In 2021, if you see a marketing, you just mean all marketing, including digital marketing, maybe even predominantly digital marketing.
But I think we should maybe just investigate what marketing is. Because when you say digital marketing, people mean all sorts of different things by it. But when you say marketing, people also mean all sorts of different things by marketing. Some people just talk about marketing and they actually mean PR or something different. The principles of marketing are the principles of marketing. You, you work out what your objectives are. You work out who you're targeting, you work out what they need and what they want to hear. And then you make it and you put it in front of them. It really doesn't matter if it's a box of biscuits or a service, and it doesn't matter if you're providing that digitally or, you know, physically, and if you're communicating it on paper or on a website, it absolutely doesn't matter because the the theory, the principles, it's exactly the same.
Okay. Welcome back to the Digital Marketing From The Coalface podcast. And the reason I've reiterated the title of the podcast, Digital Marketing From The Coalface is today we're going to have a chat about Julie and I are going to have a chat about whether digital marketing is a thing or it's just marketing, and we don't need to use the word digital. Maybe, Julie, you want to explain your thinking because this was kind of your idea to talk about this.
Yeah. It's something that comes up from time to time. So digital marketing, what is digital marketing? Is it different from ordinary marketing? What is ordinary marketing? And I think if we sort of dig into maybe what marketing is, what digital marketing is and see if we can kind of come to a conclusion. It's been debated a lot recently. And, um, you know, with, with digital being what everyone's doing now, um, you know, do you even need to mention the word digital in your marketing. But I think if we kind of take a step back and, and look at marketing and, and then see if we can kind of come to any sort of conclusion between ourselves.
Just before we actually go on with this podcast. As I look across your, your and your mic and I'm on my mic, you actually look like you're about to start crying. Is podcasting really that terrifying for you?
I look like I'm gonna start crying.
No, I'm not terrified. Maybe just because I'm looking at you.
Enough to put terror into anybody's face, I agree. Okay?
No, I think that's just my concentrating hard.
Face. Is that right? Yeah. All right. Okay. Good stuff. I've completely lost what we were talking about.
I have no idea. Marketing?
Marketing? Yeah. I mean, it came up in a discussion I was having recently with, with a couple of guys. Um, we were kind of putting together this offer, if you like, around business development and growth, um, growth, business growth services. And, you know, there was a marketing component and I just said marketing and one of them said, well, shouldn't it say digital marketing? And my response was, well, in twenty twenty one, if you're needing to say digital marketing, or rather, if you say marketing, you just mean all marketing, including digital marketing, maybe even predominantly digital marketing.
I think it would be really, really difficult to do marketing without thinking about the digital digital element of it. Easy for you to say. Um, but I think we should maybe just investigate what marketing is because when you say digital marketing, people mean all sorts of different things by it. When you say marketing, people also mean all sorts of different things by marketing, people think marketing might. Some people just talk about marketing and they actually mean PR. Yeah, some people talk about marketing and they actually just mean TV adverts or something different or networking.
So so you're you're a chartered marketer. I'm a chartered engineer. So I'll obviously mansplain marketing to you. And then.
Yeah, you carry.
On probably the best approach.
I think.
That's.
A fantastic approach.
Because.
It is. Yeah, yeah. Luckily, he's only kidding.
Only kidding. Um, right. So I'll let you sort of head off and talk a bit. And I'm going to learn something here as well. Because although I'm heavily involved in digital marketing, as I've said numerous times, my I'm not a chartered marketer. It's not my, it's not my background. And I don't actually hold a single qualification in marketing other than I've been doing it for a long time now.
Luckily, marketing is ninety nine percent common sense. I remember sitting my. I know business schools.
All over the country do not want you to say that.
I remember sitting my final university exams and doing the marketing paper, and I got halfway through the exams and I went, oh my goodness, this is entirely common sense. Why have I just spent the last four years learning this stuff? This is so obvious. Maybe because I spent the last four years learning it, it was obvious to.
Me, absolutely convinced people that do, um, nuclear physics and the like feel exactly the same. They must just get into that final exam and just think, this, this stuff is, like, ridiculous. Anybody could do it.
Um, I'm I'm still going for the marketing is a little bit easier thing. Okay. But yeah, well, I'll take your point. Um, so anyway, marketing isn't just the sort of advertising and communication side. Um, if we go back to the Chartered Institute of Marketing, which is what I'm a member of what I did, my qualifications in their definition of marketing is I'm not going to go into the sort of word for word, but it's about working out what people want, producing it, and then providing it to them at a profit. So that covers, you know, it's the identifying and anticipating what customers want. So it's looking at the people that might buy your stuff, working out what it is they want, and then making it rather than making it and then figuring out how to sell it. So it's very much a customer focused process. It's not just the end bit. When you kind of tell people to buy it, It's the whole process of figuring out what people actually want to buy, and then going away and producing it or putting it together or, you know, putting a service offering together. And then the bit about, you know, doing it at a profit is the bit where you actually tell them about it so that they come and buy it and they want to pay a decent amount of money for it. So it's, it's much broader than most people think. So you've got things like, you know, market research. So you're figuring out, you know, what people want. You've got, you know, new product development, which in a service industry like ours, it's, you know, not something we really get involved in. But I have done it. And, you know, if you work for a food company, new product development is a great job to be in because you just get to taste food all the time. I've done a little bit of that. That was great. So it's, it's a whole process right from before you actually have anything to sell, working out what to sell, then making the thing or putting packaging the thing together, working out how much it's going to cost and then telling people about it and then providing it in such a way that it actually still makes you money, and then also providing the service at the end of it so that people come back and don't give you really bad reviews.
So if I run a company that makes, I don't know, biscuits, for example. Yeah. Does new product development start with the marketing team? Do you say like, go out and find out what people want and then come back to you rather than, yeah, I've got this great new recipe. We've made these fantastic new biscuits. Hey, marketing, go and sell them for us.
New product development is part of the marketing department. Okay.
Um, a lot of people don't see marketing as part of the research and development. Absolutely not. Whether it's a product or a service.
If you work for in the sort of FMcG, fast moving consumer goods industry, which is your sort of things you sell in supermarkets, biscuits and stuff like that, then yeah. I mean, the marketing department is kind of the big, the big, probably the most important department in the company because it manages the distribution, you know, the the pricing. So, you know, if we go back to.
Just just before, just before you move on from that, I mean, a lot of our customers are engineering companies. We work with engineering companies quite well. We enjoy working with engineering companies. Now, I can't imagine that many of those companies are involving marketing people when they're at R&D stage, when they're actually looking at, you know, developing new products or anything. I mean, I'm not saying they shouldn't. I mean, I'm, I'm from what I'm hearing, they absolutely should. But I bet they don't.
Know that traditional marketing in you. So you're, you're sort of companies like your Procter and Gamble or whoever, who sort of almost invented the way marketing is done. Um, they would sort of start with marketing. I think our, our clients, the engineering companies, they, they sort of see marketing as the thing I'm trying to describe is that the sort of bit that's stuck on the end. So after you've produced it, you then go and make a nice advert or go to a trade show or something. And marketing to them is only that little bit at the end where you tell people about it, but it should be marketing should start at the beginning and everything should actually be focused on the customer. Anything that's focused on the customer should be owned by the marketing department if you like. Got you. Not that I'm trying to build my part up, but that's that's kind of if you work in a company that is has a marketing focus, if you like, then everything starts with the customer. And if it starts with the customer, the marketing department kind of looks after it. So the marketing department is massive and, you know, really core to the, the whole business.
So, so right back to basics. Um, the marketing department establishes what the market needs. Yep. It then is part of the team that puts together the plan for this is what the marketing market needs. Can we deliver it? Can we deliver it at a price the market will pay that also delivers a profit for us.
Yeah. I mean, if you look at sort of after you've got your sort of, okay, this is what we need to make that your marketing mix. So that's the other.
Name for a business.
Marketing.
Mix. Yeah, it'd be a great name for a business marketing business, wouldn't it? Marketing mix.
I suppose it.
Would.
Um, so yeah, you're once you sort of know where you're going, you basically have all these elements that fit together sort of into your, how you do your marketing. It's not a very good way of describing it, but the marketing mix, it's all the bits and pieces in your marketing. So it used to be for peace, now seven P's. But if we stick to the four P's, that's probably will kind of help us.
Establish a massive glass of water. I'm trying to stay here for at least half an hour to do a podcast. Yeah. Could you kind of.
I'll stick to four P's just now. Um, so you've got your product. So that is the thing, the product or service, what you produce, what, what, what it is that you're selling. Um, so that's really important because obviously it needs to be something that, that people want to buy and you need to know what it is and you've got your price. So pricing is part of marketing because you need to establish, you know, well, there's lots of ways of establishing pricing, but ultimately it needs to be what people are prepared to pay and it needs to make you money. Otherwise there's no point. Yeah. Um, so you've got your product, your price, you've got your place. So that's either your shop where you deliver it, your trucks, your website, if you're e-commerce, it's, it's the way that your product is available and accessible to the public. So your retail distribution network or.
Does it not? Does it not also refer to your place in the market? Like whether you're at the high end or the low end?
That's, that's positioning, which is a whole other, probably a whole other podcast.
Fifth and sixth and seventh.
No, no, positioning is completely different. And that's part of your fourth P, which is promotion. Okay. Which is the thing that people think marketing is promotion is your communication of what you're selling to the outside world. So you're advertising your PR, your website, your social media, everything is in that promotion. P and that's the thing that gets the most attention. That's the thing that people mostly think marketing is, is that promotion side, particularly in a service industry, when there's not a physical product to sort of make then promotions the kind of one we're talking about. Um, and positioning within that is how the market sees you and you can influence how the market sees you. But positioning is actually always comes from the customer. Yeah. You can't decide what your positioning is. You can decide what your positioning wants to be. But anyway, that's now we're now we're getting off the track.
All right. Okay. Um.
So anyway, you've got your, you've got your four P's, which you're sort of different elements. Um, so thinking about how digital marketing fits in. Yeah.
I mean, I'm already thinking about the digital marketing tools that we use fit into like not, it's not just like the end bit where you're actually pushing messaging out, listening to customers responding and doing all that. It actually comes in the, you know, the tools are right at the very start. Like, is there a market for it? Who else is doing it? All that kind of thing.
So yeah, so you can, you can use digital tools in your sort of initial research. You can use digital tools. Some, you know, if your product, if the product that you sell is websites, then obviously it's a digital product that you're providing. So that could be digital marketing. So that's a digital side price. You can't, I mean, it's just price. So whatever.
Pricing is a science, isn't it? I mean, we worked with that. The guys in London a few years ago didn't we. And they're, they're like a twelve hundred strong global consultancy who specialise in helping people figure out how to price.
Pricing, consultancy.
And services. I mean, I, I was amazed. I mean, I frankly, I'd never really come across it until we started working with them. This, this idea that you can build a multi-million dollar business out of helping people figure out pricing.
But then if you think about it, every time you speak to somebody, you know, pricing is really, really hard to get right. And it's something that people debate all the time.
Well, I heard a really interesting story many years ago, and I have no idea if it's true. And I won't mention the brand of car. Um, but that brand of car, which I won't mention, has a three series and a five series. Okay, I'm definitely not going to mention the brand. No. And somebody who worked in the industry kind of said, broadly speaking, the cost of producing the five series, three series and seven series. I didn't mention the seven, the seven, there's not a million miles between them, but the three series would cost you thirty grand. The five series will cost you fifty grand, and the seven series will cost you seventy grand. Now, all right, there is an element of the materials that go into the seven series are better, but it isn't. The price of the end product isn't just about the cost of production. No, it was almost like market expectation. People who want to buy a seven series car.
We all know which one you're talking about.
Yeah. That's right. Minis. Um they, they, um, they expect to have to pay.
Yeah.
Seventy grand.
You hear lots of stories.
The prestige of it.
Yeah. Of of of brands who like put their quadruple their prices and start selling more because it's seen as prestigious. And people, people value it more because it's more expensive.
Well, pricing.
Is really complicated.
We've got a software as a service business, uh, that helps people in the, in the shared office space market. If you've got an office and you want to, you know, share my office if you want.
If you want to share your office, if.
You want to share.
Your share my.
Office, share my office dot com. And, you know, we tried, uh, adverts for free. We did it purely on that basis. And then we sort of put a small fee in. And that's that business has really taken off since we started charging a flat fee. Whether you have photographs or not, a flat fee of seventy five quid, an advert. Yes. You know, and it's almost like I think when it was low cost it was like, no, that can't be any good because look how cheap it is. You know, people.
Were suspicious.
Of.
Google. They didn't. They thought there was a catch. They thought they would get a bill afterwards. They thought there was something else going on. But now it obviously seems to meet people's expectations of what it should cost. Yeah. Again, so that's that's market focused. That's your marketing department going out and figuring out what, you know, what people want to pay rather than just going, well, it costs us this much to provide it and we'll add in twenty percent on top. And that's our price. That might not work. That might be too much. It might be too little. It's not it's not a very valid way of, of setting pricing anyway, but that, you know, that's, that's why there's a whole industry built up about with helping people with pricing because it's, it's really difficult.
So the old adage of, you know, keep putting your prices up until your customers squeal. I mean, is that did that come from the marketing department?
I have I have no idea. Um.
I thought you were a shattered man.
No. Thank you. Yeah. I don't know everything. I mean, I know most things, but I don't know everything.
Yeah. Anyway, that podcast was was, uh, brought to you by. Soldier on.
Yeah. I mean, I think it's not a very scientific way of doing it, is it just kind of putting it up until your customers stop coming. You know, actually asking your customers, doing some research might be a little bit more, um, proactive and, and less likely to kill your business off.
Um, I suppose. Okay.
So yeah, so the digital side, as we were saying, the digital side cover can cover your product if you deliver it digitally. It can cover your, um.
Market research.
Yeah. Your research, um, your distribution, your place, your product itself could be digital. And then obviously the promotion, the, what we deal in mainly is really digital promotion or digital communication. Mhm. Um, and like you were saying earlier, it'd be really, really difficult to do any sort of communication, marketing communication that didn't have a fairly significant digital element in it. There aren't many companies out there now who don't have websites, um, who don't use some sort of digital method to speak to their, their audience. Yeah. So, you know, even if you're doing, you know, press advertising, there'll probably be an online version of that publication. So you will have an online presence of some description. Um, so I think, you know, I think it would be really hard to produce a marketing plan for somebody that that wasn't at least partially digital.
Okay. So putting you on the spot a bit, uh, if you think back to the days where you began your career in marketing.
That was a long time ago.
And think about some of the things you did then. Can you think? Can you kind of align that with the digital equivalent Now my. Is there anything that sort of springs out? And if there isn't, that's fine.
Well, yeah, I suppose it is. I mean, my job predominantly was producing brochures. Okay. Um so obviously that's something we don't do here. Um, it's, it's very much kind of gone by the wayside. I mean, people still produce brochures, but not in the quantities that they used to.
Yeah. That's right.
But the process is actually very similar to working on a website because you're, um, you're gathering pictures together, you're writing copy, you're sending it off to somebody to make the artwork.
I'm laughing here because, you know, the only, all I can think of is Swiss Tony from the Fast Show. Well.
I can't remember.
Well, he used to acquit everything to making love to a beautiful woman. You know, marketing Darren is very much like making love to a beautiful woman.
Okay, I'd like to see you follow that analogy and make sense of that one.
I couldn't because I'm not Charlie Higson and I'm not clever enough to do it. But but it was it was just the way that the way that you went into that just reminded me of because I'm a huge fan of the show. Who isn't? Anyway, sorry. Carry on.
Yeah. So yeah, producing brochures is a bit like making a website.
Ah, right. Okay.
Because the yeah, it's it's the same. But instead of. So you're, you're getting the design done. We get designs done for websites, but instead of them sending that off to the printer, we send it to one of our developers to build the website. So the it's very similar.
And do you think there's often so much wrong with websites because there isn't the same pressure? I mean, you've you've spoken about it before. I mean, I remember speaking to a printer once who told me about this horrible story about going to print with like five thousand beautiful glossy brochures. And on the front, instead of investors in people, it said investors in Pople and nobody had spotted it and it had been sent to print. So, I mean, we see, you know, issues with websites, you know, we find stuff on our own website that's like, oh my God, we spelt this word wrong. Yeah. You know, hope it's not the word professional. It always amuses me when people spell the word professional wrong. But you know, we find stuff as well. And, you know, I suppose there's a the pressure's off because like, oh, we found a typo. Great.
Well, we can change it. You mean.
I mean, was it was it a pressure cooker.
Kind.
Of environment when you were working on brochures? I mean, were you ever in a development of a brochure? And when it went to print, like suddenly somebody found something?
Oh, yes.
Oh, really?
Oh, we've done it. Yeah.
Must have been terrifying.
I mean, think about when we put a website live and the sort of moment of anticipation. Well, think of that and think about the fact that you've on that website, you've maybe spent ten thousand pounds. And if there's a mistake, you have to start again and get them printed again. I mean that that moment of opening a box of brochures, you've got about one hundred boxes of brochures turned up in your office. Everyone's going, we don't have room for them. Can you get rid of them? Can you put them down in the hole in the cupboard or get them out to wherever they're supposed to be. You've got that moment of opening the box of brochures.
And even if you'd used a proofreader, because, I mean, there were people who specialised in having the eagle eyes to find, you know, eyes not dotted and t's not used and.
Proofread it ourselves. But you usually had quite a few people proofreading it. But there was still the moment, and there was always somebody who would go through it and go find a mistake. And you're like, oh, you could have told me that before we send it to print. So yeah, it did happen. And also the thing you had the thing where you've got these beautiful dark blue glossy brochures in a box, you take them out of the box and all the blues rubbed off on all the white bits of the other brochures. And you basically got to get them done again because they haven't got sealed properly.
So one of the.
Things print dark blue brochures. That's what I learned from that.
One of the things that we have to help clients understand quite regularly, in my opinion anyway, I seem to have this conversation quite a lot. Is that the website perhaps that we produce for them is not a brochure, and I mean that as in it's not a you know, it's not chiseled in tablets of stone. I mean, it should be it should be evolving. It's, you know, we want to let's face it, with most of our customers, we want to get a new website. If, if, if a new website's needed, we want to get that live as quickly as possible. And we want to get like what they call in software development terms, minimal, minimal viable product, minimum viable product. We want to get that out there. And sometimes we get pushback from customers, from clients because they're like, no, we can't put the website right live yet because it's not finished, you know? And I wonder if it's a throwback to that, thinking about it like a brochure when they knew that once they said, sign off where we've approved this and the money's spent with the printers producing the beautiful glossy brochure that they couldn't then change their mind. It's really getting them out of that mindset is quite challenging, isn't it?
Yeah. Yeah. With brochures, I mean, you would you would just hope that nothing changed. Your prices didn't change or you didn't move office or something while you still had like a thousand brochures sitting in a cupboard. But it happens all the time. And that's a fantastic thing about working on a.
Website, is it to see glossy brochures with stickers on them?
But yeah, you don't want to be the person who had to go and put all the stickers and all the brochures.
That's right.
But yeah. Websites. Yeah. It's, it's hard to get people past that and go, look, you can change it. This is just a starting point because people want to put their best foot forward. I guess they want it to look all beautiful and shiny from day one. But yeah, the the priorities are different. The purpose of a website is different from the purpose of a brochure.
Doesn't it? I mean, we've got customers who kind of entirely put us put themselves in our hands, just trust us. And that's great. Love that. And we've also got like, you know, an architect down, down in, down in the Midlands. Um, great client to work with. I mean, really good fun.
Really nice guys.
Because they're architects and they're, you know, the designers, they're creative people, you know, they've been, like, more interesting to work.
With. Yeah. Very hands on with the design, as you would expect. They're very hands on, but from our point of view, we're kind of going, well, you know, the content's actually the most important thing in a website because you need to get it out there, get the design is important, but the content's really important. But you know, if you're a designer, you're a designer and that's what you're going to look at. So it's our job to sort of steer the content side.
I imagine like if when they're designing like buildings and things, if the client comes along and says, oh, no, no, put another window there and put and put a door there. They would probably say, no, no.
Yeah, they probably would. Unless, unless. Well, they'd have to say, well, yeah, but it's going to cost you.
Yeah. I mean I do know a few architects and um. Yeah, they're very particular.
Oh yeah.
They are detail people.
Yeah. They have to be obviously, you know, we're producing a website and you can go and change it. Once you've built a building, it's kind of hard to go and change it.
Yeah. Well, yeah, kind of, although yeah, They also make a lot of money adapting buildings that they designed, don't they?
Yeah. You can, you can change buildings, but it's not cheap. I mean, you know, change changing a few words in a website's not that difficult. Mhm. Comparative to putting another window in or taking it out.
So. So the website brochure analogy is a pretty good one. If even if there's a need, if you like to get the message across to people that like it's not a brochure, it's not fixed. As soon as it goes, it goes live. Well likely to be adding to it, adapting it, you know, especially if we've got, say, Alex working on conversion stuff. So he's actually, you know, watching how people are using the website and then adapting it where there are roadblocks and improving it so that we so that the website does its job better.
Yeah. That's it. And that's, that's the digital side of it. And that's, you know, where we come in. So, you know, that's an argument for saying, yes, we are doing digital marketing and not marketing.
So what else could we what else is there? Uh, either a crossover or even there's some stuff you used to do in marketing that you absolutely don't do anymore. Like not even a digital version of it. Is there anything like that? Or is everything in marketing? Because the purpose of this is obviously is digital marketing. Just marketing is kind of where we're coming from. Uh, having, you know, started a new podcast and called it Digital Marketing From The Coalface. Yeah. I didn't think that one through, did we? Um, so, you know, is there anything else that, you know, along the lines of the website brochure? I mean.
There's, well, there's direct mail.
Yeah.
There used to.
Be the.
Putting the, putting the letters and brochures into an envelope and posting it out. Whereas now it's.
Email was, was it expensive to do.
Um, yeah. Yeah. It was because you've got your, you've got to have a brochure, you've got to have a letter, you've probably got something else in there as well. You've got your envelopes or your labels, you've then got your mailing house, you've got your post.
To go along with this list.
It's quite a long list. You've got, you know, you've either got somebody very.
So typically to get a nice direct mail in front of a potential customer. Yeah. Was pounds pence. What was it.
Per per person or pounds.
Pounds per person.
Probably because you've got your postage, your envelope. You probably want to overprint your envelope.
The list again.
I quite like doing the list. Yeah.
I'd just like to apologise on behalf of Red evolution for that listing of how you put an envelope together.
Yeah, I know, but you've also got somebody having to stuff the damn things into the envelopes. Either some poor junior person in the company.
Which would have been you, no doubt.
No, I was never that junior.
No.
But sometimes there wasn't a junior person.
University straight into a senior role.
Pretty much. Yeah. So, um.
But coming down to.
Earth.
Isn't.
It? Sometimes it was me because there wasn't a junior person or it was too important to give to a junior person, or it just had to be done really fast and I had to get stuck in. So yeah.
So done is, is the idea that we are direct mail, which. And, and there was a very real cost per. Putting it in front of somebody for that compared to the tiny cost of putting an email in front of somebody. Yeah. Is that, do you think the reason that I mean all right we've all had direct mail, which was, you know, directed at us incorrectly. We would never have bought that product or service, but at least they went to the trouble of producing something nice. I mean, with, with email marketing, which is I, you know, it's still a strong way of marketing, but massively abused.
And I mean.
I mean, is, is, you know, a lot of people when they think about marketing, think about email marketing and therefore think marketing.
Is just a bit of a.
Shit. Yeah.
The thing with direct marketing and email marketing exactly the same. The success of the campaign is in your list. if you've got the list. A list of the right people. Then you're probably going to have a degree of success with it as long as you say the right things to them. The same with your direct mail. It's your list. The list is is absolutely core to any direct marketing now. Email marketing is just direct marketing. It's just delivered by email digitally, but it's still the same thing. I think that's where it all comes down to that. It's the process. You know, your marketing, your digital marketing plan or your marketing plan. You know, you need, you need to, um, figure out what your objective is for this digital marketing campaign or this traditional marketing campaign. What is it you want to achieve? You want to sell more something or others? Probably. Yeah. Um, so then it's your strategy. Like, who do you, who are you targeting with this? Who are the people you want to come and buy this thing that you're selling?
Um, but don't you think with email marketing, people don't do that. They simply send it out to a million people because even if you only get .05 percent of those people, then that's good enough.
So that's the trouble.
Completely abused.
Yeah. So your success rate is going to be skewed because you haven't even bothered narrowing it down. But I mean, even not I mean, all marketing comes down to, you know, your objective, your strategy, who you're targeting and what you're, what you're going to say to them. And that's, you know, that's just how you do it.
How did you used to qualify with traditional marketing when you were sending out a mailshot? How did you, you know, how accurate could you be sending Mailshots out? I mean, you could do, I guess, like account based marketing. So you've got a product, you know, that only solicitors would buy this product, whatever it is. Yeah. And so you just send it to solicitors. But even then it's like, it's, it's pretty scattergun isn't it?
Yeah. I actually used to, I used to send direct mail to solicitors. That was another job I had, which was pretty much all involved sending direct mail about law courses to solicitors. Um, and we actually were quite sophisticated with our lists. So we had, you had different courses of different types of law and things. And so you actually got lists of, of the lawyers, the law firms that, that specialised in, you know, commercial property or conveyancing, whatever it was. So you would actually send the brochures to the right people. Yeah. And actually it, and it worked, surprisingly enough. Mhm. So yeah, the same, the same thing. It's, it's the list. And if you can be more targeted, then you can have more success because like we say, if you know your customers, you know, if you're writing a blog post, if you know who you're writing that blog post for, you can, you can make it speak to them. You answer the questions that they're asking, you know, make it really, really relevant. So it's going to be more, it's going to sort of hit home, be more, more successful in whatever it's trying to achieve. And the same with your direct mail. If you're, if you're being very specific, if your list is only solicitors who sell retail parks, you know, then you can send them something that is absolutely relevant about retail parks rather than sending them something that's about selling houses, which they're going to go, well, that's nothing to do with me, so I'm gonna ignore it. So the more relevant it is, the better. So, you know, same thing as we do when we're talking to clients and say, you know, you need a buyer persona or an ideal customer.
Buyer personas because I mean, you know, all digital agencies talk about buyer personas and really, you know, building out those personas of your ideal customers. And I assume maybe wrongly, I'm thinking probably rightly, that you used to do exactly the same back in the day.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, every marketing plan starts with your target market. Who are you targeting because you can't write a marketing plan without it. Yeah. And I mean, if, if anyone ever comes to me and says, I want to do this, I'm like, okay, who's who's it for? Because you can't, you can't get any further without understanding who it's for.
Yeah. I mean, it is something that, that people find challenging still, isn't it? The whole kind of idea of like, right, you know, we sit down with a, with a potential new customer. We talked. We talked about how we on board do discovery, etc. in a previous podcast. So when we sit down with a new customer and we start asking them like, well, who's your ideal customer? I mean, how many times do people say, oh, everybody, everybody.
People are scared of missing out on that, that one person in a random group of people that might just buy it. And it's, it's quite hard to explain. It's the same as when like going back to when you used to produce adverts and say, write a good advert should be have one, say one thing, one message. People can we just say, and we also do this, this, this and this. No you can't, no you can't. One message, one thing, one idea. That's right. And that's when it's going to work best. And the same with, you know, with any anything you're selling, think about who it's for. It's, it's absolutely not for everybody. Think about Coca Cola. They made a version of Coca Cola that had less sugar in it.
It's horrible.
Maybe horrible. But that's not the point.
With sugar and.
Horrible.
Because they fill it with. They fill it with chemicals to make it sweet again. And it's bloody awful.
Totally agree, but that's not the point. We should agree on that. No sugar. Just normal sugar. It's fine. Yeah. Or drink water?
Yeah.
Anyway, so where was I? Yeah. So Coca-Cola invented a product that, um, had no sugar in it or practically no sugar in it. Now, who can drink that product with no sugar in it? Anyone. Yeah. Anyone can drink.
Caron can't because it gives her a headache. Well, he looks at the packaging and says, oh, it's got tartrazine or whatever in it. I can't drink that. Yeah, but.
Technically, you know.
You should have a big label on it contains nasty chemicals that might give you a headache.
Totally, totally, I totally agree. Horrible stuff. I can't touch it myself. But anyway, the point is that human. Most human beings can drink sticky brown liquid with no sugar in it. You know, you could you could market it to everyone because it. It's just a drink. Now, who is Diet Coke aimed at.
People who are trying to lose weight.
It's aimed at young to middle aged women.
Okay.
Who are maybe, you know. Yeah. Trying to lose weight. You think about the Diet Coke ads, the Diet Coke break? Yeah. They they marketed that sticky brown sugar free product at a very, very specific audience. I mean, so, you know, very few guys will probably drink Diet Coke because they know it's aimed at women.
They're horrible.
Oh, yeah. Okay. But Pepsi Max then just went in and filled.
The other horrible.
Should I just leave at this point? I'm gonna switch off your microphone or something. Pepsi Max is aimed. It's also it's brown, sticky, sugar free liquid. And it's aimed at guys.
Yeah.
But it doesn't have to be. They just decided that was their market. That's who they were going after. They didn't go, oh well, it's for everyone. They didn't go. Diet Coke, it's for everyone. They went. Diet Coke is for this group of women. And Pepsi Max went sort of for the Yorkie one. You know, it's not for women. It's it's for big macho men who want to look really strong and ocular, but also don't want to drink sugar and want to drink horrible additives. So you know that all the brands do it. You could sell it to everyone, but they choose not to. They choose to pick a group of people and put it in front of them with that message.
Yeah. And the additional thing that we can do with digital marketing, which we've spoken about in previous shows, is, um, the fact that with some of the tools that we use with digital marketing, you, you know, if Pepsi, Coca Cola had brought those ads out, I don't know, you know, just now they were just doing it. Then there's a chance that I would never even have seen the advert because they would actually target it at the people, not just by understanding that the people who are targeting it and making the subject of the advertisement appealing to that demographic.
On Instagram.
Just make sure only that demographic even see it in the first place.
So yeah, there'll be things advertised on TikTok or whatever that none of us have ever seen.
That's right. Yeah. So it's all it all becomes highly targeted.
We probably don't want to see, but I mean, you could see it on TV adverts, you know, you'll be sitting in front of it and you know, somebody or a husband or whatever will say, what a terrible advert. I'm like, yeah, but it's not targeted at you. The people it's targeted at will love that advert. So which means they're getting it right because they're alienating us, but they don't care because we're not the target audience.
So again, trying to align digital marketing stuff we're doing now with with more traditional marketing or marketing the way it was done a while ago, thinking about crossovers again. And sometimes when we're speaking to customers, we're trying to put together a message and, and they, they don't quite understand. I mean, an example would be, um, Pugsley and Lewis. Great client. Love working with Pugsley and Lewis. They restore Aston Martins. So you spoke earlier about adverts becoming cluttered. I mean their adverts because we do some actual magazine adverts.
Right. So we're not entirely digital you know.
That's right. We're producing magazines.
Are the same. You know, we've done their branding. We work on, on all their marketing really. So, you know.
The message on that is it's evolved. We've had different messages and we moved it on. Uh, currently running, uh, driven by passion, guided by experience because their market are people with very, very valuable, extremely valuable classic Aston Martins. They want to know that the people who are looking after their car just live and breathe it.
Yeah, absolutely. You would want anyone.
I relented and we used the P word, which I hate.
The.
Word. Yeah. But the, you know, um, the guided by experience was also saying, look, we've been doing this for a long time.
You wouldn't just take it to the garage down the road.
We've been doing it for a long time. Safe pair of hands and it's effective. It's working well. It's actually it's been a good message, if you like, for their ideal personas, their buyer personas.
That's it. So I mean, that's, you know, it's, it's a print ad, but it could just as easily be a.
It's on the website as well.
Yeah. But it could just as easily be, uh.
Um, but in the advert, we have a, usually a beautiful picture, you know, um, driven by passion, guided by experience and Pugsley and Lewis and that's it. We don't try and, and say, and we do this and we do that. Oh, and by the way, you know, oh.
The list of bullet points.
Yeah. Even though that's what they kind of pushed for, you know, and so I think I don't really know where I'm going with this, but I'm, I'm, I'm kind of you must have had similar conversations back in the day with, with people around, around this very thing, you.
Know.
Just you know, say what we do, you know.
Can you just say.
About it does what it says on the tin.
But and we also do this, this is this. No, this advert has to do one thing. And it seems we talk about a web page. A web page has to. Each web page has one thing.
What do they need? All that kind of stuff. Yeah.
And each each individual web page should only be doing one thing. So it's just like an advert. So it's the principles of marketing are the principles of marketing. Because people have said to me, you know, I've worked in loads of different industries, you know, oh, how can you move from one industry to another? Well, the principles of marketing are the principles of marketing. You, you work out what your objectives are. You work out who you're targeting, you work out what they need and what they want to hear. And then you, you make it and you put it in front of them. It, it really doesn't matter if it's if it's a, you know, building or a box of biscuits or a service. And it doesn't matter if you're providing that digitally or, you know, physically, and if you're communicating it on paper or on a website, it absolutely doesn't matter because the the theory, the principles, it's exactly the same. I mean, we we happen to deliver our marketing communications digitally, mostly. Mostly digitally. I mean, we've done yeah, we've done exhibition stands for people. We do print adverts. We, you know, we've done business cards and bits and pieces. But the, you know, what we mostly deliver is our digital means of communicating what they do.
But we could drop the word digital. Probably.
It wouldn't really matter. I mean, if we said we were a marketing agency, you know, what we do wouldn't change, but would. It's it's again, it comes down to customer perception. Yeah.
So if we say persona is, is might be looking for a digital.
We said we were a marketing agency. They might not, they might say, oh, you don't do websites. The fact that we do websites and, you know, digital communication, mainly people, the people who we're targeting probably would think of us would be looking for a digital marketing agency rather than a marketing agency, which they might think of as more PR, which we don't really do an awful lot of other than digital PR, um, or like TV advertising or something. So I think our audience would call us a digital marketing agency, which is why we're right to be calling ourselves a digital marketing agency, which comes back to what I said in the first place. It's about understanding what your customer is looking for. And I think that's what they're looking for. If that changes, then we would change how we refer to ourselves. We used to call ourselves an inbound marketing agency.
We did.
But we realised that people actually had no idea what that meant and they weren't looking for it. They were looking for digital marketing agencies. So in a customer focused sort of way, we started calling ourselves a digital marketing agency. And I think we would evolve, you know, accordingly if, if what people asked for changed again.
Mhm. Good.
Okay. Well, I think we've answered our own question.
I think we have. Yeah. That's right. Uh, I've certainly learned plenty listening to you talk about that stuff. And I'm not joking. Uh, that's really good. Um, and not at all surprising either. Um, I don't think there's anything else we need to cover in this particular podcast. Anything else you want to say before we close it off?
No, I think I've probably wittered on enough and.
That's all it's been really.
I've really for one day. No, it's quite nice to actually-
I listen back to this. I'll play this in the car when I'm driving down Carnoustie to watch the Alfred Dunhill at the weekend, I think.
Yeah. No, it's quite interesting to go back to basics of marketing. I don't think we do it enough and um, I don't think there's enough understanding of it. So I think it's quite nice to, to go back and cover it.
Okay. Great stuff. Well, thanks for listening to the Digital Marketing From The Coalface podcast, which we will continue to call Digital Marketing From The Coalface. Um, looking forward to getting the next episode out as soon as. Meantime, thanks very much.