Coz Breaking Up Is Hard To Do, Digital Marketing Chat With Alex & Dave - Episode 118

And I'm sure there are people listening to this who are working with SEO providers who every month hand them a report and it shows a graph going up and to the right, and it shows some green arrows, and it says, we've increased traffic. And they think, oh, good, my SEO is working. And I just find that like quite a frightening place to be as an industry really, because that is not it is has never been and will never be what marketing is actually about. And people will invest thousands and thousands and thousands of pounds into marketing that just isn't actually helping them. And they don't even realise there's just such a huge disconnect there between sort of, yeah, marketing is going well. More people can see our website. Well, that's fantastic, but that's not the aim of your website. And that's not what it's there for. The brand awareness thing is one of those other things that really annoys me because people will do it with pay per click advertising especially. They will run adverts on behalf of companies and then the company will say, what's this actually done for me? And they'll say, well, nothing directly attributable, but look, it's raised your profile. All these people have seen you. Now you're top of mind. It's just such bullshit.

So welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. And what a coalface it's been for the last seven days, isn't it? Yes, it's been quite the coalface. There's been all sorts happening, some of which we'll talk about today, some of which, if we did, we'd have to kill everybody who heard it. We would. So we can't talk about that anyway. You've miraculously actually put some stuff on your list.

I mean, don't.

Get so.

Don't get overexcited. It's only a couple of things.

Oh, I've got loads on mine.

Oh, it's not a competition.

It is. Right. So um start. If I don't like it, I'll just stop you, but give it a go.

All right. So I was going to start with a negative thing, but I won't. I'll start with the upbeat thing because I'll keep it upbeat, keep it cheerful.

Keep it upbeat.

Um thing. So the thing that's top of mind for me, um was the thing we have a client, a new ish client, um, in the oil and gas industry.

That doesn't give away too much. I'll let that go.

Yeah.

We don't talk about specific clients. I'd hit clients to like, listen to our podcast and go, I hope they don't mention me. Yeah. Rest assured, dear clients, we'd never single anybody out.

I'll try and talk around the subject.

I'm not saying vague terms. I'm not saying that sometimes we'll be talking about something, and a client or somebody we know might think, hmm, that's probably me they're talking about. It's probably me. Song by sting.

Well, this isn't a bad thing about the client at all, but they do the thing that they do for the oil and gas industry. The service is is quite complicated, quite specialised. It's also they all.

Tell you that.

But this is.

Drilling.

You know, it's just holes. It's just stuff spurting out the ground. Um, but critically, one of the things they've always struggled with, or at least, you know, they sometimes get enquiries from people who confuse them for people who offer a very similar service to domestic plumbers and things like that.

I know who you're talking about now.

Yeah. So a really interesting thing happened. We, we built them a landing page for this service, and we got a load of assets from them to help build the landing page. We showed it to the client and the first thing they said is, or one of the first things that they said was that the imagery really helped to sell the scale of it, and that that was something they'd always sort of obviously, we knew the background to that, which is that they'd always really struggled with that before. It was a very simple thing that had a tremendous impact. I think just putting in an image, you know, actually showing the size of the holes in the ground and the the size of the equipment that they were using. Um, and I think it's just one of those things that sort of really brought home to me a few things that I'd read recently. Um, one of them a survey by, you know, the Nielsen Norman group who do lots of this sort of thing. They did a really interesting eye tracking survey where they talk about this at great length. They say using the wrong images on websites. Basically, people have trained themselves to completely ignore them. So if you put stock imagery, if you put sort of rubbish photography up, people will just skip past it and look at the information. If you put imagery that tells a good story. Up. Suddenly, people want to spend time on the page. They want to look around. They want to engage with things. And I guess it was just one of those things where it's a very small thing, but it's a very overlooked part of the content puzzle. A lot of the time people just think, oh, imagery, we need some pictures. We need something to make the page look bright or cheerful, but it's actually sort of way beyond that. If you pick imagery that actually says something about you or your company or your capabilities, suddenly the page goes from being moderately interesting content to really engage in content.

Yeah. So the visual aspect of the web, um, you know, stating the obvious is enormously important. Yeah. And we, you know, we've known this forever. And how often have we seen, uh, for example, a home page on a website and immediately been blown away. Wow. But when you actually distill it down, it's because the photograph that they've used is a fantastic photograph or a fantastic video. You know, it's that vision. You know, we are visual beings. We are. And so it's very easy to make something boring, something a bit mundane look amazing with amazing imagery. And there are, as we know, you know, sites like Pexels and Unsplash, not unbounce. Unsplash places like that, um, I submit photographs to Unsplash. I get a buzz out of seeing my photographs being used by people. It's good fun. Um, but there's no shortage of places to get photographs. However, we still often find ourselves in a position where the photographs we really need don't exist. Yep. And getting companies to invest in that is sometimes okay, but sometimes can be a bit challenging. Or just just put some nice photographs in, as you said, and it doesn't work.

It doesn't work at all. And I think this is the thing, and I think over time, as web users sort of train themselves to recognise stock photography, like once you start looking for it, you will see the same stock imagery crop up time and time again. And sometimes, as you say, it's in the banners of websites for sort of enormous multinational, sort of giant companies. You're like, why on earth they couldn't possibly have struggled to pick up a camera and go and take some photographs of some of their team or something. Even universities, I mean, the Nielsen Norman survey that I'm talking about was published in twenty ten, but they have a screen grab in there from Harvard University and on Harvard University page. They're using stock imagery. And then this eye tracking survey, you can literally see people's eyes sort of swerve around.

Just basically it's like, um, people becoming, um, blind if you like to adverts. Yeah. We just don't see them.

It just doesn't work. Yeah. And that's, I think that's the thing that a lot of people maybe don't realise, especially when they're sort of like, oh, I'm busy, I'm running my business. I've got a million and one things to do. Honestly though, like, I mean, you say investment, even if you just picked up a smartphone and went and took some pictures of your team in the field.

Because we all carry broadcast quality video equipment in our back pockets or handbags?

You handbag and my handbag? Yeah, absolutely.

You know purple.

Yeah. Purple. Yeah.

I think purple is your color. Can you see why you would have a purple handbag? But I think this comes down to, you know, we've talked about this before, like whether you're doing it properly or whether you're phoning it in. Yeah. And if you're phoning it in and just grabbing some stock photography and thinking and kidding yourself, that looks right. Well, guess what people do notice and people will zone out. They won't take you as seriously.

Well, I also yeah, I mean, that's the real point for me. I don't know about you, but I just sort of immediately mistrust websites full of stock imagery. I just assume that if somebody couldn't be bothered to go and take some photos of their stuff that, you know, maybe there aren't any staff, what.

A judgemental.

Kind of you are. It's horrendous. I'm afraid so.

Depends how driven you are. You know, we've always said this if if a website is um specialised enough niche enough. There aren't many places can provide what you're looking for. You'll put up with a lot of crap. You'll put up with bad images, bad website.

Or.

No user experience or no images. That's right. And you'll put up with it. But as soon as you're in any sort of competitive niche, then, you know, like show up, make an effort or just, you know, don't bother.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. Well, that was a pretty dull search. The next one's better.

All right. It's your go now.

No, I'm not going yet. I'm gonna. Well, what have you got? I mean, I've got a few rants. I'll do a rant.

My other thing is also a big old rant.

I've got some positive stuff, I think, as well as some rants. Let's do a ranty one. Um, um. And what was I doing? I was looking at, um, some a social media platform yesterday might have been Facebook, I can't remember. And there was news came in of, uh, there'd been a road traffic collision, uh, just outside Banchory. Uh, serious And I noticed in the comments that people were almost immediately, either inadvertently or on purpose making it about them. You know what I mean? They were kind of like, how can I turn this around and make it about me? And we've spoken a lot about social media, and we've spoken a lot about how I think we're still learning how to use social media because, you know, it is, I think, spectacularly good the way some people use it and embarrassingly, spectacularly on a, on a, on a gigantic scale. Bad the way that some other people use it. You know, it's, it's that whole kind of narcissist dream approach that people take, which kind of irritates the hell out of me. But I do think we'll kind of get over ourselves eventually. But yeah, you know, this, this was a serious situation. And they were kind of I won't come up with a specific comments because I know somebody got injured in whatever, you know, in this incident, but it just kind of like, oh, look, just read it. Oh, you know, oh, and it was all kind of like, look at me, look at me. Never mind. Somebody over there has had a life altering thing happened to them. You know, I want to make this about me. How can I make this about me?

It's always a critical thing, isn't it? The first sentence is always like, this is a real tragedy, full stop. And then it's like I feel and it's like, you could just have stopped, you know, just delete the rest. Yeah. There's a really funny guy on LinkedIn that I follow called Dave Harland, who's a copywriter. And every time there's a big sort of like world shattering event on the news, he posts this little thing, which is just like, um, my thoughts go out to all the LinkedIn influencers and social media gurus who stayed up all night thinking of ways to twist the, like Haiti violence into like twenty one messages for marketers or something like that. And just like every time I see it, I chuckle because it's absolutely true. You know, anything happens. And immediately on LinkedIn, it's like, this is what we can learn from this, or this is how this applies to my job. And it's just like, rein it in. No one cares.

I know, I know, nobody cares, so the nobody cares bit is what people don't realise. I don't think they realise that they're kind of being dicks on social media now, you know? Hands up. Yeah, I've done videos that are kind of look at me videos, you know, when the Ice Bucket challenge and I went out and did the ice bucket challenge and filmed it and like everybody else did. Um, but I saw a really good TikTok and it was, I like Russell Kane if you should. Yeah. Russell Kane on TikTok is vicious, but fantastic. Uh, and I was listening to him and he was talking about the whole Valentine thing and the way he did the skit was brilliant. But I mean, just to kind of cut it right down to the essence of it, this guy was so busy telling the world how much he loved his wife, and his wife was in the next room, you know, when she sort of said, oh, you know, darling, do you want some? And you shut up, I can't, you see, I'm busy telling everybody how much I love you here on social media. And it was so funny the way he did it. It was fantastic. And he gets it. He's. He. He goes on a lot about this kind of the way that, you know, the way that we're misusing it and still, I guess, being more polite, still learning how to use it. Yeah. But I think with social media, I think if you start and this is this is this is for businesses as well, start with nobody cares. Start with how can I entertain and educate? And if like first, if you can't accept the nobody cares bit, don't bother. If you can't come up with something that's educational and entertaining, kind of don't bother either, because I can't think of a single TikTok vid or social media post that I've seen that hasn't somehow informed me and entertained me.

Yeah. It's a really tricky one, I think, isn't it? It's like learning when to keep your mouth shut. And I think in a weird way, and this might take things in a strange direction, but on the radio into work this morning, I was actually listening. They were talking about social media. They were talking about it in the context of how much damage it's doing to teenage mental health. Yeah. Had this guy on from, um, I can't remember a big university in America, and he was sort of talking about how you can you can see sort of like the curve, the elbow in like mental health statistics go up the year that smartphones became sort of like a common thing for teenagers to own. And it's all about the same thing. It's about the fact that, you know, if you take away the sort of social pressure you're in your bedroom or you're in your living room or whatever, and nobody's looking at you, you can sort of post whatever you like. And there's no there's no sort of automatic break there in your head saying this is a bit embarrassing. I think like if you wouldn't say it in, you know, if you're in the pub with your mates and you wouldn't say that thing that you're about to post on social media, probably don't post it. That's right.

It's like advice.

Yeah, but I think it's really applicable to businesses too, because I think a lot of the time people just don't realise how they're coming across. You know, it's self aggrandising it is a bit. Yeah. I mean, you look a bit of a dick really and your friends would tell you that, but because you're in your living room and no one can see you too late.

Yeah. Okay. Um, I was saying that we've had an incredible, um, seven days. There's been lots going on and the quality of the enquiries that we're getting and the gigs that we're actually landing, not just enquiries. We were landing some good gigs as well. The quality of the enquiries has been fantastic. Yeah.

It really has.

And that got me thinking about like how you in business, if things if good things are happening in business, you have to learn when to say no, which is difficult. And I know it's difficult for small businesses and I know it's difficult for agencies. You know, we've we've been in this situation for quite some time where we're quite comfortable. Yeah. Rejecting work. In fact, when you guys had an all staff, it came up in the all staff when I was kind of criticised for maybe being a bit too quick to pull the trigger. And, you know, I took that on board before totally rejecting it. And, and I completely understand, um, you know where you guys are coming from. Um, but I think it's a serious issue. Not serious issue. It's a serious point of discussion for any business, as you know, like if you if you start doing digital marketing, if you start building a fantastic website, getting your search, uh, strategy right and everything else, you will start to get opportunities from, from all over the place, from people you've never heard of who turn out to be multi-million pound organisations. You know, if you do it right, if you get the images right to pick up on something you said earlier, if you get your social media right, you educate, you entertain all that stuff, you are going to get enquiries. You are going to get, um, situations where you're sometimes inundated with really good enquiries, and you have to then figure out how to filter them and decide, you know, what's going to be worth doing.

Yeah, I was gonna say that's the key to it, isn't it? Because you see the pipeline fill up and it's like, I, I look at it sometimes and I guess because you're much more experienced than me, you're very good at sort of picking out the ones that will probably do I mean, yeah, um, you're much better at picking out the ones that will probably turn into something versus the ones that, you know, a tire kickers.

I've got form for not doing that. I mean, I have got form for like leaving some, some, uh, work on the table that I should have taken. I'm not, I'm not, not perfect at it.

But I think that's the key, isn't it? It's like learning to quickly recognise the signs of sort of actual time wasters and sort of building a process. I mean, we have a very I think you have quite a set and rigorous process within a CRM, don't you, for sort of filtering the ones you actually want to reply to?

Yeah, I reply to everybody. I'd always reply, but yeah, sometimes it's a, it's a thanks, but no thanks. Yeah. But it's funny because it time wasters. Yeah. I don't care if you've got a billion dollar company, you are looking for some work to be done. If they, if they feel like time wasters, if they feel like a bad fit for whatever reason, then you know, I would politely decline. So time wasters isn't an issue. The real issue, I think, is when somebody comes along and you know, you can help them. And emotionally, you want to help them. But from a business perspective, you know it's not the right thing to do because they haven't got the budget. You'll finish up over delivering all that kind of stuff. So I think that's where it gets difficult in business to say no. It's when you're, you know, most people are decent human beings, you know, with one or two exceptions. Obviously, one of the two people in this podcast is an exception. But most people are decent human beings and they want to help, you know, we want to help somebody who's in need. And I'm not talking about help me, I'm drowning. I'm just talking about, you know, in a business context, we want to help them. And so, you know, I understand why there's an emotional drive to try and help businesses. But but you've got to look at like we had a thing which was may still be on the board, you know, is it going to be fun? Will it take the business forward? Will it help us to make our fortune? And what was the other one?

I don't know, and ironically, I rubbed it off by accident the other day and I put the three F's I could remember back. And then for the fourth one, I was like, f*ck, I've forgotten the last step.

That's probably what the other one was. Fortune. Fun. Forward. Uh, Julie will tell us, I can't remember. Yeah.

But yeah, they.

Were quite they were quite effective. And it is quite a good way of doing it. But it's a nice problem to have if you do like this stuff, this digital marketing stuff that we do, the reach of it is phenomenal. Yeah. You will get enquiries from people you'd never heard of. It will help you transform your business. Yeah, but you have to be really careful when you do it because you kind of unleash the beast a little bit.

Well, I think because I think that's the sort of cycle I see a lot of businesses go through. And I think it's certainly the cycle we've been through is you sort of, you know, you start to make this stuff really work for you. You're inundated with with sort of stuff. You're like, yeah, let's take it all on. Let's do it all. And then as you mature, you realise that actually, you know, we shouldn't take on that sort of project because we can't deliver what they need for that budget. But I think that requires like a huge amount of self awareness. Like internally as a company, we spend quite a lot of time talking about this sort of stuff and debating, you know, when stuff you.

Should be working.

You're involved as well. See.

It's my job.

I see, I see how it is. Um, but yeah, I mean, we spend a lot of time getting to the point where we recognise, oh, do you know what, actually, if we take on that project and try and sort of deliver on that budget, it won't go very well. Um, I don't think, yeah, I think there's no, I guess what I'm trying to say is there's no sort of substitute for time and experience there. You can't just sort of magically know that.

Yeah, I think, I think I'll definitely still get it wrong sometimes. But you, you do, you do kind of get a feel. Yeah. For when. Um, but you know, talking about getting it wrong. Um, you know, when we did that pitch to the big, well, it wasn't even a pitch. It was a very half arsed approach at trying to convince a big pharma company that our approach where we don't pitch.

Where we don't.

Pitch, we actually just get do a foot in the door project or a discovery session.

Bring your slide deck. Yeah.

That's right. It's like, you know, that was definitely one we should have said no thanks to immediately. And we didn't. So, you know, yeah. I mean, we're not not infallible anyway. What uh, inane drivel do you want to talk about next from your list?

Um, it was a thing. I mean, weirdly enough, we were just talking about LinkedIn. It was a thing I saw, um, from a very big agency, which again, I won't name because it's rude, um, who are doing very, very well in our space. They popped up in Leeds about ten years ago, maybe even less than that and sort of grew exponentially.

You kind of narrowed it down so anyone could go and figure out who this is now, couldn't you?

Nobody has that much time on their hands.

Um, you seem to have.

Their CEO was posting about how the SEO department had come to the board and reported on their facts and figures, and they'd seen like one hundred and thirty percent increase in their clients organic traffic. And I was like, right, that's a really odd thing to boast about. Um, and then we were working with a potential new partner. Um, and they sent us an SEO report that one of their sort of like third party contractors had produced and said, what do you think of this? And it was the same thing. It was people legitimately sort of handing people a PDF document with some traffic increases on and saying, we're doing a good job. And I just think that's an appalling place to be in twenty twenty four. It's such a low. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. And this this CEO of this big agency had posted this thing and all the comments underneath were like, congrats and smiley faces and love.

Hearts because it's social media.

Yeah. And then somebody at the bottom had just written, but what does this actually mean?

And just everybody attacked them.

Yeah. Well, absolutely.

Talking common sense.

But it just there's this, this huge problem. And I'm sure there are people listening to this who are working with SEO providers who every month hand them a report and it shows a graph going up and to the right, and it shows some green arrows and it says, we've increased traffic. And they think, oh good, my SEO is working. And I just find that like quite a frightening place to be as an industry really, because that is not, it has never been and will never be what marketing is actually about. And it's such a low bar for, you know, success really. I can't imagine sort of congratulating myself on having increased somebody's traffic. I mean, no, it's.

Just not in and of itself.

Well, it's ridiculously easy to do, you know, if you want to show a graph of just, just general generic organic traffic is increasing, you just go and find a load of keywords that nobody else wants to rank for because there's no point ranking for them. And you and you rank for them. And then, oh, look, some traffic's coming and it's, you know, it's a terribly easy thing to do. It's utterly meaningless.

I mean, we're interested in how we can directly attribute the work we've done to, um, to an invoice being sent that is.

Yeah. And it has to be.

It's not really complicated.

No. Everything has to be attributed like that. You know, if you're going to say, oh, we've done this thing and it's successful. Well, where, you know, how is it grown? The bottom line otherwise it is just noise. And people will invest thousands and thousands and thousands of pounds into marketing that just isn't actually helping them. And they don't even realise there's just such a huge disconnect there between sort of, yeah, our marketing is going well. More people can see our website. Well that's fantastic, but that's not the aim of your website. And that's not what it's there for.

I mean, I get that. You know, what I just said is, is overly simplistic because it could be that all the work you're doing is just about raising profile and raising awareness and stuff like that. And you're not actually that you're not actually at that stage in the journey necessarily looking to send out invoices as a direct result of the improved search presence, for example, because it's a, you know, because, you know, in B2B especially, you know, it can it can be two years from like the first time somebody sees you to them actually sending you a. Yeah. Purchase order.

But if you, but if you're doing your job properly, you know that and you know what the sales cycle is and you know how. And you can prove that that traffic is at least engaged. It's the right kind of traffic. They're searching for the right kind of keywords and doing the right things on your website. But I mean, the brand awareness thing is one of those other things that really annoys me because people will do it with pay per click advertising, especially. They will run adverts on behalf of companies and then the company will say, what's this actually done for me? And they'll say, well, nothing directly attributable.

Attributable, attributable.

I don't know why I stumbled over that. Um, but look, it's raised your profile. It got you this many impressions. All these people have seen you. Now you're top of mind. It's like it's just such bullshit.

It's just through and through.

Yeah. It's like this industry. The wonderful thing about the internet is it lets you track and attribute things properly. There is data that lets you prove.

Yeah, to a point. I mean, we could, we could talk at length about attribution and the problems that surround it.

Absolutely. But by and large, you should be able to say this is bringing in this, or at least this is helping to generate or this is sort of getting people to engage with these things rather than just this really top level, like, oh, your organic traffic is up one hundred and thirty percent or so. Mhm.

Okay. Is that it?

That's it.

That's totally that's that's your list.

That's my list. Yeah.

It's a good job. I took the time. Um, I've got, I've got some notes written down, which I'm just going to kind of look at and see if they still make any sense to me. Um, I was talking, I was thinking about the, you know, a lot of the conversations we're having just now, um, we are looking at people's businesses and their digital footprint and the tools that they're using, etc. and we are advising them on a course of action sometimes, which might be, um, excuse me again to, um, invest in the HubSpot stack, which we're heavily invested in. We do. Um, so, um, I often feel slightly uncomfortable, even though as an agency, we're spending seven or eight hundred quid a month on CMSs, CMS Pro and marketing Pro or whatever, you know, we're quite happy to spend that money because we see the benefits of it. Um, I mean, we are, you know, currently HubSpot partners. Um, and, you know, we get a little bit of a kickback when people buy HubSpot. Yeah. And it's that kind of slight dilemma with like, yeah, we will get a little bit of a kickback if we sell you this, but that's not why we're selling you it because thinking about one of the previous might be the last podcast that we did where, you know, where quite often we've been in picking up the pieces, when a bunch of agencies have sold people things that either they didn't need or they've sold them and not explained how to use them, and they've just been gathering dust, expensive dust, twenty five grand a year for the licenses, and they're not actually doing anything with it, that kind of thing. Um, but that kind of, I guess the bigger story there is, you know, it's often brought up that you can do all the stuff that HubSpot does, for example, or Marketo or.

Salesforce, any of them.

Or all of those things. Um, you can kind of do it all by just Heath Robinson sticking things together. Spreadsheet. It's not even that. Heath Robinson it works. It's fine. You could use Hubspot's free CRM, embed the forms on your website. I think maybe you can't do that with the free one anyway. But you know, you can you can glue it all together. And I guess it's trying to communicate. The when you get, you know, we've had that invitation to tenders come in. And one of the things they said in it, they kind of hinted at HubSpot and came to us because we, we know HubSpot. Um, but, but they almost answered their own question in the, it, you know, everything feels a bit disjointed and things getting things to talk to each other is a problem. And nobody really knows why that's done with that technology and that's done with that technology. You know, the really hard thing in business is, is, is, is getting found, getting seen, getting engagement, getting an enquiry, having good conversations, converting those conversations into business, into paws, into invoices. That's really hard. So anything you can do to remove friction in the other part of it, like for example, your website and your CRM and your marketing stack and all that rest. Like, why wouldn't you just spend a few quid and just get something that just works.

It's really interesting because there's a whole industry around. In fact, I think I was bitching to you earlier in the office about, um, a consultancy that do marketing operations audits. Um, because I was talking about the, um, TikTok video that the guy that runs it had done. Okay. Um, and he was sort of, you know, talking about the whole boom and bust cycle in consulting and digital services in general. But the really interesting thing is that there is an entire industry around sort of marketing operations consultancy where people will go in and tell you how to fix your sort of Heath Robinson marketing tech stack and be like, oh, the processes aren't aligned and the software isn't communicating with itself and all of this stuff. And people build these very complicated sort of integrations and plugins to pass data from one thing or the other. Or you could just buy a system that does all that. And it is baffling to me that people aren't just like, yeah, do you know what HubSpot, you know, Salesforce, Marketo, whatever, like pick your poison. But for God's sake, pick one. Don't just sort of try this awful, I don't know. It is baffling because like you say, time is precious and it is really hard to do all the sort of the actual stuff to attract and engage people. So why make it harder for yourself?

Well, I think what people do is, you know, in the kingdom of the blind, the one eyed man is king, right? So in a lot of businesses, you get people who know a little bit about the web. They've installed WordPress, they managed to create a web page and suddenly they become like all powerful within that organisation. We see this a lot even now with big organisations, we're seeing like single points of failure when it comes to web and digital marketing and everything else. So people like learn how to use WordPress. And that was a struggle for them, but they did it. And then so if there's other things out there which actually are way better, it's like, oh, I haven't got the head space for that. So they'll just persuade their boss or persuade the powers that be to stick with this kind of cockamamie setup. Yeah, well, two podcasts on a roll and I've got cockamamie in there. Um, and.

That would.

Actually fit.

Yeah.

There's an element of it, isn't there? There's an element of that I think. Yeah, absolutely. Then they become blinkered to anything else. Oh no no no I like craft CMS. No no no no. I like WordPress CMS. So they can become blinkered to anything that might actually be the really good solution that they need. And that's not necessarily HubSpot. This isn't a, this isn't.

A HubSpot.

Promo video.

And this might cut a little close to the bone, but one of the absolute worst things is when that single point of failure, who's decided they absolutely love WordPress, feeds that information up the chain and somebody else just takes it at face value. I mean, how many pitches or enquiries have we had recently where people have been like, we must use WordPress? Like the one overall requirement is this must be built within WordPress. And there's literally no reason for that at all. I mean, fine, you know, all cms's are built equal and I'm not going to sit here and say that WordPress is a CMS because it's clearly not. Otherwise, you know, it wouldn't be.

Hugely popular CMS.

But it's not the only CMS.

VHS was a hugely popular video system.

Look how that went. Well.

But Betamax was better. Yeah, but it didn't catch on because VHS was popular.

That's true. And there's an element of that. I think WordPress does sort of steamroll over other potential platforms that are really good. Um, but no, I mean, there's no reason to be like, you know, just because your IT guy or worse still, your IT department have told you that WordPress is the safest or the best or whatever. Like that's not true. It's never true. And when you say, I will only build in WordPress, you do close the door on an awful lot of other interesting technologies, I think.

Yeah. Don't disagree with that. Um, the power of networking, we talk a lot about a lot about digital marketing.

Don't you be selling networking on our digital marketing podcast.

You know, we talk a lot about.

It doesn't work.

We, we, um, he thinks he's Morecambe and wise because he looks at the camera and talks.

I can't stop looking at it because it's right there.

I'll tell you, one of the earliest proponents of that was Benny Hill, who's probably not very politically correct anymore. And he's long since dead, but he was very funny. And then Morecambe and Wise did it as well. I think Tommy Cooper was quite good at it as well.

To be fair though, it is a thing in like Shakespeare too, you know.

Is it?

Yeah. Address the audience. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah.

Let them in. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I think that's the first because.

It's a camera.

Well, your.

Cameras first came out. You know, it wasn't. They weren't used. They weren't used necessarily in that way.

Were they not?

No it was I think it was it was comedians. I think that kind of pioneered the kind of, you know, letting the audience in by, by looking at the camera, I think anyway. But yeah.

Interesting.

Yeah. Yeah. I suppose if you're thinking about Shakespeare, that my knowledge of Shakespeare is limited, although I'm a huge fan of, um, certainly the comedies, I quite like the comedies, you know, the ones with a joke in them.

Yeah. But it it's often it is, to be fair to you, often done there, you know, it'll be one character turn aside, you know, deliver something to the audience, turn back and finish the line. But then like also, yeah, like really famous sort of. Yeah.

So what was I talking about? Networking. Um, we have an opportunity landed on our lap, which is fantastic. A really great opportunity with a huge engineering conglomerate. Um, us being tech and engineering specialists, uh, a huge engineering conglomerate. And that really is not as a result of anything we've done online. Uh, it's a relationship that started in the mid noughties probably and has, you know, and that person has kind of come back time and again when they've been in a situation that they needed some, um, you know, help, whether it's with, you know, web, web apps, digital marketing, whatever it is, you know, that we need to do, but, but also, um, thinking about a couple of our new clients based down in Edinburgh, you know, we joined the Edinburgh Chamber and the Aberdeen Chamber never really, um, seemed to do very much for us.

Um that's not a slight on the Aberdeen chamber.

No. I mean all right. You know Aberdeen is a is a curious market, very, very oil industry focused, less so these days as everybody starts greenwashing and pretending they never had anything to do with the oil industry, which is hilarious. But, you know, it's kind of Aberdeen was the chamber in Aberdeen. My criticism of them, uh, may be unfair today, but back in the day it was it was like they were very interested in the big shiny, yeah, high turnover oil companies and less interested in the companies that make up something like ninety five percent of the, of the UK's businesses, which are small businesses. And the Edinburgh Chamber, to their credit, are not like that. So we have got currently one client directly from a chamber event who's now introduced us to another client, and we've got a discovery session with them in mid-April. mid-April ish. Um, and then another recommendation from the chamber, again, not through digital marketing as a direct result of networking that we're currently having a conversation with about some of the search things that we can do for people. Um, and I guess that the only point I'm making is I think, I think in the past I've been, I've been reluctant to go networking because quite often I've found myself in a room full of people that were just trying to sell me something. And it's just, it was pointless. Um, and I'm a little bit jaded with it. I don't mind it. I mean, I'm quite fairly.

Accurate.

Description of.

What networking is.

Pretending. I'm interested in what they've got to say. I'm quite happy to do that. But I think it's, it's too easy in the twenty first century with like social media and digital marketing and paid search and organic search and everything else that goes with it, it's too easy to forget that, um, you know, face to face networking can still be a good thing. And we've got some interesting work coming through as a direct result of that.

So yeah.

I don't know. I mean, most people listening to this, both of them in fact, will, will probably recognise that, you know, networking is useful, powerful proven tactic.

Yeah, but it always struck me and I might be very naive in this, but it's always struck me as very high risk, high reward. Like, for example, the situation you described there where you go to a networking event, you bullshit somebody for a few minutes and they decide they kind of like you and they throw some work at you. You've got to be able to deliver really well there. You do like, you know, because it's, it's more of.

Always.

Do well. I disagree. I think it's more of a there's more at stake. If if you if it's a personal relationship that you're developing and you fluff it, that person's not just going to be like, oh, that was a bit annoying. I'll move on to the next provider. They will remember that you let them down and they will probably tell people. Yeah, I see it as a very sort of like, you know, it's either gonna burn you or it's gonna go really well and that's fine. But like, it's just one of those things where I don't know, there's a level of sort of distance online. Somebody reaches out to you through your website, you never actually meet them face to face. Yeah. If you don't do a fantastic job, they're probably like, oh, well, you know, onto the next one. Um, I don't know, networking to me just seems very personal. But then I'm a child of my generation, I suppose. I don't like talking to people in real life.

I saw a TikTok about that and it was like it was a millennial. I think it was a millennial or Gen Z or whatever, and it was like he was playing two characters, as people often do in TikTok. And it was basically, yeah, just just give them a ring. Ring them. No, no, I'll send them an email. No, just just give them a ring. But they might be busy. They might not answer, but just please just give them a ring. So it's like ring, ring, ring rings twice. See they didn't answer. They didn't answer. You only let it ring twice. Yeah. But yeah, but I was obviously they were obviously busy. It's like, I've got to say it. I do sometimes in the office here say like, just pick the phone up or, or send an email and say, do you want to jump on Zoom and have a conversation? I mean, I'm just talking about it doesn't have to be a telephone. Um, you know, just that face to face or, you know, voice to voice communications, real time communications can sometimes sort of short circuit a whole shitload of pointless emails.

The amount of times in the office that, like, emails have been flying back and forth and back and forth. People have gone on Zoom and within about three minutes it's sorted out. It's incredible. I mean, you know, you cannot communicate properly through email versus just like looking at somebody. But I still hate it. I mean, I was organising something online earlier and I got, you know, I was using the webchat, using the webchat, using the webchat. They were like, just call this line. I was like, no, I'll get this somewhere else. Yeah.

But you're a good communicator. I mean, you and I sit here and bullshit away and some people listen to it and you're a good communicator. Why is it you know it?

I think I genuinely think it's like an ingrained thing. Like the phone is disturbing. Like when my phone rings, it annoys me. It's like, if you don't need to talk to me, that's that's annoyed me. Um, and I think I feel like I'm inflicting that on other people, I guess.

Yeah, I know what you mean. I mean, I do find myself sending messages to people saying when would be, when would it be convenient to have a chat? Or if I just ring them, the first thing I'll say is, is it convenient to talk right now? Because I hate being interrupted with a voice call if I'm in the middle of something.

Yeah, but something. It's just something that happens. Sometimes people ring you up and just start talking at you and you're like, no, I'm in the middle of something. But that's awkward. The whole situation is quite awkward. So I guess I just sort of default to trying to avoid it, which is not very mature, but there you go.

It's not unusual either. It's not unusual. Um, okay. Oh, nice. Motorhome just pulled up out there.

I, I wouldn't know a nice motorhome from a bad one.

It's a seventy three plate. That's all you need to know. That's like a year old.

A new motorhomes are very expensive.

I assume motorhomes are very even. Old ones are expensive. Um, here's the thing. And I want you to be really careful here. Um, don't just say the first thing that comes into your head.

All right?

Losing a client is sometimes a good thing. Do you agree?

Um.

The answer is yes.

The answer's cheesy. Chips. You said the first thing that came into your head. Apparently I'm quite hungry. Um. Yes, sometimes.

You've had chocolate cake, and if you hadn't put it on the carpet and eaten it all.

There.

You wouldn't.

Be hungry. What? The crumb.

We got a free sausage roll from the butchers next door. And I gave that to you and Amy. I didn't even get a bite of it.

And we fought. We fought over it.

What did you have for lunch?

Uh, stuffed pepper.

Stuffed pepper for your lunch?

Yeah. Look, this isn't a this isn't a shame, Alex. For what he eats.

It's that easy, though. So, yeah, losing a client is sometimes a good thing. Discuss.

Well, I mean it. Yeah. You're right. This is a tricky one because, like, the obvious thing to do is say like, yeah, like, you know, sometimes people aren't a good fit. I think, um.

That's not where I'm coming from.

No, I know you're not coming from there. I'm trying to think about how to articulate it as in, I guess you're thinking of it in terms of like, sometimes losing a client is good in the sense that it allows you to sort of reflect on what's happened and grow, or that sometimes it's a good fit because.

You're assuming that you've done something wrong. I'm not. I don't think when I'm coming from.

A defensive.

Position, where I'm coming from is that sometimes it's good for you and it's good for the client. And it could be that you go your separate ways and realise it was a mistake and get back together. You know, like people who get divorced and then get married again. I don't know what the statistics are like on that. But, you know, I imagine if people get divorced and then get married again, that they probably stayed together because, you know, when they were apart, they kind of went, oh, that was stupid. We can actually, we actually got along quite well, you know what I mean? Like, like, they kind of realised that after all that person was would do, it would be fine.

I just typed a very marketing thing into Google. Then I just typed divorced and then remarried retention rate. And I knew what I meant, but probably googled it.

But anyway.

It did actually.

But what I'm saying is, irrespective of whatever that statistic tells, tells us exactly that.

Yes. So basically they are much, much, much more likely sixty percent more likely to succeed. Second time marriages.

Well, there you go. So that was me kind of using intuition to suggest so sometimes. And we've had clients leave and then come back and when they've come back, they've generally just they've never gone away again. Yeah. And, but what I'm talking about is sometimes, you know, you get to the point with a client where for whatever reason, they, they get a wandering eye. If we're going to use a relationship analogy and decide to have a roll in the hay with somebody else, right. And I don't think that's a bad thing. I think it's okay to like for businesses to decide to try a different agency out. And it might turn out that that was the right thing to do. And the other agency had a better agency for them, etc.. Um, but I think as a, as a mature agency ourselves, you know, it's happened to us sometimes. Um, we don't have a huge attrition rate. In fact, our retention rates, you know, as we've often referred to is insane. Um, but now and again, things, you know, for whatever reason, you know, people go their separate ways. Yeah. Um, and that happened to us like last week, I think it was not the week before last. Um, you know, client, we've had a great relationship with them. We've done some great work with them. We've enjoyed working with them. It's all been good, but they've been kind of wooed away by another agency and you know, all power to them. You know, I've said to them like, I really hope this works out for you. And I meant it because it felt like the right thing to do. And, you know, and it might seem an odd thing for us, for me to say to, to a client where we're getting a, you know, a nice monthly recurring revenue from them, it was the right thing to do. And I genuinely think it was the right thing to do.

Because I.

Think and but what's interesting is, you know, what happened as a result of that is we had two extremely good enquiries, both in a in a niche that was similar to that client that would have possibly restricted us from working with these other people. And like that, that kind of void in, in that respect has been like immediately filled by, you know, a business that's considerably bigger.

So I guess what you're saying is that there are plenty of fish.

Well, yeah, but it's just like, I think what I'm saying is it can be the right thing to do for lots of reasons. And if you don't, if you're not frightened of it, if you don't sort of like kick and scream and say, but I don't want you to leave, you know, if you just let them go. And I wish I'd done this in relationships in the past, which I didn't, by the way.

But anyway.

That's a, that's another whole new barrel of fish to discuss at some point. Um, but if you, you know, what happens in life is when you, when you commit to something and when, if you commit to sort of saying, right, okay, I think it's best that, that we go our separate ways, all kinds of great things can happen because things that couldn't happen before or wouldn't have happened before do happen, you know, kind of is what I'm saying.

I guess.

I'm just saying embrace.

It.

Yeah, a little bit. You know, like, don't take it personally. Just, just kind of go, well, you know, yeah, we had a good run. It was, it was a good gig. Um, and now we've kind of, you know, gone our separate ways, you know, and with a, with a kind of very fond, fond farewell sort of thing, you know, but as a result of being of that happening, you know, we've got, well, we've landed one of them and the other one looks like a fairly sure thing. Yeah. Um um and we wouldn't have been able to do those if we'd still had this other client because it would have probably been a conflict.

And you take. Yeah, absolutely. And I think as well, like, I mean, what you're discussing, just to sort of keep it in the sort of relationship analogy territory is, is like you say, a hallmark of a mature person, right? It's like somebody says, oh, I'm, you know, I've, I've been texting somebody else and you just say, right, off you go then. And that's really hard to do in real life. But it's also like, I guess if you can sort of control your emotions, the only real option, because what are you gonna do? Force them to stay? And I think in business, it's, you know, it's even worse, isn't it? You can persuade or pressure somebody into staying in business with you when they're looking elsewhere, but that relationship is never going to be productive. The energy isn't good, and I'm not a big fan of that sort of like spiritual, you know, vibes and energy thing in business relationships. But I think it is very true. You don't want to be working with somebody where you're constantly worried that they're talking to other agencies on the side or, you know, you're not going to do your best work like that.

No, that's right, I agree.

You get a sort of a chance to reframe the whole thing in your head when you do part ways, and it does sometimes lead to much better things just because you're in a better place and looking for those opportunities, I guess.

Yeah, that's for sure.

Be positive.

Speaking of looking for opportunities, last subject for today. Um, sometimes right now we are going through a process with a couple of organisations. Both actually both quite big, both serious chunks of work. Um, but we're going through a process with them, you know, like where they've asked specific questions. They want us to let us see this, tell us this.

About the hoops out. They kind of jump.

Yeah. That's right. And if and juxtapose that with um, a meeting I had last week where the meeting lasted fifteen to twenty minutes and it was completely obvious to me and thankfully completely obvious to the prospective prospective client prospective client that we were the we were the right people to help them. Do you find that it was just like, you've got the gig, you know, like, when can we do the first piece of work you've got? You've got the gig. It was just like a gut feeling. The conversation. It was it was just completely obvious. Now, maybe, you know, when there's a few grand a month at stake, that's fine. But if it's a two hundred grand web project or a two hundred grand web app project, or, you know, like we're going to spend ten grand a month on our PPC, you have to go through more of a process. But to what extent is the question I'm asking you? I will get there eventually, you know, to what extent should we trust our gut when it comes to building relationships, finding new clients, whatever line of work you're in, as opposed to like the process.

I don't think you have a choice. I think this process, I mean, the whole point of this podcast is to sort of cut through the bullshit and be entirely honest. That process is.

You're not necessarily being entirely honest. You're just telling us what you think that's being. You're just telling us what you reckon.

I'm not saying it's the truth.

I'm an expert. Who do you think you are?

Damn it. They'll take my microphone away. Next. Um, no, I think the process I. I think it's the mother of all evils, to be perfectly honest with you. Look, there are web agencies out there. There are huge agencies out there who employ teams of people to navigate these processes. Whatever sort of, um, hoops or hurdles you put out to try and trip over people who are just blagging it. People will engineer ways of overcoming them and convincing you that they're really good. And the more that you try to sort of build this. I mean, it's very like hacking in some ways and internet security in general, isn't it? The harder you work to put up firewalls and to find interesting ways of sort of stopping people from accessing stuff, the smarter they'll get at doing it. it. And I think this whole sort of process thing where you ask people to pitch or you set them challenges, or you try to prove that they're worth what they're worth, like you're always going to get people who are very adept at navigating those situations and still critically cannot do the job. You won't get rid of them. The only thing that will guarantee that you get rid of them is you learning to sort of hone your instinct of who is a good provider, who is a good person to work with. Business is about relationships. And I think if you try and make it this sort of very process driven thing, like this agency ticked all these boxes, so they must do good work. That is never going to be true. It's not. It's a complete myth. And to pretend that you could engineer a process that actually did that, I think is sort of ludicrous, really. So I don't really understand the point of any of it. I think you'd be much better if you just sat everybody in a room and said, right, I think I'm going to get on with those guys. And, you know, maybe people would hate us.

It's one of the reasons that we like foot in the door projects, because you don't really know. You go through an entire process, exactly what you've just said. You get to the end of it. You know, this agency are fantastic. The work they've done before is great. All the rest of it. But you don't actually know if they can do it for you. They don't actually know if they're the right agency for you, which is why a foot in the door project is a great idea. I mean, one of the things we do is we do discovery scoping, uh, two or three hours whatever, free of charge, because it's a way for us to figure out whether we're the right guys for them to get a sense of whether they like working with us, all that stuff. And that's probably worth a lot more than I mean, the public sector obviously goes through a rigorous, uh, a rigorous process and never speaks to the people directly. Millions of pounds and waste millions of pounds of public money because all they do is they get fantastic responses from people who are good at providing fantastic IT responses for public sector work.

Literally some people's jobs. And look in one of the industries where the most money sloshing around in the world, professional football. When somebody wants to transfer a player, they want to buy a player for tens of millions of pounds. They do not go to them and say, right, let's see you do twenty puppies and do six corners and do seven penalties. They don't know because what they actually do is they say, right, we're going to have a trial. We'll hire you for a bit, we'll put you in the team. And lo and behold, you get to see whether or not they actually perform well. And, you know, it's just a no brainer. And yet here we are with these sort of massive public sector contracts. And.

Uh, I mean, none of the ones I'm talking about for us are public. No they're not. One of them is a not for profit, but there's no there's no big corporate.

Sector, but but big corporate learn from the public sector. And I think that, uh, you know, I think one of the reasons we have so much waste in the economy, I mean, certainly with sort of huge. And I know we are going slightly off topic here, but huge companies like the NHS, for example, and the way that they procure IT systems, I mean, there's so much waste baked into the system because they do all of this awful sort of process driven nonsense that just takes them further and further away from finding people that can actually solve their problem for them.

Was it fit, fund, finance, forward and fit? Are we a good fit for maybe, might have been might?

Well, that will bring things in a nice little.

Photograph of it. Somewhere.

Somewhere?

Yeah. And speaking of fit hula hoops, you mentioned hoops jumping through hoops.

I'm not doing an exercise.

I could never, ever do hula hoop. I just I don't know if you've ever tried it. I couldn't do it anyway. Caron bought this. It's like an exercise hula hoop, so it's got a bit of weight to it. I know. Covered in foam. Yeah. I can do it.

Really?

I can do the hula hoop. It's fantastic.

How long?

As long as you want. Yeah. As long as you want. It's not like. I mean, if it goes wrong and it starts to come down. I struggle like hell.

To.

Get it to come back up again. I just can't do it. But, um. Yeah, we did, we did. We had a go at the hula hoop and it honestly, I was, I was, I was beaming when I did it. It was because I had all my life, you know, I've never been able.

To.

Do it. No. I still don't know if I've got one of those lightweight ones you had at school, which is like a plastic, like no weight in it. Whether I'd still be able to do it, I don't know. Well, I assume this heavy one. It was brilliant.

I assume that the exercise one is like the pro version. You know, you get to feel good about that.

Elite.

Elite version.

Yeah. Elite hula hoop. I tell you, it's a lot of fun when you get it going and you realise, wait a minute, this isn't this isn't going down, it's actually going to stay there and I can, I can just do it. It's really good fun. Anyway, on the fun finance forward fit hula Hoop naught. Have you got any other, um, horseshit you want to mention just.

Before any more horseshit for now?

Okay, that's enough horseshit for today anyway. Really, I think. Yeah. Uh, you've been listening to Dave Robinson, Alex Bussey on the Digital Marketing From The Coalface podcast, and Leslie's been patiently hovering in the background filming it all for YouTube, because we've been told we have to put it on YouTube because people like to watch people talking.

I don't think anybody wants to watch me or you for that matter.

But, um, thanks for listening. Stop watching. Um, remember, if there's anything you'd like us to discuss, don't bother telling us, because we'll ignore you. Uh, we'll just talk about what we've been doing week to week on at the coalface of digital marketing.

It's a one sided conversation.