The One Where Alex Eventually Shows Up, Digital Marketing Chat With Alex & Dave – Episode 106

One of the other things that happened this week that I thought was quite interesting was quite a long term client. A good client came to us and said, we're going to be doing sector pages for our website. My heart sank because in general, sort of this kind of cookie cutter content that you see on an awful lot of websites is really boring. And then weirdly, they sort of had a round of, of internal meetings and interviews and talk to like various stakeholders and people of the business and came back with this huge, long sort of list of all the different industries that they work in and all the different pain points people in those industries have, and all the different ways that their solutions can be tailored to it. Initially, I was really nervous about talking them down from this idea, and in the end, when they came back with all this work, I was like, oh, okay. Actually, like there's a ton of useful information in there. We can actually do something meaningful with this. And I think this was just like a really good example of when doing something quite boring and quite mundane can actually be really good if you put the work in.

So welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. And as I start to record this, the ever well organised Alex hasn't bothered his arse to even show up yet, even though he said to me, he's got all kinds of notes written and he's actually prepared for this episode of the podcast, but not prepared enough to be here or here he is. Now. He's actually deigned to come and speak to us. Now he's got his notes on his phone.

Generally speaking, it's a good idea to give people warning that you're starting.

You saw me come upstairs and pick up the recording device, didn't you? You did see that.

Ah, so you're.

Assuming you did see that?

You're assuming that I pay any attention to you. See.

That doesn't happen anyway. Alex, let's, um, let's talk about our week at the coalface of digital marketing. And seeing as you're prepared and you've got some notes, you go first.

Yeah. All right. In at the deep end. I see how it is. Um, yeah. Funny week. Strange week.

For me. Haha.

No, no funny reason. I seem to keep having the same conversations with different clients. Um, which is sort of weird, but also, is.

This going to be like a kind of mourning and bumping your gums kind of episode?

No, I don't think I have no intention of moaning. I'm in quite a good mood. No, I just, I just seem to have had quite a few conversations this week with different clients that have ended up going in exactly the same direction.

So tell me more. I'm interested.

So like, one of the things that we've been wrestling down with various clients has been around their PPC budgets, pay per click. Yes.

Okay.

So I think.

Google ads mainly. Yeah, yeah, three or four times.

Right. This week I have been asked, should we be spending more? Should we be spending less? How much should we be spending on our AdWords budget? And it gets to the point where you sort of feel like you're giving out the same advice over and over again.

But surely, Alex, Google tells you exactly how much you should spend and you should just do as you're told.

It does have a bid estimator tool that a lot of people don't know about. The little squiggly line next to your course.

It's a little squiggly line next to something and you can't find it.

You'd very easily overlook. And if you click it, it tells you, yeah, like you say, it says, oh, please spend three hundred pounds and you'll get half a click extra or you'll get six hundred more conversions even though you're not tracking conversions. Yeah. I mean, well, I think part of the problem with PPC budgets, especially, is that all of the tools that you can use are sort of, at best, having a bit of a guess at what you should be spending. Um, and it is, to be fair, I think quite a murky thing for a lot of people to just sort of pick a number and work out, you know, this is how much we should spend, this is how much we should budget. I think a lot of people do the opposite. And they're like, well, what we have is a thousand pounds or what we can, what we feel comfortable asking.

Well, interestingly, we've just had, um, a document sent to us. A guy phoned and we've had a good conversation. He sent us a document. It's a kind of outline, high level, what we want digital marketing to deliver into our business. And in that document, it actually makes a statement that we've set aside two hundred and fifty to three hundred and fifty pounds. I don't know if that was a week or a month for pay per click advertising. Now, it might be based on research or it might be based on this is what we can afford. But that's not quite how it works.

Exactly that I think most people default to the latter. They're like, we've got this much money, or this is how much we can ask the CFO for without feeling embarrassed. Um, and then yeah, the other side of the story is, oh, we've done some research, meaning they've gone on something like SEMrush or keyword Planner and typed in a few keywords and seen that it's about a pound a click and said, oh, I quite fancy fifty clicks, so I'll budget fifty quid and you sort of draw a line under it there and call it a day. And that just doesn't really work at all. I don't think with pay per click. I think you really do have to look at the problem the other way round. Right. And you have to say as a business, you know, how much is a customer worth to you Yeah. And how much then? You know what percentage of people that you get on the page do you think are going to turn into a customer? And then how much does it cost to get that many people on the page in terms of clicks you're paying for? Yeah. And always as well with PPC. The other thing that I found myself explaining time and time again this week is that the caveat is that, you know, you can look at something like the cost per click, that something like Google ads estimates, because they do all these tools estimate and they tell you, you know, it's going to cost you about one pound thirty for a click. Mhm. And again, that's an estimate and it's a range. And you cannot sort of bet on paying that amount of money. And I think a lot of people get very tied up in this idea that, oh, well, if it's one pound thirty for a click and I spend five hundred pounds, I'll get exactly this many clicks. Right? And it's like, no, because it changes depending on what.

I find strange when I've looked at, you know, when I look at click the click estimates and things, is it it's sometimes correct me if I'm wrong. I'm pretty sure I've seen it. Say a click will cost somewhere between twenty five pounds and one hundred and ten pounds, right? Yeah. And that's like, uh, wait a minute.

What a meaningless range. Yeah, yeah. And all that means because generally that's what AdWords is doing there is it's looking at the highest price per click on a given hour, and it's looking at the lowest and it's giving you the range. But they are like I say, it all depends if six people have said it so that their advertising comes online at four p m and ends at six p m and within that window, they've got three hundred pounds to spend. Then in that window, if you're trying to compete with them, you're going to pay a lot more per click too. And if you're advertising at seven o'clock in the morning when nobody else is, then you'll pay a lot less. So it is hugely variable. And I guess the thing that I keep saying to people is, well, let's just sit down and look. Then, you know, let's get into the numbers and look at, you know, how many people do you actually want to land on the page? How much is it going to cost you? Roughly? When can we afford to advertise? What keywords can we afford to compete on? Yeah. And then you sort of eventually, after having those really detailed conversations, you end up at a rough sort of number, rough estimate that works for you, but you can't get there by sort of coming at it from the. We've got this much to spend or we fancy spending, or why don't we just spend five hundred pounds on AdWords and see what it gets us? Because until you've done all of that research and getting into the numbers and working out what you actually want to spend, you've got no idea.

And you don't have to talk quite as fast as that. Sorry, there's no rush. It's fine. It's like you're making it difficult for people to listen to it. Sorry. Oh, God. Anyway, um. Yes, we like a car analogy, so let's use a car analogy. You could decide you've got five thousand pounds to spend on a car, and that's fine. You can then go and buy a car for five thousand pounds. You can't decide you've got five thousand pounds to spend on a car, and you want a twenty sixteen plus year Porsche nine hundred eleven because you cannot get a Porsche nine eleven twenty sixteen plus for five thousand pounds, you know? So it's all very well deciding what you want to spend. But we know some of the customers we work with, in fact, some of our own PPC campaigns, we're paying twenty five quid a click. Yep. Because the potential value of that click is, you know, ten grand, twenty grand, whatever it might be, potential value if you convert it. Yeah. So, you know, I think people get scared about the money they spend on PPC when it starts to become like chunky amounts of money, you know, and it irks me that if, you know, say, um, for one of the search terms we're going after, say yesterday, maybe we, you know, we spent seventy five quid, we got three clicks and all three of those people spent 10s on, on the web page we sent them to, you know, and we know what we're doing with this shit. And we still get it horribly wrong and we're still getting clicks. Um, even though we've nailed it down to the nth degree. Um, you know, we're still getting clicks and we're still getting rather visitors that are not spending any time. They're kind of deciding within a couple of seconds that this isn't what I'm looking for. And we've spent twenty five quid to get their eyeballs on that page. But that's the game you have to play because by the same token, you know, we have landed, you know, twenty twenty grand gigs from a single click.

Well, that's the thing. And that's why we always talk in terms of percentages, isn't it? I mean, we say one to three percent conversion rate is good because, you know, ninety nine of the one hundred people that you lead to your web page are just gonna, you know, dick about look at things scroll up and down a bit and then leave. We are you really are playing a numbers game. But I think the point is, like you say, the numbers do normally pan out. And the other thing is that when people are spending, other people that is are spending twenty, thirty pounds a click for a keyword, you pretty much guaranteed that there is actually value there because they wouldn't be doing it otherwise. So yeah, I think you're right. People do get scared, but I think a lot of it is just about thinking realistically about the numbers and yeah, working out, like you say, I mean, if you're selling a product that's worth ten or twenty grand and you have the option of paying twenty pounds a click to get people on there, and you can convert them at a ratio of one percent, you're an idiot if you don't do it. Mhm.

Yeah. It, you know, I think when you start to pay good money for clicks, it focuses your mind on the whole end to end side of, of PPC, like making sure you're bidding on the right keywords, blocking the wrong keywords, writing good adverts that attract clicks, and then as important as anything, making sure that the page you send people to is as good as it can possibly be. And while we're on the subject of PPC, you know, we've done some work this week, uh, for a client and, you know, the page which we hadn't built that they were sending people to, you know, when it was, it wasn't even because we're PPC experts. It wasn't even because we know what we're doing. Anybody could have looked at that page and thought, well, if you send people to that page because they're looking for X and you bid on that keyword, you they typed, they type, they type that in, clicked on the advert, landed on this page. Why are you suddenly talking to them as if they are technically minded and know exactly what's wrong with the piece of kit that needs to be sorted out. You know why? How are you not saying like, like we've been doing this forever. We're brilliant at it. We're qualified to do it. Our customers love us. Oh, right. Sounds like a sounds like I've landed on my feet here. I'll, you know, fill in this form, pick up the phone, speak to these people.

Yeah. There's an empathy problem there. I don't know, maybe this is reductive, but I think this is sort of where I've got to with it, is that a lot of people in marketing and otherwise really struggle to actually put themselves in someone else's shoes. Yeah. And ultimately, when you're building these experiences, you really do have to be thinking, you know, if I knew nothing about my product and I was a customer searching for it, what do I want to happen? What do I need to see in order to make me feel like, oh, okay, this is the right place. This is a safe process. And I just think so many people get that so wrong. They're too busy thinking, how can I, how can I show how clever I am? How can I show how good at my job I am and not sort of what does the customer want to see? What do they care about? Yeah. But yeah, I don't know. I'm sure there'll be people listening to this that are like, oh, it's way more complicated than that. You know, there's way more to it. But I just think if you, if you think about what a customer wants, then you'll be halfway there at least.

Yeah. But I mean, that statement you just made assumes that anybody's listening to this. They're not really we do this for you and I. I mean, you know, fine, well, we're doing this. We're just, like, howling into the wind. Yeah, absolutely. Um, okay. Do you want to do you want to keep going or.

Well, like one of the other things. Uh, yeah. One of the other things that happened this week that I thought was quite interesting was a client, quite a long term client. A good client came to us and said, we're going to be doing sector pages for our website. Um, and my heart sort of sank because for a lot of people, sector pages, industry pages in general, sort of this kind of cookie cutter content that you see on an awful lot of websites is dire. It's really boring. Um, so I just sort of like inwardly sort of sighed and rolled my eyes.

Died a little.

Bit. Yeah. And then weirdly, they sort of had a round of, of internal meetings and interviews and talk to like various stakeholders and people throughout the businesses and the business and came back with this huge, long sort of list of all the different industries that they work in and all the different pain points people in those industries have and all the different ways that their solutions can be tailored to it. And it it's weird because initially I was really nervous about talking them down from this idea and saying, you know what, actually this is a really terrible idea. It's boring. Nobody wants to read it. And in the end, when they came back with all this work, I was like, oh, okay. Actually, like there's a ton of useful information in there. We can actually do something meaningful with this. And I guess it's one of those interesting things because I spend a lot of my time talking to clients about content and how to sort of write content that, you know, works and helps customers, but also stands out a bit. And I think this was just like a really good example of when doing something quite boring and quite mundane can actually be really good if you put the work in and you sort of take the time to go and gather expertise from people and just thinking, not just how can I get five hundred words on the page, but how can I answer this problem and talk to these people in a really meaningful way? So that was really positive thing. I think thinking like, oh, this is a terrible idea to, oh, actually, I'm really behind this now.

Yeah. And I think it highlights that just like in all lines of business. And it's important to have an open mind. Yeah. And you know, our clients, for us, our clients are often, as you would expect, sources of information so that we can understand how to position them, present them, etc., and talk about them. Um, but they also have, you know, fantastic ideas that, you know, because they're the subject matter experts, they see things that maybe we don't see.

So that's exactly.

That was an example of.

That. Well, yeah, and it's like the minutiae, isn't it? It's like, you know, you can say, oh, we're going to do a sector page and it can be the worst thing in the world. But if you actually, you know, if you actually do spend the time, take the effort, you, a lot of clients have that knowledge inside their organisation. Somebody somewhere in the building will be sat there with a wealth of really interesting knowledge, but it's just about tapping into that and using it to make your content more interesting.

Ultimately, speaking about more interesting, is anything on your list interesting? Because so far it's been boring.

Why don't you go there? No.

Carry on for a change.

For a change. All right. You're in a bad mood today.

I'm not in a bad mood. I'm in a smashing mood. Playing golf today might go well. Playing golf again tomorrow. Might go fishing on Sunday. Might go and watch the golf at Trump International on Sunday as well. Yeah. I mean, I'm not a fan of that guy. But I mean there's some top golfers playing golf on the legends tour.

The news is full of his mug shot and how he's turning it into an iconic, uh, campaign sort of emblem. And so I was listening to the radio on the way into work this morning, and one of his ex campaign managers was saying that it was a twenty billion dollar mug shot in the sense that he thought it was going to raise that much funding for the Trump campaign. Oh, really? Plaster on mugs and t shirts.

And I couldn't be less interested. And I love politics, as you know, but I could not be less interested in that.

No, but the last one really was, I don't know, I guess one of the other things that I've said to a few people this week is about trust signals, um, on websites and the dangers. I guess where I want to go with this is the sort of dangers of of cookie cutter approaches to the way you think about marketing.

You've already used the term cookie cutter. You'll need to use something else.

Um, let's see a jargon free term. No, I'm drawing a blank. You can tell I work in marketing. Um, it's not blindly doing things that the internet tells you to do, right? So we spent quite a lot of time this week building, um, CTAs. That's calls to action for a client that builds very boring, um, industrial equipment. Um, and it's to go on a page and it's to tell people, you can download our.

Content and it's going to go on a web page. Yeah.

Well, who'd have thought.

Groundbreaking, groundbreaking. Alex.

So link to a PDF that contains information about their track record and the purpose of putting it there is obviously to fill people with trust because, look, you know, this company have done this stuff before. They've done it for big names that you recognise. And here's a list of the things they've produced for those companies. And it makes perfect sense in that market because one of the key problems that they face is that, you know, people spending a huge amount of money on this bespoke equipment do not want to work with somebody who hasn't done it before. And that's fine. That's all well and good. We had another conversation with a client, I think you were sort of listening into yesterday where they were like, I really like the designs you've put together, but please strip out all the testimonials, all of the trust signals, all of the logos because we think it looks desperate and needy. Yeah. And we were talking about it afterwards. And you were pointing out that actually like potentially for their marketplace, it does look desperate and needy and you just don't.

Very self-assured, very confident, very successful. They don't really care what John Smith from Accrington thinks about their product because they know it's great.

They know it's.

Great and that's it. That's their positioning.

And there's an element for some markets where like, as soon as you raise the specter of like, oh, I've put a positive review up, it's sort of, I don't know, like almost implies the negative that maybe there could have been a question about whether or not this thing was trustworthy. So I think what was quite interesting about it for me is that it just goes to show, doesn't it? Because you can read a post online about how you must include trust signals on your website and you can be like, yeah, that makes perfect sense. And it's true for some markets, but it's not true for every market. And I guess it just comes back to that whole thing of like, think about what you're doing and don't just blindly follow best practice because it's best practice. You know, it's got to be like, right for your market.

And examples of trust signals that resonate would be.

Well, so like testimonials, video testimonials, especially, um, which is what we were trying to do for that client's website, ironically. And they were like, please don't do that. Um, anything like that, any sort of case studies, any track records, that sort of thing.

Memberships of professional bodies, that kind of thing. Standards you had, the length of time you've been doing it, how long you've been around, that kind of thing.

I think that is a pretty universal one. I think most people, if you if you say you've been doing something for twenty years, they think, oh, okay, they must know they must be at least slightly competent. I don't know, I.

Guess I guess, um, you know, where you are, your, your physical presence can also be a trust signal if you're, you know, if you're in a shiny office in the west end of Aberdeen, that implies that you are successful because those places don't come cheap, even post-COVID.

But I think even if you're working. Yeah.

Signal to people.

Even if you're working in a sort of grotty industrial estate somewhere, at least saying that means that you're not sort of importing stuff from China or I think people online are sort of operating from a place of skepticism, aren't they? And if you don't give them, yeah, you don't give them some sort of proof. They'll just assume the worst.

Yeah. It's like we I think last week we talked about having um, people pages. Yes. On websites and how, you know, people do business with people irrespective of brands and everything else. And, you know, some businesses don't put themselves put their, you know, their key people online and talk about their key people. And yeah, they're probably missing a trick.

Well, because I think they think that the first assumption will be that, oh, these guys are just, you know, they're just this corporate entity. You know, the individual people aren't aren't interesting or important. They're just this brilliant corporation. But the truth is, most people probably just assume that you're outsourcing or that there isn't a team. Mhm. Yeah. Mhm.

Okay. Um, out with digital marketing. What happened on Monday?

We were forced against our will. Whipped down to the golf course. No, it was great, actually.

You were taken to the.

Golf.

Club and fed.

And watered.

And then on a beautiful sunny day, instead of being in the office.

We got to play.

Golf. Got to hit golf balls. Several hours and, uh, an hour and a half.

Yeah. Yeah, but it was great, though. It's really fun. Um, I was terrible. Everybody was terrible.

You were? No, not everybody was terrible. Some people were okay. You were terrible. You've gone quiet now, aren't you?

I'm trying to think who could possibly have been okay. Mhm.

Yeah. It was good fun. It's not. We didn't do it as a team building thing. Because I'm a bit skeptical about, you know. Yes. We're gonna have a team building session.

Oh, we're all best friends now. Because we were.

Yeah. Hit a golf ball or anything else. It was purely because, um, there was some interest expressed, and it was, and it's on our doorstep. So we went and did that. It was good fun. Um, aside from, uh, the golf session, from my point of view, um, this week, um, a couple, just a few things that number one, um, we, we got a new customer, um, in Monaco of all places. So that was lovely and, um, looking forward to working with them. We're going to be doing some, um, just some general website management, but potentially getting involved in helping them with um, search engine optimisation, other aspects of digital marketing and just generally being proactive and working with them. Thinking site visit.

I was going to say, yeah, you took them on just so you could go to Monaco, be honest.

Well, I wouldn't yeah, I mean, I go to France and pop over to Monaco to visit.

Just pop over, will you?

Yeah, absolutely. But um yeah, it's nice. It's, it's always nice picking up new customers and getting to work with new people. Um, when it's people in a part of the world or, you know, part of Europe. Um, in this case that, uh, we've never done any work there before. Yeah. Um, quite excited about that. So I'm looking forward to, to getting going with them. Um, we've also had a sort of blast from the past. It's an interesting, you know, a good few years ago we went to see a potential customer in Aberdeen. Budgets weren't aligned. Never went anywhere. Um, obviously since then Covid happened. His business has, you know, gone in various directions. But broadly speaking doing okay. But he's got got an internal marketing person and has now decided, um, need to get a need to get an agency involved. It's not really working. And this, this came up, I'm trying to think who else it came up. I'm not naming names anywhere in this podcast, but he came up somewhere else as well. Where somebody. Oh yeah. Yeah, there's another, another, another new customer. Um, in Edinburgh this time, um, just as exotic and lovely as Monaco. Um in Edinburgh this time. Well, I think so. Um, and they were kind of at a point where they've got to the size where they're thinking we need to get somebody in-house for to help and lead and head up marketing, which I think is a great idea. It's absolutely fine. But they were kind of almost saying like, we need somebody who can do this, this, this, this, this, this, this and this and all those thises are all kind of quite specialised, which is why, you know, working with an agency is a good idea. And this sounds like an advert for an agency, I get that. But if you work with an agency, you might spend three grand, five grand a month or whatever on a, on a retainer or, you know, just an ongoing kind of month to month, um, engagement. But what you're not getting for that is, you know, you're not getting somebody for forty hours a week, you know, four weeks in a month, you're not getting that. But what you are getting is all, everything you need, all the bits of the jigsaw are there in the agency. So if you need a designer for half a day and you need a strategist for a day, and you need someone that can do SEO for a couple of days. It's all there included in that fee, whereas you're just never going to get that with an employee. You know, often said that if you really want to replicate what you'll get from an agency, then you need a small team, at least a small department. And that's going to cost you, you know, one hundred and fifty, two hundred grand a year, I think.

Yeah, I don't know. I push back on that slightly because I just think the economics of it just don't make any sense. When you're hiring in-house, you're getting one person for forty hours, but they can't do any of the things that you need them to do, and they're not actually going to spend.

They can do some of the things you need. Some of them, you wouldn't hire them unless you're an idiot.

Yes, but but but what I'm saying is that, you know, it's that jack of all trades, master of none thing all over again, isn't it? It's like one person slaving away for forty hours a week, but jumping between SEO and PPC and doing a little bit of tinkering with the website, a little bit of that and a little bit of this, it's never going to be as efficient or as powerful as just sort of outsourcing and paying for sort of like a fractional team. Effectively you get marketing, marketing department and okay, you only get them for say, ten or twenty hours a month or whatever. But in that time, they do the work of several people. So what you end up in at the end is much more efficient. I mean, we were having a conversation. I was having a conversation with a client this week yesterday, in fact, where she said exactly this. She was like, you know, this is why we pay you guys because, you know, we could never afford to pay somebody in-house to do this amount of work and be across this many different things. And I think that's the thing. It's it is very expensive. It's an expensive exercise, building a team and you don't know what's going to happen and you will end up saddled with staff. Whereas I guess with an agency, if it's not working out, you can just walk away. You're not taking any real risk there.

But yeah, um, you know, the new, the new client in Monaco is working with an agency in Monaco at the moment. And yeah, it's kind of hasn't quite worked out how they'd hoped it was going to work out. And they.

That's the great thing isn't.

It. And it hasn't worked out. But yeah, so you can move on. I mean, it's, you know, we work with some fantastic in-house marketing managers. Yes. Um, and that's something we like to do. We like to provide fill the gaps, if you like, provide the services that the people in house don't, can't provide or whatever. Um, but, you know, for businesses who are, who are at the point of recognising that they need to, um, they know that they might want somebody in house to help them with marketing. You know, it is a, it is a, a quandary trying to think, do I, do I get somebody who's got, got a broad understanding right across the piece and then we'll hire and outsource as required. Or do I look for that mythical unicorn that can do everything? Who can do everything? And they really don't exist.

For fifty or sixty grand a year. Yeah. No, I mean, the other thing I think that's really interesting is from, from my side is I see a lot of people with internal marketing teams who have, you know, many employees who are very specialised, that they'll have an in-house designer and they'll have an in-house SEO person. And I honestly cannot count the number of times where I've had conversations with people where they've been like, oh, I've got to find something for so and so to do or oh, so and so can help with help out with that, because otherwise they're sat around twiddling their thumbs. I think, you know, the honest truth is in house, you probably don't need a full time designer all the time. You'll need them. Sure. For a few hours a week, they'll be incredibly important and you won't be able to move forward without them. But then the rest of the time you're going to be finding them work, and you just have to worry about any of that if you're paying an agency.

No. That's right. Yeah.

Well, this did turn into a sales pitch in the end, didn't it?

Yeah it did. I mean, I'm not going to apologise for being great at what we do and working for some great businesses and doing great work for them. I mean, I guess all we're really saying is, you know, this week at the coalface, you know, we've had conversations with more than one client where they're looking at potentially hiring in-house and they've got this challenge of what kind of person should I, should I hire? What skill set should I hire? You know, what term you know, and trying to find the these, you know, mythical multidisciplinary people, disciplinary multi-disciplined people. Yeah. Is, is um. Yeah, it's not going to happen. Um, nothing else much really. I mean, the, the new customer stock potential customer in Edinburgh is part way through a kind of website revamp, etc.. And so that's Siri or something in the background. Decided to start Siri quiet.

They'll rise up.

Unbelievable. I mean, watch does it to me as well. Yeah, I'll just be playing golf or something. And then suddenly my watch is saying, oh, I didn't really quite understand that, but I think you meant blah blah blah. I'm like, I never asked you.

They're always listening. Always.

Yeah, yeah, it certainly sounds like it. Um, one last thing. Uh, it's a bit, it's another bit of a whinge, but I'm broadly speaking, you know, I quite like LinkedIn up to a point. Do you a little.

Yeah.

I like it because I like it because people share genuinely useful stuff in there. We certainly try and share useful stuff, like we might share links to podcasts, to the research we've done, and maybe useful blog posts, things like that. Or, you know, somebody asks a question, we'll jump in and, you know, provide, you know, some, some insights, some thoughts on what they've asked. But some days and it seems more stairs, probably you can go in there and it's just, it's just turned into a real look at me. Well, platform, just like a lot of other social media. What am I missing?

Um, what what percentage of people in your daily life do you meet that have something interesting or useful to share with you? Not that many. And the problem is that we're always told now really, you can't see viewers. But I am doing a swear at David. Um, no, I mean, you know, the advice you're always handed out is like post regularly engage with your fans, share useful information, but people just aren't that interesting and they don't have anything interesting to share. So they default to sharing drivel. And so, you know, the whole thing becomes clogged with drivel. If people only posted when they had something interesting to share, i.e. once a month, it would be much nicer. But but also people wouldn't get the engagement they craved. So.

You know, it's just this whole kind of, you know, I'm so proud to announce that, you know.

I've done a.

Certificate, I passed my Google AdWords exam, which like takes an hour.

You might put like my one hundred meter swim certificate on there.

But don't forget to say how proud you were when you got it when you were six. Otherwise it's meaningless. Yeah. Okay. Um, didn't really want to end on a morning. A morning kind of note, but, um, it's been, uh. Yeah, yeah, like you said, it's been it's been an interesting, interesting week, I suppose. You know, new customers. Great. Um, some challenges around the typical things. As a digital agency, we get challenged around with respect to search and paid search and some content stuff and design stuff and technical build stuff.

And yeah.

Yeah, there's, there's a lot going on just now. So, um.

It is a busy time for us, isn't it? Yeah, it's been quite.

Seems to be. And with one of our team members, um, off because his daughter arrived last Friday.

Yeah, that was exciting.

Hello, Quinn. Yeah, she'll listen to this in twenty years time and go. Ah, they were talking about.

That was my first mention. Yeah.

That's right. Absolutely. So congrats to Rob. Yeah. I'm just so I'm so proud to announce that.

You can post that on LinkedIn.

Can you?

Yeah, I think so.

Why would you do that?

Well, you can post on Facebook maybe.

Okay. Okay. Um, if you want to come and talk to us about your week in digital marketing or marketing in general, whether you're a digital marketing manager at, um, a company large or small or whether you, uh, like us agency based, um, we'd love to hear from you go to read evolution dot com, fill in the form, tell us who you are and what you'd like to talk about. In the meantime. It's goodbye from me.

And from me.