We actually have been asked to tender for a piece of public sector work, just broadly speaking, the transactional nature of tender documents in our line of business. Fair enough. If you want to build a block of flats or if you want to build a bridge. I understand that that's maybe a good way of doing things like that, but when it comes to businesses trying to create great websites, good communication tools, tell great stories. I don't know, I just don't think going out to tender makes any bloody sense.
I do know there's quite a few B2B businesses that sort of take the same line, that you have to have a meaningful conversation to get a solution. That's actually right.
So many times we've seen invitation to tender documents come out and they are utterly meaningless. Maybe, you know, they've used a Scottish enterprise template sort of thing. And you must ask that your website does this and does that, and it should do this and it should be compliant with this.
And it's really obvious when you read those tenders that they don't actually understand what they're asking for, do they?
Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface, where we are continuing despite listener numbers falling off a cliff to adopt the conversational what did we do in digital marketing this week?
The audience hates the podcast, but we're just gonna carry on.
No, the audience don't hate it, do they? Because we can only go by feedback. And we had we had a feedback.
A feedback singular. We did get some good feedback.
We did. Yeah. Thanks, Chris. We got some feedback. And apparently this format works. At least it works for Chris.
And like all good digital marketing experiments, you should always just base everything that you do on the feedback that you get and, you know, just take it as.
You can if you value that person's opinion, which I do. So there you go. So once again, thanks, Chris. Um, have you actually done some work? Have you actually got a list of things you'd like to talk about this work?
No no no no no. The sun was shining at the end of last week, so I just sat about and enjoyed it.
Sun shining today as well. Fantastic. The office doors open as well. So um. Out onto the metropolis that is Aboyne.
The busy busy.
Street. You will probably pay for that now because there'll be a big Oriel park outside at the butchers and and, and basically mean that we ruin our podcasts, but hopefully not. Um okay, we'll kick things off then.
Uh. No pressure. You love that so much, don't you? Um. What? Well, okay, so there's, there's a few things that really stand out. Um, one of the things that don't look bored already.
Oh, no, this is me, I interested.
Oh, is it okay? It looks surprising that you bored face. We have a client, um, who I think we've spoken about before, based in Florida. Um, we spent a lot of week, a lot of.
That just you showing off because you kind of look after that client predominantly you and Caron So you're just showing off. Hey, you know.
I just work on it a lot.
But it's not impressive.
Nobody cares ninety percent of my life working on the damn account. Um, so I've been talking him down from a ledge over the last week. He'd sort of decided that he wanted to sort of reinvent the idea of a website from scratch, which was an interesting conversation. Right? What if he is? I mean, I think I spent some of the last podcast saying, you should always listen to your clients bright ideas and be willing to try brand new things. And then yeah, he came along and was like, oh, what if we had this brilliant one page interactive thing that gave them all the information they needed about our company and our services and our track record in our history? And I was sitting there thinking, so like your website, you mean? And he was like, no, no, no, but different from the website, separate, but with all the same information. So that was a fun conversation. Um, but I think.
What you say that, that the, the end result of that was that he decided not to do that.
Well, yeah. Well, I think it was actually you that said something in passing to me and Caron when we were discussing it, about the fact that, oh, this all sounds like something that could just go into a video. Um, and we just, you know, sort of floated that idea because I get it. Like clients want to tell everybody the story about their business and there really.
Shouldn't be telling people stories.
Well, this is it. And I guess this is the thing really, isn't it? Like we constantly say, you know, tell a good story, get all the information out there, you know, use your website to sort of, you know, enchant people with the idea of your business and what you're about and your mission and your vision and your values. And that's what he wanted to do. He was just trying to do it in a way that sort of circumnavigated all the time and effort that's gone into building a brilliant website. And we were just sort of saying, you know, you don't need to do that. The passion is commendable. But look, you've already got this fantastic platform. Let's just put all of this stuff that you want to say to your audience in a video. You can address them directly. Um, and.
Did he like the idea of, I mean, there's nothing new about that. I mean, it's like, that's what corporate videos have always tried to do, you know?
Yeah.
Tell a story. And they were always a bit preachy and bullshitty. But I mean, generally speaking, that's what the corporate videos were about.
So I think that's the interesting thing is that they, the client in question does have an interesting angle, and they do stuff in a very different way to other people. And it is getting that across without, like you say, resorting to those sort of tired cliches and just preaching at people and saying we do things different, which immediately makes people's eyes glaze over. So yeah, I mean, for sure the actual sort of getting the video to be good bit is going to be quite difficult. But.
And how have you because I know you will have I know you won't have.
Yeah.
How will you how have you established that his ideal customers like videos.
Well, all we really have to go.
Ladies and gentlemen, you can now listen to the waffle.
No. It's surprising. So if you weirdly, if you look at stuff. So it's it's software for managing irrigation stuff. Yeah. And if you look on YouTube, this is not a product that other people don't produce. It's out there. And the view counts on some of the videos around the, you know, how do these things work? What do they do? What's the benefit in kind of huge. So yeah, I guess.
We haven't got any of that on that site at the moment.
No. Well, no it's tricky. So the, the client and the sort of his team have been working on the value proposition for quite a while internally, and I think they've only just sort of got to the place where they're ready to sort of chat about it, where they've got to the place where they really have conceptualised it and understand it, I think because for a long, long, long time, they were very obsessed with the sort of technical minutiae and the fact that it was more efficient and it would give you X amount more for your buck and that sort of thing. And I think they've now sort of cottoned on to the fact that that's not what their audience care about. So it's a work in progress. But like many of the gigs we work on, I think they do sort of evolve over time, don't they?
Yeah, absolutely. Okay. That was that was moderately interesting. Well done.
I'm shaking my head. You can't. What else.
Have.
You got?
What do you want? I mean, we can we can alternate because I've got a few things written. No. Yeah. That happened last week that I was going to sort of talk about.
Yeah. Go for it.
Well, one of them and I can't remember what triggered this me to write this note down. Um, it's about whether to put together a tender. And we've covered this in previous podcasts, whether to put together a tender or whether to have Conversations with maybe a few organisations that look like they might be able to do what you want them to do, what you need them to do. And we're big fans of having conversations. We like talking. You might have noticed if you're listening to this podcast, we like talking, but I, I just think that tenders, you know, with the public sector stuff that we occasionally go after, it's nearly always based, you know, on a tender document and you can ask questions, what the questions are in a public forum. So if you have an insight and you want to ask a question, then you have to share that insight with everybody else who's bidding for it, who might not have thought about the angle which has generated the question. Um, actually just having a meaningful conversation is just about impossible. Yeah. Unless and this is, this has happened because we actually have been asked to tender for a piece of public sector work. And this started the process by tracking down likely partners, picked on us and asked us a bunch of questions, which helped them then put out a request for information document which they asked us to respond to, which we responded to, and then they came back and asked more questions. So it's a very specific requirement that they've got. And so they have engaged because they recognize that there's a danger if they just put it out there. On the Public Contracts Scotland website, that nobody will reply. They'll just be left with a, with a, with a.
You know how that works. Tendering process.
Tumbleweed rolling along and nothing else happening. But just broadly speaking, the transactional nature of tender documents in our line of business. Fair enough. If you want to build a block of flats or if you want to build a bridge, you know, I mean, you specify it's all done, then you put the documents out, the drawings and everything go out to tender and the quantity surveyors get involved and they go, well, it's, you know, it's x thousand bricks and it's X tons of cement. And they just put a price together and I understand that that's maybe a good way of doing things like that. But when it comes to the, you know, when it comes to businesses trying to create great websites, great social media, um, good communication tools, tell great stories. I don't know, I just don't think going out to tender makes any bloody sense.
Well, I mean, you're right, there'll be people listening to this who are like, yeah, it's absolutely essential to tender. All I can really speak to is the fact that we do have a couple of engineering clients who also refuse to tender. And they do. Oh do they. Yeah. Um, um, so again, when they're building sort of like messy infrastructure where you'd think you'd go in and say, oh, X amount of concrete, X amount of piping, X amount of steel. Yeah. Um, they refuse to do that because the whole idea being that, you know, what they do isn't they'll work out a bespoke solution for you, but they have to understand your requirements first. And it's not what you think they are. You know, people go out to tender with a sort of right, we need a thing that does this and it needs to be this big and it needs to have this many gallons of water moving through it a minute or whatever, and they don't really understand their own requirements because they're not the experts. So I do know there's quite a few B2B businesses that sort of take the same line that actually you have to have a meaningful conversation to get a solution that's actually right. Um, so yeah, I don't know. I think tenders are just a sort of, I know I can see the value. It's a shortcut. It stops a lot of very long conversations that go nowhere. It stops you wasting time talking to somebody who then turns out can't deliver or whatever.
Yeah.
But I think it's, it's just become the norm. And I think it sort of gets in the way of a lot of good business, to be honest.
I totally agree. And I like the, the, the idea, um, which I agree with that they are not the experts and why should they be? They're experts in their own field. And so, you know, we've seen so many times we've seen invitation to tender documents come out and they are utterly meaningless. It's quite often like.
We need an SEO website.
Maybe, you know, they've used a Scottish enterprise template sort of thing. And you must ask that your website does this and does that, and it should do this and it should be compliant with this.
And it's really obvious when you read those tenders that they don't actually understand what they're asking for, do they? It's like we need a sixteen page interactive responsive website on mobile, and it must be SEO friendly. And it's like, well.
Yeah, that's right. Yeah.
You know, you don't really know what you're asking for. And we're much more interested, I think, because we know that the good solution comes from fully understanding the problem and sort of drilling down and finding out what is the problem. What are you trying to do? Because it's not just build a website. It never is that simple.
We're having a Julie and I are having a good conversation. Julie met somebody when she was networking. Um, and that's turned into a really good conversation. And we're developing an understanding of their business. We're looking at what they've been doing up to now. They're part way through a project, which we're also giving them some insights about where that's going and whether it's the right thing to do, etc.. Um, and it's, it's great because we're, what we're doing is we're just building a relationship. Now it might be that ultimately that relationship doesn't flourish, that we don't turn out to be the right people for them.
And I guess from that perspective, it's a bit frustrating if that happens and you've wasted six hours on calls.
So we are generally speaking, trying to with any opportunity that comes along, we are trying to understand the customer, their business, what success looks like, what what they need to achieve. And it's never like HTML this or SEO that or PHP this or WordPress or Joomla this or HubSpot that. You know, they're just tools. They're just vehicles trying to really understand what they're about is something that happens when you have conversations, like when you send a half assed ITT document out.
This is the thing, isn't it? You know, who's your target audience? I mean, you know, I'm sure you've had some marketing agency in that's done some buyer personas for you. But when you actually sit down and have a chat with somebody, like, this is the kind of customer I really want, then you can sort of build from that and go somewhere meaningful. And I think it is just to get about getting past some of that jargon and noise. A lot of the time, isn't it? Okay.
So tell me some more about your week last week.
Uh, lots of conversations about tracking. Okay. With several different casts. I don't know what these things always just seem to, like. Come at once. Do you get, like, a glut of one problem? So this was, um, a couple of customers we've been doing either paid advertising or organic. So SEO sort of campaigns to, to drive more traffic to their websites. And they were saying, you know, it's odd because we've seen some tracked enquiries, conversions appearing in our Google Analytics console. And, you know, we've seen some of the forms come through and we know that those are from the paid or the organic that you've been doing. But we've also just generally noticed a sort of uptick in enquiries across the board, you know, more phone calls. And is this from what you're doing? And, you know, I find myself going back a couple of times and saying, well, the honest answer is we don't necessarily know. And they're like, but you've got conversion tracking in place. You must know everything. And then having to sort of explain to people that actually these tools are fantastically useful, but they're not bomb proof and they're, you know, they will tell you when Google Analytics or any other platform knows for a fact that somebody clicked on your paid advert or your social media link and then converted, that's happened. And you know, they can track that. But if somebody takes a look at your website through an advert, puts their phone away, gets home that evening, goes on the desktop computer, logs into a different Chrome profile and looks you up and buys something. There's absolutely no way for any technology to track that. And I think it's one of those things that often gets really forgotten in discussions about this kind of thing. They're like, okay, so we can track everything. And it's like, well, yeah, up to a point, but we're never going to know everything. And so yeah, it was an interesting one because, you know, and it wasn't in a negative way at all. It was clients saying like, well, actually, I think even though we've only seen, you know, three or four conversions from this this week, I actually think we've fielded a sort of extra ten or eleven phone calls. And do you think those could be related? And the answer is, well, yeah, but we don't know.
And Yeah. I mean, I know you're not a huge fan, but I, I like to think that people are, um, when an enquiry comes in via the phone that they're saying, you know, just could you tell us how you heard about us? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I searched on Google and found you. What? You know, if if it's possible, at least you remember what you typed in. Yeah. Oh, yeah. It was something like, uh, web design, Aberdeen or something like that. And then, you know, get that information into, um, into your CRM and, and it helps to understand.
I'm not not a fan of it. I just wish people would bloody do it. Yeah. That's the problem. You can tell a sales team somewhere like, please, when an enquiry comes in, can you try and find out where it's from? And they absolutely won't. And that's not a dig at salespeople. They've got enough on their plate. But I think it's just one of those things that, well.
In between golfing and.
Looking at their Rolex.
That's what they do now.
I think so, yeah.
I think so.
But yeah, just a sort of, I don't know, I guess a general gripe is that I wish people were more aware of the fact that, you know, analytics tools are fantastically useful, but it's like that old Disraeli quote, you know, lies, damn lies and statistics. You can't and shouldn't pin your faith on on numbers. On a dashboard.
No. That's right. Okay. Um, something interesting happened this week earlier. In fact, I think it was on Monday. Monday evening, was it? I think it was. I decided to go out and hit a few golf balls and not in the practice area. I decided to play play a few holes. Anyway, I was walking up the eighth, which is a par three. You knew that you didn't, and the guy in front of me hadn't put the flag in straight. So it's like it's just this beautiful evening. I was playing golf and was like, this thing. Well, why is the flag at a quirky angle? Like, how hard is it to put the flag in straight?
Not, ladies and gentlemen, a symptom of obsessive compulsive disorder at all.
Know it well. Any golfers listening will know exactly where I'm coming from anyway. It just it's it's actually just common courtesy just to like, nudge it a millimeter and make sure it's in properly and it's straight. So I took a video I sort of videoed and like, you just sort of like tried to make it mildly amusing, but that sort of whetted my appetite. So I was further around the golf course, and for those interested, I was on the fifteenth, which is the one that goes around by the water. Yeah, it's a nice hole. Interesting hole par. It's a par four. You need a big cutty kind of rescue club or a four iron or something. Getting far too technical now. Um, so when I got finished and it got me thinking about um, what a joy it is. If you um, are looking for your golf ball, which isn't a joy, I know, but if you're looking for your golf ball and you find a titlist pro V one, which is what the pros use are fantastic. Golf balls are quite expensive. I don't know what you pay. You pay forty odd quid for a dozen of them. I don't know, they're.
Probably probably.
Expensive. They're probably five quid each or something like that. But when you find one and it's in good condition, it's like, oh, it's, it's a nice feeling because.
What's the etiquette? You just get to keep it if.
People don't put their names on them? Well, some people do, but then you just go, haha. John's. John's ball is now off.
Yeah.
But anyway, so I actually cheated. I put this pro V into the grass and then I did this little video walking along and you know the the absolute pinnacle.
Sorry you lied on social media.
I think the absolute pinnacle of, of golfing joy is not when you hit that pure seven iron in the green to two feet or anything, you know, the absolute, it's just the best feeling in golf being obviously, you know, tongue in cheek is when you find you're looking for your pinnacle. Three pinnacles are like cheap golf balls. Um, when you're looking for your pinnacle three and you find a Titleist Pro v1.
Sure.
Anyway, I was out on the course, decent connectivity, so I'd recorded the video straight onto TikTok and, um, thought no more of it. I did put some tags in golf, TikTok, and golf, and a few things like that. Anyway, this was I posted it, I don't know, it's about half past eight on Monday evening. By midnight it had ten thousand views. Ten. I've never I mean, I've never I've never put anything on social media that's got traction. Um.
Because you're boring. Because I'm boring.
By and large. But this thing, it just struck a chord, you know, based on the comments, it just struck a chord like, you know, haha. Yeah, I'm usually the one that finds the pinnacle three and da da da da. And obviously people had shared it with their friends who said, oh yeah, this guy's nailed this, you know, like, you know that feeling you get. And it was just a talking about that feeling you get of pure joy when you, you know, you find a five quid golf ball sort of thing. But it also got me thinking that there is a purpose to this, that, you know, quite often people like the Holy Grail with with social media is to get.
Something that.
Goes viral, but you can't create something to go viral. Well, you can try, but I made no effort whatsoever with this thing. I just thought it was quite amusing. And it went ten thousand views, eleven thousand now, I think. So it kind of blew up and then went away just like a lot of things on social media. Um, and I've got no second album, you know, that's it. I put all my greatest tunes into that one video. Um, so, but it did make me think about that. Like, you know, the random successes that you can have online. And like some of the work we do for clients sometimes, you know, we think it's a good idea and we execute and it kills it. Absolutely superb.
And then sometimes.
And sometimes it doesn't. And that's just the nature of the beast. If you knew exactly what the formula was for things to go viral or things to be successful.
Um, well, it wouldn't happen anymore. That's the thing. I think this is the thing a lot of marketers like fail to understand is it's the whole lightning in a bottle thing. You know, it happens once in a blue moon and you can't curate it or create it. And if you could, everybody would be doing it and it wouldn't be remarkable or interesting and the formula would be dead. And I think this is the thing, isn't it? It's only because it's rare and fleeting, and you can't sit in a room and sort of it's like, you know, I've heard lots of people talking about writing comedy in the same way. You can't sit in a room with four walls staring at somebody or, you know, a group of people and write funny things. It just doesn't happen.
Well, that's what comedy writers do, is it?
I think they actually just well, I think most of it's observational. I think they go and live their lives and then try and sit and turn it into something.
Because to me, that's, that's my that's the job I wish I'd, I wish I'd had. Is it sitting around a table with, with funny people writing funny stuff, making each other laugh and like thinking, yeah, that's funny, that's good. That must be the best job in the world.
Probably. Probably up there.
Because you're a writer. Yeah.
But we don't get to write funny things, do we? We write about, I don't know, pumps and water and SEO occasionally. And it's depressing, I suppose. But no. Yeah. I mean, I think it's one of those things, isn't it? Like, the point is you have to actually go out and sort of live your life and hope that these things happen, but you can't sort of sit there and force it. I think that's the thing with a lot of content online now is it's a lot of people just sitting there and thinking, I must be funny. I've got half an hour to record a funny video and it has to be good.
Oh yeah, I think, I think people do feel that pressure. Yeah. Um, there's, there's, I mean, there's a few people on Twitter. Well, Twitter, I do follow people on and it was a few people on TikTok that I've sort of, you know, like, I like the stuff that they post, but it's kind of like there's two of them I can think of and they've just dried up. There's nothing coming out. They haven't posted anything.
Suddenly realised.
That.
They run out of material.
You know, like to a certain extent, with this podcast, we, we were following a formula of like, let's talk about this, let's talk about that. And now we've moved to this conversational style where we're just talking about, well, we got, we had and mixing in anecdotes and various other things.
I think in our defense, we got through one hundred episodes of educational content and then realised, actually, digital marketing is not that deep. You're done. Now you can go off and be a digital marketer. No, I'm being facetious. Yeah, I think that's the thing. You have to be adaptable and you have to recognise that sometimes if you're trying to force something, it's just not going to happen. But it's interesting because one of the other things I was doing this week actually was like a little bit geeky and you might pull me up or bleep me out for talking about this, but I was reading a really interesting, um, study and it was a study about flow states and digital content. So you're familiar with the idea of flow states, I guess vaguely. So it's like the sort of scientific term for that, you know, when you get like properly sucked into something and you'll read or watch or whatever for like an hour or an hour and a half and not really notice that the time has passed. It's like fully engaged. You're excited, you know, you're firing on all cylinders. You're like, wow, this is brilliant. I'm learning so much right now. And they were basically saying that brands that can sort of create content that does that to people are the brands that people remember. That's what people actually care about. So a lot of digital marketing is sort of designed to get people on your website and then engage them. But actually the people who are sort of at the apex of this are the people who are creating content that actually gets people into these flow states and helps them to learn and that sort of thing. And they were trying in this study to sort of understand, you know, how this had happened and how you create content that gets somebody into a flow state. And it was all terribly sort of academic. And they had all these different models for working it out and, you know, trying to analyse how good content sort of resonates with people. Um, and they couldn't really sort of answer the question in the end, other than to say that it had something to do with sort of finding the right balance between engaging, you know, sort of easy to read, easy to access content and content that sort of pushed people or demanded quite a lot of them and sort of helped them to sort of think about things in new ways and that sort of thing. But it was just a very similar thing. You know, they were going to all of this detail and trying to sort of unpack what it is that makes really engaging content engaging. And the sort of answer they came to in the end is like, you can't really there is no formula for it, and you can't really tell why. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.
Extract that out. You know, people invest many hundreds of millions into films which are utter flops. Yeah. Complete and utter. These are experts with.
Well, let's say.
The very best, most famous actors. Yeah. All the resources at their disposal, a team of.
Scriptwriters.
A team of script writers, the very best cinematographers, the very best scriptwriters usually, and it falls flat on its face. So yeah, I mean, what what's the difference?
It's not a science, is it? It's like people.
Want. I mentioned before about the difficult second album. I mean, yeah, you know, there's plenty of bands like Nail it, nail it, nail it, then what the actual. Yeah. With the, with their third or fourth album, it's like, what happened?
Yeah.
Um, you know, you know, something, just when you were talking about that, something that came to my mind was this, you know, when you, if you go onto YouTube, if you're looking for some instruction, some help with something, and as soon as the video starts, they go, like right before we start, can you remember just like and subscribe, hit the bell. Honestly, they've lost me. They've lost me straight away. Because you know what? If they if they entertained me or they educate me, they help me, they engage me, I'm going to do all that. I'm not going to do it before I've watched your video. So it's just, it's just, it's just not the right way to do it.
But this is one of those things where, I don't know, like, I might sound like a massive snob here, but it's one of those things where I think like people who are not trained to and don't understand how to engage people make a massive flop of it because you can come up on YouTube and you can grow up watching YouTube videos and whatever, and sort of absorb the, the methodology of the people that you watch and you think, right, I'm going to be a YouTuber now. I'm going to go out and create this content and completely miss the point, which is like you say, you cannot start out by demanding something of somebody. Like if you, if you wrote an article and you used the intro to say, please like and follow my blog, nobody would ever read it because the intro science says is how you grip people and you have a few seconds to do it, and they waste those few seconds by, like you say, demanding something of you because they don't know any better. Yeah. But yeah, it's a whole generation of people out there that make content that is just, I don't know, obnoxious, really.
Well, speaking of content, that segues into something. I was just going to have a little bit of a beef about, you know, you know, I like, I mean, I like, I use Twitter and I like politics and interest in politics.
Now, but yeah.
It'll always be Twitter to me. Um, and so sometimes people link out to stories on newspaper websites and my oh my, are they getting it wrong? I mean, how many times have you clicked in Twitter or read it? I know you're a big fan of Reddit. You click a thing, takes you to a page because you want to like read the article so you can maybe go back and join the conversation and you get advert, advert, advert, pop up paywall, and you just go like, oh, well, sometimes I mean paywalls, honest. It's like, you know, there's hard work going into this content. If you want to read it, pay us. I don't mind that it's when they won't use paywalls. So they just, they, they've created. I'm trying to think what it's like the equivalent of it's, it's like the equivalent of, um, you know, for a while and you still see this, but for a while, like somebody would put like a billboard up somewhere, like a homemade billboard, like, you know, John's car servicing or something like that. Yeah. We've got the car analogy. Get John's car service. And then somebody else would go, oh, actually, uh, you know, like Susan's, uh, saunas and, you know, suddenly, like you just get this plethora of local businesses slapping up thirty bob posters and, and, and it just like everything was just noise. I mean, and those news sites are not doing digital marketing very well. They're just desperately trying to get clicks to make money so that they don't have to put a paywall up. And it's, I don't know, it's so bad when I look at them. I just, I think just it's somebody looking at this and thinking, we have to do this. We know how awful it is, but we have to do it. And, and it's fine to do it.
Well, I don't know. I mean, I've always been a big believer and I might be being a bit naive now, but I've always been a big believer that if you do the work and you do it properly, the rewards will follow. I think newspapers are trying to take this weird shortcut where they want to be paid right now for the clicks and the ad views. I mean, the I, the independents sub newspaper. And for American listeners, that's just like a sort of standard tabloid American listener, very good standard sort of tabloid newspaper in the UK. Um, they get this fantastically wrong because they've gone all in for click bait for just sort of like very rubbish, thin surface level content with loads of adverts and their reputation has been trashed because of it. And I think this is the thing the newspapers don't understand. People remember these bad experiences and they will stop coming back and the newspapers that get it right. Like, I know you're not the world's biggest fan, but like the Guardian newspapers like that that just give the content away for free. They create a good experience. People will keep coming back, though.
Yeah. And they just take the different approach where and I'm not, I'm not, I'm not against beg for money occasionally. In fact, I shared a Guardian post um, this morning to, to LBC. Um, yeah. Uh, at least they're honest. They just say like, you know, we could do with a few quid, you know, click here, a fiver sort of thing, you know, that kind of thing.
But it is like a bit like shopping on an Asian high street. Now, I think if you're trying to read an article on a newspaper and you're just being shouted at all the time, and it's interesting because yeah, people who are professional sort of marketers who create content for the digital sphere know that actually, you know, like a landing page only performs if you strip away all the distractions, you know, to the point where if you really want somebody to buy what you're selling or engage with what you're saying.
Which is the journalism.
You have to take away, like, you know, the menus and the CTAs and everything and just give them a content straight, right? That's what if a customer came to us and said, I really want somebody to read this and absorb it and engage with it. That is what you do for them. And these newspapers are just doing the the polar opposite.
Well, you also get inappropriate ads. It might be a story about something really serious. And then suddenly there's like, you know, buy a pizza. It's like, wait a minute. I'm reading about a person who murdered children, like in the in the recent recent murder case. Yeah. And, and someone started flogging.
A Domino's.
Domino's.
Pizza. You're reading this heart wrenching.
I don't know. And then they also, in their desperation to get clicks, the clickbait stuff, they just tell barefaced lies as well. You know, there's, there's quite a few going around just now where it's showing pictures of famous actors like Jack Nicholson, Clint Eastwood looking somewhat worse for wear, you know, like, because they're quite old people now and, you know, you won't believe where Clint Eastwood lives now. You won't believe where Jack Nicholson. Sure I will. Pretty sure it's a big mansion.
Somewhere in Hollywood.
Yeah, it's just complete horseshit. And I don't know where. I don't know what the end game is. I really don't know what the end game is. But anyway, um, one thing I took Tuesday off, as you know, and I went down to, uh, a fishery down in, uh, just near Gleneagles. In fact, the road to the fishery drives alongside one of the halls. It's a very pretty, very pretty courses. Um, I do want to go and play there. Actually be quite nice if I could afford it. And um.
Is it.
It's interesting, you know, it's interesting because I mean, you know what I'm going to say. So basically it's a, it's a fishery. So I do trout fishing and everything else. But I also like course fishing called course fishing because it was what all the common people went fishing for the course.
Yeah. That's interesting.
Because like.
Like the bad fish basically.
Basically. Yeah. like the landed gentry. They would fish for salmon and trout fishing. Yeah, the pike and the carp and all that. They're just common, coarse kind of fish and coarse fishing. Excellent. Um. So beautiful fishery. It's a great place. Second time I've been there, I love it. I'm going to go again soon. And, um, so I know these the fish. I want to catch the carp. I know they're there.
Mhm.
It's, it's up to me to figure out.
What sort.
Of.
Bait to use, how to.
How to prepare the area where I'm.
Fishing. Understand your audience. Yeah.
That's right. I understand my audience. And I had a great day fishing, caught lots of fish and really good fun. Um, but, you know, it's like, it is like what we do, you know, we understand where our audience is. We, we, we put the traps out there. We put the great content. We, we make sure that they're going to find us when they're looking for us. And, and then we, you know, hopefully, you know, we can bring them in for ourselves and obviously for our clients and turn them into customers. And, you know, I don't know, it is an analogy. I just thought I'd mention it.
Well, no, it's an interesting one.
Hackneyed, I know.
I think it's interesting too, because I think one of the things that I will say about it is I think it's also one of the reasons why experience is so important, isn't it? Because I imagine just like fishing, you can watch as many YouTube videos on how to fish carp as you like, but until you've been one hundred times and caught one hundred carp or I don't know how many carp you catch each time, but the point is.
ten or eleven days fishing at least. Anyway, so yeah, lost a few as well.
You learn every time you do it is what I'm saying. And I guess that process of like, pick the bait, you know, pick the right spot, pick the right weather, pick the right, whatever it is, all stuff that is happening subconsciously, but that because you've fished so much, you sort of do by instinct and people who, yeah, don't have that experience just don't really get what you're doing a lot of the time. Yeah.
What have you got?
Uh, that's pretty much it really. I mean, the only other thing I really had to talk about was just our content, which, I don't know, like but a little bit self-congratulatory. But we've been going through, as you know, like we've sort of haven't been blogging as much as we should have been for a while and sort of went through a process internally of coming up with a new content calendar and then spent quite a lot of last week sort of getting all the sort of wheels in motion with that. So doing more video, doing more social media, doing more. So I want to do like a HubSpot newsletter, um, every month where we just sort of recap all the stuff that we've done and just getting everything in place for that, not HubSpot newsletter, LinkedIn newsletter, okay. And getting all the stuff in place for that. But I guess it was just one of those things where, you know, we're an agency that do content for people all the time, and we have to occasionally sort of touch base and sort of, you know, sit down and, and start that process over again all the time. Um, and I think that's quite interesting.
Consolidate you mean. Yeah, yeah, consolidate.
And I think that's probably something a lot of people listening maybe won't realise is that, you know, we go through these as well, like kind of periodically, let's reset and.
We feel their pain.
Yeah. Have a think about what we're doing.
Mhm. Yeah. Okay. There is other stuff I could go on about what we've been banging on now for thirty odd minutes. I think that's probably enough. Yeah. Well, I had a meeting with a potential client on Thursday. Um, I might save that for next time. Next week. Chat about that because yeah, there was some things, some things that came up which were um interesting. And um, I'm sure there's plenty of other businesses that are in a similar situation. And so yeah, we'll talk about what we've suggested is the right way forward for them, but we'll cover that next time.
I think in the industry, that's what's called a cliffhanger.
Is.
It? Good job.
It's not that exciting, honestly. If you don't come back and listen again, you won't be missing much. You've been listening to Digital Marketing From The Coalface with Dave and Alex, where we talk about what we've been doing for the last week at the coalface of digital marketing. Hopefully some of it was, uh, interesting, useful, and we hope all of it was enjoyable indeed. Bye bye.