As a strategy. What I would say to anybody listening to this is if you've got a weak online presence, don't necessarily jump straight into new website, tons of content, SEO, etc. you know, sometimes experimenting with PPC can bring in some good business and give you some really good market insights.
I want to say something that might come out wrong. Paying for marketing. It doesn't bring success by default, right? You cannot just decide, right? I'm gonna splash cash at the wall and now I'm doing marketing. So the business will roll in and revenue will be generated. You are gonna have to be more involved in the process than that. And if you are working with like a legitimate, sensible, grown up marketing agency, there will be a period of experimentation where you are very much plugged into what they're doing and that they have to ask you questions. You've got to understand the audience. You've got to understand what resonates with them. You've got to understand what the competition are doing. And that all takes time. And unfortunately, it does take money to. It does take experimenting with cash.
Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. Take two. Because Dave Idiot Boy Robinson didn't press record. Um, and he's with as usual, Alex Butcher.
Yeah. Unwilling co-host.
You didn't correct me when I said boss.
You can say, what the f*ck.
Alex, isn't it? Yeah, but I was saying in the unrecorded version of this podcast that I always get nervous when I'm going to say your name because it feels there are options. There's no option with my name. It's Robinson. Robinson, unless you're Scottish, in which people nearly always call me Robertson because Robertson's a more common name. And so the brain hears Robertson when I say Robinson, which is way more polite than the unrecorded version of the podcast. What I said there. Um, yeah. So your name Bussey. Yeah. Just that's it rhymes with.
Yeah.
Hussey.
Yeah, sure. Let's go with that.
Yeah.
Okay.
Isn't a famous press magnate Hussey? Is that So I should know that I'm an idiot.
That was not the version that it was shortened to at school or changed to at school. As you can probably imagine.
No, I can't tell me.
I'm not gonna repeat it. We shall leave it to the pussy.
Yeah. Pussy. The pussy. Yeah.
Not very inventive.
You went to a school full of uninventive morons? Yeah, basically, it sounds like it. Yeah. In my day at school, somebody with the nickname Bussy. Nickname Bussy. Probably fussy. Oh, fussy. Bussy. Probably like that. Yeah. Pretty sure.
Probably quite fitting.
Yeah. All right. Um, as I mentioned in the preamble, um, which is only going out on tick tock and stuff like that, obviously to try and intrigue people and interest them in.
Like an.
Exclusive come and listen to the, um, the boomer and his mate talking.
About.
Talking about PPC and SEO and digital marketing. I was going to have a little conversation with you around the idea of full service versus some service agencies. Yes. Now, you know, stall fully laid out by us, um, with some exceptions. For example, PR, we are a full service agency. We can talk to you about your strategy, develop a strategy, we can design it, build it, we can build apps, we can run PPC, SEO, we can do content. We can do fantastic job with video, podcasts, you name it, we can produce it. We're a kind of Swiss army knife of of services.
Making your impartial pitch.
Uh, it's something I heard somebody on, on TikTok. I think they were talking about themselves or it was, I know it was somebody on, uh, on LinkedIn talking about themselves. And I'm a Swiss Army knife of a marketing expert. And I just thought, what a bell end.
The f*cking the marketing twats on LinkedIn. And they're like, oh, I wear so many different hats in my roles. You're a terrible marketer and we all know it.
You only need one. You just need a Tilley hat because it's like, keeps the sun out, keeps the rain out. It looks stupid, but you don't care. It's just like the only hat you ever need. You only need to wear one hat.
This is a. This is a place that boomers reach, isn't it? Uh, it's not boomers, it's people. You get to a certain age and you stop caring what your clothes look like. I've heard about that. Yeah. Yeah.
I love me till.
I had to go to my neighbor about this the other day who was wearing open toed sandals and socks. I was like, what are you doing? And he was.
Like, all right, is that not. Is that not.
Good? That is wrong. Is it? But he's like, I can do what I like. I'm retired.
But I've seen some very young, very cool people wear flip flops. Not the thong type, the strap type. Flip flops with socks. That's a thing.
They're not very cool.
It's a thing. You've seen people doing this.
It was, like, a fashion brand, like Gucci.
Like yeah it was no, no, it was stupid. I can't believe that I'm. I'm more up to date than you. I know about socks and flip flops or sandals or whatever. Well, it's actually really cool, apparently. I still, it still looks stupid, but I mean, it is a cool thing.
Maybe it's one of those things where it was uncool for so long that it's sort of like, you know, like counterculture. Cool. Maybe, I don't know.
Yeah. Anyway, full service versus some service. So I mean, for example, we had an opportunity which has come our way. We haven't won it yet, but it's an opportunity. Nice company, decent sized company, an I.t company in Edinburgh. And they've got a relationship with the design House and that design house have designed them a new website I think. I think new website, maybe branding, maybe there's other stuff, but certainly a website. But they want to build that website in HubSpot and they so they look for an agency who could build it for them and they came to us, which is lovely. It's a nice opportunity. Now we're comfortable to do that. Um, for us, the challenge is always going to be with these situations. And we haven't seen the designs yet, so there might be no challenges whatsoever. But the challenge is because we do everything, we could have designed it for them as well as build it for them.
And then we would.
We might look at the design and go, oh, we wouldn't have done that because solid reason why.
You're making hard work for yourself later on that might be really expensive to implement. Yeah. I mean, yeah, there's an element to that. I mean, I think just to sort of come in on what you're saying, I think there's a real I mean, for design, I think you could probably make a case for it, right? Because design is a very creative thing. And different people have different types of creativity. And maybe sitting thirty designers in a room makes the end product better for it. But like so much of what confuses me about specialist agencies in our industry is that so much of what we do just isn't that complicated, that you'd need an agency of thirty plus people to do it, like PPC specialist agencies. I mean, you know, you only need one or two people to, to sort of like keep each other in check, check each other's work, make sure things are good. So what's the value there of having sort of thirty operatives doing PPC only really that you can scale and service more clients? It's not that you're creating a better product. And I think that's part of what I was saying in the sort of non recorded version of this, is that I think an awful lot of specialist agencies.
Stick the knife in and twist.
It. You two. Um, yeah, a lot of specialist agencies sort of market themselves as sort of like, you know, knowing more, being better.
And they.
Might, they might, but I'm not sure I really buy it.
Do you mean they might not?
I'm pretty sure they don't for SEO, PPC, those types of things. They're just not that difficult.
To.
Really.
I think if all you do. Christ, it must be boring. But if all you do is SEO, you're gonna know the ins and outs of it. You're gonna know way more detail, I would think, whether you need to know that way more detail in order to deliver a better end result is questionable.
Yeah. Like I say, the analogy, the thing that always sticks in my head is like cobblers, isn't it? It's like, oh, it's specialist, bespoke shoemaker. He must be brilliant. And half the time it's worse than what you buy next. So yeah, I don't know. I don't really buy it personally. The one thing I would say though, is that I've always thought before I started working here, um, that full service is one of those like really contaminated words in marketing, just because people misuse it all the time. Loads of people build themselves as a full service agency. And what they mean is we do SEO and we have like a designer who freelances that we occasionally tap into. And I think it has a really bad reputation. Like I'm sure a lot of people listening to this will be like, oh, but full service just sounds like too good to be true. Yeah, I bet it's not really full service. So I think sort of agencies that that brand themselves as full agents, full service agencies, like we do have a sort of uphill battle there to persuade people potentially.
Yeah, I know what you mean. Yeah. I mean, for example, um, and we recently worked with a billion dollar company and solved a gnarly software problem that they have that they had. We solved it for them because we have that level of expertise at our disposal.
But this is what I mean. And they didn't need to go to a bespoke software house that does nothing but coding really difficult. They came to a full service agency and we did something very technical.
Because our search strategy works and it's particular technology that we have expertise with. And they went looking for a solution, found us, had a conversation. We've solved the problem for us. They love us to bits for doing it, but there aren't there isn't another, company in Aberdeen who do what we do, who could have solved that problem for them? I mean, we have that depth of expertise. You know, we often talk about the fact that everything from the box full of wires and discs and chips and things, you know, we manage everything from there, right through to the blog posts, which get indexed and bring people to websites and everything in between. Um, I wonder though, if it comes down to, I mean, one of the companies you admire is they call conversion rate experts or something they call dot com, something like that. They are CRO conversion rate optimisation specialists. That is all they do. Yeah. And we admire them. You admire them, I admire them. I like reading the stuff that they put out there. They're very good at what they do. And it's kind of like, yeah, that's a, that's something that we can we can relate to. Now, why is that different to the people that you berated for being SEO specialists, for example?
Well, I don't think it is different, but I've absolutely no doubt in my mind that there are conversion rate optimisation experts working in full service agencies right now that know more than them. I don't like I don't you know, they're very good at marketing themselves as a lot of very specialist agencies are. They have that sort of innate ability to say, well, look, we're the specialists. We know this stuff inside out and build a platform for themselves. But I don't think that's necessarily reflective of how much they actually know. Yeah.
Well, for example, that that old wreck of a car of yours, which you love to bits, you take that to a company who specialise in Land Rover. Yes. Why do you not go to a generalist garage? Because they'll probably have people that will do it just as good a job.
The actual reason I go to that garage is because the people that work there, it's a father and son. They're both in their like late fifties, early 70s, um, and they.
Both in their late fifties.
And early seventies, in their late fifties. And one of them was there and they look like they know what they're doing. They look like weird sort of car wizards. I think I can trust them. And when I take my car.
To.
Clark's, basically, and when I take my car to a garage that's full of like eighteen year olds, I'm like, ah.
That's a bit.
Yeah, a little bit, a little but no, I mean, I think I'm guilty of it. And this is the thing. I mean, and it's funny you should say that, actually, because my car costs me a lot of money to keep running. And now two of the control arms and the suspension need replacing. And I've genuinely had this conversation with my wife about fourteen hours ago where I was like, I really don't know if I'm gonna keep taking it to these guys because although they're specialists, they're really slow and it's really expensive, and I'm pretty sure anybody could do this particular job. So yeah, absolutely. And that's the thing I think a lot of the time, you know, the specialist thing does come with a lot of sort of there's a lot of negatives to it as well.
Does it come down to in some in some instances as to who started the business? Because I'm a generalist, I almost became a specialist. I was heavily into coding and stuff, but frankly, there was too many people who were way better at it than me. But I'm, I'm a, I'd like to think a, a exceptionally good generalist. And I know that sounds big headed, but, you know, I know enough about a lot of things. Many hats I can wear, many hats. I know enough about a lot of things to be able to be in lots of camps as well. And I don't normally blow my own trumpet, but I recognised as I get older that I do have some skills in that I can talk to the coders, I can talk to the marketers, the strategists. I can kind of pull that all that shit together, and I can communicate it to our clients as well, which is good. But I'm a generalist, so I wonder if we became a full service agency because I wasn't, say, a dedicated coding specialist or a dedicated SEO specialist or whatever.
Maybe. I think it depends what kind of work you want to do. If I'm being honest, I'm gonna give a really boring answer. It's the answer my history teacher always told me in her essays, which is that it really depends. I think, to be honest with you, I think it's a completely meaningless distinction. Um, because it all comes down to who you're dealing with. I think if you want an agency that is going to coordinate the whole project for you, that is going to work out what's right, work out how to get it done, get stuff over the line. Then you want to work with people who are generalists, right? If you've got if you've got sort of loads of time, a massive budget, and you want to be. Personally, I think a better way of phrasing this would be if you can't detach yourself and stop micromanaging, probably working with like really specialist agencies, eight or nine of them and trying to get them all to talk to each other and work together and sing from the same hymn sheet is probably fine. But, you know, I think it really does come down to what you actually want from the engagement. And I think what people underestimate with specialists is the amount of time that you will spend. I mean, I before I started working here, I freelanced, I freelanced, just doing PPC because it was much easier to market and much easier to make money doing. But I often ended up working gigs with specialist SEO consultants or SEO agencies. And the amount of time I would waste trying to get the SEO people to understand what I was trying to achieve so that they didn't sabotage it. All of that stuff that happens when you sort of employ lots of specialists and expect them to get on together, you know, it's a lot of work, and I don't really see that there's a huge advantage to it personally, but that's my opinion.
So they the. Ultimately, if you're looking to create an online presence that builds leads, that's your focus. And if you go to an agency who do that, because they have all of those skills in-house, you don't have to go and find somebody to design it. Find somebody to write content, find. Then you are not necessarily going to get a team of. You're still going to get a team of dedicated specialists. It's just that they're all under one roof.
I suppose, and we all have different specialisms, and there's not thirteen of us that just do PPC. But I mean, look, you know, one thing I think it's really important to stress here is that, for example, when you say to us, design a page. Yeah. Deanna, one of our designers or Rob or whoever is working on that design brief does not go away into a bubble, design something fantastic, and then come back and the devs say, oh, shit, like that. We can't build that. It's too complicated because we're used to working with each other and we know how we work. We have good communication internally and that's what you get. I think with a proper full service agency, I think that is the real selling point, is that everything is sort of, you know, coordinated and it's not sort of this weird, disjointed mess. I mean, I'm sure there are people listening to this. I'm sure there are fantastic specialists out there who are very, very, very knowledgeable. And just saying in general, I don't think the distinction is a particularly meaningful one.
Okay. Happy with that?
I think so.
Do you want to move on?
Yeah. I guess the first thing I really wanted to talk about was a bit about sort of experimentation. I think I referred to it as flushing your money down the toilet.
We're going to go into the early the early years of Pink Floyd or something. Is that what you're talking about?
Prog rock? Yeah. I was thinking about this earlier because I said I really like prog rock bands. And then I said yes. And then I was starting to think the other band that came to mind were Blue Oyster Cult. And then I was like, are they really an experimental band? Anyway, off topic.
I can only name Don't Fear the Reaper. I have got an album on vinyl by Blue Oyster Cult that hasn't got Don't Fear the Reaper on it. No, but I can't remember much of their stuff, unfortunately.
You should definitely dig into their stuff. Fire of Unknown Origin is one of the best songs slash albums slash. Things in music. Anyway, very off topic now. Experimentation. So we had a situation recently that does actually sort of dovetail with what you were saying, where a client had come on board for PPC and PPC alone, and that was because he was already working with another agency around the sort of construction of his e-commerce site, the management of it, the running of it. And he just wanted somebody that could drive the leads. Mhm. Um, he, to be fair to him, did stay the course for a couple of months. Yep. But in the end, he ended up sort of pulling the plug quite suddenly, um, because it wasn't generating the leads that he wanted. Mhm. Um, I guess from my end with it being Digital Marketing From The Coalface will just be like fully transparent. The bit that upset me about it was that there was no sort of end of things with gigs that aren't going well. Generally, you sort of get a feel for that and then you sort of, you know, things wind up slowly and you have lots of chats with the client, and the client kind of lets you know that things aren't working and you let them know that what's not working from your end and, you know, everything comes to a sort of tidy resolution. He just turned around basically, you know, we had a chat. He was like, yep, let's try this for another week. Let's go in this direction. We were in the middle of trying something, and he just turned around one day and said, I've decided to pull the plug on this. Um, I think in retrospect, it all comes down to the fact that we were working with somebody else, um, who was.
Dare I say it, we were brought in as specialists to deal with the PPC. We didn't have control over the landing page experience. And no matter how hard we tried, we couldn't get the landing page experience developed the way that we needed it to be developed. So guess what? It didn't work.
Okay, so you can lead a horse to water, but you can't force it to drink. And this is always the rule with PPC. Yeah. Um, but, you know, I think in general, one of the things that sort of struck me out in that situation was something that you always say, which is that, you know, this really is about experimenting. It's about trying different things and seeing what works and.
Which he got. He did understand that initially.
Initially, and then he lost confidence very suddenly in.
You. If money's falling out of your bank account and nothing's happening, you would.
Yeah.
If you were spending that money, you'd have gone. Wait a minute. Something's not right here. There's something missing. We need to pause. I can't keep hoovering money. Sorry. Flushing money down the toilet.
Pause, regroup, think, try and work out what's happening. Yeah. Not just sort of walk away and be like, this isn't for me anymore. Yeah.
Which is there was something fundamentally wrong with what he was offering. I mean, he definitely, you know, we were putting the right eyeballs onto his proposition. His proposition wasn't right.
Well, yeah.
I would suggest.
Yeah, absolutely. That and the way it was being sold wasn't right at all for the market. And lots and lots and lots of problems. But at the end of the day, I think the thing it comes down to is that really in these situations, you have to sort of be willing to stay the course. I mean, he has literally flushed his money down the toilet now because he won't learn from any of the things that we've done. And I know that's a very sort of glib, you know, marketers response like, oh, we learn from failure. But I mean, it's, it's true. You have an opportunity to pivot and change course. You have an opportunity to look at the offer and adjust it and make the sort of two or three thousand pounds that he'd invested trying PPC actually generate a result. And it may have been further down the line and it may have been more expensive, but there was still a lot of potential there. And now there isn't. And I guess that's the thing for me, it's just sort of like if you're going to go into this thing and then bottle it a couple of months in, you are going to waste money. It is a waste of money to do that because there are often teething problems. There are often, you know, there's a learning what if.
What if, like you were banging your head against a wall, that there was a fundamental flaw in the thesis, in the strategy and surely like just saying, right, stop. We'd know by now if this was going to work and it's not working, and there's very little else we can change. That might be the problem. So therefore there is such sort of this. It's a fundamental issue. It's fundamentally flawed.
Yeah, I agree, if it was like a product that nobody else was selling successfully, if you, you know, you could turn around and say, there's no market for this or, you know, this just isn't the way to sell it. But you can see other people selling the product that he's trying to sell, you know, successfully. They have big businesses. And more to the point, you know, when you're looking at PPC keywords and you look at the cost of them and somebody else in that market is willing to pay five, six, seven pounds or dollars or whatever a click. You know, it's because they're selling product. You know, nobody is doing this for fun to flush money down the toilet. Competitive keywords are competitive for a reason. And there is always a way to sort of crack that nut. It's just, it's just not always very straightforward. It's not always a case of like, right, you type the keywords in, you put the adverts up and people start buying stuff. That's not the case. And I would say an awful lot of gigs, especially the sort of gigs that we take on where it's a complicated offer. They're complicated products or services or whatever. It expecting things to be quick and to happen fast is just a fool's errand. You have to sort of be willing to go into this and learn with us. And I think that's the the sort of honest way of.
Because just to pick up on something I was going to talk about today, because it obviously dovetails perfectly with what you're talking about, this idea of being nowhere when it comes to generating business online. Um, and, you know, we get enquiries from people who have neglected their online presence and they've seen that, like when they search for products and services that they provide, it's just their competitors that are showing up. They're not, you know, they're not getting any of that potential business. And they, they almost, you know, as a proposal we've got out at the moment and, you know, they kind of almost a desperation, you could sense it in the invitation to tender, you know what I mean? And, and they want to kind of we want to do this one or this one or this one. And they think there's a possibility like that that's going to solve the problem. And like in six months time, they'll have caught up with everybody. And that might happen if they throw the resource at it, but it also might not. And so this idea of spinning up, um, a dedicated advert or landing page, sending traffic to it from Google ads and experimenting and figuring things out is often time and money well spent. Um, because it lets you understand, you know, how strong your proposition is. Uh, and so that you can build out something way bigger and more expensive with confidence. So what we were doing for him, uh, made sense, but we never got a chance to kind of get to the end game and figure out what the missing bits were that were, that were stopping it from converting. Yeah. So as a strategy, what I would say to anybody listening to this is if you've got a weak, um, online presence, don't necessarily jump straight into new website, tons of content, SEO, etc., you know, sometimes, you know, experimenting with PPC can bring in some good business and give you some really good market insights before you assign a serious budget to to the bigger piece of work.
Yeah. I want to say something that might come out wrong, but it's that paying for marketing doesn't bring success by default, right? You cannot just decide, right. I'm gonna splash cash at the wall and now I'm doing marketing. So the business will roll in and revenue will be generated. You are going to have to be more involved in the process than that. And if you are working with like a legitimate, sensible, grown up marketing agency, there will be a period of experimentation where you are very much plugged into what they're doing and that they have to ask you questions constantly, and you have to be involved, and you have to say yes or no to ideas. And, you know, it's not hands free. It's not like you get to pay us and then just sort of like, go and do something different in your free time and will suddenly magically take care of the marketing. It's a massive learning process involved. And like, I think the other thing I would say about it is that marketing is very sort of niche or industry or market dependent. It's never the same Cookie cutter strategies just don't actually cut it in our industry. So the idea that, you know, because we're marketing specialists, we automatically know how to sell to people who are buying locks for trucks or nuts for cars, or do you know what I mean? You've got to understand the audience. You've got to understand what resonates with them. You've got to understand what the competition are doing. And that all takes time. And unfortunately, it does take money too. It does take experimenting with cash. You can't just do all this stuff sort of frivolously, figuratively, and then roll out, you know, the winning campaign on day one. It's just not how it works.
So fixed price, variable scope. What are you saying? I mean, the idea and this is this is relates to a piece of work that we didn't win recently where it was clear what they needed in Sephoras, like their website needs to generate business. It's very successful engineering company, but they want their website to work harder for them. Great. That's exactly what we do. So it was a great gig, great opportunity. And the way we start these engagements is always like sit down, figure stuff out together, because the proposals you get from the internal people are woeful. Most of the time it's not their job. They don't understand what's possible, what they're missing. You know, all the stuff that we do is not something that they're generally you wouldn't expect.
People to necessarily.
Well, you'd expect marketing people to, but let's not go there. Um, so the starting point is always like, let's figure it out. But we also, when we do respond, we always say like, on balance, it's likely that this is what it'll cost.
Yeah.
So we got told we weren't successful because we didn't give a fixed price in the other agencies did. So that brought me to thinking about like giving a fixed price against a variable scope of work. We're not sure what we need to do, but um, but here's a fixed price for delivering it. I mean, that's, I'm being facetious. I know that I'm being a bit controversial because experience tells us that we probably know roughly what things are going to cost, and we put prices in there saying this is likely to cost, I don't know, fifty K, whatever it was, you know what I mean? But the reason that we didn't get the gig, probably one of the reasons was that we didn't give a fixed price in the other agencies did. It was clear that they'd had been bitten on the ass by a previous agency, and they thought that the way to solve that was to nail them to the floor, um, and get a fixed price off them so that they could then just deliver anything and everything for this fixed price.
Governments do it. Uh, it's going to cost us fifty billion pounds to replace these ferries or ten million pounds.
We're in Scotland. Don't talk about ferries. That's a very sore subject. Well, it is if you're an SNP supporter anyway.
And what always inevitably happens is you get to the end of the product project and they say, oh no, help, it's gone thirteen billion pounds over budget. Ah, we're really sorry. But actually, to finish this, we need an extra twenty billion. I understand it one hundred percent from a business owner's point of view. You want the certainty. You want to be told my new website will cost me this much money and you can budget for it. And you watch it go out the bank account and you can say, that's going to pay for my new website. But it is incredibly unrealistic to the point where it seems almost absurd to me. And I know I, you know, I am a lowly digital marketer and I don't run a company. And I don't, you know, sort of move in those circles. But it's absurd because people regularly and routinely blaze through fixed prices. You know, you get to the end of it and you're like, sorry, we actually can't deliver on that. So what's the point? To, to not work with somebody in case it costs more? I mean, it is probably going to cost more than, you know, whatever number you take anyway. Absolutely. Yeah. It's a, it's a sort of like commoditisation of the process that I think it just shows like a real lack of understanding of what's actually happening. You wouldn't go to a lawyer and say, I want you to draft me a contract that, you know, you know, gives me perpetual ownership of this property and allows me to divest bits of it and retain money if it's ever sold. And I want you to do it for three thousand pounds. They'd be like, it takes what it takes, you know, at the end, I'll tell you how long it took me. Yeah. And it's a trust exercise.
I think it's fair enough that people want to know what they're getting into.
Absolutely.
You know, so if we say, yeah, you know, this is this is probably what the thing's going to cost. But we, you know, we'll firm it up before you make any commitment is what we'd said. You know, this is this is likely the budget, but we'll do this pro bono work to figure out exactly what you need. We'll then be able to give you fixed costs for everything.
For each step of the.
Process. And then you can say, yes, let's do this. But instead, they decided to go with somebody who gave them a fixed cost against an unknown scope of work. Yeah, it's I don't know, I get that my point of view is bias because we don't like doing that. We like to spend our own money, invest our own time and energy to help people understand, help businesses understand what they really need before we then embark on a piece of work with them.
Yeah.
And also to do that.
And also we're just too honest to say, this is definitely going to cost you fifty grand. Because always in the back of our minds, we're like, well, you know, you don't actually know and you want to tell that to people. But yeah, I mean, I think back to your earlier point, I think inevitably in these situations, what has happened is somebody has been stung in the past, probably if we're being one hundred percent honest, because they've mismanaged that agency relationship, possibly don't hold agencies to account. You don't ask them where the money is being spent, the bills stack up, you get to the end of the project, you swallow the loss, but it makes you feel bad. So the next time you go in with this sort of, you know, completely wrong idea that you're gonna stop that agency from taking the piss by imposing a budget on them. But that's that was never the problem. The problem was just that you weren't talking to them often enough. Yeah. That's right.
That's right.
Just my view.
Which actually has no value whatsoever.
Yeah. Well, and I'm sure TikTok will be quick to tell me that.
Have you got anything else on your list? I've got one more thing I'd like to talk about today.
One of the things I do have on my list is this whole thing about what's happening at the moment, about shoehorning B2C or business to consumer tactics into B2B marketing.
I don't actually know much about what you're talking about because you're saying you're saying it as if there's a lot of debate going on. So that's great. I'm all ears.
Well, there's a funny thing happening, which is just that an awful lot of people are sort of pushing this narrative at the moment on like various marketing blogs, drums, marketing news. There's there's marketing profs, there's a whole host of places where people are talking about the rise of influencers in B2B marketing, for example, and how you should start spending your budget on Micro-influencers and a B2C tactic, a very popular B2C tactic, because if you can pay a rapper, I won't pretend to know the names of any current relevant rappers.
Dig doggy just made that one.
Jay-Z, whoever. Um, I only, I only live for like sort of weird eighties hip hop that no one cares about anymore, like run DMC. But you know, like I say, there's this whole sort of growing push towards like use Micro-influencers and in B2C, it makes sense. Somebody wears you trainers, they take a picture of themselves, they put it on Instagram and people think, oh, those are nice trainers. Where do I buy them? The idea that you can.
Sell that nauseating, that whole concept of influencing.
Well, yeah, but this is a marketing podcast. You have to tread carefully because this is like ninety percent of marketing now is just paying people to wear your crap.
How does the B2B influencing work?
Well it doesn't it's stupid.
Bolts and nuts. Not nuts and salted.
I mean, nobody. I mean, okay, if you're if you're in B2B and I don't know, you're selling like flanges or something like that, and.
You don't even know what a flange.
Is. F*cking know what you're selling stuff, engineering stuff, pipes, boilers, that sort of thing. Yeah. I can sort of get behind that. There might be. Yeah, there might be people in your field.
Blowout preventers.
If you've quite finished. No I don't think, I don't know if blowout preventers will push us over our R rating or not, I don't know.
Yeah it might do.
Um I kind of get like maybe there's someone on, on LinkedIn who's like a subject matter expert in the field of heat transfer. And you can get him to name drop you once or twice. And that will somehow. But when you're trying to sell really complicated solutions to problems, which is what most B2B marketing or sales is actually about, you're trying to sell somebody something that they're going to have to invest a lot of money in, and a lot of time using or getting to grips with the idea that you could just pay somebody to sort of name drop it a couple of times or like, you know, show themselves using your dashboard in the background. And that will translate into sales is, I think, farcical. But this all came about because a client came to us and said, we've basically been told we can have an extra two hundred and fifty K a year of marketing budget. How would you spend it? To which my response was, you know, being hit with that blind, uh, hang on a minute. Um, but they kind of came with this laundry list of ideas of things they'd read about online, um, that they should maybe think about trying or could give a go. And I just think it's a really strange place to be that, you know, we have in b2b tried and tested tactics, things that work and things that we can measure working. And there's a whole load of people out there trying to push these ideas that are just sort of unmeasurable, never really going to work. And then clients are sort of reading that stuff and thinking, oh, maybe I should give this a try. Maybe we're missing out. Maybe, you know, my marketing agency aren't as good as they as other marketing agencies because they haven't come to me and proposed that I try influencer marketing or affiliate marketing. That was the other thing that I read about. It's like the rise of affiliate marketing in B2B.
Yeah.
How's that gonna work?
Well, yeah, I mean, I guess if you built a website that was all about heat exchangers, and if you look for a heat exchanger, you land on heat exchangers and you make it so that people can put in their requirements, and then you can then flog that lead to a company that built heat exchangers if.
We're.
Being the same. And that's all affiliate marketing is. Except instead of like having a link to an Amazon thing that costs thirty quid, you know, it's a, give us your details. And then like, this company is looking for this. We estimate that's going to cost about a million quid to build. Do you want to buy it off us for fifty grand?
But this is the thing. I mean, is anybody actually going out and buying heat exchangers based on a list of top ten heat exchanger manufacturers? Or do you know what I mean? This stuff is easy to do.
Ten things to consider when you're going to buy a heat exchanger.
These things are easy to do in B2C because the sales cycle is short and simple. People read stuff. They buy stuff. That's it for B2B. I mean, we've seen time and time again, B2B buying decisions have like hundreds of touchpoints. People read things, they research, they watch things on YouTube. You are not going to con somebody into buying a complicated bit of kit on the basis of an affiliate blog.
No you're not, but you might get in front of them because of an affiliate blog maybe. I don't know. Maybe you just sound a bit.
It sounds a bit desperate to me.
Which is horseshit.
Yeah, it's sort of like it's just funny because an awful lot of these like supposed sort of like fonts of B2B marketing knowledge just do seem to be sort of scraping the barrel a bit. It's sort of how can we shoehorn all of these B2C things in and make them sound sort of like they might be relevant for B2B audience, which they're not? No.
That's right. I keep digging the table with me, with my pencil. It's almost like, that'll do. All right. Um, we've been blathering on for quite a while now, one way or another, even though we had a short break. Um, conflicts of interest. This comes up from time to time with us. So for example, we had a really nice enquiry on Friday from a property company, uh, quite a large property company based in Edinburgh. They've got offices in ten cities. We already have an excellent client who we love, who is a property in the property industry, business, whatever you might say, professional services in the property sector based in Edinburgh. Um, in fact we have, we also have one based just outside Edinburgh ish. Well just outside is probably pushing it a bit. Alloa. Um and we have someone in Aberdeen who we work with. So like the first thing I did was thank you for the enquiry. Delighted to have a conversation. Just so you know, we work with these companies already. Um, so that's like full transparency. And if they said that's not an issue, we would then go to our current clients and say, we've been approached by these guys. Would you have.
An issue.
If we work with them? Are you okay with it? Exactly that. But how how far do you think professional services business should professional services businesses take that kind of thing? Because if you say are in, I don't know, let's take a bigger place. Like if you're in Glasgow or Edinburgh. Well, I mentioned Edinburgh already. So let's say, for example, a firm of solicitors in Edinburgh was was a client of ours. Does that mean we cannot work with any other soliciting firms of solicitors in Edinburgh?
Well.
Unless their letters.
This is an ethics question.
Well yeah, because it's kind of.
Well it is an ethics question first and foremost, because I know for a fact that there are.
Only affect people in ethics.
Ethics, ethics. I'm not sure we can. You'll have to cut that out. People think making fun of people's speech impediments, which is not okay. I agree.
I agree.
Um, I know for a fact that there are agencies, um, agencies that I've worked with who have on their client books, several competing companies who do not know. They don't know that that same agency is running SEO and PPC.
That's quite interesting.
Yeah. And these are big.
Is that because they think it's wrong that they're doing it. So therefore they're not going to tell anybody. I mean, that would that's a tightrope. You walk in there.
It's a real tightrope. Yeah. I mean, I think the way you have to think about these things is are you going to be competing with yourself? Because it's fundamentally, I think, dishonest to take somebody's money. And this isn't a problem that lawyers or anybody else really have. But but we are going to put two clients in competition for the same keywords. With SEO or on PPC, where you're literally bidding against other people in an auction, if you are basically going to pit one client against another and take both of their money, I think there is a a sort of fundamental dishonesty to that, unless everybody's okay with it and.
Is okay with it.
Yeah. And, you know, you can say to people, well, look, you know, we are also trying to rank somebody else for these keywords, but you'll be positions one and two. Are you okay with that? Yeah. Or we'll go after different keywords, you know, for the two of you.
Or what if we went to our client and said, this opportunity has come along? And they said, well, we would have a problem if you took that work on. Does that mean then that that client has to agree to stay with us for a defined period, because none of our customers are contractually bound. We keep businesses, we keep customers because we do good work for them. That's our modus operandi. That's what we would prefer to do. But if you know, if you said we've been in a situation where working with an IT firm and another IT firm contacted us, quite fancied the gig, if I'm honest, and we mentioned it to them. Oh no, that would be a real issue. There's a total conflict of interest there. Um and that other IT companies now no longer with us. I'm not bothered that they're no longer with us.
But it's frustrating.
It's frustrating that that other piece of work and as it happens, we've got yet another IT company approached us on Friday based down in Newcastle actually. And that looks like it might be an interesting gig. Um potentially. Um but yeah, I mean it is, it is interesting isn't it. You know, where do you, where do you I mean, yeah, it companies is a good one because you know, there would be no conflict of interest if I'm providing IT security, cybersecurity and IT support services to you. Uh, Alex agency limited and that same company was providing them to me. Dave agency limited. That wouldn't be an issue, would it?
No, it's only because you're going to be competing with yourself in a public arena. I think that it even becomes a problem, but it is just how you negotiate that, isn't it? Because how can you how can you in good faith, say to somebody, I'm going to work really hard to get you the best possible results, knowing that you're sending some of the traffic to a different website and that they're not getting those leads as a result.
Be interested, um, to know if any agency owners listening to this, what their approach is to situations like that, whether they go full transparency like we do, or whether they do the cloak and dagger stuff like the other company that you mentioned.
one of the things I'd be really interested to know as well is what, um, really niche down digital marketing agencies that only have one industry, you know, you see them all the time. They're like one of the ones I see all the time is people who just do B2B SaaS. It's like they only all of their clients are B2B software vendors. Yeah. It's like at a certain point, a conflict of interest is inevitable. So how on earth do you manage to sort of niche down and be that specific? And still.
Because some agencies that we've spoke about this in the last podcast, some agencies have gone very niche. Yeah. We only help companies that install generators as a secondary power.
At a certain point, you're going to get two generator operators who want to rank for the same keywords. So I don't know how that works. Let us know. I know.
Okay, um, I think we've covered quite a lot in the, um, this split recording. Well, we had three goes at it. First of all, I didn't press record, so we didn't record the first bit. The first time I've ever done that in one hundred and twenty odd episodes. Yeah. So, you know, Leslie. Leslie did say I was wondering when you'd actually do that. So she kind of knew it would happen. So it's happened now. Well done. Um, and we've covered quite a lot I think.
I think we have. Yeah.
Because we did miss a week didn't we. Because I'm just going to blame you.
Yeah. Sorry I couldn't be bothered.
Coming to the office or something.
Like that. So David said come in and do a podcast. And I said, nah, f*ck you. I'm gonna sun myself here. It's rude.
Uh, okay. Uh, you've been listening to Digital Marketing From The Coalface, where Dave Robinson and Alex Bussey, uh, talk about stuff going on in agency land at the coalface of digital marketing. I think, again, we managed not to mention any clients by name, which is, uh, the way that we do things. Yes. Uh, and, um, hopefully it was of some interest, but probably not.
There we go. There it is. Thank you.