Just because your website isn't performing doesn't mean you need a new website, is what I was trying to say.
It is a really good point. I mean, we have a lot of conversations with people who are like, I want a new website. This one isn't working. So of course it's not working, doesn't appear in search. How could it work?
So it's almost like we foolishly persuade people not to create a new website because, you know, that'd be more work for us. There's more money to be made for us if we say, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, your website's pants. And we've heard people say that, oh, I spoke to this agency and they said, there's nothing we can do with that website. If you want to work with us, you have to start by building a new website. But we would very rarely do that.
One of the things that I've observed is that, yeah, generally speaking, a chief marketing officer or head of marketing or whatever stays at an organisation for what, a few years? The first thing they do tear up the website and build their own, build a new one. A new website comes along, doesn't do that much better. They're like, oh, leave it. Give it time, give it time. We've seen worse. And then they leave and a new CMO is brought in and they're like, oh, we need a new website.
Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. And it's felt a bit like a coalface today.
Starting off on a lighthearted note.
It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. Um, we have had a bit of a hiatus once again in the recording of the podcast.
If you don't tell people, they won't notice.
Apologise. I apologise to our, um, fans. Followers. Well, that's what it's a fancy name. His name's John. So, um. Yeah. Best of times. Worst of times. Had a bit of a shitty experience today, which we'll touch on. We did kind of, um. But, uh, we'll start with the best of times. Um, one of the reasons that we haven't done any podcasts is things have been completely manic, crazy busy with some fantastic new clients and some fantastic opportunities waiting in the wings. And it's just been, um, quite the outstanding, if you like, finish climax to twenty twenty three.
I'm shaking my head. Nobody can see me shaking my head. But yeah, I could.
So, um, what's caused the big uptick in or you know, increase rather in enquiries and things like that? Is that our website, which we are about to replace with a brand new one, seems to be performing better. We've made a few tweaks and changes and found some stuff that we thought was maybe holding it back. And yeah, indications are that maybe it was. Um, so that's been good. Um, but yeah, it's just been a, just been a rare old time. And it's, I do wonder if there's a bit of confidence in the economy. Yeah, that's helping a little bit as well I think.
So I don't think it's any mistake. I mean lots of the people who've come back to us are people that first enquired a little while ago as well, which does sort of support that idea, doesn't it, that people are sort of gaining confidence again.
Yeah. We did a we've done a, we did a kind of a rush job over the last week. And that enquiry first came in, I think, in September. And just, you know, it's now what, twelfth of December. So it took a while to come back. And then when it did, it's like we'd like to engage you to do X, Y, and Z. And by the way, we need it for next Tuesday. Uh, which was fine. I mean, it was, it was, um, nice to be put under that kind of pressure and produce the goods, which we did. There was a moment during it where it felt a bit like we were losing the room. You know, you've got to remember with this stuff that we do, it's, you know, whatever agency you're working with. And I did see somebody put something on TikTok last week, which I shared with the team, which kind of resonated, you know, agencies like us, good agencies, we're always trying to do the absolute best for our customers. We just are. I mean, and I don't mean like we are and nobody else is like we care about our customers. I'm not talking about that kind of bullshit. Yeah. Good agencies do you know, we lose sleep and thinking about and trying to do the right thing for our for our customers and, um, yeah, um, it's it's been, um, it's been good. It's been, we've been getting, you know, lots of good gigs coming in and that's, that's good. We've been. What else have we been doing? Um, it must be something of interest. Otherwise it's gonna be the world's shortest podcast.
No, I mean, well, we have just been very busy with sort of standard client work, which I guess is the point of the podcast is to talk about that stuff, but it's hard to know where to sort of dive in really, isn't it?
Um, well, talking about podcasts and we do have a meeting next week with a prospective new client. Good fit for us. Engineering company, technical company. Um, exactly the kind of business that we love to work with. And during the initial chat that we had, it did come out that, uh, the chap I was talking to had listened to the most recent episode of this podcast and kind of figured out from that listen of the podcast. It's not a very good English, but anyway, kind of figured out while listening to the podcast that maybe obviously it's early stages, we might be the kind of team, the kind of people that they want to engage with to help them with the work that they need, nor they need to do in order to expand their, um.
That's obviously because of my contribution to the podcast, just.
Obviously because of your contributions.
That's on the record.
That really goes without saying, but then you went and said it, which wasn't necessary. So that's nice because, you know, we've been banging away at doing this podcast now for quite some time over two years, one hundred and odd episodes, one hundred and twelve, I don't know, something like that. Um, and it's been great fun to do. Um, we've kind of changed tack as most people who listen to the show know that we, you know, we now just talk about stuff we're doing?
Yeah.
Which is, which is good.
Um, but also risky because it means we don't get those nice attention grabbing sort of podcast titles, like ten ways to make your website make you a million pounds or whatever it is that people look for. I know. And we lose all that sort of buzz. And it feels quite workaday sometimes. Like when I'm talking about stuff on here, I'm often like, wow, I'm boring myself. But I think it probably is of interest to people.
I was, yeah, in the conversation I had with the prospective client, um, it turned out that the episode had listened to was, um, why agencies can be dickheads, which why.
Are we.
Dickheads?
Why are we like.
I mean, we are sometimes dickheads. I mean, everybody, everybody is from time to time, I suppose. Um, okay. Well, I mean, just so there's lots of good stuff going on, you know. Exciting.
Oh, we got.
Good clients and everything else.
The elephant.
Yeah. I need a bit of catharsis. Um, it's, um. We had an opportunity to pitch, and it really didn't feel like a good fit. It was, um, a big pharma company, and they've given. They gave us the opportunity to pitch to them. It was, um, a very significant budget that they said they had for this project. And it just felt odd them coming to quite a modest agency, a small agency like us, um, with no farmer experience to speak of. We've done bits and bobs over the years, but no, no significant farmer experience. And it didn't feel like a realistic prospect and I foolishly treated it as not a realistic prospect. Went into the pitch earlier today and just winged it.
Don't sell yourself short. That's not true.
And fell flat on my face. I had a plan and the plan was to be honest about the best way to create the website that they need. They've spent clearly a lot of money getting to where they are, and their website is awful. I mean, it looks okay, but it performs not a jot gets no traffic, doesn't generate any business for them, isn't being seen by the people that they need to see it. All of that stuff. And we have a process and a strategy for turning that around. And it doesn't involve creating a shiny, you know.
PowerPoint presentation.
Presentation.
That's the point, isn't it? I mean, look, at the end of the day, there's a lot of bullshit in our industry, as we've talked about before. You know, there's a lot of people trying to pull the wool over other people's eyes. We have made it our business to to go out there and say, right, we're not going to do any of that shiny agency bullshit. We're not going to wave our hands around and skate the truth and try and pretend we know more than we do, or that we're talented when we're not or whatever. We're going to be honest. We're going to speak in plain English. Yeah. We went to a pitch where they were expecting a shiny slide deck and a couple of people in slick suits, and we just sort of talked to them honestly, about how we'd approached the gig. And that didn't go down well, but we've pinned our colours on that. You know, that's what we're going to do. And I think whenever you're doing something sort of brave and a bit unusual. You are obviously going to alienate a certain section of the population who expect that sort of orthodoxy, who sort of rely on it. Right?
Yeah, one hundred percent.
And I think that's okay. Like, not everybody has to like us. Not everybody has to like our approach.
No. That's right. I mean, I didn't dislike them at the end of the process, let's face it. It was quite a short lived.
It was no time to dislike them. Yeah.
That's right. It very quickly became apparent that we weren't going to meet their expectations in terms of the presentation that we were giving. Um, in my defence, we have been flat out for the last, you know, wee while and they came to us like last Monday or Tuesday saying we're giving you an opportunity to pitch. By the way, it's twelve o'clock next Tuesday, take it or leave it. But I should have just said, well, we haven't got time to prepare the pitch, so count us out. I should have really.
But also, I mean, it is such I'm not going to keep swearing. Um, it is such garbage isn't it? Well the expectation, I mean, one of the things that really stood out to me during that whole process. And one of the things that I keep coming back to is that one of the people about halfway through sort of said, oh, but, you know, you've pointed out that there's loads of problems with our website, but without a presentation to show us what you've done for other clients, how can we possibly know that you're the right people to fix it? And to me, that's just the sort of the crux of the whole thing. You know, people, business owners are going into this expecting certainty and guarantees, but there aren't any. That's the honest truth. And anybody who says otherwise, anybody who says, oh, I can definitely deliver for you. Look at all these other wonderful things I've done is a liar. It's, you know, it's not all luck. It's not like you can't have a consistent process that delivers, but there is no certainty. And we know full well that sometimes you take on a gig that you think, yeah, this is going to smash this, and it doesn't work out that way. That's just the nature of the business.
I think I'm disappointed in myself because I should have just played the game.
But I think if I'd said to you a week ago, oh, you know, I'm only gonna come into that presentation, into that pitch with you. If you do a nice shiny presentation, you'd have been like, nah, f*ck that. That's not what we do. That's not who we are. I think with hindsight, you know what I mean? Like, because they sort of like got fixated on the fact that we didn't have anything shiny to show them. And, you know, it's quite funny because during the pitch she was like, oh, but have you, have you prepared anything to show us? And David said, you said to her, well, you can go on our website. There's loads of case studies. It lays out all the details. And she was like, oh, that's quite a funny response. I didn't mean on your website. Yeah. Have you prepared something for us? And it's like, no, yeah, he's got the time to.
You know, there are there are multi-million pound pharma company and they just expect a certain level of response from agencies. And we're not, you know, we we weren't given enough time to do that. I mean, we are, you know, good at creating a visual communication. I mean, that's what we do for a living and we're very good at it. And in fact, the one I've been working on for the last.
Ironically, was a presentation.
Was a presentation for a client who's doing a presentation to one of their customers. And we knocked it out of the park. And so, yeah, I don't know, it's almost like, um, um, all the way, you know, last week when I was busy doing the other stuff and I knew this presentation was coming up, I was kind of thinking to myself, you know, they kind of are gonna expect a shiny presentation and you're not going to do that. And I kind of persuaded myself that I would get away with it, and they would see why we do what we do. Because, you know, to anyone who's new to the podcast and doesn't really understand how we work, we our preferred way of working and the way that we work that we know generates results is to, you know, work with a customer pro bono for, for half a day or something and really get to understand what the problem is they need to solve and figure out whether we're the right people to solve it or not. Um, going down the pitch route, and I understand it's not always feasible for them to engage for half a day only to find out, oh, these guys are not the right people, I get that. But ultimately, that's how you get the best results.
Yeah.
The whole having a grown up conversation. Digging in, going to, you know, going quite deep with it. And at the end of that, everybody knows whether or not there's a good fit.
Yeah. I mean, this is how we do business. This is how we talk to clients. It is just conversational. There's no need for all the sort of window dressing. I mean, we love a good analogy. Go on. When people interview chefs for restaurants, they don't ask the chef to come and show them a catalogue of all the dishes the chef has cooked in the past or, you know, reviews from Yelp. They ask him to come in and cook something, and then they decide whether or not they want to build a relationship on the basis of that, which is why things like foot in the door projects work so well. Yeah. But this idea that you can just ask people, I mean, you know, this is the problem is if they've given us a month to prepare and we've put together a shiny brochure, you know, if you give everybody that time, people will just bullshit. They will just pull something together that looks very good, irrespective of what their actual capabilities are.
Yeah.
You can't reasonably expect people not to. And that's I think that's the whole problem with the way agency work is awarded. A lot of the time it's you give somebody loads of notice and then the expectation is that they spend all of that time crafting something that looks very polished. But for what you know, to what end, that's not representative of what they're going to do for you or with you. It's just a sort of weird window dressing exercise and it just makes people feel safe, which is silly.
Yeah. And I think the, the easy solution to that is, um, I should have said to them, I guess in a roundabout way, we did have this conversation. They certainly thought we did anyway, but I guess, you know, if I said to them, you know, what do you expect to see in the presentation? And they could say, we expect to see exactly how you will help us case studies that show you've done it before for other people and all that kind of thing. And spell it, spell it out and, and, and give us a note of your capability. And if if I'd done that, and like I say, we did it in a roundabout way and I kind of didn't fully engage with that process. Um, but it was a bit of an understatement.
But if you had, we would have been one slide deck among many. And I think that is the, the place where a lot of agencies end up. And a lot of people I know who run agencies who struggle to win work, struggle to win it, I honestly think because they are in that rat race and they're just trying to outperform other agencies on the same playing field. And I think at a certain point, you have to look at that sort of squabble, that fight for who can have the shiniest slide deck or who can have the nicest animation for when their stats come in or whatever. It's just absolute nonsense. And if you play that game, like you're not gonna win any good prizes. And anybody that's sort of buys into that process, I think is, is not really the right kind of partner anyway. I mean, it's the same sort of thing as big businesses who want an SEO report every month, and they want it to look pretty so they can show it to key stakeholders. They don't care whether you're actually doing any work or whether it's good, or whether you're really drilling down and finding new ways of generating leads for their business. They just want a shiny little document that they can put on someone's desk. And that is equally stupid. You know, we wouldn't work with somebody who did that. Um.
We have, um, often referred to ourselves as a rescue agency. We have and, you know, they need a rescue agency. They need to be.
Rescued from the clutches of their current agency, who ironically, are all the things that we're talking.
All the things that we're talking about and have produced this just, you know, garbage website, which.
You ever you have a fun phrase that I won't repeat for those websites to you.
Um, websites.
Yeah. Well, that other shiny wankers one. Oh yeah, that's right.
That's just from one of our automotive clients. Um, it uses that we, um, and I think not just we, I mean, talking about ourselves quite a lot, a bit, a bit of navel gazing going on, but I think businesses in general, when they need the services of another business. What they need is somebody who will get into the trench with them and figure it out and do the difficult stuff and, you know, really make sure that they are much stronger at the end of the post process in many ways. And, um, you know, the kind of whole approach that we take with the discovery and let's, let's look at the problem together and see if there's, if there's good chemistry between us and if we're on the right wavelength. And have we got the skill set that's going to be needed once we've all agreed what needs to be done? I just I still think that's the way to do it. And, and although we will, you know, there was a lot of money on the table with that one. I mean, you know, what, if we if we did a really shiny presentation, are they really going to go with a eleven eleven person agency in Scotland for this gig when they're a, you know, a German large, multi-million pound German pharma company. No they're not. They're going to go and find themselves a big, shiny agency that.
one hundred and fifty people shiny somewhere in London.
And and and, you know, I think in in once you get up to that kind of rarefied atmosphere, companies like that just kind of don't feel comfortable if they're not spending a lot of money, even if what they're getting is no better than what they would have got if they'd come to a smaller agency.
Well, it's a funny thing, isn't it? Because one of the things I was saying to you yesterday when we were talking over what they actually needed is, you know, they didn't need to they don't need to spend the amount of money that they've budgeted for that project at all. You could deliver on a fraction of it, a quarter of it. And I think that's the thing, like a lot of these people have very overinflated expectations. They, they, they want the sort of reassurance and the comfort of the shiny agency that's going to service their two hundred and fifty thousand or three hundred thousand pounds a year retainer. And it's like, you don't need to do any of that stuff. And you are just wasting a lot of that money. But yeah, it's hard to have those conversations with people. I mean, Yeah, I think we do. You're right though. We do have to move past that. I mean, what are effectively just sort of like mating rituals, you know, like you watch David Attenborough and they have the weird birds that sort of flash their tails at each other. I mean, that is agency pitching. That's what's what's actually going on. And it is nonsense. It's not a good way to choose a partner.
I've always quite liked Weird Birds.
Well, that's the birds should listen to this, too. They should get their act together. Honestly.
Birds do.
Yeah. They're not sure you can say that.
I don't think I can. No, that's right. I didn't say that. Um. Okay. Um. So yeah, that's been somewhat cathartic. I shall, I shall go for a, a run in the rain.
Oh very blade runner.
So I go for a run in the rain tonight. And, uh, that'll clear my head a bit more and I'll be fine. But, um, it does things like that. I think, I think in business in general. So I'm not just talking about agencies. I mean, maybe the creative industries, it's maybe a little bit more salient, maybe, I don't know. But I think in any in any line of business where you experience rejection or you experience some difficult conversations and all that, if you care about whatever it is you're doing, it does bruise you. I mean, it has to.
Yeah. Otherwise, you're just not paying attention, I think. But yeah, I just think it's interesting because the sort of overriding sentiment for me is that always, whenever I've met or talk to anybody who's like truly, honestly successful, one of the things they always say is that they really value people that can just like, cut through the crap and be honest about things. And this is one of those situations where effectively, somebody was annoyed at us for not for trying to do that and for not sort of playing their weird game. And I just think, you know, it's just not a, not a not a thing to dwell on overly long, I think.
No, no, I think I think you like I say, I mean, I've kind of, uh, sucked it up and had a good think about, about what happened. I'll, you know, I shall, um, no doubt as I do ruminate on it and um, but here, you know, it was, it was a tough one. And the irony is, as we, as I said at the start of this, um, inane chatter, um, it, it comes a bit left field when things are going.
You have a run.
Of success. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. It's, you know, things, things, you know, couldn't really be better. In fact, you know, we are in that position now where we're being quite choosy about the work that we take on. And that's lovely. It's a nice position to be in. And you know, any business owner can relate to that, that they don't have to just like hoover up everything that gets offered. Yeah. You can actually take a look at things and think, no, that's not going to be, that's not going to be enjoyable and profitable and something that we'd be proud of doing. So we're not doing it.
I don't know if that's just a like a thing with our industry. I mean, I've not really been outside of our industry, so I don't really know. But I think part of it comes down to like the sort of boom and bust cycle of our work as well, doesn't it? Like, because agency life is so much sort of like, I don't know, all the buses always come at once, right? So so you, you're always sort of like a bit leery about things like this. It's like, oh, we lost work and that's really bad. But it doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things. There's plenty of work around, but it feels bad because you don't necessarily know where the next opportunity is going to come from or or whatever. But yeah, I don't know. I guess you're right. You just have to sort of look at things in the round. Do you zoom out a bit?
Yeah you do. So what else have you been doing at the coalface this week? Tell me what you did on Monday. It's only Tuesday, isn't it? So what did you do yesterday?
Uh. Client content. Boring. Um, it's not boring, obviously, but it's probably boring for people to listen to us talk about how we wrote stuff for clients strategy. I mean, it's coming up at the end of the year. So we're having a lot of conversations about with people about, okay, you know, this is coming to the end of projects because we're very good at project planning, obviously. So everything always ends nice and neatly at the end of the year. It does. Um, but lots of conversations about what we're going to be doing next year and sort of planning things and seeing things up for that.
Yeah. Okay.
Good stuff. But yeah, not hugely interesting, I guess.
No, I've been doing quite a lot of, um, Google analytics for GA4 stuff. Not, not particularly complex stuff, but I've just been getting really interested in making sure that we're putting markers in place so that we can see when people are doing some of the things that we want them to do, you know, engage, um, fill in forms, that kind of thing.
So it's a funny thing with things like GA4, isn't it? Because it's like when just.
For anyone listening doesn't know what the hell we're talking about. Basically the replacement to Google's Universal Analytics, um, software, they've now phased that out and it's now GA4, which actually is a lot better.
It is a lot slicker. I hated it to start with, but it is a lot better. But I think with with Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics, any of those products, when you start talking about it, it's like you have to sort of couch everything in that. I'm not an expert because, you know, there are people out there who are just like insanely talented with it. All they do, though. Yeah, and that's their entire life. But then to most of the people listening to this podcast, they will just be like, what on earth is he talking about? Like all of that just went straight over my head. It's a, it's a funny thing, isn't it? It's like, as soon as you dip your toe in that pond, I guess it's like anything, once you start to gain a little bit of experience, you realise how much you don't know. But also you do end up sort of enmeshed in it and unable to see that it is actually quite complicated.
Yeah. In essence, um, Google's, uh, product called Google Tag Manager, um, lets you without having to go to the website itself, drop little snippets of code into your website to, to see, um, to sort of set up triggers which, which fire events, which then GA4, Google analytics four tells you about. And so if you're interested in, you know, how many people clicked a particular link on the website or how many people filled in a particular form, you can see that stuff generally anyway, but there might be certain aspects of the person's journey through your website that won't necessarily be flagged up particularly clearly in Google Analytics four.
But that matter to you.
That matter to you. But therefore, you can use these tools to do that. And once you start playing with it, it's not actually that complicated and you get some really fantastic insights.
Yeah. Well, to, to just for a bit of context, I guess one of the things we're looking at isn't it was just like how, how much of a form somebody had filled out and stuff like that. And just sort of, it's all good and well, knowing that somebody started the form and hasn't stopped it or whatever. But you want to know sort of exactly which bit, which stage of it they got to and that sort of thing. It's really useful.
Yeah. So I've been, I've been doing a bit of that. Um, we are still waiting to hear about a pretty big potential gig and um, I'm, I guess other business owners and, you know, salespeople can relate to this. You get to a certain point with things like that where you just know that it's not coming your way because you know, what's really happening is the company are going through due diligence with the person that they've decided to work with but.
Don't want.
To let you go. Everything's signed off. They don't come back to you and say, you know, thanks, but we got shortlisted for it, which was lovely. Um, and again, we were going up against a well.
We.
Got to.
The last. Yeah. We got. Yeah. It was.
We're thinking it was possibly just a couple of us at the last stage and uh, you know, an eleven person agency going head to head with a one hundred person agency is a bit David and Goliath, isn't it? Well, we all know who won that fight. We do. You don't always win that fight if you're the David in that relationship.
But I think probably the one I mean, not to talk about us too much, but I think one of the one things I will say is that we do keep finding ourselves in that situation recently where we're going up against. And that's good because that means we are sort of pushing into that territory, I guess, tentatively.
That's right. And I do wonder if when we push our new website live, which is kind of imminent, you just wonder what impact that's going to have, whether whether we'll be perceived differently as a result of the new website.
I think so. I mean.
It's quite a departure from where we are now. What we've done, isn't it?
Yeah. And I don't hate our current site at all, but I do think the new one is makes us look more, I don't know, professional better. I don't know.
But, you know, it's interesting because we were having conversations and I hope people can relate to this. You know, we were having conversations internally about this new website and we decided back in, I think it was July, to go down the route of moving our website away from an open source content management system into the HubSpot ecosystem. We already use HubSpot Marketing Pro, and we decided to fork out another, whatever it is, three or four hundred quid a month and use the HubSpot CMS.
Yes.
And, um, yeah, it was around about July. It's now December and we're still working on that because obviously we've got to fit it in around client work and everything else. But, you know, not just that, there were some moments where it felt like it was losing direction and everything else. Well, one of the things that motivate us, motivated us was to simplify the management of the site so that, you know, within the HubSpot CMS, it's a software as a service. It's a SaaS. So it means that we can all be in there doing stuff.
We can mess about with it.
Rather.
Than.
The sort of slightly convoluted, um, dev stack that we've got at the moment. Um, but we'd all kind of convinced ourselves and the design types in the organisation were saying, oh, this isn't, you know, it's not looking right. It's off brand. It's not, not this isn't good. This is we could be better. And there was lots of conversations. And meanwhile, I was quietly thinking to myself, I think the main problem is that there's something going on in the site, which I haven't figured out yet, which means we're not really getting in front of enough people of the right type. Type as in potential customers. People who need the stuff that we do. So while the new site's getting built, I went off and found some issues with our site around date stamps and things like that, which which I decided might be hurting us because it was making it look like all, all the pages were new, You know, they were basically revamps of older pages. And the original date stamp was on there. And I was like, I wonder if that can be hurting us. So I kind of took care of that. And lo and behold, things did start to improve. And then we started to get some really quite impressive enquiries. I mean, the one we were talking about earlier that we, you know, when I messed up the pitch today, I mean, they came, they found.
Us on Google.
Google, they found us in Google and looked at our website and went, yeah, we want to speak to these people. And that's our current website, which, you know, we'd all kind of persuaded ourselves. So I guess the, the story I'm trying to tell there is, and we often, as I've already mentioned in this podcast, rescue websites. So if your website isn't delivering leads, it isn't delivering enquiries. You might not be doing yourself any favors by throwing it away and starting again. Yes. I mean, what we did with our site is we found some technical things, which it turns out were probably holding the site back. Almost certainly. And suddenly the enquiry started coming in. Now we're going to flip the site anyway. We're going to we're going to use the new site because it's a big step forward. I think both, um in terms of structure and, uh, you know, the visual appeal of it and everything else, I think it showcases the work that we do quite nicely and is a better user experience. But, um.
I think if enquiries drop off, you'll be banging the drum of, well, you know.
We could always turn it back on again. I mean, we've been very particular the way we've gone about developing it, you know, we're not changing URLs, but we are changing content and we are changing the look and feel and we are changing the content management system. I mean, I don't I don't anticipate things falling off a cliff. There's absolutely no reason they should. We've moved to a, a better system, um, a less complicated tech stack. And I'm not just talking about the content management system. I mean, there's a, there's some kind of jiggery pokery that we had to do with DNS. I'm getting awful geeky now. I know, um, In order to, um, you know, make the website, um, behave a certain way. And we've always had a sneaky suspicion that that might be one hundred. Not ideal. We'll soon find out I suppose. But um. Yeah, just because your website isn't performing doesn't mean you need a new website, is what I was trying to say. Yeah, just it took me five minutes to say it.
Yeah. No, it is a really good point. I mean, we have a lot of conversations with people who are like, I want a new website. This one isn't working. It's like, well, of course it's not working. It doesn't appear in search. How could it work? So. Yeah, one hundred percent.
And I think it's, you know, it's certainly it can often be more challenging for us as an agency when we it's almost like we foolishly persuade people not to create a new website because, you know, that'd be more work for us. It'd be, you know, there's more, but, you know, there's more money to be made for us if we say, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, your website's pants, you need a new website. That's the starting position. We can't do anything. And we've heard people say that, oh, I spoke to this agency and they said, there's nothing we can do with that website. If you want to work with us, you have to start by building a new website. Well, we would very rarely do that. And and the main reason is and there's an invitation to tender out on just now on the Public Sector Scotland website, and it's worth quite a lot of money. And we looked at their current website and it's actually not awful. And they absolutely don't need to build a new website, because what will happen is they'll get sucked into that vortex of creating a new website and completely ignore the reason that their current website isn't working very well, which isn't because it's not a very good website. It's just it needs adapting, adjusting, optimising, tweaking.
Well, I think.
Etc..
If we're being entirely honest, I think a lot of companies are trapped in this loop, aren't they? I mean, one of the things that I've observed is that, yeah, generally speaking, a chief marketing officer or head of marketing or whatever stays at an organisation for what, a few years? The first thing they do tear up the website, build their own, build a new.
Agency of choice to build a new one.
New website comes along, doesn't do that much better. They're like, oh, leave it. Give it time, give it time. We've seen worse. And then they leave and a new CMO is brought in and they're like, oh, we need a new website. And you just stuck in this endless loop of reinventing the wheel. But it's like nobody's ever even seeing these websites. So, you know, how could they perform properly? But I think this is just about a lot of the way a lot of companies look at websites and their web presence as a sort of like disposable sort of experimental thing on the sidelines of their business rather than a functioning part of the machine, really.
Yeah. I think the thing is as well, um, although as I've just said, it can be quite time consuming and traumatic in many ways, building a new website is still probably easier than figuring out why your website isn't working particularly well, because that is the clever stuff if you like.
Well, and sometimes there's no I mean, you know, we do this stuff day in, day out, round the clock, and it's still taken us a long time to wrestle down what's wrong with our website. And we're still not one hundred percent sure. It's not just that it's difficult, it's that it's a giant unknown, right? And you just sort of continually experimenting. And it might work and it might not. And I think a lot of people just don't have the patience or the confidence to do that. It's much easier to just say, tear it up and start again than it is to sit and live with the uncertainty for a little bit.
Yeah. And there's that kind of excitement of something new and creating something new. And it's, it's, it's, you know, I still think even in twenty twenty three, almost twenty twenty four that, um, C-suites can sometimes get seduced by the idea of a nice shiny new website. And I think still people are going, hey, look at, look at our new website. I mean, I was one recently. There's somebody I know I'm not going to name. Um, and, um, yeah, I'm not going to actually say any more than that because I could easily could easily identify this person. Anyway, they posted on LinkedIn. Um, really proud to announce we've got this new website, right? And I went and looked at it and it was shocking. It was shocking from an aesthetic point of view, from a technical point of view, from an optimisation point of view. And clearly they spent a couple of quid on it. Hopefully not very much. Not many couple of quids. Um, but it was just awful, you know, and people just I don't get it. They don't have to make those mistakes. You know what I mean? But it's such a lot about this stuff. Now we don't have to keep buying rubbish like that.
But you're you were. I'm right in saying, aren't I? Maybe I'll drop myself in it. Now. You were a structural engineer at one point.
I wasn't I was a mechanical engineer at one point.
Okay, fine. I'll I'll find a different analogy. But no, I mean, look, the point I'm saying is you absolve yourself of blame if it's the website's fault, if the reason that your website isn't generating business is just that it's an old crappy website, then that's not your fault as a business owner. It might be the case and it might maybe, but it's, it's a little bit like if you, you know, if there's something wrong with your house and there's water coming down the chimney or whatever, and somebody comes to look at it and they say, oh, yeah, you just need a fresh coat of paint. That'll fix it. It's you know, it's such an easy sell. It's such an easy thing to sort of let yourself be seduced by. I can see the appeal, but it's very rarely. I don't think I mean, we know because we have some clients with websites we didn't build that we don't particularly like that perform very well. And that's not do you know what I mean? A website doesn't have to look fantastic to do well, it just has to look good enough to meet people's expectations and then tell a good story. Yeah. And I think a lot of people are very trapped in this way of thinking where if it's not shiny, if it's not shiny than everybody else's, it doesn't work. And that's not really true. You can make a pretty terrible looking website perform well if you know what you're doing.
Yeah. I mean, that's quite that's quite a nice turn of phrase, a pretty terrible website. And that doesn't mean it's pretty terrible. It means it's pretty, but it's terrible.
Terrible. Yeah.
I like that. Me neither. Yeah. I think we can. I think we can use that. Got a pretty terrible website. We can make it pretty damn good. Um. Okay. Um, well, we kind of covered quite a few subjects there. Like I say, I kind of felt like I needed a bit of catharsis. Um, and just to kind of get that off my chest, um, in amongst, um, just an incredible good news story over the last couple of months and going into twenty twenty four, um, you get a little bit of a slap in the face and it's still, despite all the good stuff that's going on, it's still kind of knocks you.
It's interesting though, isn't it? It's a very British thing. Maybe, I think to do this to talk about bad things, but never a good thing. At no point when all the enquiries were coming in were we like, we must do a podcast about how popular and and wealthy.
Nobody, you know, nobody really wants to know how successful the doom and gloom is generating these fantastic leads. And we've now got these wonderful new customers because they just think, oh, sure enough, well, like when things go wrong, people really. I mean, social media, for Christ's sake, you know, all people do on social media is so show you their shiny life, don't they? You know, they don't show the bad stuff unless there's attention seeking.
So you think it's like the reverse for this podcast?
Yeah, because, I mean, I'm not seeking attention. I mean, I know it's just.
Like bad news, don't.
They? Yeah. I mean, generally, if you, if you listen to the news, it, you know, it, it doesn't cut it. If it's just like this great thing happened and then this other great thing happened. And then in the other part.
It's so.
Funny thing happened.
Because the poet Ben.
Benjamin. Benjamin Zephaniah. Yeah. He just died.
He just died? Yeah. Um, I was listening to a rerun of a, um. He was like guest editor of BBC radio four, and they were rerunning it the other day, and he was making the pitch for good news. He was like, you should just do nothing but be like, oh, so and so just got better from cancer. And so and so had a really good day and stuff like that. And they were like, but nobody would listen to that. And it was, it was really disheartening to listen to because the news presenter was just unpicking his arguments every time. But, but people just wouldn't tune in for that. People liked.
It. He's right.
Yeah, absolutely right. But it's horrible.
Although in theory, albeit superficially, people do tune into social media and like, okay, on on, I don't know your favorites. Reddit. My my favorites. Um, generally ex Twitter. Um, although it's increasingly just irritating.
I don't think you can say that you go on Twitter for good news though.
No, that's what I mean.
I mean.
Yeah, that's what I mean on ex or Twitter it's you know, because of the people I follow it's political stuff. It generally is people bitching about bad stuff. Um, whereas I've recently, um, because of my involvement in the golf club and I'm on the social committee at the golf club, I've been doing more on Facebook and then currently I've got like a campaign running locally because of a bridge closure and I'm trying to do my bit to, you know, help people who are being affected by it. So I'm leveraging Facebook for that. And so I've spent a bit more time on Facebook. And although you get people on Facebook who, you know, something will get posted and they'll come on and immediately criticise it. It's nothing like as vicious as as ex I mean, what's what's read it like vicious.
No more.
Grown.
Up. Yeah. People like so in Reddit, you upvote downvote depending on whether or not you think something adds to the conversation. I like that, but people actually just use it as a sort of, I don't like your opinion, so I'm gonna dance. Yeah. So there's a bit of that, but it's generally quite thoughtful.
I am considering like switching allegiance from from X to Reddit because I'm getting a bit fed up on X. Yeah, it's all very tribal because politics is. And, um, every time I comment on something, I get one of these love bots liking, liking, you know, literally like I could do it now and within five minutes or a few minutes, there's like, you know, um, sweet Susie one, two, three, four. He's looking for a soul mate. Um, type profiles, which like your comments, which just like I'm just like every time block, block, block, but it just seems relentless. And I don't know, I don't know if Elon Musk is trying to do something about it because stuff like that can eventually just destroy a platform. Well, there's clearly something wrong. It ain't working. Whatever he's doing.
I was right, I'm right in thinking, aren't I, that one of the first things he did was fire all of his sort of QA teams and stuff like that. So yeah, maybe.
But correct me if I'm wrong on Reddit. Um, you can't even immediately start commenting on stuff. Do you have to.
Get massively restricted to start with? Yeah, it's weird you can't post until you've got a certain amount of like karma, which is upvotes basically, and stuff like that. So you have to start off just like sort of actually adding to discussions otherwise commenting and stuff. Yeah. But the idea being that it sort of rewards you making useful contributions to things rather than sort of, yeah, yeah.
Okay. I might, I might actually spend a bit more time on there. I mean, my favorite is still, um, tick tock at the moment I am learning so much off tick tock for work and golf and fishing and you name it. There's somebody on there imparting their wisdom. Well, it's so good.
I did a funny because I was building a cabinet in the bathroom, right. And I was trying to hang the door properly and I went to tick tock. I was like, do you know what? Like maybe the kids of today actually have something, right? I'll go there and have a look. And now my TikTok feed is just just joinery stuff. But like amazing joinery stuff is like people like, just like hold two pieces of wood down and do a little squiggle with a knife and suddenly there's a box or something like Jesus, that's incredible. But it's really interesting for that sort of thing. I think you can learn a lot through it. It's just, again, about getting on the right side of the algorithm, isn't it?
I do find I do quite enjoy learning by watching videos and things like that, rather than I've never been particularly good at reading. Um, I mean, I can read honest, honest, I can, yeah, but I kind of like, you know, like video stuff, video tutorials I find particularly useful.
It's really interesting, isn't it, to think that we used to live in a world. We came up in a world though. Everything was in textbooks, everything was in. I remember, um, my first ever job, my boss buying me Eric Ward's book on how to build links, which is fantastically ironic if you think about somebody writing a textbook about how to do something on the internet. But that's what it used to be like.
I did some good. I had some good conversations with Eric, I did, I did a, I did a bit of technical work on his website and had some good conversations with him a good few years ago, obviously because he's been dead a while, been dead a very sad, took his life, didn't he took his own life, I think.
I think he did. I'm not.
Sure.
Yeah, he was brilliant. I mean, some of his strategies are still I mean, everybody uses them don't they.
So yeah. Yeah. That's right. He was certainly a legend. And um, when I found myself kind of inverted commas working with him, it was just like I was doing some pro bono stuff just to help him out and, you know, but we had some good conversations. And yeah, it was I remember being like, when I heard about him, you know, it was very sad. But, um, okay, we can't finish on that note. No, we need to finish on some things up.
Yeah.
That's right. I can't think what though.
What are you doing for the rest of the week? It's only Tuesday.
It's only Tuesday. Yeah, but yeah, it's only Tuesday now. But it's basically Friday in about four hours. Or at least it'll feel like that. Yeah, yeah. So, um, I've got a proposal to do if I decide to do it. Um, and just, just more technical, technical work on, on some of our newer clients. I've got a nice sort of list of things I want to work on this week and to get to get one, one project in particular really kicking along quite, quite nicely. So I'm looking forward to that.
Excellent.
Good. All right. Um, I think we'll manage another one before Christmas won't we. Yeah, absolutely.
We'll hold ourselves to that.
We'll hold ourselves to that. We'll try and get back onto a decent cadence. There you go. Finish on one of my favourite words. You've been listening to Digital Marketing From The Coalface, which is usually just a lot of drivel that Dave and Alex speak about their working life in digital marketing at redevolution.com Um, if you've got anything you'd like us to cover in the podcast, um, you could send it in. We might cover it depends. If it's interesting, we will. If it's not interesting.
We'll send it in an interesting way. Carrier pigeon. Yeah. Something like that.