I was writing a blog post for our blog this week about how to budget for digital marketing for. Lots of clients have sort of said to us recently, oh, how much should I be spending on it? I had these little endless conversations where, you know, the answer is it depends all the time. And I was like, right, there must be a proper actual way to work out how you budget for this stuff. So read a ton of ebooks, you know, guides and blog posts and that sort of thing. And got to the point where I'd sort of basically taken what, what we do, I think just sort of subconsciously and sort of turned it into what looks like a proper process. But the bottom line of that process is, like you say, what you actually need to look at whenever you're working out, can I afford to market to these people? Is how much does it actually cost to get yourself in front of the people you actually care about at the moment when they care about it? And that is massively variable.
When you do digital marketing, well, whatever it is, you're putting something that somebody wants to buy right in front of them. At the moment, they've got the credit card in the hand, right? Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. This is the podcast where me, Dave Robinson and I talk about what we've been doing at the coalface of digital marketing this last week. And to start things off, I'd actually started recording this podcast, uh, downstairs where we record them. And, um, I was kind of, you know, taking the piss out of Alex a little bit because he hadn't rocked up yet. And then Alex went flying past me with a very red face, opened the door and slammed it behind him. And I thought, oh shit, I've pushed him too far this time. But in fact, he wasn't angry at me. Thank. There you are. I've said it on a podcast the first time I've ever used the F word. I think I.
Used.
All the time. But anyway, um, he was in fact angry at Google because Google. We love Google, but we are complete dicks when it comes to customer Interaction. They just are. They are absolutely useless at customer service.
To put things into perspective.
An utterly lamentable at customer service. Go on, tell them what happened.
I was trying to pay them money. I was trying to set up a new account for our client so that we could spend that client's money on Google ads. Would it let me know? Just endless roadblocks and not like, actual big issues. Just endless sort of faff, you know, just just little things like, oh, you can't add this payment because this payment card, because it's been added on another account once centuries ago. At some point in the past, but not like, would you like to speak to somebody about that? Would you like to try something different? Just an error message. And then you have to start the whole process over again. And after the third time of doing it, I was pretty much ready to throw my laptop out the window.
Yeah.
And then I contacted customer chat and got a chat bot that wouldn't let me speak to a person. Yeah. It's just yeah.
But don't you think that is what tech is doing to us? I mean, I love tech. I've got my Apple Watch on my wrist. I'm going to buy a new one. I'm going to buy an ultra when I can afford it. I've got my iPhone sat there, my MacBook sat over there. I've got an Apple TV at home. Love the tech, love Apple tech and I love technology generally, but I do find that increasingly it irritates me because it tries to help.
This is.
The. And it doesn't help. It just gets in the way. And that's so annoying.
Like human beings are very good. If you explain a problem to them at figuring out the solution quite quickly, that is the power of the human brain. Technology is not particularly good at that yet, but companies keep putting robots in the way of humans.
But when you get a human brain that's reading off a script, that's equally well.
Yeah, it's the same thing really, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. But it's not this is not I mean, you know, funnily enough, in the notes that I have for this week's podcast, which unfortunately I have left upstairs, but.
It's.
Okay.
I'll allow.
That. Um, but one of the things I had to talk about was HubSpot, another technology vendor who we like very much, we frequently recommend their technology.
We use their technology, we use we pay a lot of money for their technology.
Absolutely. And again, you know, trying to sign a customer up to one of their services and.
They've always made that complete. It has to be the moon in the right place, the wind in the right direction. It, it, it just staggers me. It just utterly baffles me how they make it so completely confusing.
I feel so sorry for anybody that tries to sign up to HubSpot without an agency to fight their corner, but I mean, to put things into perspective. The thing with HubSpot started with me asking, are HubSpot reps specifically, how do I do this thing? He he he, he told me the wrong thing to start with. Yeah.
And then.
He, and then he got me on a call and explained how to do it the right way. I did all the things that he told me to do. Went back on the next day to find that HubSpot had automatically closed the entire order, deleted it all, said order lost, closed, and the whole process had to start again. And it turned out in the end that actually what needed to happen is the customer completely separate from us on HubSpot website and sign up for everything because the package he wanted couldn't be set up through the partner dashboard. But rather than just explaining that, it took sort of several weeks and several failed attempts to get to the point where we just had to say to the customer, log on and put your credit card details in.
I guess if there's any point to this, it's, it's that if you're working in digital marketing, say you're in-house and I've got some things to say about in-house people this week. If you're working in-house or if you're a business owner trying to navigate this stuff, like don't beat yourself up if you find it confusing because it's our bread and butter, it's what we do day in, day out, and day in, day out. You are somehow, um, foiled. You know, your, your, your endeavours are somehow, um, you know, like fruitless because of just people just don't think things through.
It's just systemic incompetence, isn't it? And I think, you know, to, to make a, I don't really know where this point goes. There's no real positive spin on this really, but it's just to point out that a phenomenal amount of productivity is wasted wrestling with tools you know you're not when you are marketing a business. And I'm sure it's also true for accountants and many other people in many other walks of life, you are not just able to do your job, you must do your job and also sort of navigate all these ridiculous sort of Sisyphean tasks where it's like, oh, okay, you want to you, you want to sign someone up for an account? Well, yeah, you know, let me steal three weeks of your life. Whoops.
So take the hoops out, untangle them, try and jump through them. And by the way, while you're trying to jump through them, they'll shrink. Yeah. Uh, and you'll get stuck. And you must.
Do it in time. To the Benny Hill theme tune.
Well, the Benny Hill theme tune is de rigueur, obviously. Yeah.
That's right.
Anyway, I'll, um, get back to Digital Marketing From the Coalface after our little, uh, our little rant and, uh, the, the, uh, the, um, the stuff that, that led to that, um, had a really good meeting with a potential client. I know I say that a lot, but anyway, we do. We do our job very well. And so we get opportunities to speak to potential new clients or potential new client yesterday. Um, and they operate in quite a competitive niche. Um, but it's a lucrative niche. It's a, it's, um, it's, it's, it's a, it's an area of business, um, that is widely needed. And if you can make good progress, you know, if you can get good traction in that niche, you'll do quite well. The one side of their business is doing extremely well from referral business and repeat business. They're good at what they do. People like them. They do a good job. They look after their clients instead of making them jump through hoops and utterly confusing them like the likes of Google and HubSpot do. Um, they look after their customers, but there's also another aspect to what they do and they want a slice of that pie as well. And when we looked at the people who are getting the lion's share of that other side of the business, which there could be tapping into, it was pretty clear that those people had put a Herculean effort into building a website that is extremely powerful, ranks extremely well, and generates a shitload of business. They want some of that. But it was pretty clear that they weren't. They certainly weren't the kind of people who didn't want to spend money. But there's no way they would want to spend the kind of money they need to spend in order.
To.
Penetrate that market and try and play catch up with some of the people who've become well established in that market. Um, they're almost well, yeah, they're probably reluctant to make the level of investment that's required.
Maybe even can't. Yeah.
Well, maybe they can't. Yeah. To, to a certain extent. But um, I still wonder to what extent people say, for example, you operate in a certain niche. You look at other players in the niche, you think, well, we're better than them and we've been around longer than them. And you know, everything about our business is better than their business. And so they want that. What they want, what that other business have got in terms of a strong web presence that generates lots of customers, attracts lots of business, generates lots of money, but they just have never got their head around what it takes to achieve that.
Do you think part of that is because there's this sort of persistent myth in business that, you know, like challenges or like there's something about the sort of David and Goliath story that I see being sort of told and retold all the time by business people that, you know, if you're agile and you're smart, it doesn't matter that you're small, it doesn't matter that you're a quarter of the size. You can, you can challenge that sort of entrenched top dog and sort of take away their market share because you're cleverer than them. And I think part of it is that, right? It's like a lot of people are very naive to the reality of what it takes, because as far as they're concerned, all they have to do is be willing and agile and clever and think outside the box. And sometimes it does actually just require a lot of time and effort to, to sort of replicate that sort of thing.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I can't think of any anything specific, but there's those conversations. There's often lots of like throw away statements. Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We need blog. Oh yeah. I can write blog posts. I can do that. I can do that. I'm not.
Talking about a.
Couple of can you write, you know, can you write ten, two and a half thousand word blog posts every week for the next year? Yeah. Can you do that? Because if you can't do that, then you can't do the level of work required. If you want to try and catch these people up who are stealing, who've stolen quite a significant lead on you. Yeah. Um, you know, these are good people I'm talking about. They're good people. They're bright people. They're successful people. But I still think that there's, there's, there's a kind of feeling probably perpetuated by the, um, the shitty end of our market, you know, the much cheapness end of.
Anyone can do.
This, anyone can do this. It's not expensive. For ninety nine dollars a month, we'll produce twenty blog posts because we'll use AI to write them and Google won't know any better. And we can do all this stuff. And and it's cheap and it's fast and it never is.
Clearly you're not going to. Well, I mean, and I think this is the thing isn't it? I mean sometimes that is true for for relatively sort of young and unsophisticated markets, you probably can, you know, on a very small budget knock the the key players out or whatever. Yeah. But yeah, you're not going to take Halliburton or somebody like that out by churning out AI generated content. You're actually gonna have to put real time and effort in. Yeah.
That's right. And I think that's it. I think, you know, when you think about what happens when you do digital marketing, well, whether it's paid advertising, organic search, search engine optimisation, content creation, um, social media advertising, whatever it is, if you do it well, you're putting something that somebody wants to buy right in front of them at the moment. They've got the credit card in the hand, right?
Yeah.
Which interestingly is what sparked your little tantrum about twenty minutes ago, isn't it? Credit cards. But so we've gone full circle on that one.
It's interesting because one of the things I really wanted to talk about is I was writing a blog post for our blog this week about how to budget for digital marketing. And I went out because basically because lots and lots of clients have sort of said to us recently, oh, how much should I be spending on X? And, you know, like, how much should I be putting towards my PPC? And oh, how much do I actually need to spend to achieve X objective? And had these sort of endless conversations where, you know, the answer is it depends all the time. And I was like, right, there must be a proper actual way to work out how you budget for this stuff. Yeah. So read a shit ton of ebooks, read a shit ton of guides and blog posts and that sort of thing, and got to the point where I'd sort of basically taken what, what we do, I think just sort of subconsciously and sort of turned it into what looks like a proper process. But the bottom line of that process is, like you say, what you actually need to look at whenever you're working out. Can I, can I penetrate this market? Can I afford to market to these people? Is how much does it actually cost to get yourself in front of the people you actually care about at the moment when they care about it? And that is massively variable. I mean, you know, we have clients who are paying thirty, forty pounds a click for PPC or pay per click advertising. We have people who spend two three thousand pounds getting us to build them really good content that then ranks well and gets people that way. But the point of the matter is you have to be very careful with the amount of money that you spend, and you have to be very careful with how you allocate it, and you have to actually spend the time working out how much it's going to cost. You can't just say, oh, I'm going to spend three grand and I'm going to get these results because that's not how it works. You have to actually. I agree.
I think the the, the caveat to that is if you've figured out what work is required to achieve a certain outcome, what likely is going to achieve a certain outcome, then the budget that you have available dictates the pace of work it does. So, you know, if you've got a client who wants to spend two grand a month and the stuff they require you've established is like, this is what's required. And however you carve it up, that's fifty grams worth of work. Then at two grand a month, it's going to take you four years or whatever you know, to, to actually achieve it. And by then the goalposts have moved. But that doesn't mean that you, you won't make some good progress during that three or four years and achieve something great. That's that's fine. But that's often what, you know, that's often what I'll say to potential customers if they, you know, because sometimes customers and I understand why and it makes sense, you know, they've kind of looked at budgets and they've decided that they can spend two grand or three thousand pounds a month for the next six to twelve months. Let's just say on marketing, they recognise they need to be out there more, be found more, whether it's social or, you know, search or whatever it is, they realise that that's something that they need to do. Um, and they also have been quite grown up about it and said, this is all I can afford. So, you know, we like a car analogy, you know, if you've, if you've can afford five hundred quid a month, then and you want a four wheel drive car, then that's fine. These are the four wheel drive cars that.
You can have.
Or you can do it the other way around and say, I do want that Range Rover. Top of the range Range Rover, which costs one hundred and twenty thousand quid. Uh, I'm gonna have to be.
Prepared for the money. Yeah.
No, I'm gonna have to be prepared to pay five hundred quid a month for the next twenty years in order to have that vehicle. If someone's prepared to let me do that and finance it for me. So, you know, it's kind of you can come, you can come at it from two different directions. You can, you know, you can like, like Mike Lieberman at square two marketing, they have an accelerator program. So they've established everything that needs to be done. And they'll say to people, if you've got sixty grand.
Just give it.
We can do it in the next two months. If you've got like three grand a month, it's going to take us the next twenty four months.
Because ultimately it does just cost what it costs. And like you say, all of this sort of the stuff that agencies do in terms of pricing is just finding a way to make that either palatable or affordable, isn't it?
Well, just before this podcast, I went over to, uh, to the house to meet a roofer because it's an old house. Our house was built in about eighteen fifty or something like, yes, people in America listening. My house was built in eighteen fifty. The office that we're sitting in right now recording. This was built in around about eighteen fifty as well. Um, and so it's got an old slate roof. I like to look after things. So, you know, the guy came around, I pointed out, you know, things I can see. I also said, look, there'll be things that you can see that I can't see. And I didn't say, so how much to fix it? How much is it going to cost? I just said, just sort it out for me.
Yeah.
He's an honest guy and it'll cost what it costs. There's no point, there's no point sort of trying to. I mean, all right, I know that that job isn't going to cost ten grand. You know, if it was if it was a job. Like I want you to build me a new garage. Give me a rough idea what that's going to cost because I. Is it, is it five? Is it ten? Is it twenty? I want to know that. But for a lot of stuff, like you said, you know, like you say things cost what they cost and yeah, it doesn't matter. You know, you can certainly try and find cheap alternatives.
Um, it's really hard without turning this into a rant though every week now. Yeah. I mean, we.
Should just change.
It to rants from the.
Rants from the marketplace, from the marketplace, from the coalface.
Um, I'd like to see you say that twice in a row successfully.
No, I couldn't even say it once. Successfully.
I think there's almost something that I want to articulate about the fact that. Yeah, it's that when you. Yeah. Uh, I don't know when you when you should.
Listeners, I wish you could see the pained expression on Alex's face as he tries to figure out whether he can articulate a thought.
Yeah. If you if anybody tries to sell you on the pricing, as in I can do this cheaper than anybody else. I think in our industry, that is a massive red flag, isn't it? It's like if a roofer came to your house and said, oh, I am going to do this at half the price I get from a business owner's point of view, that it is really uncomfortable to give somebody carte blanche to spend money and to say like, you just do whatever it takes. But that is realistically where all the grown up agencies operate, because none of us are particularly interested in beating somebody else's quote or doing it for. We can all tell how much it's going to cost, roughly. It's not rocket science. So, you know, when people start sort of asking for price reductions or asking you if you can beat somebody else's price, I think a lot of us do just sort of switch off a little bit simply because it is just you don't want to get trapped in those discussions really, because this is what it's going to cost. And there's no way of sort of changing that really to a degree.
No, I agree. I agree. One of the agencies in the agency mastermind group that meets once a month that I'm involved with is American agency. And you know, they're busy offloading Offboarding clients.
Yeah.
Basically getting rid of clients who are not serious about making an investment and seeing the returns that that investment is going to bring. Because as an agency, they're bigger than us. They're into the millions of turnover and they're bigger than us. And, um, they're, they've recognised that they just don't want to mess around with, with thirty Bobby Orr and thirty Bob their clients.
I mean, getting.
Get nothing, achieve nothing. You don't achieve anything.
Well, this is the thing, isn't it? I mean, getting down to brass tacks, there's nothing you can really do. We have to charge a certain amount per hour to keep the agency afloat. There's not really that much wiggle room there. So then, you know, your option to bring the prices down is what. Do less work. Do the work more slowly. But. But both of those things leave clients annoyed and frustrated. So you are sort of trapped past a certain point. And I imagine it's the same for a lot of people who offer services like lawyers and stuff like that. That just isn't that much you can do to bring the price down because the costs are sort of fixed really. We're not in control of, you know, the cost per click of a Google ad or how long it takes to write a blog post. Those are just sort of the immutable hard facts of digital marketing.
And one thing I did with, with the customer yesterday when we were talking about costs and PPC costs and things like that, I said some of the things that we bid for as an agency, we pay thirty quid for one click.
And yeah.
And just, just to kind of, you know, say like, we're not here trying to say to you, spend this money on PPC, you know, like, Christ, we'd never do that, but you need to do it. I mean, we do it as well. You know, we're in exactly the same position as a lot of our customers. We are sweating about how to get in front of the right people at the right time on a, on a daily basis. It's what we do. It's how we attract all our own business, you know. And so, you know, we do get the sort of pain and anguish, if you like, that comes with the realisation that something that you thought might cost not very much money is actually going to require to do it properly, require a serious investment anyway. Do you want to go and get your notes?
Uh, well, the only other.
Have you remembered roughly what you wanted to talk about?
Roughly?
I think you haven't got any notes, have you? I have got there's no point going upstairs and pretending to get your notes because you haven't actually got any notes. Oh he is, he's getting up. He's going to go and get his notes. Okay. That means that in the meantime, I've just got to wait for him to come back downstairs with his notes. Um, I think I mentioned, or if I didn't mention it's, uh, we've got a birthday in the office today, so we're also eating cake while we're, while we're podcasting, which is, um, which is nice, I hope. I'm pretty sure you haven't actually heard us eating any of this cake while we're, while we're talking. At least I hope so, but it's, uh, quite nice to have a cup of tea and a piece of cake and a chat and then somehow try and pass that off as a podcast and something that people might be interested in listening to, Although it seems that maybe people are. Um. At this point, I'll just reiterate that we would welcome, um, guests on the podcast. We do get approached quite a bit from people who'd like to come on the podcast and talk to us, but I need to stress that we kind of want people to come in and talk about their coalface experiences. We don't want people to come on and talk about some software they've written or talk about something they did twenty years ago, but we've kind of got the podcast on track now in terms of what we're talking about. And it's like the stuff that we're doing, the stuff that's hitting us right now and the stuff we're working on right now. So if you do want to come on, um, by all means get in touch with us at red evolution dot com. But we particularly are interested to talk to people who are wanting to relate what they've been doing this week at the coalface of digital marketing. Right. He came down with no notes.
Well, I came down Julie's using my laptop to talk to the Google person that I, uh, said some unsavoury things to earlier. Okay, well.
You nearly did. You didn't quite hit return, I don't think.
Did you?
Go on. So can you remember?
Well, there's only one thing left that I really wanted to talk about. And again, I don't know, without turning into too much of a rant, but it's a thing.
You need to stop saying that because it is just a rant. The whole podcast.
There's a thing that has happened a few times this week, which is clients requesting things that are purely sort of, um, unguided vanity projects. Um, and we're going to negotiate this one carefully because we don't want to name any names.
Well, we never do on the podcast, but I do know who you're talking about. And I do know the conversation or at least one of the conversations.
One of them. Yeah.
And I've actually got a little note myself which, which might feed into what you're saying.
Well, yeah, I mean, it's happened a couple of times this week actually. So people have come to us with an idea or a request or a thing that they want to do. And we have said to them, I'm not exactly sure that what you're trying to achieve here is achievable via the channels that you're trying to achieve it. So they'll come to us and they'll say something like, can you set up a PPC campaign to help us attract brand awareness? And we have to go back to them and say, hmm, I'm not really sure that PPC is the right medium for that. PPC is very intent based. It's when people are searching for a specific thing. They don't necessarily want to just be told your company exists. People do.
Use PPC for brand.
Awareness.
As in like they might be number one when you type in the company name, but they also want to be in the PPC when they type the company name as well. So that kind of brand awareness.
Yeah, absolutely. And then there's also sort of wider brand awareness as in like sometimes it's worth positioning ads on keywords just so that your name is there, even if people aren't going to click it and blah, blah, blah. But specifically what they're looking for is sort of like, we want to raise awareness of our company by advertising on something sort of unrelated to our company and get our company name out there by having an ad on it. Um, to which we've said, you know, that's not really the right thing to do or the right way of looking at it. Another conversation that we had, um, somebody was like, I don't want our big splash page for all of our services or products. I don't want it to have so much information on it. I want it to look like this other website that I really like. It's really pretty. Um, and we had to go back to them and say, look, you know, from a user's perspective, this page with no information on it is really difficult to use. It might look pretty, but it tells you nothing. And what you've got, although it doesn't look maybe as sort of like minimalist or sort of, you know, in twenty twenty, you know, that sort of like design aesthetic that they go for. The point is it's packed with useful information. People find it easy to navigate. And then people just sort of insisting that their ideas are right anyway. Yeah, yeah. And it's a really tricky place to be because you want to do right by your customers. You know, chances are they're under pressure from somebody else.
One of our, um, um, um, what is it? Uh, values fearlessly pursue our client's best interests.
Well, this is the thing. And, you know, I can appreciate that sometimes these people are under pressure by somebody else higher up potentially to do this thing or that, you know, they've they've already sort of put themselves out there and said, we're going to do this. And now they have to follow through on that. But it's just really challenging because you want to just have a grown up conversation about why something will or won't work. Ultimately, what you want to be pushing to somebody's website or PPC channels or whatever is stuff that will actually improve their business. It's not about sort of, you know, massaging somebody's ego or, or, you know, making the CEO feel like he got his way or whatever. It's about actually delivering results because ultimately that is the whole purpose of digital marketing is to, to drive revenue. And you can sort of fluff it up. But that is what we're here for at the end of the day.
I can see the attraction of working in-house and there are there are some fantastic in-house people. Sometimes we work with them. Sometimes a company has an in-house person with maybe one or two other people working with them. Sometimes they're on their own, and then they outsource a lot of work to an agency like us and or other agencies. And there are, in my opinion, some fantastic in-house people. Um, Jane, if you're listening, you're one of them. I'm not going to name the company. She knows who she is. And because one of the things about Jane and people like Jane is they're very good Being in charge of marketing there, maybe chief marketing officer or the, you know, um, uh, what would you call it? Um, chief marketing officer. Below that would be chief marketing executive or whatever, I don't know. But they also people, people, people like Jane, they know what they know and they're very good. They also know what they don't know. Yeah. But then for me anyway, and I know I'm an old git these days, but like, there's a whole raft of people appearing as in-house marketers who've maybe done an undergrad or a postgrad in digital marketing. And I'll put it bluntly, they are f*cking useless. They are. They have not put the time in. They've not put the mileage in. They do not have they do not have the depth of knowledge required to look after a multi-million pound engineering company, for example. They just don't have that experience. They don't know what they're talking about. They have a superficial overview, understanding of most of. Now, I am not an expert on everything, and neither are you. No, no. But as an agency, you live or die by delivering. You know you have to deliver results or you get sidelined. Yeah. And it it really grinds my gears that there are seemingly a lot of people. And the thing is as well, sometimes those people come in and with the arrogance of youth, they will not accept that they're a learning stage of their career. And they could actually work with an agency like us or other agencies to achieve great things. They think because they've been given the title and the job in the office that they are.
They can do it.
And and they can tell us what to do. And then you finish up in situations where these businesses like exactly like you say, they're, you know, empowering these people who don't know what they're doing. You wouldn't do it with engineers. You wouldn't say like, well, this engineer has just come out of university, designed me a bridge to go across, you know, the fourth sort of thing. And then they just set off and like, and like come up with some, you know, and they just let them run it up.
It's like somebody else's problem. It's like, oh, well, maybe the contractors you hired were bad.
Yeah, yeah. That's right.
I mean, I'm gonna push back slightly because I don't consider myself a young person. Really?
You're only about thirty two, aren't you? Thirty three?
I forget thirty two, I think. Yeah. Um, but I feel sort of obliged to defend them. I don't think I don't think it's just young people. I think sometimes you get people who have come into marketing from some other or being given responsibility for marketing and don't really buy it. And they also, I mean, what I really think is like in our industry, you see the whole Dunning-Kruger effect thing sort of writ large is an awful lot of people who don't know what they don't know and are utterly convinced that, you know, in their lack of knowledge and understanding, they actually have very good knowledge and understanding. And I think that's the really frightening thing. You know, you can talk to people about and you'll hear people do it all the time. They'll bandy around like buzzwords like UX and stuff like that without ever really stopping to think about what they're really saying and what it really means. And they'll be like, oh yeah, I want to do well. A brand awareness campaign using pay per click marketing. And you're like, just those are just words that you've read somewhere.
The one thing I would say, um, to business owners who are, um, in the position of deciding they want somebody in-house and I understand why they want to do that and that's fine. But, you know, hire an agency.
Yeah.
Who, who could help you find that person and help you make sure that, that you get somebody who is, has a good foundation understands either if you need them to understand things in depth, then they do. But if you just need somebody who's a general practitioner, you, you know, find somebody who's actually open to, to, um, learning and, and accepting that there are things that they know and they don't know. And I would, I would add in defense of young people, you know, read evolution is predominantly young people. I mean, if you take, if you take the agency, if you take the agency owners out of the equation, everyone's under forty. Yeah. And, you know, um, are they. Yeah. If you take the agency.
David Marshall's into forty.
He really is. Yeah. He's actually probably younger than you are.
No he's not.
So, you know, what I'm saying is like. Yeah, absolutely. It's not like we're a bunch of sixty five year olds who are, who are kind of, you know, bitching about younger people. Well, no, it's just like, why would you, as a younger person in marketing, not just welcome with open arms, the opportunity to actually properly understand things and work with people who have got your best interests at heart?
So that's my big question. Like I've always been, um, in an agency ecosystem. I've never worked in house anywhere. So maybe this is just my naivety. But to your point earlier, you know, the stuff that you and I don't know, um, luckily we're surrounded by people who can explain it to us and if we don't know something, we can sort of swallow our pride and go and find out about it. My question is, how do these young people who go into an in-house position where there's like maybe one or two marketers ever actually learn anything? Like, what if there's nobody around them to ask?
Well, they get hired because people on the C-suite or like, oh, I don't understand this, but but young Alex does or young Sean does or young Susan does. Oh yeah. They're come and meet our head of digital and they understand it all and they don't understand it all. You know, they maybe understand some of it a.
Bit.
Like some of them understand it all because there are some brilliant in-house marketers out there, as I keep saying.
A bit like that thing Donald Trump said about his seven year old son being good at the cyber.
Was he good at.
one of those classic Donald Trump isms? But yeah, I think it's true, isn't it? It's just like people don't know what they any of that is, and they just assume that a young person will. But yeah, I don't know, like I feel quite sorry for people who do get sort of trapped in house when they're young and early in their careers, because I think without that sort of, you know, without being surrounded by people who know a lot of stuff, you must atrophy. I suppose you could use YouTube videos or something to learn some of it, but an awful lot of it is just experience really.
Whereas we are motivated to learn stuff because if we don't, we don't get gigs.
We starve.
We starve. That's right. I suppose if you're in-house, there isn't the same motivation to spend every day trying to making sure that every day you learn something new and you put the hours in. Even if you're not getting paid for them to really understand things, the people that do do that are the ones I'm talking about. The ones that are, you know, actually very good and probably better than us at digital marketing.
And.
Various other disciplines, you know. Totally. Um, there are lots of great people out there, but certainly we've, you know, we've come across people, uh, who are in positions. And I just think to myself, it's just breathtaking that they're in those positions and they're being relied upon. They're in a position of authority within an organisation and clearly haven't got the first idea.
But if there is a sort of like underlying point to the point I wanted to make about the sort of like random acts of marketing that we've been, that I've been dealing with this week, it's that there should be sort of real intent and understanding behind everything you do. You should never be doing things just because it seems like a good idea. And I think, you know, it's something that we're aware of in House. I mean, we've had conversations before. We spent quite a lot of time optimising our own landing pages, tweaking them, playing around with language and that sort of thing. And there have been times before where you've quite rightly said, you know, what is the evidence for this? What is the proof that this is going to work or that this is a good idea? It just because it feels right to you as an individual doesn't mean that it is the right decision. And when you go out and ask colleagues, coworkers, agencies that you're employing, is this a good idea? And they say, no, it doesn't necessarily have to be a personal attack. It doesn't have to be your ideas. Rubbish. It's just that this is genuinely probably not going to have the outcome that you want it to have. Think again. Yeah.
And do you know what I mean? In life in general, really clever, smart people put their hand up and say, I don't understand. Yeah. I don't know. I'll go and find out. Could you explain to me? Yes. That really smart people do. That the smartest people I've ever met are the first to admit when they don't know something.
Yeah.
Stupid people are the ones that try and bluff and pretend they know something and pretend they know best. Yeah. It's just. It's just how it is. Because, you know, it's back to that saying that, you know, um, capable people are often self-deprecating and yeah, idiots are cocksure kind of thing.
Absolutely.
So we've just insulted loads of people. I don't care. I honestly don't care. You know what I mean? I, I am past pandering to that sort of bullshit. I just, I just think, you know, we, we only ever have our clients best interests at heart. We are always trying to do right by our clients. Yes, we get it wrong. Sometimes we take ownership of it when we get it wrong and we try and fix it. You know, we come at the whole thing from a good place. And when I see money being wasted on, you know, on vanity projects and the like, because somebody thinks it's a good idea based on nothing at all, then it does kind of irritate me. It just does.
It irritates me too, that when the comeuppance eventually comes, you know, when somebody higher up sits down and looks at the stats and the marketing hasn't worked for whatever reason, it all just gets sort of hand-waved away. It's like, oh, well, it's marketing. You can never tell what's going to work and what isn't. And I really hate that. I don't know if there's any one thing that I would campaign against. It's that sort of fatalistic idea that marketing is this great, unknown sort of land of smoke and mirrors. And you can try something, might work, might not. Shouldn't be too upset. You can demand more of your marketing team than that. You can say to them, you know why? What is the evidence base? What is this going to achieve? And when it doesn't go right, you can then sit down and say, well, look, it didn't work. You were wrong. Let's do better next time. Just avoid this awful sort of fatalistic loop, I guess.
Talk about getting it wrong. We got a horribly bad Google review this week, did we? Correction read evolution didn't get horribly share. My office is a side project of ours, so share my office dot com. It's a place. If you've got some spare office space, you can go and put an advert on seventy five quid, no commission payments or anything else. You can advertise your desk in your lovely office in Shoreditch or whatever it is, and earn some spare cash from it.
Do you rehearse.
That? I didn't know it was good. Okay, so that's what that's what share my office is all about. Mhm. Um, and it's a self-service portal. So basically put an advert up. If you rent your space out, you rent your desk out, take the advert down like Gumtree, I guess. But unlike Gumtree, I mean, adverts stay for as long as um they need to, um, we don't insist on adverts being taken down, etc. etc. so somebody left a review. What they've done is they've clearly gone to the site, tried to find an office, phoned some of the people on the adverts because they don't come to us, they go directly to the people who advertise. And they were like, oh no, we haven't got any office space. What's that advert doing there? Because, you know, they hadn't taken their advert down, but neither had we pruned and policed it.
Yeah.
So they kind of give us a one star review saying this site is a complete waste of time. And it's awful. Which is a shame because it isn't. A lot of people use it and they get they find office space and people rent out desks and make themselves an extra five hundred quid a month for the desk that they weren't using anyway and stuff like that. Um, But took it on the chin, said, yeah, you're right. You know, maybe we should have a more vociferous, um, pruning process to make sure that we, we get rid of adverts that are also we've gone through an exercise where we've taken a bunch of adverts, adverts down. And when we did saw the people who had the adverts automatically got an email so they could have then come back to us and say, no, no, I still want that advert and we've pruned it right down. I mean, we've got rid of a lot of adverts and from now on we will continue to do that. We'll make sure that they're pruned. And you know, I on the one hand I'm irked because it's a self-service portal and it's not our fault that people didn't take their advert down once it was past its sell by date. But at the same time, I totally get that. This person must have phoned a few people and got nowhere fast and just thought our site was a complete waste of time because the adverts were all out of date.
The thing is though, I think in an interesting way, this is sort of like a problem that most businesses will face at some point, right? It's that in making any sort of decision about the way you do customer facing services, you have to make a compromise. So if we do what you're saying here, where we go through and prune the adverts, anybody who has office space in perpetuity, as in a.
Lot.
Do, right.
They've got ten spare desks and there's always at least two of them available. So the adverts been there for the last few years on purpose.
So in sort of creating a slightly better experience for the people who are going to go on and look at old adverts and ring them up and get disappointed, you create a much worse experience for the people who just wanted to put their advert up there and leave it up there in perpetuity. They don't have to log back on and update it or whatever. You can't do anything without upsetting someone, can you? I think that's the that's the bottom line. And what is good for one set of customers will be bad for another. And that is yeah, it's a tricky one because I don't really.
I mean, I think I think the lesson from it and any business, um should be the same is first of all, respond to the bad review and say, you know, yeah, get, get what you're saying. Sorry, we'll review this. We'll see if we can, we can improve it. I mean, it's a side project. Our livelihood doesn't depend on it. It provides a really good service to the people who use it, because the alternative is to go to an office broker who will work and market to get get your split, and then they'll take a ten twenty percent in perpetuity commission payment. Well, this is not like that. It's a lot cheaper. Like you say, it's a bit more like Gumtree on its dedicated to office space. Um, and it does okay. It makes a few hundred quid a month for us and it provides a great service for people. But um, you know, we took it on the chin, we responded and went away, had a think we've now changed our, um, process, if you like, for trying to make it more relevant. Yes, you're right, some people will have been irked that their advert was taken down. But you know, if they didn't want it taken down, it's back up again by now because they've got in touch with us. Yeah. And so, so like any business who and because of the online world in which we operate, it's very easy for keyboard heroes to kind of keyboard warriors rather to, to type something and tell the world how bad they think you are. And this person didn't leave a proper name either. It was some kind of initial or something like that. So, you know, you know, obviously, um, gutless, but even so we listen to them. Uh, but, you know, people are all are ready to do it. And the only thing you can really do, unless it's just some absolute bellend saying something ridiculous is respond, respond in, in both communicating back to them that you hear them and recognise this maybe is a problem, and respond by changing the way you do things in order to make, you know, provide a better service or a better product.
It is tricky though. I mean, you touch on something there that I think is very current and very worth talking about, which is this whole idea that social media, for example, has made it so easy to complain about things. And you've got that whole like, squeaky wheel problem, haven't you? You know, a minority of people complain about something, and that minority probably isn't reflective of the majority of people using a product or service at all. But they complain about it and they complain about it loudly. And social media amplifies that voice. And an awful lot of companies just sort of default to reacting. You know, somebody complains, change it. You know, the customer knows best. And it's it's a tricky thing because, you know, like, I've never genuinely never left a positive review. And that's probably a really horrible thing to say, but I just.
Lovely. I've left loads.
Yeah.
I don't even think I've left a negative review. I tend to only review when I've got something good to say.
And that's a really positive way of of looking at it. I think the only time I've ever used it is to complain about something. And I just assume, you know, if it's good, then I'll use the product and I don't necessarily go and say it. And that's probably wrong. Right. It's not providing people with the right feedback, but I think an awful lot of people are like that. And I think there's a real danger that if you just listen to the sort of very vocal minority, you end up making changes that, yeah, maybe aren't in the best interests of most people.
I have complained to organisations via a tweet or an ex.
Very effective, isn't it? It's very horribly effective. Very.
Yeah. The biggest organisations in the world, except for HubSpot and Google and idiots like them probably try. You know, big organisations tend to respond because it's in a public forum where you've said, um, you know, you talk.
Rubbish.
When you shouldn't have sort of thing, when am I getting it back or something like that, you know what I mean? Um, okay. I think we've, I think we've probably ranted long and hard enough today.
So yeah, we've covered a lot of ground.
Yeah, maybe we'll try the next one a bit more upbeat. Or maybe we'll just keep it ranty.
I don't know, depends what people like really.
If you look at like, you know, I listen to the news every morning, there's never any good news. It's always bad news. It's always ranty bad news. And that seems to be what people want. So maybe we should just become those two ranty digital marketing people.
Just the only people that.
Listen to everything.
People that like having their blood pressure spiked for no reason.
Well, at least it helps us with our blood pressure because it gets it off our chest.
I mean, I feel wonderfully sort of calm and relaxed now.
Yeah. Good, good. As opposed to going through the door without opening it like a cartoon. All right. Uh, like I said earlier in the podcast, if you want to come and talk about your week in digital marketing and you want to, uh, come and have a rant, or you want to just come and be all happy and smiley and say positive things, then we'd love to hear from you. Uh, in the meantime, you've been listening to Dave and Alex on Digital Marketing From The Coalface.