Some Agencies Can Be Dickheads, Digital Marketing Chat With Alex & Dave – Episode 113

Let's just talk about this example. We recently lost a customer because of a relationship between the CEO of the company and another agency, like a personal relationship. And they wanted to check some of the work that we were doing. They had a look. We'd gone a certain way with the work, and the other agency said, oh, you know, you should have done that. You should have done that differently anyway, you know, fine. You know, we do very occasionally lose customers. Every business does. And, you know, we just did whatever we needed to do to hand over any access to anything that we needed to hand over to. And conversation you had with somebody on the inside revealed that within about a week, this other agency had cost them a month's worth of sales.

Yeah, absolutely.

And that's because of the other agency were dishonest the way they went about winning the work.

Absolutely. And it's what happens when you treat marketing like a zero sum game. You know, you know, finding an honest marketing agency. It's really hard because of this kind of behavior.

Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface with me, Dave and my esteemed colleague Alex.

Yeah. Alex, who's just had a load of criticism levelled at him for not making T frequently enough.

No, no, he wasn't not making T frequently enough. It's the fact you've only ever made T once. That's. That's not the same thing. All right. Anyway. Yeah, we've had a bit of a hiatus. Apologies for that. Um we are trying to get back on a on a regular footing with these, but we've been kind of wrapped up with gigs and stuff at the coalface of digital marketing. No excuse, isn't it? Yeah. We should have found the time, but we just haven't. So we will going forward. Um, we've got a few things to chat about this week and who knows, we might chat about things that we haven't even thought about yet because such is the nature of this free wheeling, uh, conversation about working at an agency at the coalface of digital marketing.

You get all your buzzwords in did I.

I don't know, I wasn't playing buzzword bingo. I don't like that. I was just joint ventures.

MM.

We've got some experience of being approached and even kind of working somewhat. Yeah. With other agencies, other organisations on a joint venture, kind of, you know, the sum of the parts kind of situation. Um, we've been working on one over the last not quite twelve months, but twelve months ish. Um, which is kind of gone nowhere, um, for whatever reason. And I just thought, have a little chat about, you know, whether you're in an agency like us or any sort of business where there's an opportunity to do a joint venture. Um, or maybe we'll just talk about it from an agency perspective because it's what we know about.

Yeah.

Rather than try and.

Pontificate.

About anything else.

Applicable to plenty of other businesses.

Could well be. Yeah, yeah. So you know, the basic idea is, well, you get you get agency networks, like for example, um, business to business network, BB and BB international who are huge. Um, they've got like collectively a turnover of, I don't know, one hundred and fifty, two hundred million, something like that. So like, if you as a company are looking for an agency, if that agency is part of a network of agencies in, in theory you are, you're getting, if your business needs it, global support for your business. Plus you're also tapping into vast expertise. Yeah.

Um, because how many agencies are in BB? It's quite a few, isn't it?

Yeah, but it's not, it's considering the, the, the turnover is quite a big number I think. Um between twenty and thirty I think thereabouts, based in Europe, based in the UK. If we're not counting the UK as part of Europe, it kind of is. But anyway, UK and Europe, uh, Australia possibly America, definitely. Yeah. Um, Singapore. Yeah. Places like that. So I think this idea of, of joint venture collaborations is good. I mean, they are not purely, um, a bunch of agencies who know each other's phone numbers and like, oh yeah, give John at Acme agency a ring and get them to do this bit because we're too busy. It's not like that. It's that it's this pooling of expertise. And you know, the, the offering, if you like. So that's one end of the scale. And there are many, uh, agency networks. I'm only mentioning BBN because it's one I'm familiar with. Um, there are other agency networks as well. And then you'll get situations like, thank you, Julie. Thank you. I wouldn't have made him tea, but anyway, there you go.

The last one ever.

That's what he said the one time he made you one.

I did no such thing.

Um, then you get situations like, um, I'm in an agency network, as you know, and we meet once a month. The other agency that's like in America.

Collaborating and helping each other. That's right.

But one of those agencies has a very good close relationship with the design shop in Memphis. I was trying to remember earlier, it's Memphis, Memphis, Memphis, Tennessee. So he's in Memphis and they have a very good working relationship with a design shop, because the design shop don't do the tech stuff that he does that his agency does. And so that can work really well where you've got a situation, you know, and.

Um, does it like less formalised arrangements though, aren't they generally it's just sort of like, can you scratch my back? I scratch yours.

Can be, but like, you can also so you can form those kind of relationships, which is what we've been attempting to do with the other agency. Um, who are, you know, geographically quite close to us, um, hasn't gone particularly well. Um, but, you know, maybe there's lots of reasons for that. But anyway, um, what you can do in those situations is you can either talk about that when you've got, when you've got an opportunity for a gig. So we've got an opportunity for a gig, we've done the it, we've done the Q and a follow up follow up. We're waiting to hear. Now, I think there's a very little chance we'll get the work because they're also speaking to, well, they shortlisted us and at least one other agency and the other agency are like nine times bigger than us.

Yeah.

So they're massive. And I just think they'll probably go, they'll feel like the bigger agencies are safer. Pair of hands. That's not necessarily the case, but they might feel like that. So I think they might go with them. Um, but we were very upfront in the it, we said we can do these bits, but we can't do these bits, but we work with another agency who can do these bits. And you know, when I did the Q and A, I think I did, I actually mentioned them by name when I did the Q and A, so we would never pretend. If you like that we can do stuff that excuse me That we can't do if we're in a JV. We would just bring the the JV partner to the table. But I don't think everyone does that. There's a lot of smoke and mirrors in agency land where people make heavy use of freelancers and subcontractors, but they.

Don't labeling agencies as well. I mean.

Loads of white label agencies as well.

The other sort of unspoken truth isn't it, is that a load of agency work gets outsourced to agencies that exist, you know, as basically joint ventures, but just in the background. And, you know, you don't realise that it's the other agency that's done the work and stuff like that.

I guess the question I'm asking or trying to get to the bottom of is whether it matters.

That it's a joint venture.

I don't think it matters that it's a joint venture. I think I'm more interested in whether it matters that there's full transparency, that it's a joint venture that's delivering the work.

I think so.

Yeah, it probably.

Is. It's about accountability at the end of the day, isn't it? A lot of it. And who's going to take ownership and pride in the work. I mean, if I'm doing something that my name's not going on, am I going to work as hard at it as I would if my name was attached to it. I don't know. I'd like to think I would. But when you scale that up to sort of agency level, and you're asking an agency to sort of take ownership of and be fully accountable for work that they're not actually going to be attached to, I don't know.

Yeah. I mean, that that brings me on. Um, well, it maybe doesn't quite bring me on, but the second thing I was going to have a little chat about today was agency client relationships. And I suppose that does feed into JV situations. Um, yeah, I just, uh, yeah, I think like being transparent makes perfect sense. But more importantly, I think because we run a small agency, I would say this, wouldn't I? But I think that this idea of the JV and bringing in expertise as required, um, means that clients get the best of both worlds. They get an invested group of people like read evolution like us and we then we, to your point, we will own any third party relationship, we won't ever turn around and say, well, they did that, but that's not our problem. It's not our fault. We are still ultimately looking after the client's best interests because we have that ongoing long term relationship, and the chances are the JV partners have been brought in to do something specific. And then there'll be, you know, that's it. Thanks. See you later. Yeah.

Maybe you keep each other right? I guess as well, don't you? There's an element of if you know, another agency is going to be sort of, uh, touching your work or looking at your work or whatever, you are going to put your best foot forward. So yeah, I think it works from that perspective too.

Yeah. I mean, have you any experience from the past of JVs with, with, uh, previous agencies you've worked with?

Yeah, a couple, I think they work really, really well when people, like I was saying to you earlier when we were talking about this, they work really well when people go into them without any sort of ego, you know, they're just sort of there to collaborate and bring about the best outcome for the client. And when everyone's focused on that, it's fine. As soon as it turns into sort of point scoring. Yeah. Because that's actually my experience with joint ventures is that they always end up like that. Like somebody does a really good piece of work and they're very quick to take credit for it. They're very quick to knock other people down. You know, other people, you know, it ends up always in, in my mind as a, as a sort of pissing contest, because people can never just be loyal to the idea of delivering well for the client. It's always got to be a bit of self-interest in there.

Yeah. I mean, we have experienced that firsthand where, you know, an agency came to us and said, we've got this opportunity. It's not really what we do here. Here's the information we have. And we then said, right, that's great. And this is the way to approach this. They then second guessed us and said, no, we.

We've already promised the client, we.

Can't.

Possibly.

Do that. And we were like, well, we ain't doing it the way you've decided you want to do it, because that's not in the client's best interest. Yeah. And they just saw their ass, you know what I mean? And it kind of soured the relationship potentially anyway. Well, not potentially it soured the relationship because it's like, well, you know, we are we sound like Mr. Goody two shoes, but, you know, we're always trying to do right by our clients. I mean, one of the things I want to talk about today is, is owning mistakes. And I'm not for one minute suggesting we don't make mistakes, but when we do, we do own them. Yeah. And, you know, I just, I just felt in that situation like they were only interested in a very, not even significant financial, short term financial gain. Instead of being honest with the client and risking the client saying, do you know what? That isn't what we first discussed. And I'm not comfortable with what you're suggesting because of whatever reason. Um, so I think, um, maybe egos do play into it, but it's probably more about, um, what's the word I'm looking for? Um, uh, the culture.

Yeah.

You know, we, you, you said, I think in the last time we did a podcast, which was about nine years ago, uh, you said, um, that it used to irk you that I would ask searching questions of clients that we were trying to win. You know, you know, in meetings with people. And we were trying to win them as clients. I, you know, again, Mr. Goody Two Shoes. I am definitely not that person, but I am genuinely only ever interested in doing for the client what's going to be be beneficial to the client at any price. You know, I don't mind losing work if the client doesn't buy into, you know what we're suggesting because of because they've been told somebody else by by their mate John or something. You know, I don't mind that I don't mind. I'd be a much wealthier man if I could just swallow my pride and say, you know, I don't care that this is not the right thing for the client. Let's just take the money.

But, well, I don't know. I mean, you say that. I mean, you know, whether you call it did say that whether you call it cultural being grown up or whatever. Yeah. I think the thing is that to sit around a table and have these discussions and say things like, oh, you know, the thing that we told you we were going to do for your website or whatever. Having sat down with actual experts in the field, we've realised that's not the right thing to do. And actually they've got a much better solution. Those are really hard things to say, and it's really hard to sit around a table and have a discussion with no ego. What are we actually trying to do here? What's the best solution? And just sort of put all of that stuff to one side, pride and all that nonsense. I think it's really rare that people are willing to do that, but that is when joint ventures work. I mean, you know, in my experience, when they have paid off is when everyone is just sort of.

Very limited experience.

Yeah, my very limited experience, like everything. Yeah. What Dave's trying to point out here is I have seventy years at the coalface just yet.

And I nearly have.

Um, but, uh, yeah, no, I mean, you know, it's fine as long as everybody can sort of rein it in and sit down and be grown up. But that is vanishingly rare in business and in real life, to be fair, that people can actually do that. And it does sound a little bit worthy to sit there and say that. But until you get a group of people in a room, sat around a table that can just sort of like knuckle down and do what's right, then it's always gonna go pear shaped eventually.

Yeah. Honesty, you know, in, in its many forms. Um. is yeah. Lacking, I think, I think sometimes in a business.

In our industry or just.

Not just in our industry, in business in general, you know, the, the gladhanding, the hail fellow well met bullshit that you get in our industry and, you know, like people are just, oh, you know, like laughing at a joke that isn't funny because they just want you to sign a contract and give them some money. All that kind of disingenuous bullshit. I think it's becoming it's becoming less common. You think it's very I think it's very old school, you know, and I think honest conversations are well, because of because of social media, I think that that conversation, I mean, social media conversations can often be vile. You know, they can they can just people on their keyboards just type the most ridiculous bullshit and, and.

Present company included sometimes.

And are horribly, um, horribly rude and everything else. And, you know, that's just the nature of the beast. But you know, that aside, I think social media has created lots of conversations. So conversations with strangers, which can often be really good fun, really, really interesting podcasts have become very popular. Listening to other people's conversations. So I think we are getting better at having conversations. Yeah, I think.

I don't know. Okay. Well, like you say, my experience is very limited. This is the only industry.

I don't care what you think.

You're an idiot. Yeah, well, there's an.

What was I saying about being rude?

Um, you know, my experience is limited to our industry. So I often think of these as sort of like marketing industry problems, but I still see an awful lot of people just sort of like, you know, spouting bullshit online about marketing, especially LinkedIn's the absolute worst for this just like crap generic advice that they're sort of acting like they've reinvented the wheel and it's, you know, just, just like either common sense or wrong. And then also like a few weeks ago, we were having this chat about a friend of mine who just launched an agency and doing the same thing, sort of like peddling this idea that like, oh, they were different because they were going to look out for the client's best interests and they were gonna they were gonna do the right thing. And that was somehow special and exceptional. I don't know, like, there's just still a level of sort of acceptable bullshit that everyone seems to swallow, especially with marketing.

But does anyone swallow it? Does anyone really swallow it?

I don't know.

Does anybody swallow? You know, members of an opposition political party saying, when we get into power, everything's going to be great.

It'll be suddenly different. The banners will be red, not blue. You'll see. Um, yeah. No, I don't think I don't know, I don't know, but then I don't think that sort of level of sort of skepticism is particularly healthy or helpful either. Is it? I mean, you've got a lot of people talking crap on, on LinkedIn or Facebook or whatever, and then a load of people sitting there saying, oh, those people are idiots. I mean, nobody's having a genuine, useful conversation. Finding genuine, useful conversations online is, I think, really difficult.

Well, look, look at this. You know, let's just talk about this, this example without, you know, very carefully, without naming names. Um, we recently lost a customer and we lost a customer because of a relationship between the CEO of the company and another agency, like a personal relationship. And they wanted to check some of the work that we were doing. They had a look, we'd gone a certain way with the work. And the other agency said, oh, you know, you should have.

Done that differently.

Should have done that differently. Anyway, you know, fine. You know, you know, we do very occasionally lose customers every every business does. And, you know, we just did whatever we needed to do to hand over any access to anything that we needed to hand over to. And a conversation you had with somebody on the inside revealed that within about a week, this other agency had made a complete ass of it and cost them a month's worth of sales.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, this is the thing. And this is not I mean, and.

That's because of a dishonest. No, the other agency were dishonest. The way they went about its winning the work.

Absolutely. And it's what happens when you treat marketing like a zero sum game. You know, if your success has to come at the cost of somebody else's failure, if you're constantly looking for opportunities to bring other people down, you know, you just create a worse environment for everybody. I mean, I think marketing is quite fraught. I think, you know, finding an honest marketing agency, a decent marketing agency is really hard because of this kind of behavior. And I think it is sort of endemic in our industry. I really do pity people who, you know, a lot of the people listening to this will, at some point in their lives, have to hire a marketing agency. And it's insanely difficult nowadays to know who's actually telling the truth, who's just a bullshitter, you know, who's at it, who's not. And I think a lot of the problem comes from when you, you know, you treat these relationships like that because there is an opportunity whenever you're looking at another marketing agency's work or whatever, to, to bring other people up with you, you know, to point out where things could be better to help each other get better. I mean, we do work with an agency that we know through your mastermind group occasionally, and it's not like a formalised relationship or anything, but just literally it's that started because he asked for a bit of help and we gave him some advice and, you know, everybody, but.

He didn't ask for some help. He was talking about it in the group. And I said, look, you.

Told him he needed.

Help. No, no. I just said, if you want another pair of eyes across it. No, no cost implications. Happy to cast give you another opinion and have another look at it. And and then it turned out that, you know, we, we may we may actually have a sort of formal semi formal relationship.

Yeah. But if everybody treated our industry like that, you know, every opportunity is an opportunity to work with people to help other people get better, to share skills and knowledge. Everybody gets better because of that. I mean, nobody can be across everything. Nobody can have all the knowledge or the understanding in the world. But if you sort of use that fact as an opportunity to point out flaws in other people's behaviour, it doesn't really help anybody. It just sort of makes for a very combative environment.

Combative or combative, I don't know. Anyway, yes I agree. Um, and yeah, that that ain't, that ain't helpful. I mean, you know, barriers to entry are quite low to get into, you know, situation where you call yourself a marketer. Mhm. There are also lots of people like me who came via engineering and became involved in marketing. So, um, we are a, um, um, an interesting bunch, I think, who has sat on, you know, on the, uh, the marketing side of the table, if you like.

It does also remind me of something else actually that happened personally outside of work last week where somebody came to me and they basically said, I've had somebody do an SEO audit for my website, and they found a billion and one things wrong. Are they really wrong or not? And I had a quick look at it and they weren't really wrong. It was, you know, that usual thing that that a lot of sort of like tech SEO people do when they're trying to flog you a service, which is like point out a load of minor nitpicky things that, you know, PageSpeed insights has told them and tell you that the world's going to end if you don't implement all their changes straight away. And I think it's just worth mentioning, because I know a lot of the people listening to this do sort of by marketing services, that sort of behavior where people sort of tout for work by finding a million and one flaws, using an automated tool that is sort of the, the apex of this sort of rubbish, nasty sort of unworthy behaviour, isn't it? It's like just going around and pointing out flaws in other people's work to win business. It's a very effective technique. It's unfortunately. Well, I think so, because I think a lot of people who don't know better look at these reports with the red and the ten out of one hundred scores, and they think, oh shit, like my SEO agencies let me down. It's insanely easy, I think, in any walk of life, to point at what somebody else is doing and find all the flaws in it. Very difficult for people who have to make these decisions about who to employ or which agency to use to actually see through that and work out what actually matters and what doesn't. Which again, comes down to that. If you can just have an honest conversation, it all goes away because you can say, do these things really matter? Yes or no?

But to use a motor vehicle analogy, no.

There's a surprise, a motor vehicle analogy.

Yeah. If you if you um, you'll see, for example, um, I'm in various Facebook groups related to motorbikes and you'll see somebody who'll put some photographs up of a bike that they've restored. It might be a nineteen seventy six Honda four hundred four and it looks stunning.

But somebody say you've got the wrong pedal.

Yeah, it's got it's got the wrong indicator. It's got like, that's not the right bolt for that bit on the, on the, on the, uh.

And what percentage of those people are also motorbike restoring people? Yeah. Usually. Yeah.

So, so it's not just in our line of work where people, uh, like finding fault with others. It's a kind of human thing, isn't it, I suppose. Tell you where I find it particularly, uh, challenging. Um, it's one of it's one aspect of my job that I do find, uh, difficult is. Trying to help people understand That the information I'm giving them is not being given to try and persuade them to buy some stuff off us.

We're having a conversation with a client like this the other day, weren't we? It was yesterday, actually, where you were just pointing out some sort of. You were just like saying like, we could have a look at some of this because this doesn't look quite right. And they were like, oh, well, you can just have the contract when, when the other contract expires. And you were like, no, no, no, I'm not actually touting for work. I just want to help you. Yeah.

That's right. We've got, um, we had an enquiry come in and it's a company down in Wessex or somewhere like that, certainly down in the south of England. And they've got a system that was written by. To be fair, it looks like a have-a-go hero. It's written using technology which is now well out of date. So they'd said, you know, it's been pointed out to us that this is full of security issues. Can you fix it? And we looked at it and you can't fix it because because it's been written using this old technology, it needs to be rewritten. Yeah. You literally can't fix it. You'd have to rewrite it to fix it. So I had to tell them that. But as I'm advising them of this.

Yeah.

It always to me feels like they're just gonna think that I'm telling them this so that we can get a gig to rebuild it for them. It's really not. But yeah, I don't know how you communicate that.

And I don't know how you wrestle it down because I think, I don't know, maybe I'm speaking sort of just for myself here. But I mean, I'm certainly aware of the fact that sometimes I pull punches because I don't want to make it look like I'm just pointing out flaws for the sake of it. You know, there are times when you sort of tone down criticism or you say, oh yeah, you know, maybe that's an that was an all right idea or whatever. Just because you don't want to sound like you're being unduly negative to win work. It is a really difficult thing to wrestle down, like how you just sort of get through that and sort of level with clients. I guess you just have to not care.

Yeah, but I think you're right. I think, you know, you can like, you know, the technical SEO report, as you, as you suggested earlier, it will pick up things. You run it through Screaming Frog or something like that or any of the tools SEMrush. And it'll go, this is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong. And but to be fair, they usually say critical high and low. Yeah. Words to that effect, you know, and people can, especially if things are not happening that they thought would happen. So for example, they're not getting the search engine traction they thought they would. So they're really scrabbling around looking for the reasons for it and that. And, you know, I've been through this pain with our own website and you know, it, there's, there's been some things that have been happening. Jump on any, you know, it's what we do for a living. And I'm still confused as to why this, this has happened. So, you know, it's like we're in the same world as our customers a lot of the time. Um, I think we did get to the bottom of it, thankfully. But, you know, they, those reports, as you rightly say, you can, you can be honest with people and say, look, this is like in a perfect world, none of this would be wrong with your website, but.

It doesn't actually.

In the same, by the same token, if you, if you put like the Guardian or the BBC's website through these tools, it will find just as many faults and errors with them. These tools are actually designed to try and get you to buy shit, so they're designed to frighten you. Um, and there's a difference between that and your website is making people's personal information available to the public. There's that where you, you can't pull.

Yeah.

You have to just.

Say this is wrong.

You are, you are breaking the law by doing this. And we've had to do that more than once.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Well, I think it's a really good point, isn't it? But again, like, and this is where like sort of, uh, I really do feel for people who are in the, the, the seat, the hot seat making these decisions because these tools tell you something's a critical error and you've got no way of contextualising it. But I mean, to your point about the BBC or the Guardian, all that really matters in those situations is that your website is better than the people that you're competing with. It doesn't even have to be as good as the BBC's website, you know what I mean? It's like it has to pass the bare minimum and, and trying to get people to sort of understand that, you know, you don't have to tick every single box and that if you know, if your site really was, you know, like riddled with catastrophic errors, it wouldn't be performing at all. These things just don't matter that much. But it is hard for people to sort of decide that for themselves. I get that.

I mean, this, this is, you know, what we're actually talking about to a certain extent here is, is um, client agency relationship. Yeah. And, you know, if you need an agency in, in, you know, in the, the modern era, if you like, of marketing who genuinely have got your best, best interests at heart and, and will kind of help you filter out the bullshit so that you, you know, exert, um, sorry, expend your energies in the right areas for the maximum, you know, results, I suppose. Um, we've also covered off, you know, owning mistakes. I mean, we all, we all make mistakes. We're, you know, we're to me in life, it's, it's the way you respond when things go wrong. And it's not just in digital marketing, to be honest. it's across the piece. You know, when the shit hits the fan, the way that you respond is what's really important. Because trying to create a universe where things don't go wrong is a fool's errand.

So yeah, absolutely.

Um, okay. I'm just going to pivot a little bit now. Uh, we don't generally in these conversations in these podcasts now talk like specific, you know, five ways to improve SEO. If you're in the beginning.

Make more money from your YouTube ads. Yeah, absolutely.

That sort of thing. But, um.

Are you making fun of other digital marketing podcasts?

Um, I'm, yeah, one thing that we've, we've dabbled with is, um, you know, we like paid search, we use Google paid search, but we also have dabbled with and not put anything like enough energy into being paid search just had a really great enquiry this week. Like I kind of knocked a campaign into shape that had been, well, I actually imported a campaign from Google ads, um, and then tweaked it slightly and decided to give it a go on Bing. And for a fraction of the cost of, um, clicks, albeit, you know, fewer clicks that we get from Google ads. Uh, we're now, we're now seeing traffic and we had a fantastic enquiry came in. The reason being that some large organisations are kind of in-house, you know, anyway, are forced to use Bing as the search engine because the, the way that the whole operating system is set up in the Microsoft ecosystem. Um, so don't forget about.

Yeah.

Bing.

I have to admit, I feel a little bit stupid because I think in my mind, um, I always, I think I just buy way too much into, I mean, we were talking earlier about noise on the internet and how sort of bad marketing advice gets propagated. I think I'm really guilty of buying into some of that. I listen an awful lot to things that say, you know, ninety nine percent of people use Google Chrome or, you know, like everybody nowadays is using Google, not Bing. And I just sort of assume that, you know, if it's sort of zeitgeist, if it's if it's popular, if it's the majority, that's where you should be. And you forget sometimes that actually your audience is a tiny, tiny fraction of the population, and there is a very good chance that they do something that is completely aberrant from a, you know, sort of a top down perspective, you know, that, you know, ninety nine percent of people may well use Google, but the one percent just happens to include a lot of large organizations who deal with other businesses, which is our target market. And you sort of you can, I think anybody can, you know, even people who work at the coalface can be guilty of sort of just listening too much to the sort of trending advice and not thinking hard enough about actually, you know, like you say, what if this is different? What if people in large organisations are tied to this platform, have to use it? We can reach them there instead. So yeah.

That particular one and these, these aren't exact numbers, but the ad had had something like ten impressions.

Yeah.

It had had two clicks and one stonking enquiry. Well, no.

I mean, that's a fifty percent conversion rate.

We're not talking about like, because it's B2B, we're not talking about. Oh yeah. You know, we need, we need ten thousand impressions a week. And out of that, will get seven hundred clicks and out of that will make two sales. It's not we're talking much smaller numbers. It is like we talk about a lot with our customers. It's about being where your ideal customers are. And if your ideal customers are on Bing, even if they're being forced to be there, then just make sure you're there when they're typing the problem that they're trying to solve to make sure they find you. Um, I don't really think I've got a lot else to try and cover off today. I mean, it was, it was just a kind of the usual from the coalface, meander through a few things that are occurring. Anything else happening this week? We've got we've got a very big website which is getting towards the end of its build, and we're kind of now doing some of the fine tuning and some of the tweaking. It's a website that's got some functionality. It's it's hooking into.

Some functionality is an understatement.

Well, it's hooking into third party. Well, I mean, the design is, is, is kind of quite involved and it's making heavy use of inline videos and things like that. So it's, it's really quite cool. Looking forward to getting it launched. Um, but it's also like using a sort of an API. Yeah. Um, just using some Json stuff, I think, but we're actually hooking into other systems as well. And, but, you know, we had a really good session with the client yesterday, didn't we? And we were kind of going through, um, you know, a few of the key pages and, uh, that was good. That was a, that was a good, good session. Um, we've got some. Yeah, we're working on, we're working for some really big organisations, um, fixing some, some, um, web based software for them, which is, which is again, nice to get that work. Good fun, good enquiry. It's an interesting, uh, enquiry which has now come to fruition. Um, the initial enquiry came in, we had a very, very good conversation.

And then it went.

We then got ghosted and I was like, what on earth did we do.

Wrong.

Anyway? Uh, you know, long story short, it turns out the person first of all had Covid so was off work for two weeks and then, um, had to go off to the states on business and, and then came back to us and said.

Look, I remember that website.

Sorry about this, uh, delay, you know, you know, here's the information you needed. Can you give us a price ASAP and get cracking, you know, um, which is always nice because, um, you know, we're sensitive souls and we, you know, we kind of.

Cope.

Well with soul searching. Like what on earth did we do wrong to scare that person off? We hadn't scared them off. Their life got in the way. Do you not think, though in life in general, it's very easy to make wrong assumptions in situations like that?

Absolutely.

And just forget that, you know, the people that we're talking to, they've got a million other things that they're trying to do just like we have. Um.

Well, that's the classic thing with dating, isn't it? Like you text somebody and they don't text you back and you're like, oh, they hate me now. They don't care about me. It's like, no, they went to the pub with their friends, you know, like that statement.

Says a lot about you.

Alex. Oh, well.

He said, always, always reply to me. Remember, it's like thirty years since I've dated anyway, so you know.

Well, let's hope you never have to again.

Yeah I know. You know what I mean? Talking about that, it's quite funny because I, as you know, I mean, I'm I'm sixty next month. And so I'm a, you know, considerably older than you. And in my dating days.

Um, it was, it was like, well.

There was no texting or anything, you know, literally no texting. It was like, you know, you know, if when we were like fifteen, sixteen, it was literally like, go and ask her if she'll go out with me. My mate wants to go out with.

You putting notes in people's pockets, you know, come.

Back. She said, no, you know what I mean? It's like, it's so easy now. I mean, for, for people to, to try and make friends, shall we say oops, beep. Um, okay. That's, that's it for now on that, um, on that note, uh, what we'll do is we will make every endeavour to keep these more regularly or regular going forward. Not that anybody cares.

Well I mean.

But for our listener.

You alienate people by doing that.

Person. You alienate.

Person.

All right. You've been listening to The Digital Marketing From The Coalface with me, Dave Robinson and Alex Bussey, and we'll speak to you all again soon.