Take Digital Seriously Or Don't Bother At All, Digital Marketing Chat With Alex & Dave - Episode 116

One of the things that we see is people who don't want to be involved in the marketing when it's in that strategising phase, but then they do want to be involved when they start to see the tactics being deployed.

I think it's appalling that people on the C-suite don't get involved in this stuff. One of the more successful business people I ever spent any time with, he and I sat in his office at this very big engineering company, which became an enormous engineering company. He sat down with me and gave me a couple of hours at the very, very start of the project. And like I said, he's one of the most successful business people I've ever had the pleasure to know, an absolute powerhouse. And he recognised how important it was. And yet we still find ourselves talking to companies where the people at the top think this stuff is way beneath them.

Yeah.

So welcome back. Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface with me, Dave Robinson and Alex Bussey. Say hello. Alex.

Hello.

I said say hello. Alex.

I'm not gonna do that. Oh, it's not Simon Says.

Yeah. Um. Well, no. Um.

It's good to see you're in a good mood.

I'm not in a good mood. I'm just. I'm just, uh. It's Friday, so.

All right.

I'm not in a bad mood either. Um, it's obviously, um, we decided last week when we did our first podcast for quite some time that we would keep up the momentum. Mhm. Um, so here was here we are keeping up the momentum with more drivel from the coalface of digital marketing. Lots happening this week. There's been lots of stuff going on, but my notes are are scant at best. What about you?

Well, it's frustrating because I can't read them from upside down this time either, so I'm not going to be able to crib them. Um, no, I just wanted to say that I don't I'm not really sure it helps our listeners when you are wholly negative about the podcast all the time.

But it is, though. It's just driven.

I mean, you know, yeah, no, there's a couple of things I really well, there's one thing that I really wanted to talk about, but I'm trying to rack my brain.

No, you know, I think yeah, no falls in the same category category as people who give one hundred and ten percent and call a building a premise. All right. Go on. Yeah. No.

We're off to a good start. There's only one thing I really want to talk about, and it's something that's been bugging me since, I think, Monday of this week. I'm not sure whether we've really covered it before. Um, but it's just to sort of talk about why you shouldn't sort of, um, react negatively when people explain to you that your budget is too small or I guess another way, a better way of framing this is to explain why agencies sometimes ask for bigger budgets. And it's not to feather our own nest. I think that's the that's the sort of the place that a lot of business people operate from. So my agency's coming to me and they're saying they need four grand a month because, you know, they want more money. Um, and it's just to talk around that subject really because, well, a problem that I've run into a few times recently is people who say, well, you know, we've got a small budget and we want to do all of this great stuff. And then you go to them and you say, we can't possibly deliver everything that you want us to do on this relatively small budget. You simply cannot do everything at that price point. And then they'll say, okay, well, I just want to do the bits that I think are important to me. And then you say, okay, and you do that and you miss out all the other stuff that was probably necessary. And then they come back to you and say, well, how come this hasn't happened? And you have to have the conversation again about the fact that you actually do need to do everything all at once, and you do require a certain level of investment to make digital marketing work. Because I think the sort of analogy in my head is, is it's a strange analogy, actually. I don't know if it really works, but it's like if I.

Got a strange head.

I've got a strange head. If I give you a jet plane, say, like a jumbo jet. Seven. Four. Seven. And I sit on a runway. It has no engines. And I say, make this jet plane go. And you try to make it go by attaching the engines one at a time. Terrible, terrible things will happen. And that is sort of, I guess what I feel like happens a lot of the time when somebody comes to you and they say, okay, well, here's a thousand pounds, do some marketing and you're like, we can only, you know, we can use that to do PPC. Fantastic. But if all we do is PPC for you, a thousand pounds a month, in six months time, you will not have the results that you would have had if you just sort of made the full investment and done all the other good stuff, because it's I guess it's because what we do is quite multifaceted. You can't just do PPC. You can't just do SEO in isolation. You have to be doing quite a few different things together. Um, and we just, yeah, I don't know. I don't know if you have any thoughts on this, really, but it's just it's just one of those things that I think a lot of people maybe don't understand. Coming into it from the outside is that, you know, this isn't a sort of like you put your, your coin in the slot machine and pull the lever and some good stuff comes out. It doesn't work like that.

So on the one hand, um, budget driven marketing, if the budget is insufficient to achieve much, is problematic.

Yeah.

It's also problematic if companies don't have a budget and we come across this a lot. You know, we want to, um, engage with an agency to help us grow the business. Great. Have you got a budget in mind? Uh, no, we haven't got a budget in mind. Which is code for. We don't want to tell you how much budget we've got, because you'll tell us that's what it'll cost. And we've covered this a thousand times. It's this ongoing kind of lack of trust dilemma. And I understand that until you get to know somebody, you can't really trust them. So that's that's kind of normal. Um, so we, you know, if a, if a company comes to us and they say we've got five grand a month for the next twelve months because our marketing is all over the place and we want to grow the business, and we understand that marketing will be a key part of growing the business. Um, at least, you know, we know where we are now. If we do the discovery work and dig into it, create the strategy and the strategy. Strategy requires fifteen grand a month in order to implement it over a twelve month period. Then clearly there's a problem. It's like, you know, change expectations. I accept it's going to take a lot longer. Yeah. Which is kind of problematic in this day and age with things moving and changing. I mean, they move and change. But I mean, the fundamentals I guess are the same. Um, so, you know, what are we actually saying to people? Like on the one hand, it has to be needs driven, the budget has to be needs driven. But on the other hand, if you haven't got some idea of what kind of money you want to spend when you start the conversations, then you could be wasting everybody's time.

Yeah, well, I think it's that when we because always when we start projects and I imagine most other agencies are the same, they do discovery and you spend a lot of time and a lot of effort sort of outlining the scope of the project.

You think most other agencies do discovery.

Trying.

To be a lot of agencies are strict to tactic agencies, straight to tactic, no strategy, straight to tactic. Just like, let's do some PPC and see what happens.

Yeah, yeah. Well, okay, so, well, I'm gonna be optimistic and assume that most agencies work like us. You know, you put all of this work in and it is a fair amount of work into working out what exactly is involved in getting you to where you want to be. And normally at the end of that sort of strategy, the discovery and the strategy that follows it, you come up with a sort of rough ballpark figure based on the amount of work that you think there is to do. And when an agency comes to you with that figure, I guess what I'm really getting at is, is if you turn around to them and you say, well, I think you've just conjured that out of thin air and you can have half of that, you know, that's not going to work. There's a reason they've come to you with that figure. And you cannot necessarily just sort of do a quarter of the plan and get a quarter of the results. It just doesn't work like that. No, because without sufficient investment, you know, I mean, you can't put three wheels on a car and then be like, well, it'll go a third of the speed, you know, three quarters of the speed because it just won't. Um, and I guess that's what I'm getting at. It's like you have to at least meet the threshold that your market sort of needs to get started.

A typical conversation for us. I don't think it's unreasonable. First of all, let me just let me just reverse. I don't think it's unreasonable that people some businesses who've never really taken marketing seriously. I don't think it's unreasonable. And I've said this a thousand times before in the previous podcasts that they don't know what stuff costs. Yeah, I just think it's totally reasonable. They don't know what stuff costs. We're all in that situation. If you were to say to me, uh, how much would it cost a plumber to fit a new shower in my, in my eye, I might guess like, well, the shower's about five hundred quid and it'll take him about a day. So about a thousand quid. I might not be a million miles out with that, but I might go to, you know, um, a real kind of high end plumber. And they say, well, you know, we fit showers and, you know, starting at two and a half grand because they fit a Trevor Boost shower or some fancy thing, you know what I mean? So I don't think it's unreasonable, um, that people don't know what things cost. That's why it's vital to do the, the whole discovery piece. But what I do think is important is that there's a conversation early on about typically what things cost. So if we might say to people, you know, at the very low end, uh, we've got people that were working with, with a budget of a couple of grand a month, and at the higher end, five, six, seven thousand pounds a month. And plenty of agencies would say, yeah, ours is ten, fifteen thousand a month, whatever. And that conversation is the vital thing for me because, you know, even some of, you know, there's plenty of large businesses. If you said to them there are there are businesses like yours who are investing fifteen, twenty, twenty five thousand dollars a month on digital, whatever that might be, you know, web stuff, lead gen PPC, whatever. They would be just horrified. They've never spent any money on it in the past. And suddenly you're asking for them. The two grand a month sounds like an awful lot of money. Um, and that's why, you know, the discovery, as you've said, most decent agencies will do this and we do it, you know, free of charge. Um, because we want to establish, um, what's needed if we're the right guys to do it. And then, but you will always qualify, you will always, um, pre-qualify that, that session with a, you know, it's likely it could be in this range and all that does is, you know, people that were thinking it was a five hundred quid a month type thing and are gonna, you know, we're not going to waste anybody's time or theirs or theirs. Ours.

Yeah. I mean, what do you think about when, when so pre-existing clients, um, or relationships that have been going on for quite a long time. You've got a set budget. They decide they want to pivot and use the budget for something else. You know, you go back to them and say, well, if you if you want to do, I don't know, TikTok marketing or, or to sort of branch out and start doing SEO. And historically you've only done pay per click advertising or something. You know, we can do that, but it's going to swallow all of your budget and we're going to have to abandon the stuff that we've been doing before. Like how I mean, because I think that's a thing that a lot of people do sort of dance about with their marketing. They want to pivot, they want to try something new, they want to sort of like, and sometimes that can be valid. Sometimes it's useful. But I think a lot of the time, you know, you it takes a long time for digital marketing to pay off and.

Sometimes.

Sometimes. But when you pivot away from something and completely abandon it, you end up sort of stalling. Everything stalls. Yeah.

But this is this is the, this is the tactic, approach, tactic first approach to marketing. So, you know, let's try TikTok, let's try X, let's try PPC, let's try LinkedIn, let's try SEO.

Whereas in reality, you should probably be doing all of the all the bits that are relevant.

Well, in reality, you need to do a strategy and figure out, you know, where your tribe is, how to get in front of them, and what you need to do to try and get them to engage with you. So, you know, it's kind of relevant. I mean, if you, if you're trying things out, then it's usually the case that you haven't got a strategy unless you, you know, you're a complete me too business. And, you know, you can see your competitors are all over PPC, so we better just get in amongst that. Yeah, you just kind of like just copying and doing whatever other people are doing because maybe even that's my that might be in and of itself better than doing nowt, I guess.

I think a lot of the time, though, that pressure comes from above. Like it'll be people, you know, higher up, maybe like CEOs, that sort of thing who look at it and say, well, I can see our competitors doing this. Or like, you know, I went on and googled something and our competitors popped up in ads and we didn't. So now I want you to do Google ads. And I think that's quite difficult for certainly, like, I think it's difficult for our clients, like marketing managers, for example, to negotiate that. But it's also quite hard for us because then, you know, you sort of like, oh, well, we could pivot over there, but it's not a good use of your budget. So.

Yeah. The, um, that's why, um, you know, discovery scoping, call it whatever you like discovery. I mean, I'm kind of going off the idea of calling it discovery. It's obviously the legal, the legal industry uses discovery, don't they? But, you know, just figuring out where a customer, where a potential client is, um, what their market looks like, what markets they could potentially be in that they're not in what their competitors are doing. And those sessions are good because at the end of those sessions, companies broadly understand what their competitors, you know, understanding what your competitors are doing is, is quite, um, what is it? It can be, it can be a positive experience because you can actually uncover that, you know, if we, if we do, if we do something, we're likely to steal a lead because our competitors are not doing anything. More, more. Usually today, twenty twenty four companies are. Companies we talk to are playing catch up to a certain extent. And then when we do the scoping discovery sessions, we find out that that their competitors are, you know, streets ahead of them. But what that does is it helps us understand what we helps everybody understand what's needed. So, you know, well, they can't then just decide that they're going to do a couple of grand a month engagement because we've already established that they've got a mountain to climb.

You need to climb that mountain.

So like either don't even try and climb the mountain. Just take the cable car to the top. I use PPC paid, search, paid, paid anything, interruption type marketing. PPC is an interruption marketing. But you know, there are plenty of other tactics which are hit and hope, as you say in golf hitting hope type tactics, um, or, or, or, you know, get serious about it.

Do you think? Yeah. I think listening to you say that, I think one of the things that jumps out to me though is, is the word everyone, right? It's like these discovery sessions really only work when you get everybody who's going to be involved in the room. Yeah. And I think because I think one of the things that we I.

Know what you're talking about.

I think one of the things that we see is people who don't want to be involved in the marketing when it's in that strategising phase, but then they do want to be involved when they start to see the tactics being deployed and they're like, oh, but, but why aren't we on LinkedIn? My mates on LinkedIn, you know, CEO of XYZ company. And I think that's the key, isn't it? I think, I guess what we're saying is that, yeah, you actually have to get everybody who's going to be involved round a table and have a very frank discussion.

I think it's appalling that people on the C-suite don't get involved in this stuff, and it's one of the more successful business people I ever spent any time with. And I'm not talking about, you know, like watching watching them in an auditorium. I'm talking about. He and I sat in his office at this very big engineering company, which became an enormous engineering company. Um, he sat down with me and gave me a couple of hours at the very, very start of the project. And like I said, he's one of the most successful business people I've ever had the pleasure to know, um, an absolute powerhouse. And he recognised how important it was. And yet we still find ourselves talking to companies where the people at the top think this stuff is way beneath them. Yeah, it's it's beyond dumb.

And it's sad because you meet very impassioned. Um, I know you hate the word passionate, but you meet people who are very driven.

I hate it with a passion.

Marketing managers who are really excited about what they're doing, and they are handicapped by that lack of buy in. They cannot get ideas past the post.

Unless, you know, I can understand situations where the CEO, the people on the C-suite are conduit ING everything through the CMO, the chief marketing officer, or whatever, or whoever's heading up marketing. You know, they've definitely got the ear of them. They're just kind of busy running the company and doing other things, but they are involved indirectly. That's fine. I guess just to clarify where I'm coming from, it's the people who think this is all a load of fluffy nonsense and it's a waste of time. Um, you know, that irks me because then you find yourself exactly in the situation you talked about where, you know, they'll just kind of dip their toes in now and again and say, I was talking to Rodney at the club and he told me that he's, he's doing a, he's doing fabulous business on LinkedIn. Why are we doing LinkedIn? You know, tactic based bullshit.

Or like, there was an example earlier today where we were talking to somebody and they were saying, you know, we built a website, we got sign off from the marketing manager, we got everybody involved in the content, we produce all the content. And then at the end of the project, the CEO came in and said, right, you don't need that bit of the website, you don't need this bit or nothing. Yeah. And gutted it based on. And had they been involved at the very beginning, maybe they could have said, don't bother going down this route because I'll never sign off on it. But you just, you know, it wastes everybody's time. Really. Yeah.

I understand it. I get it, I get it. I understand why people who are running large multi-million pound businesses and, and they're taking in fifty million million of investment from buckthorn partners or somebody and all the rest of it. I understand all that. I understand the dynamics of it all. And this stuff seems so, you know, unimportant. But like, you know, do you really think that the, the the Amazons, the Coca-colas, the apples of this world paid no attention to marketing and messaging and storytelling and all that. Well, you.

Know, that's why those brands exist. That's there for a lot of brands like Coca Cola, for example. I mean, like ninety percent of what they do now is just brand positioning. That's it. That's sort of what Coke is.

And all right, maybe B2B is different, but in B2B, you're still positioning yourself as the go to people for blue widgets.

Yeah.

You're still you're still positioning yourself as that and telling a good story. Anyway, I think we've kind of gone a bit tangential on that. We have. Okay. What else you got? Uh, what else has happened this week that's been incredibly enlightening and enlivening and a joy to to your tiny brain.

Um, it's a good question. Um, one thing I have run up against a couple of times, it's actually something you said earlier in the week in a strategy session is, um, just to, because I know we've touched on the whole gated content thing again, but I guess just to revisit that about whether or not it actually works because it's something that we've spent quite a lot of time doing for a client, uh, is producing an ebook. And I think quite rightly, when we sat down internally and had a little strategy session about it, you said, you know, what's the value in that? What's it actually supposed to do? And I think in that instant. Um, without delving into the details, it's basically an ebook about how to get buy in from the C-suite for a new project. And I think, you know, for them, it's going to form like part of the sales process as well as the marketing process. They're going to give it to potential customers. Um, so I think it does make a lot of sense, but it was an interesting thing because you challenged me on it and immediately I thought, oh, actually, maybe this is a mistake because in general, I think that tactic of producing white papers and ebooks is quite tired now, isn't it? I think it is sort of.

Yeah, it's always been effective. If you've got something that people really, really want.

Yeah.

Like if it's.

Stats.

Yeah, it's stats. Um, how to, how to become rich by selling tat on TikTok, you know, obviously things like that. Um, yeah, it's difficult. I, I, I've always been free and easy. If there's something that looks mildly interesting to me and they want my email address, they can have it because I'll just go and click the button as soon as I get what I want and tell them to bugger off. So it's not. And I don't find that I'm not one of these people who are like, who will spend like an hour of my day emailing people to say, how dare you email me? You sent me an email and I never asked for that email to be sent. And I'm indignant with rage. And just like, just like, I'd rather just, like, spend an extra hour on the golf course, but bugger off.

But that's an interesting point, though, isn't it? Because I think what we're effectively saying is like, you might not annoy somebody, you know, but that's it. That's the best case scenario. Like, I can't remember the last time I read an email that I'd been sent after downloading an ebook. I don't think that's a thing.

No, I think I think we are becoming, um, you know, um, a new noon. Is that the right word to it anyway? Yeah. Um, I think, um, I, I think it's as simple as if the, if the pin that is being felt by the people you want to down you people who you want to download the PDF and that probably isn't good English. But anyway, if the pain isn't acute that they're feeling, they're not going to do it or there's a risk they might not. So why risk not getting your stuff in front of them so that you're then being considered? And that's just stating the obvious, I think.

Yeah, no, I think I agree with you. Yeah. I think it's one of those tactics that it's really hard to justify now, especially when you consider the time investment in writing a white paper or an ebook or something like that.

I mean, split test it.

Yeah.

You know, just make, make the offer, make sure that a thousand people see the offer and then with a gate on it and make sure the same, you know, yeah. See what your foregone conclusion if it's not gated, they're just going to click it. If they finished up there isn't it. But I guess it'd be interesting to know how many people the gate prevented from opening it and downloading it.

Well, I guess it would also be really interesting to know if you could. I'm trying to think in my head how you would track it, but if you could somehow track how many leads each experiment generated as well, because that's the real kicker, is we still sort of hinge on this idea that people need nurturing and that, you know, you need their email address and you need to get the book because then you have to send them twenty follow up emails. Otherwise you're not front of mind and they'll forget about you. But I'd be quite interested to see that done. Statistically, if you give somebody a resource for free, are they not going to remember you because you were the guys that gave them something really useful for free? I don't know.

Yeah, it's an interesting one. It's not really, I'm just humoring you because you actually brought some subjects to the podcast.

Thanks. You're a very nice person, by the way.

What do you think about price driven enquiries? We've had a few of them this week. You know, the conversation is usually quite short and yeah, can get me some prices.

Yeah. It's really difficult, isn't it. Because I think this is back to the way that people don't understand what they're buying. I think what we were talking about at the beginning of this is that you can't really know how much something's going to cost until you've done a load of discovery and a load of legwork. Well, it's a little bit like if you contact a Savile Row tailor and you say, how much is the suit going to cost? And they're going to come back to you with a very wide range that is probably not in any way indicative of what you'll end up paying. And I find it surprising that people in these companies shop like that. They think, oh, I'll just go and ask for their prices. It's like, well, you know what? What do you want to see? They're like, you want to see a nice round number and to feel like, oh, that's affordable. But that's, I don't know.

I'm sure lots of I'm sure everybody, nearly everybody in business gets this. Yeah. You know, whether you're selling legal services, accounting services, marketing services, or, you know, anything in between, people are interested to know, you know, what this might cost. Um, I guess I'll go on.

Well, I was gonna say, I think you sound a very conciliatory note there. I think, I think it's fine to say that you understand where it comes from. I do think it's a little bit odd, bordering on naive. I mean, you wouldn't go into a car dealership and say, how much does a car cost? Most people get.

They got the price on the windscreen, you clown.

I mean. They do. I've never noticed. No, but I mean, you know, most people don't think, oh, I'll just ask how much this very broad and ill defined thing costs.

And how much is a car that you mean that sort of dumb question?

Yeah. It's like normally you think, okay, well, you know, you know, I.

I think what I'm driving at though, I think I think more than more than that, I, you know, it's fair enough that people want to know what something's going to cost. I think what I'm driving at is, is that, you know, when the conversation is just almost purely about money. So it's just like, hello, my name's Dave. Hello, John. Nice to meet you. Right. If you could get some prices over to me for website management or SEO or whatever, that's all I really need right now. You know, that kind of thing. Yeah, it's.

It's really challenging, isn't it? Because I think for a lot of people, business is all about money and all that matters is money. And that's how we that's how we talk about and frame an awful lot of things. But I think the reality of it is that we don't. I mean, certainly, and I think it's one of the things that probably sets us apart as an agency, but we don't really sell things like that in blocks. It's not sort of commoditised in that way.

But it does come up a lot, doesn't it? I guess, um, uh, to me, it's, I think it's when it's bolted on to, uh, a lack of interest when, when I'm having a conversation with a potential customer, they kind of just want a price and they're clearly doing something more interesting on Zoom, you know, on their computer when you're having the Zoom call with them. It's that kind of thing I'm really driving at. So I'm probably just having a whinge.

No, I think well, I think, I don't know, I, I because I think to me it's more like a fundamental misunderstanding. It's like when people ask us about packages, like SEO packages is my favourite one like that. And it's like, we don't know, grown up agency sells packages and you haven't, you've fundamentally misunderstood the problem. The problem isn't that your website needs an SEO package to work. It's not like putting oil in your car or whatever. It's like you need to sit down with somebody and you need to discover what gap your your website has to cover to, to work properly. But they don't even get that far. Like you say, they're busy doing something on Zoom. They're busy, you know, they've read somewhere like, oh, I need SEO to make my website more popular. How much do I pay for SEO? You know, like, just like, snap your fingers and it's done. It's not this is, I think with digital marketing in general, you get out of it what you invest in it. And I mean that in terms of like time and energy, not money.

It's yeah. But I mean, if somebody said to us, um, you know, how much are your website packages, your SEO packages, for example, then we'd be perfectly legit for us to say at the start at two thousand quid, the fact that they're not necessarily an off the shelf package. Well, absolutely not an off the shelf package. The fact that it's a it's a conversation, figuring out what they need, putting together a strategy and then start and then delivering on that strategy. If they've said, right, okay, well, I'll buy a two grand package. You know, you could, you could, you could potentially sell them something unless the discovery uncovers that, like it's really not even going to touch the sides. So don't bother. Yeah. And we would say that to people, you know, we would say it's, you know, there's no point spending two grand even though, you know.

Yeah, maybe it's a maybe it's a semantics problem. Maybe it's the packages bit that I really dislike, but it is the idea that you can just say, you know, like fifteen links, six Metadescription. Yeah, no.

That's yeah, I'm.

Not. I feel like when people say packages or what are your costs? That's what they because.

They've said, okay, so two thousand and how many links will I get for that? And how many blog posts will I get for that?

And it's like, you've just missed the point entirely. That's not what we're doing.

That's just our fault for having conversations with the wrong type of potential customer.

But I don't know though, because I think sometimes it's people who are, you know, otherwise quite good prospects as in, you know, they work for a decent going business. There is a big gap between what their website is doing and should be doing. You know, you know, you look at these people, the enquiry comes in and you go and look at their website and you're like, yeah, we could knock it out of the park for them. It's a decent going concern. There's a big market for what they're doing, but they just they've just completely framed the problem incorrectly in their head. And now they've gone down a sort of path where you can't necessarily follow them and you can't help them because they're like, oh, but but how many links will that get me? Or, you know, sort of just that.

Process, if we get into those conversations, they're usually quite short because we actually understand, you know, when we're the right guys, you know, based on those conversations and, and based on the kind of business that they are. Which just brings me on to the final thing to have a quick chat about today. We with our new website going live, the HubSpot website, which I'm delighted with, um, performance.

Even though you hated it to start with.

Yeah. Because I, you know, it was, it struggled for a while. It was, yeah, it was, it was all just a bit, I don't know, I can't really, I don't yeah, let's not bore everybody with why I didn't like it. But um, I certainly um you know, we got a good product in the end. I'm pleased with it in the end. But importantly, you know, it's on the HubSpot platform, which is making owning it, running it the way it's hooked into our CRM and everything else is just, it's just a joy. Um, so that's all great. Um, but one of the things that we decided to do is we, we took a long, hard look at the kind of companies that we really like working with and that we work successfully with. Um, and we have now set our stall out as a company who work with tech and engineering companies who need their website to generate leads. It's a very simple proposition, very specific. It's very specific. And we've decided to to, to own that. We've decided to embrace that. Um, obviously, you know, well, what if a such and such company comes along and they read that and then they see that, oh, well, no, I'm not a tech or an engineering company. And that's it. End of conversation. I'll go somewhere else. Um, yeah, fine. But you know, my, my view is that that by setting our stall out, the people that we really want to work with will see that they're people we really want to work with.

Yeah.

I don't know where this is going to go. I mean, what are your thoughts on it?

Well, I think it's really interesting, isn't it? Because I think we're sort of back to talking about something that anybody listening to this podcast will recognise. Anybody that's listening to this podcast for advice on or information around messaging, especially if you've ever thought about the way that you pitch your company, you have had this internal debate, you know full well deep down that only twenty percent of the people that are on your website or that see what you're doing or whatever, are actually the people you want to work with. And at some point you bottle it. I think we've all been there. You think, no, I can't possibly just say that. I only want to sell. I don't know, um, I'm trying to think of an example like Porsches to, you know, Italian gentleman with over fifty.

Cars.

In the bank. You know, I don't I don't want to I don't really want to humor people who have less than fifty grand to spend and aren't looking for, you know, top of the line product. Oh, and you think to yourself, oh, I can't possibly say that. It's too bold. I'll lose a load of potential customers. I think you do just have to be brave at a certain point, don't you? I think that is what it comes down to. I don't think if we're being completely honest with ourselves, I don't think we ever thought that, you know, we weren't for tech and engineering companies. We just didn't want to say it just in case it backfired and lost US business. Yeah.

I mean, we've a long time ago recognised that we particularly like and are particularly good at B2B. So it's only a it's only a I mean, in tech and engineering companies doesn't narrow it down. You know, we've got a, you know, there's an agency that we do some work for who are based in the States. And they've, they've niched down to companies who install generators in people's houses, you know, specific. No, but yeah, but, you know, he's following that. He's researched it and he's he thoroughly believes that as the go to guys for, for those companies. And there are lots of them. And I can see why. Why would you go anywhere else? These guys understand this market inside out and we've come across it, you know, like companies like ours who only work with accountants or only work with solicitors, that's very specific. We're not that specific say in engineering and tech companies.

But it is something you're right. And it is something a lot of people do ask us at the very beginning is, have you had experience working with companies in our in our niche before? It is important to. People are one hundred percent get that. I think, yeah, I think you have to strike a balance. Um, and I think you do have to be quite bold. I think going after just one very specific narrow bit of the market is a very brave move, though.

Yeah, but we haven't done that. You don't believe. No.

We've left ourselves open. And but again, a lot of this comes down to perception doesn't it. I mean we say tech and engineering companies. We have a very specific type of client in mind, but lots of people will think of themselves as a tech company, you know, that we wouldn't necessarily think of or, you know, they might run an engineering company, but not think of it as an engineering company. So you do have to be careful. And I do think you have to be constantly testing that messaging and not just say like, right, we've made it abundantly clear who we want to work with. Now the market will do the rest because that's not we don't know that that's true necessarily. No.

That's right. Okay. Um, I can't think of anything else. This has been a bit of a dreary podcast. I'm not, I'm not I'm not delighted with it. But, um, I think, um, there are some, there are some interesting insights, I think in there from the coalface of digital marketing.

I think you're just in a grumpy mood.

I'm not. I'm not in a grumpy mood. I'm annoyed with myself because this week there was a couple of times this week where I thought, oh, that'll be great for the podcast, I'll scribble it down. And I didn't scribble it down. So I'm kind of irked at myself. So I shall try harder for next week. I shall make sure.

It is one of the things, isn't it? I mean, just reflecting on that briefly, it's quite difficult when you do these podcasts and you are sort of always aware of the fact that you're trying to gather material for it. But it is very frustrating when there's topics and things you know, you want to cover, and then it just sort of slips out of your mind.

Yeah. That's right. Exactly. So we'll get better at that. So if you've managed to stick to the end of this one, well done. You deserve a medal. Um, but we will improve and we will keep this going. But at least it's real. It's just a couple of guys who work in digital marketing talking about the shit they're doing. And I think that that has some value in and of itself. Um, you've been listening to Dave and Alex on Digital Marketing From The Coalface, uh, more of this, uh, nonsense next week and, uh, have a great weekend. Or if you've listened to it on Monday because you've just got back to work. Have a great week and, uh, speak to you soon.