Lots of our clients working quite boring industries. From the outside, we work with a lot of B2B sort of service providers and that sort of thing. And we have this sort of perennial problem where it's in communicating the story of the product in a way that is actually sort of engaging and that people want to listen to. In every industry, it is possible to find an interesting and engaging way of telling your story. It probably requires a little bit of work. It probably demands that you do go and sort of quiz your current customer base or, you know, ask really sort of personal questions of people. But ultimately there is just sort of no excuse.
I mean, I think the thing to remember in the B2B situation where ostensibly the product service is boring is that clearly it's not boring to somebody. Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface with me, Dave Robinson and Alex Bussey, where we talk about what we've been doing in the last week ish week ish.
It's got looser as time has gone.
A little bit looser. But, you know, it's probably about a week, innit? Since we since we did one of these. Um, hope you're enjoying the format. Um, I guess if you're listening right now, you must be sort of enjoying it or you've accidentally decided to listen to it.
Downloaded.
It by accident. Yeah. We basically talk about the stuff we're working on. We have some observations. Sometimes we get a bit ranty because, well, I'm an old guy and although Alex can't use that excuse, he likes to have a bit of a rant as well sometimes, but, um.
Just a deeply angry person. But yeah.
Deeply angry person, as I witnessed not too long ago. Um, speaking about being a deeply angry person, that's a bit worrying when you think what we just did, we just, we just went over to, uh, one of our guys is a keen sports rifle shooter. So he arranged going through all the right police checks and everything. First, I hasten to add.
With our real names.
With our real names. Yeah, it turned out there was somebody with my name and my date of birth who lived in Leeds, who was a dead wrong'un because the police came back when he when he was getting the police checks done.
And said Robinson.
And said, who, who is this? Who's this? Did did did the Dave Robinson on the on the application ever live it like, you know, Wilmington close in Leeds or something like that. It's like, no.
At least they're doing the jobs.
Yeah. Apparently. Um although they couldn't tell the difference between law abiding goody two shoes, mister, me and some reprobate in Leeds, which is a bit of a worry. Um, so anyway, we went over and we all, um, tried our hand at range rifle range shooting, which was a lot of fun.
It was very fun. I really enjoyed.
It. Really good fun, I enjoyed it, it was good fun. So that's why I'm a bit worried that you just told us all how angry you are.
Were you missed.
The because about an hour ago you had a gun in your hand.
Well, you missed the bit where I was trying to rally everyone to arrange a workplace accident.
Okay. A workplace accident with air quotes. Um, okay, so let's kick things off, um, With something that, uh, you want to talk about, and then we'll do some interesting stuff after that.
Ah. Very good. Very good. Well, you know, after the what is that, like the ninetieth time you've told me I'm rubbish at this? I did some, I did some reflecting. I want to talk about something that will maybe help the people listening. Um, actually sort of, uh, get more out of their agency relationships. Assuming you're working with an agency. Of course. Yeah.
Why wouldn't you be? Why such wonderful people aren't we?
Um, and it's really just a reflection on something that I've noticed over the past couple of weeks. We have obviously, um, you know, different clients in different industries. Many of them have slightly different ways of working with us. At the extreme end, we have clients who are, I would say, sort of extremely cautious about what we write and what we put on their websites, um, to the point where they insist on sort of going over absolutely every bit of content.
Fine tooth combing everything.
Yeah. Like to a ridiculous degree.
Which slows down the whole production process.
Yeah.
And which slows down the whole get better rankings, get more customers processed.
Right. Which is exactly where I'm going with this. So we've got content with them that's been sat with them. And it's not a dig at this particular client. It's a fairly common problem. But we've got content set with this one particular client that we wrote four or five months ago. Um, and on the other end of the spectrum, we have clients where we basically write the content, put it up on the website, and then after it's up and live and ranking or starting to rank, they go through and sort of double check everything. We make tweaks, we make adjustments. And those are two obviously very extreme examples. But what sort of brought it all to a head, in my mind, was the client that lets us sort of have free reign over their website, and we put a page live. It was for a new sector that they were tapping into. By the end of the week, they'd had an enquiry from a fairly big player in that sector for that service. It was a good lead. The client followed it up. They're interested. And I guess to cut a long story short, that is pretty likely to turn into a fairly chunky sale, sort of, you know, several thousand pounds worth of business for that client. And it's just because they let us get the page up and live in good time. And it's not to say that you should sort of like give your agency free rein to do anything, but it is just a reflection of the fact that if you do insist on sort of, you know, going over everything with a fine tooth comb, if you're working with an agency that you don't really trust to write good content that has to be doesn't have to be edited six or seven different times, that will ultimately cost you. I think it has a very real cost. I mean, there's, like you say, it slows the whole process down, but you do also just miss opportunities. Um, I don't really know what the best advice is really. You can't just say to people, let your agency do whatever you like, because we both know there are some pretty bad agencies out there. Um, and it'll get you into a world of hurt, I guess more what I'm thinking is make sure you're working with somebody that you would trust to put something up on your website at five p m on Friday and it not be horribly wrong, because if you haven't got that sort of relationship and there isn't that sort of trust, everything you're doing is much slower and much more arduous than it should be, really.
I think the trust is a massive, um, element to this. But I also think the longer you work with a customer. Obviously you build trust, but more importantly, you build product expertise, you build subject matter expertise. Because the thing that you know, any right thinking client customer of ours want should be wary of and, and the good customers are mindful of this is that with the best will in the world, we write some content which makes them look silly.
Well, especially when they're in.
Here is an Aston Martin DBX five. And isn't it wonderful? And it's like it's a three. It's an Aston Martin DBX for guys. And you've just made us look silly. Do you know what I mean. I mean it's like it's things like that. And you know so I think I think there's two elements to trust. I think there's the trust. Like I believe these guys are absolutely trying to do the do right by us. They're trying to do a great job, help us improve our website, improve the enquiries the website generates. And if you haven't got that, you really are not working with the right agency for you if you don't trust your agency implicitly. And then there's the trust that you only get after a while, as these.
Guys actually know their shit now.
They actually understand what we do in great detail and which.
Does take time. It does take time for.
Them to speak about it. Yeah.
And I guess that's the other angle to this, isn't it, is that you have to invest the time in the relationship. I think a lot of people think like, oh, I've hired an agency. I can just let them crack on with it now, you know, again, with the best will in the world, we can't be subject matter experts for, you know, oil refineries and car manufacturers and everything else. So there is a sort of learning process involved where you do actually have to pour your knowledge back into that relationship so that the agency can sort of skill up and get better. But I think like, I don't know, like with the client in question that I'm thinking of, that sort of massively slows everything down. We have been working with them for a great many years, and they do trust us to know what we're talking about. It's more a sort of process problem on their end, and they just have all of these ridiculous sort of internal processes and like four different people have to approve of everything. And you have to, you know, all the sources that you've cited, you have to record the links and download the documents and send them to them so they've got proof. And I just think like for a lot of businesses out there, they really are sort of hamstringing themselves by clinging to this very sort of arduous approval process.
Yeah.
And I don't really know what you do about that. No, it's just sort of.
I mean, obviously we would impress upon the client that the fantastic content that we've created for them. Let's assume we are talking about content.
Um, but it's.
The same with video marketing. Yeah. But any kind of asset marketing asset, you could say the same thing about it until it's out there. It's not actually working for you. Yes. So you've made this investment over the last three or four months. There's a lot of work being done and it's having zero impact one way or another. Either way on, on your bottom line because it ain't out there working for you. So maybe there's a night, maybe the idea should be that, you know, we need to have conversations earlier with clients to stress the importance of cadence. My favorite word. You know, the importance of like gathering information, doing research, producing the content that's going to move the dial, make a difference, generate the leads. But then getting that out there and it, it needs to be factually correct. It needs to be so that such that it doesn't make the client look silly, but it doesn't have to be perfect.
Yeah. Well, that's the thing, isn't it? And it sounds very cliche, but that whole perfect is the enemy of good thing, I think is really true of marketing. And I think you can sort of apply what we're talking about to websites as well. Like there are quite a lot of web projects that stall at the sort of, you know, what should be the final push because the client wants to go through and snag everything sixteen times and they want, you know, Jeff from accounting and Linda from marketing to have an opinion on everything. And you do get these sort of awful situations where a lot of work and effort and energy has gone into something that is sitting somewhere on a test or development server and not seeing the light of day. And it is, yeah, a colossal waste of time.
It is. I mean, there's a good point there and, and something that came up for us because on what was it Monday of last week. I think we had till Wednesday to do it because the deadline was extended. But on Monday last week we submitted um, a tender for a piece of work.
A very chunky tender as well.
Chunky piece of work, chunky potential piece of work. Yeah. And um, one aspect of it was, could you give us an idea of what it would cost to rebuild our website? And, you know, my approach, our approach was like, you don't need to redevelop your website, you need to evolve, you need to iterate what's there. And two things there. First of all, it was built in a, you know, a half decent content management system. If you can call WordPress half decent, uh, there's a lot of content. They have a lot of rankings. Aesthetically appalling, um, clearly missing opportunities, very confusing user experience, but all fixable and massively preferable. Preferable to, um, starting over. Because if you start it over, all you're going to do is become embedded in this massive project to rebuild your website instead of getting on with the really hard stuff and the really important stuff, which is to get the website working harder, even a poor website can be improved so that it works much better and much harder. Converts much better with way less effort. I'm going to caveat this, but with way less effort than starting over. There are situations where we've got another client down in Yorkshire, and their website has been built badly, and everything we try and do with it, it's been done in a way that just is convoluted. It's problematic. It just it's just a right pain.
It's the difference, isn't it? I guess between yeah, taking a house that's sound but dilapidated and taking something that's sort of built on quicksand. But yeah, I mean, I take your point, I think.
Well, that isn't a good analogy because as you know, I've got a degree in building surveyor.
Here we go.
And it's much cheaper and more sensible to knock something down and build brand new than it is to try and refurbish something old. Yeah. Because when you try and refurbish something old, every time you knock or take a bit of plaster, Off you go. Oh, okay. Like. And you lift the floorboard. It's like, oh, Jesus.
I don't know that.
And then you look at the plumbing and you go, Holy shit, you know what I mean? It's like it is. It's like way more expensive to renovate. So yeah, the sentiment was right.
But but the example is.
The example is probably not.
I mean, I think that's why when HubSpot, I mean, I don't know if you remember, but I do remember, I think it was two Christmases ago now, um, sort of listening into a HubSpot webinar, um, where they, they were sort of talking through the whole growth driven design philosophy that they.
Tell everybody what growth driven design is because there will be people listen to this who don't fully understand.
Well, it's just sort of exactly what you were talking about, right? It's the idea that a web design process doesn't have a finite end. It's the idea is that you iterate on something as you go, and you don't expect to have the perfect product at any point. You just keep improving forever.
So you go live with a rubbish website.
No, you go live with the the most sort of, well, I'm not going to use, I don't want to use the word because you're just We're playing buzzword bingo here. They call it minimum viable product. It is the the the worst possible plausible design, if that makes sense, is the least that you can do sort of thing. Right. I've explained that very poorly.
No, you're you're kind of along the right lines. It's it's the it's the, the website that stands up shoulder to shoulder. That is that can go live the best website that stands up, that can go live as opposed to the perfect website, which took six more months and still wasn't able to be pushed live.
Yeah.
And that's all it is really.
And I think but I think that's a sort of concept in a way of thinking that can be applied to literally every step of the digital marketing puzzle. It's like, stop trying to get the perfect strategy. Stop trying to get the perfect content. Stop trying to get the perfect website, do stuff. See whether it works, and then improve rather than getting stuck on this, you know, this awful loop of it must be brilliant. It must be perfect. Everybody in the company must love it. And yeah, nothing moving forwards.
No I agree. Okay. Um, what else did you do last week?
What else did it.
That you want to talk about.
It's gone now into the ether. It's surprisingly hard to remember. I was thinking about this this morning. I was like, what did I do last week? And when you try and break it down, it all sort of blurs together. I mean, there was one other thing.
If only we used a system like Monday dot com. So you know exactly what you did last week.
Well, I know exactly.
What we.
Do. Technically. Did I just I wrote, I wrote lots of content. I did lots of strategy work. It wasn't, it wasn't terribly interesting for our listeners. Okay. Um, but there was one other thing that that sort of came up and it was, it was, I don't know how to like frame this in a way that isn't just sort of a bit boring and recycled, but basically lots of our clients work in quite boring industries. Um, from, from the outside, we work with a lot of B2B sort of service providers and that sort of thing. Um, and one of our clients, um, is sells a software product that is even more boring than the sort of normal level of boring. I mean, we have this sort of perennial problem where it's in communicating the story of the product in a way that is actually sort of engaging and that people want to listen to. It isn't just this software does this boring thing that you don't really want to think about. Um, and they basically, after a lot of back and forth, um, sort of agreed with the idea of doing some actual sort of consumer research. So going to their current, um, users and actually asking them a bunch of very sort of personal and detailed questions about what sort of value the software has brought to the organisation. Yeah. So that we can then go away and tell a much more interesting story, which is, you know, this could save you this much money and this much legal trouble and, you know, sort of bring these benefits to the business and it'll be real and backed up with actual statistics and that sort of thing. Um, and I guess where I'm going with this is that in every industry, it is possible to find an interesting and engaging way of telling your story. It probably requires a little bit of work. It probably demands that you do go and sort of quiz your current customer base or, you know, ask really sort of penetrating and sort of personal questions of people. But ultimately there is just sort of no excuse. I mean, you know, when we came to the end of it, I was quite excited by the idea of the whole project because it had gone from sort of like, oh, okay, we can tell people we can save them time and money to actually, we can actually be really specific about what exactly this will save you. And that is just from sort of thinking, okay, how can we sort of back this up with something and then going away and doing the work to, to do that?
Mhm. Okay. I mean, I think the thing to remember in the B2B situation where ostensibly the product, the service is boring is that clearly it's not boring to somebody. Um, because if I've got that specific problem that you solve, then, you know, I'm wildly excited at the prospect of buying your ultra boring software from you, your very boring company, to solve this real No problem that I've got that's costing me money or taking me away from the stuff I should be doing, I think.
I think so, yeah, I think the only thing I'd say about that is that sometimes I don't know, um, the way people spell, it's especially bad with SaaS products like software in general. I think just like the way that it's sold is so often like, even if you really do genuinely have that problem, it just the way that it's marketed just sounds so sort of superficial and disinteresting, oh, it's going to save you hours of time. Oh, it's going to save the world. And it's like, it just doesn't really land or resonate with me.
Yeah, I get that idea of superficial marketing. Not not really thinking about the end user, not really thinking about the problem that you're solving and, and the story you could be telling. You just go for the usual tropes, the superlatives, you know, the best in the world and you know.
Yeah, well, that's exactly it really.
You know, you change your life, you know.
And it's and I guess that's the thing really, I guess ultimately the point I'm trying to make is if you actually sort of drill down beyond all of that superficial nonsense, there is always an interesting way of telling the story. Um, it's just it may well require a lot of research and legwork.
There's a guy I like to do. I follow him on Tik Tok, I think I do. Alan milliard. I think milliard m m I double l y. Yeah, something like that. Basically he's an engineer. Um, he builds motorbikes. So he like, like if he'll get a car. Two fifty Kawasaki, which is a two stroke Kawasaki from the nineteen seventies, might have been eighties as well. But anyway, nineteen seventies, three cylinder, two stroke very you know, I like them, you know, but Alan makes that into a five cylinder. Right. And he actually engineers these things and builds them. And, and but he'll also do like bike rebuilds and everything. Looking at something he did yesterday, it was, I think it was a v ten. He put a V-twin engine in a motorbike, as you do as you do. Um, but his videos are, I think to, to a lot of people, they would be the, the epitome of boring and, and now I'm going to just put a little bit of heat on here. So this oil seal goes in and. Oh that's gone in lovely. Oh and I'm really pleased with that. And the way he talks, he's very laid back to me as somebody who likes motorbikes. I'm interested. It's it's it's a fantastic thing to watch. But I don't know. There's certainly people in the office upstairs would be looking at me and watching it and going, why am I watching this?
But I think that's boring.
This is this is uninteresting. So you just I mean, I'm not I don't even know what I'm saying. What I guess what I'm saying is, broadly speaking, by just walking out without saying goodbye, we're doing a podcast.
Here.
That's gone. That's Amy gone. Um, she was a sharpshooter as well today. She was. But you know, this I, I guess I'm kind of almost like falling into my own trap of like the usual superlatives and nonsense, like, well, you know, it'll be interesting to somebody. Well, but I'm kind of I'm, um, I guess what you might call it a frustrated tinkerer. I've got loads of motorbikes, as you know, I counted them. It's embarrassing. I've got eight of the damn things. And some of them need tinkering with and playing with, and I'm perfectly capable of doing it. I lack a bit of confidence. Think I'm going to break it. I think it'll never work again. Take a.
Break.
You know, that kind of thing. So to me, it helps me to understand what goes into a rebuild and the detail and how he does the stuff he does. And, you know, he undertakes work that I'll never undertake in a month of Sundays, I would imagine, like certainly turning a three cylinder motorbike into a five cylinder motorbike. And the thing is, he cuts the engine block with a hacksaw. Yeah, you know what I mean? And and it's just one of these miracle workers when it comes to that stuff. And I find I find the stories he tells so interesting, so good.
But I actually think that's not that's not just sort of leaning back on the whole superlative thing, though. I think that's a really interesting example of somebody who really knows their market. And I think this is the other thing about really good messaging. You know, the stuff I was just talking about with the software, it's still going to be deadly boring to somebody who isn't in that industry. I think in a way, one of the ways of telling whether you're B2B or any other sort of marketing messaging is really working is if it puts a lot of people off. Because ultimately the core sort of small group that you actually care about. Yeah, they have a really specific sort of need or desire. They want to digest a specific type of content and that isn't for everyone. It can't be. So, you know, if what you're doing does just sort of resonate with the everyman, it probably isn't going to land with the people that care about it.
Yeah.
And somebody who makes motorbike content that like, I don't know, Caron or Julie or me or whatever liked probably wouldn't be very interesting to you, a motorbike owner, because it'd be very superficial and top level and yeah.
Yeah, perhaps. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Um, something that I was, I was looking in LinkedIn this, I think it was.
Well, that's a foolish thing to do.
So I wasn't so much looking as someone had sent me a message. I went to LinkedIn. The page popped up with stories in it. I just glanced and I saw there was it was an agency, um, in a, in a Scottish city and I knew of.
Them one of three.
I knew of them. Um for that I can think of four, uh, five. I knew of them. And, um, and there was this like there was a bunch of them there. I was like, oh, wow, they're fairly grown. You know, that's pretty impressive. You know, I've gone. And so I sort of went in and had a look and I thought, crikey, you know, because I'm interested in, you know, the industry and players and everything else. So there was like six or seven of them. Oh that's impressive. So I went to companies House and I had a little look.
At.
The finances. I was like, wait a minute. There's six or seven of them. And last year they turned over seventy grand. What? What? Something's not quite working there. But that led me on to thinking about, uh, this question. And I don't really have an answer, and I'm not even sure where I stand on this subject, but the question is, is your agency a bunch of freelancers instead of an actual agency of people who work together all the time? And if they are, does it matter?
Oh, see, I think it really does have quite a strong opinion on this.
Oh, go on then.
Well, I just think it's deceitful. I think, you know, if you went to I don't know if you went to bank, a bank and then it turned out that they weren't really a bank. They were just, you know, a bunch of freelancers that were, you know, individually minding people's money or they were like, you know, independent contractual financial advisers or something. You'd feel like someone had, you know, robbed you a little bit. Mhm. Um, there's a trust thing when a big organisation goes, well, yeah, goes to buy off an agency they're buying not just the sort of expertise of the individual people in that agency, but also like the sort of broader organisational expertise, the fact that agency has been around for years, the fact that it knows how to deal with gnarly problems, the fact that it's used to working with big corporate clients, like there's so many sort of minute things that are really important for an agency relationship to work and that people think that they're buying into. And if it then turns out that it is a bunch of people in their respective bedrooms scattered around the country, can it work? Sure. But if you think you're going to sort of buy, you know, into or buy time from a unified organisation with a really strong way of working and really sound strategies that have been tested time and time and time again. And it turns out that it's not that at all. I think you have the right to feel a little bit deceived.
If that bunch of freelancers pretending to be an agency do a fantastic job, does it still matter?
Can they do a fantastic job?
Mhm.
Probably I individual. Well, I guess it depends doesn't it. I mean, yeah, potentially they could all be fantastically knowledgeable and experienced in their own right. But I just think it's very unlikely. And again, you have to ask yourself who goes into a relationship lying. You know, it's like catfishing on Tinder isn't it? It's like if you if you put photos of.
Yourself a lot about.
That. Well, weirdly, I was reading a news story about it this morning. But yeah, if you put, you know, photos of yourself from twenty years ago on a dating app.
Oh, is that.
What it is? Yeah, yeah. Or use other people's photos or whatever.
So the self change Tinder profile.
Yeah. But it's a very strange behavior, right? Because people will put somebody else's photos up and then arrange a date. And then when somebody turns up at the date and finds a completely different person sitting there, they just hope that they're like, oh, well, I'm here now, so I may as well try dating you anyway, but I sort of feel like it's the same thing with this. It's like we'll pretend to be an agency. This can't possibly hold up to close scrutiny at all, but we'll just keep pretending until they realise. And then what? Hope that they signed a contract with us and they can't back out. If you felt that your small group or collective of freelancers were going to do a shit hot job, you just advertise yourself as a group of freelancers instead of pretending to be an agency.
I mean, some do. I mean, there are some agencies that are rather like fronted and they're unashamedly say, basically, we're a bunch of experts, not freelancers. We're a bunch of experts, and we all work independently and come together to work for projects. So basically you're getting the absolute best of everything for your project. But that's a good story, isn't it?
It's a fantastic story. Yeah. And it's, you know, it's like people that put current up to date photos of themselves on Tinder to, you know, when people do sit down with you across the table, you know, that they already get what you're selling and are buying into it. But if you've lied. Yeah, I just, I just don't see why you'd do it personally.
But is it possible that we're just being martyrs to the course because we've got a small team? There's eleven of us, but we've got, you know, we've got a sysop. Not many agencies have a system systems ops specialist. Uh, we've got three devs.
Um.
Designers, strategists, content, all the rest of it. Uh, you know, obviously people, some people multitasking. Um, are we not martyrs to the cause? Because, you know, like, for example, you know, we know that sometimes like one part of the business is carrying the other because they're just that month, there's not an awful lot of dev work needs to be done. And because we're not using freelancers, we've got our own people. Um, you know, we still have that overhead. We still have that, um, um, payroll to meet.
But we offer a much better service to clients because of that. I mean, if we, if we.
Just because of that, because you could argue that a freelancer, I mean, I, you know, own this agency and I'm pro agency and I'm playing devil's advocate here. I hope you realise that. I think agencies are fab, and especially when they are a tightly knit group of people who understand each other and do great work for their customers, which is the point you're making. Yeah.
Yeah. Because, well, this is and it's a wider point too, because it's like if we didn't have devs and we outsourced to remote working devs who worked.
For more money.
We would make more money, but they'd work for us forty percent of the time, and they'd fill the rest of their time with other work from other clients. And then when we went to them and said, right, you know, client X desperately needs this page up. Would they be doing a fantastic job or would they just be phoning it in really quickly so they could send us an invoice? And that's the problem. I think you've got to sort of massive conflict of interest there. A freelancer's responsibility is to themselves, not to the company. It's not do your best work. So the agency looks good and therefore I make more money. It's just, you know, do the work, get some more work lined up, keep going.
Well, is it different then from an agency like us being asked to do some PR work and we don't do PR. So we would say to our client, well, that's not something that we have any expertise with. Uh, but we know somebody who does. And we'll introduce you and, you know, we, we're not the sort of business that takes kickbacks and percentages and all that. We would just make an introduction and say, right, these guys, we trust them. They're a great PR company. Please have a conversation and work it all out between you if you need us for anything, any information you need from us, any of our expertise that needs to feed into this, we're here. Um, is that not the same? Because.
I mean, if you know, if the PR agency, if we well, if the PR agency that we recommend does a shit job, we look a little bit silly, but it's not it doesn't directly come back on us. Do you know what I mean? It's not our work. We're not responsible for it. I guess that's the point really. It just depends on whether or not you see the organisation or the entity as having a sort of personality and a history and a track record of its own or not. And if you do just think of a company as a bunch of people who happen to work together, then yeah, it probably looks pretty similar, but I think there is more to it than that, Really. I don't want to get too wanky and start talking about, you know, how you how you sort of like develop an ethos and build a sort of company mindset and stuff. But I think we do work better together than we would if we were independent contractors.
Okay. Yeah. I don't disagree, but I, you know, I'm grown up enough to ask the question and I think.
It's a very useful question.
Well, yeah, but a lot of agencies, big agencies, agencies that are by finance, by, by turnover, if you like, ten times bigger than us are definitely outsourcing a lot of work to resources that cost less than having that resource in-house with its relentless drain on payroll.
Yeah.
On, on the finances of the business.
Although it's interesting because I was talking to somebody about this the other day who runs an agency where they have a lot of staff in-house, they also outsource quite a lot of work to Romania and have a sort of second office, quote unquote, full of Romanian devs who are, strictly speaking, freelancers. But they made an interesting point. I don't really know how I feel about it, but their point was that in institutions like the NHS, for example, the hierarchy and the sort of different levels of management and expertise have a value. And if you pay a large agency to outsource work to you, for Romania, for you to Romania, even though they're outsourcing work to some Romanian devs that you could have probably hired cheaper on freelancer or five or whatever. The fact that they are there in between you checking the work, making sure that it's good, sort of setting the briefs properly does actually add some value. So it's not it's not that I think you're.
Still the single point of contact.
Yeah. And you still sort of own the work and you still make sure that it's good enough and you QA check it. And I, I sort of get the, the point. I mean, I don't agree with outsourcing stuff at all, but I can see that getting a huge agency who's very experienced outsourcing stuff to outsource. Your web build would still be much more efficient than trying to outsource it yourself, if that makes sense.
It does. Yeah, because you could be taken for a ride, right? Because you don't actually know what these people do. You don't understand what devs do. You don't know what it should cost and whether they're doing a good job or not. Whereas you work through an agency who are outsourcing on your behalf. All right, they're going to make a twenty percent markup or something.
But at least you're going to get a website at the end of.
It. In theory, you've got somebody, you know in your camp and your team who's who's making that.
And someone to fall back on. If it's not good enough to write, someone to go back to and complain to, because, you know, if you go on freelancer on Fiverr and hire a dev for twenty pounds to build your website, when it does inevitably fall over, they will not respond to your emails. An agency that has a reputation to protect will. So yeah. Yeah.
I don't know if we got anywhere with that. I mean, I think I think it's one of those kind of circular arguments where you can, you know, you can, you can kind of almost convince yourself that something's good or bad, but then quite quickly, you could have the opposite, The opposite view. I suppose it's.
All just people at the end of the day, isn't it as well? I think that's the other thing to remember.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Um, okay. I've got a few interesting conversations coming up this week with, um, website management gigs for a couple of um, well largish organisations. So we'll see how those conversations go. Uh, possible SEO strategy gig, um, chatting to somebody in the morning about that. So we'll see how that goes and I'll, you know, that'll all feed into, uh, feed into, um, the podcast the next.
Yeah, definitely.
Um, the next episode of the podcast. In the meantime, um, enough drivel for one day.
And that's pretty much everything. Yeah.
Okay. Good stuff. You've been listening to Digital Marketing From The Coalface with Dave Robinson and Alex Bussey, where we talk about what we've been doing this week in digital marketing. Sounds to me like we didn't do much this week, to be honest. So, you know, um, and, um, look forward to speaking to you next time.