have to really keep on top of these things. Don't you just.

If there's any agency owners listening to this, this, this system, I would say for any agency up to sort of twenty, twenty five people or thereabouts would probably find this system really useful. Because, I mean, it started from an idea in my head where I just wanted like a heads up display. Like, where are we across all the work we're doing? Um, in terms of like, most importantly, like financially, are we, are we delivering what we said we'd deliver? Are we making money? Which parts of the business are making money? Which parts of the business are busy? Which parts are not? Just kind of generally something that in one screen gave me that information. And that's exactly what the GMs does. I mean, it's I just could not imagine trying to run the agency without it these days.

Well, I was just.

A quizzical look on your.

Face. Well, I was just about to say like, I'm just not sure I agree with the twenty five person thing. I mean, I've worked in an agency with, what, like forty odd members of staff? That still would have been invaluable to have. It's still one of those things that I think all agencies.

Was I supposed to be impressed then?

No, you were supposed to. I'm making the point that it's more useful than you're making out, that it's a perennial problem in agencies of any size, isn't it? Communicating at a really top level. These are the clients. These are the priorities. This is the money that has to be, you know, sort of generated and and used this month. I think that is really difficult to sort of show in a very easy to understand and digestible way. I think this does that. And I don't think there are many tools out there that do it.

No. And I think I think it's healthy that across the board here at Red evolution, people can go in and we and can see exactly how much we're billing this month and how much we build last month and how much each of the disciplines. Yeah.

And whose disciplines doing more than the others.

Well, yeah, you could get competitive with it, but I mean, I would, I would take on the chin the argument that if somebody here isn't busy, then it's my fault because I'm not bringing enough working for them to do so. It's not it's it's not there as a stick to beat people with. But I think it is important in any agency and, you know, smaller agencies and bigger agencies that people and any business, not just agencies that that connection is made between the work that's getting done and salaries getting paid.

It's so easy, isn't it? Especially in an agency environment, I don't know, maybe in other in other businesses as well, to get sort of siloed into what you're doing and what you're generating and forget that there's a sort of bigger picture and that other people are working on things. And yeah, it's just I think it's really good to keep everybody in the loop, like you say.

Another interesting thing that I was working on on Wednesday was we're doing a bid or another agency, um, in Scotland has been asked to do, uh, to, to tender on some work and we've got a kind of strategic alliance with them. We do stuff they don't do and vice versa. Um, so they've been asked to do produce a, you know, attend a response, uh, a tender response. Yeah, it's like it's soft and fluffy. But they've been asked to do that, and they knew that they couldn't do it without our help and not to be credible anyway. So, you know, great to them they went back to the customer or potential customer and said, look, we can do that, do all this work. But in conjunction with another agency, I don't think they mentioned us by name. So on Wednesday, they sort of set up a, you know, just set up a Google doc and said, like, Dave, put your bits in here kind of thing, which is what I did. So I put that together and hopefully that's all going to get wrapped up and sent to the customer client, potential client tomorrow.

The time consuming things though, aren't they? Yeah. I don't think people realise when they request them quite how much work has to go into it from our end.

Well, that's why it's important again, any business, not just agencies, but like if you get an enquiry, can you provide a price for X, Y, or Z? It's best to have a conversation with the people first, not just I mean, I don't know, maybe there are some businesses, you know, you sell blue widgets. How much for ten blue widgets? Yeah, we can do ten blue widgets for a hundred quid. Great, great. You've got the gig. Here's a hundred quid. Send us the ten blue widgets. But for us, it's important that we understand, um, what the person really needs and whether or not we're the right people to do it. And, you know, being, being sort of, um, blunt about it, can they afford to pay us to do it? You know, and, you know, we're not the most expensive agency by any stretch, but, you know, if somebody comes along to us and says, we'd like to have a meeting to discuss our website, and we've got a budget of five hundred quid, we are not going to have that meeting because we are not going to be able to deliver what they want.

Yeah.

Sort of thing. And that's a bit of a silly example, but, you know, qualifying and trying to understand what the real challenge is that people are trying to solve and what kind of budget they've got makes a lot of sense.

But it's also the, the whole like making sure that you actually sort of see eye to eye with somebody who can work with them. Right. Because that's the one thing I've learned from you. And I guess like you say, it doesn't matter if it's purely transactional and you're just supplying a good or a service. Well, no, a thing. Um, but if you're supplying services and you're going to have a long standing, long running relationship with this company, doing that thing where you cut through all the noise, don't bother with the proposal, talk to them directly. It lets you sound out whether or not you're actually going to be able to work with them on a personal level as well, because, you know, the amount of times in previous roles that I've spent filling out proposals and sending them to companies and then, you know, it just not working out because we're not a good fit or they're not the right kind of client or whatever. And you just spend ten minutes talking to somebody and you can sort of immediately tell whether or not they're going to be a good fit. And I think that is a very worthwhile exercise, because you know full well that if you speak to somebody in that ten minutes, you don't get a good vibe from them. In three years time, we're going to be having a really awkward conversation with them when we try and break up with them.

So we had a really nice enquiry came in this afternoon. Um, and it's a company who specialise in, uh, managed hosting, Linode hosting specifically, not necessarily just for websites, I imagine, you know, if you've got an app that needs to run on Linode and it's in the cloud and you want it to run, um, Linode, Linux, Linux, I said Linode because that's who we use for most of our cloud hosting. They do Linux hosting. So, um, it's really good. They phoned us first of all, which was great. And, and, and said that basically they get, they get requests to do stuff for their customers that they don't do completely outwith their skill set, you know, and web stuff, digital marketing stuff, etc.. So they decided finally, and they've been in business for about twenty years, they've decided finally that they want to not just keep saying, no, we don't do that. They want to be able to say, yeah, partner with somebody. So, um, it was a, a nice, uh, I'm assuming young lady, a nice young lady that I spoke to. And she said, um, you know, do you do face to face meetings? Well, first of all, I think she said, yeah, I think she started, do you do face to face meetings? Like, yeah, absolutely. We love doing face to face meetings. Oh, great. Because I got the impression she'd been speaking to other people and they'd be like, oh no, no, no, we don't do that. We don't want to actually speak to.

Other people who potentially aren't really in this country at all.

Well, potentially.

Yeah. This, you know, we, I suppose we're talking about the low cost.

Overseas.

Resources.

To.

Send us.

twenty five million emails a day saying we can do everything much cheaper. Um. No thanks. So and then she said, you know, where are you based? And I said, oh, well, I said, you know, post Covid were kind of spread out a little bit like a lot of agencies are. So but you know, some of us in Scotland, some of us in the north of England, oh, we're in Soho. And I said, well, it's not a problem. We've got clients in London. We're quite happy to jump on a plane or jump on a train and come and see you. So but the bottom, the bottom line with that is that, you know, the back and forth, um, is that, you know, she's kind of given us an out, an outline of what they want. So I'm now going to speak to her and I think a colleague, she keyed in on the email, uh, on Monday and, um, and if, if it looks like it's a good fit, you know, pop down to London and have a chat about it. But it's a really nice enquiry because it's one of those enquiries that could be the gift that keeps on giving if.

We're the right.

Guys for them and the right guys for their clients who are looking for services, then, uh, really quite excited about that. The other thing that we did on, um, where are we Wednesday? Um, because I kind of jumped to Thursday there. Not that it has to be particularly, you know, linear. Um, on Thursday was, uh, agency pal of mine in America was having a bit of a challenge with a PPC campaign. So we, I said to him, look, if you just want another pair of eyes on it and just give us a shout. And so we jumped on and we had a really good conversation with, uh, with those two guys, didn't we, over there in, um, you know, I'm not actually sure where, where, where he's best, but well, it's somewhere near. Well, certainly this was to do with a client who's in Long Island, I think. So I don't know if I don't know if he's based around about that area, but um anyway, we're going to have a follow up with them next week. We sort of we did, I think, add some value.

Yeah, I think so. I think well, I think just without getting too much into the weeds of it, I think he'd just been given some quite bad advice, I think.

So yeah.

And that's again, you know, another sort of thing that we seem to come up against a lot, isn't it, especially with PPC, it's just people who sort of hand out advice willy nilly without actually getting to grips with the problem and working out what the right solution is. And then we have to sort of unpick it.

Speaking of willy.

Nilly.

Yeah. Who is the only character in Coronation Street?

Never watch Coronation Street in.

Coronation.

Street.

Who's mentioned in every episode but has never been seen.

I don't know.

Willy Ecker's like very good.

I quite like that. It's a bit.

Of a dad.

Joke. It's a little bit.

And I'm not a.

Dad.

Big sigh.

There. Right.

Um. Okay. So moving on. Uh, today was a really interesting start to the day because Julie and I went into Aberdeen and met with a new client of ours. Fantastic client, really enjoying working with them. Uh, the head of marketing in particular is a, is a great person to work with. So we went in and it was kind of a, the, there were more people came into the meeting. Subject matter experts. Um, and um, it was kind of, we were there really to advise, but mainly listen and try and understand where the business is, where it's trying to go, the, the problems it really solves for its customers, the products it produces, etc.. And it was a couple of hours, there was a bit of a fight with tech to get the tech going, because they had a couple of people who were coming in remotely, I think, from America into the conversation. Uh, and isn't it amazing after all this time and Covid and everything else was still having this, like you're on mute or like, we can't hear you type type conversations. It's I mean, I'm sure people, if anyone's listening to this drivel, I'm sure that they can relate to it. It just seems to be like this ongoing thing. Anyway, Julie and I went in, uh, we had a really good session. We, you know, got a much deeper understanding now of where they are and where they're trying to get to. And, you know, we can really add some value. And I'm looking forward to the, uh, probably an ongoing type engagement to work with them.

But I think that's another interesting point. I mean, just to pick up on that, like you, we went into that meeting. It was an internal meeting originally, right. And we were it was sort of invited into it. And we went primarily.

What do you mean? I invited myself and that sort of person.

Pushy bastard. Um, yeah. And the idea was like basically that we were trying to help them sort of wrestle down the keywords that they'd need to go after and that they should be prioritising and realised very quickly that without more background information and insight into the business process, we can't really do that. And I think, again, that's just one of those things that, you know, we do add a lot of value there. And if you are working with an agency, that is the sort of thing that you should be doing with them, is inviting them to internal meetings and sitting down around a table with them and talking about the business and how it works and what you're actually trying to achieve, because it's very easy to sit over here, you know, one hundred odd miles away or fifty miles away or whatever, and come up with a list of keywords and say, these are the keywords you should go after. But unless you're actually sat in on those meetings, sort of listening and understanding what the business is actually trying to do. It's really hard to make those the right keywords. Yeah.

So one of the really interesting things in the meeting and this, it will sound like a criticism. It's not meant to be, but, um, the subject matter experts kind of very quickly started focusing on tactics. Mhm. And I think that's a mistake that people make all the time with digital marketing. They start like, how can we use TikTok? Or, uh, or rather, let's just, let's just put some videos on TikTok and see what happens. Let's, let's do a, a LinkedIn advert and see what happens, you know, and there's, there's merit in experimentation. Of course there is. But it really is kind of like, well, it's got to be some method in the madness.

Yeah. There's, there's got to be a reason for the experiment, right? You don't just like randomly start in a chemistry lab mixing chemicals to see what happens. You're trying to get to a specific place, an outcome. And I think that's the problem, isn't it? Too many people are just like, I mean, yeah, I had a client meeting this morning as well. Um, while you were out, that was, you know, like I say, a very good meeting. Really interesting. Halfway through the meeting, somebody popped up with her. And when should we start doing something on threads? And I was just like, uh, never, you know, just like, uh, why? And it's just one of those things, isn't it? I think the tactics are exciting. They're really shiny. There's something to get sort of fixated on, but they're a distraction from the actual real work, which is in figuring out that sort of strategic direction. And really, once you've got that strategic direction, finding the right tactics isn't very difficult or very time consuming.

No, I agree, I agree. Um, later on this afternoon or earlier this afternoon, rather, it was um, we were supposed to have a meeting with a potential new client, an enquiry that came in a couple of weeks ago and they kind of cancelled it last minute. They didn't cancel it. They just said, look, something's come up. Can we push this to next week? Which is fine.

It's understandable. It's also quite annoying.

Yeah. I mean.

You know.

We our little hearts sank. You know, we were kind of we were we were all fired up. We'd put our, our best suits on in case it was on. You know, their camera was high definition. Yeah.

Um, quickly shined my teeth. No, but I mean your teeth. I just assumed. What do.

You do? Brush your shoes and shine your teeth? You got that the wrong way around, I think.

Uh, yeah, I don't know, without making it too sort of real and navel gazing. I think sometimes it's easy for people to forget that it does sort of. There's quite a lot of, um, like, I guess not anxiety, but, you know, you sort of like prep yourself for things, don't you get into a certain headspace.

You try and you try and learn a little bit about the organisation. So you can like, you can just let them talk and you know. Exactly. Yeah, you realise you're an X, Y, or Z type company and this is the sort of thing you do. We'd, we'd done some sort of digging around using SEMrush and got some kind of high level, high level understanding of where they were currently in terms of their search presence, for example. And then, you know, bubble burst and sorry, meeting cancelled. It might be one of those, um, can we postpone the meeting because they decided they didn't want to talk to us after all, it happens. Some people have that foolish.

I actually think it's almost worse the second the other way around where they do want to talk to you later. But now you've already gone through all the SEMrush data and come up with these sort of genius insights a week ago and forgotten them. And now you've got to sort of desperately try and claw it back and recapture the brilliance. I hate that, but yeah, it happens.

Okay. Um, I think what we'll do is we'll, this is, this has actually gone on longer than I thought it would. Uh, thirty, thirty odd minutes already. Yeah. Well, I suppose you know what I'm like. Um. Oh, the band did a great gig last week, by the way. We had, we had some gear issues on Saturday night. Yeah. But the owner of the bar out in, out in Bali has just said, like, you know, offered us two more dates. The gig was fantastic. Locals love you. When can you come back? Will you come back?

Please come down then went down?

Well, yeah. Despite us having a few, uh, gear issues, which was entirely our own fault. You know, it was a good thing because the first gig, like, things went really well. Um, you know, the PA sounded great. Everything just worked. And the second one, it was fine, but it could have been better in terms of the sound coming through the PA, because we just kind of phoned in. We just phoned in the the gear aspect, not practicing, getting ready for the gig and everything else. And, and like, yeah, it worked last time, it'd be fine. And we just kind of phoned it in and phoning it in. That's a term you use quite a lot. I've probably picked it up from you, but you know, it's, it's like generally speaking with anything to do with um business. I mean, the band is a business. We got paid. Mhm. Oh no, we didn't get paid. Sorry.

We got paid.

Yeah. We got paid. And um, it's.

A little.

Brown envelope and we just kind of let that little bit of it. We phoned it in a bit and we paid the price and it bit us on the ass. And, you know, it's nice because if it had gone really well again, we wouldn't have actually stepped back and said, let's look at this PA system and let's make sure it's absolutely right. And, and now we are doing because we, we kind of got caught out a little bit.

Because if I was going to be glib and one of those wannabe business gurus, I would say that is a perfect example of how we learn from mistakes and not successes. Right. And this is like very applicable to marketing because you can set something up and it works fantastically. And you think, oh, I know about that. Yeah, I can, I can do PPC campaigns in my sleep. Oh yeah. LinkedIn advertising. Easy. And then the wheels fall off. You don't know how you've done what you've done in the past. You've not learned any real lessons. You've just sort of skated along the surface of it, seeing success. And now you've got to dig in and really learn something. But yeah, I mean, I think that's just human nature, isn't it?

Is it is. In fact, the conversation with the agency owner over in America was almost because of that, because that for that very reason, you mentioned that that a campaign for a client in a similar niche or niche had the campaign worked really well. And so they replicated it for a different client, same product in a completely different part of the country. And like, it hasn't worked. Like we've done exactly the same and it hasn't worked. So, you know, you think, well, maybe the first campaign got lucky. Yeah, maybe the second campaign was particularly unlucky, lucky. But if you don't really know why the first one was successful, then. Don't be surprised when the second one doesn't work.

Absolutely.

Just because it did doesn't mean it will. Um, anyway, that was a that was a little aside, uh, which actually in the end, um, was moderately relevant.

Um.

Okay. Um, I think we might try this format for a few weeks and see if people want to. Uh, yeah, I mean, I, when I listen to podcasts, I kind of quite like listen to podcasts where it's just people having conversations and hopefully, um, although it's, you know, me and you, Alex having a conversation that I'm thinking there's things in there which will be of use to people in this industry or just people in general, because otherwise you're just waiting on. And if not, if not, we enjoyed it anyway. Um, so thanks for listening. Um, if you do want to come on and talk drivel with us, uh, drop us a line at evolution dot com. Um, in the meantime. Yeah, let's wrap it up.

Absolutely.