If a company were going to approach an advertising agency and engage them to do billboard adverts or TV spots, you can be one hundred and ten percent sure that the CEO and probably a couple of other members of senior management would want to rock up and talk to the advertising agency and make sure that the pitch was right and that they were going to advertise them in the right way, and that they were going to say the right things. But when it comes to your website, which I would argue is way more visible than a billboard or a TV ad, you'd think it does get sort of delegated down to almost as if it's a piece of software, you know, a bit of kit. And it's, it's strange because it really is the most public facing aspect of your business nowadays. I mean, it's the first thing anyone's going to do when they hear about you, you know, irrespective of whether they read it in sort of like a pitch document or they see it on an advert is go to your website. And, and yet, like you say, trying to get sort of engagement with the people at the very top of these businesses is often quite challenging.
Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface, Dave Robinson and my colleague Alex Bussy talk about what's been happening at the coalface of digital marketing. Certainly where we're concerned anyway because we're at the coalface. Um, I know that you've come super prepared for this podcast, so off you go. What have you got?
There was one thing I really wanted to talk about. Um, but getting there is, is tricky, so you'll have to bear with me slightly.
All right. You mean I have to do something else meantime or.
No, I mean, just bear with me and it'll be a sarky knob. Normally.
I find that.
Difficult. It's sort of in my notes. I've written clarity of purpose, which I know you'll have a thing or two to say about it as soon as I say it. Um, but but basically this is sort of driven by two things. The first thing was that a client came to us and said, we've been given this really cool opportunity to sort of publish something in a really prominent trade journal. Um, can you help us write it? Um, and then somebody from up high in the company sort of handed down this directive that we were going to use this opportunity to post in a journal to, to sort of promote the product and service that this client does. It's a software solution. So yeah, it was, it was sort of like use this as a sales pitch effectively. Um, which led to much sort of hand-wringing and wrangling because the client realised that they didn't really know what the sort of top level pitch was. They didn't know how they wanted to pitch themselves and exactly what they wanted to say in this journal. And the other thing that sort of fed into it is our own sort of discovery about our industry pages. We realised that we didn't have any industry or sector pages, which was a little bit of an oversight on our part, I suppose, because it turns out that a small, but I guess relatively significant number of people do actually sort of go to market looking for a specific type of, you know, marketing agency, a tech or an engineering marketing.
Agencies with a specific experience, I guess.
Yeah. Yeah. All of this stuff. You can't do any of it. You can't set up industry sector pages. You can't write a headline for your business, and you can't really write a sort of top level sales pitch in an industry journal unless you actually know what it is you're doing specifically the problem you're trying to solve. Okay. And exactly who you're trying to solve it.
For, right?
All of this stuff.
Are you saying that these clients are this this particular client? They know what they do. As in, you know, we weld things together, we do this or whatever it is, but they don't really know why or the problem they solve or.
It's, it's, it's how you sort of like how you pitch it to somebody who isn't necessarily sort of looking for the solution, right? It's like you're solving a really important problem and people might not even realise they have that problem.
Yeah, I know all about that. But it's no, I do. Yeah. I think it all ties.
Yeah. Yeah.
Strategy execution tool people. People have got the problem that they don't execute their strategy and they haven't got a tool for executing their strategy, but they don't necessarily go looking for that.
So this was exactly it. It's like an industry magazine that is going out to a bunch of people. So the stuff in the solution in question is complaints management software and air or employee relations management software. Right. And the question is, how do you pitch to a bunch of people who do need this software to help them improve staff morale, manage their staff better, keep everybody on the same page?
Okay, I think I know. Yeah, I know what you're talking about.
How do.
You.
Yeah. How do you sell them on the advantages of that from, from a starting point of like, you know, they're just completely ambivalent about the whole thing. They don't know anything about the problem. You just got a sort of cold pitch it. And they'd never really gone through that process of working out how you do that.
So they developed some software because, well, yeah. What had driven them to develop the software in the first place?
Well, a real need. So I think initially the story is that somebody had approached them to, to make the software and said, you know, we really need a bit of software that does this, that manages this for us. And they'd gone ahead and built it, and then they had done a very good job of marketing it to people who were also looking for that software solution. But like I say, opportunity came up to sort of pitch it to the wider audience.
And that's not unusual for for organisations to develop some software to solve the problem for themselves and then realise that actually there's a market for this product. Other people have got the same problem. We could do that with our resource management system that we we built, because I wanted a heads up display to show where we are financially, everything we're working on. Yeah. The GMs, you know, and, and like plenty of agencies in the sort of ten to thirty people range, maybe slightly more, um, would benefit from it because it gives us that heads up display of exactly where we are with all the work we're doing this month, where the business is from an income point of view.
But there again, I guess that's where the whole sort of clarity of purpose idea comes from. Because if we decide to do that with the mess we do, to be able to go to agencies and pitch it to them quickly and say, this could absolutely change your life. You have to be very sure you know what type of agency is you're pitching towards, what exactly the pitch is, how you frame it. And I guess where this is coming from for me is that an awful lot of the time when we're working with people, especially at the beginning of relationships, they think they know that, or they think they have a reasonably good understanding of what it is that they do and who they do it for. But it's often not sort of honed enough. There's a lot of work to be done, a lot of the time in sort of figuring out exactly who you can solve the problem for. Yeah.
If you went to a lot of businesses and went into that business and just said, you, you, you, and you come with me, and then one at a time, took them into a room and said, just give me a very quick thirty second pitch about what your business does. Some people would struggle with that. I think, yeah, they would know that they are a draftsperson or a welder or whatever, but it's usually more of an issue further down the line in businesses. So when people are like, well, I'm a welder, I go to work and they show me the drawings and I weld things together. But, you know, they might not necessarily know the bigger purpose, but maybe it's maybe it's further up, maybe it's further up that the, you know, that the, the corporate ladder, that people don't really get it. They only understand the bit that they do and not the bigger picture.
Or that they understand the bigger picture in such a sort of like macro way that they're missing the point. Like, um, we have a client that used to pitch themselves as just sort of like space and storage experts, just like super meaningless, right? It's like so big picture that there isn't really, there's really no context for it anymore. And it's in a lot of the time, I think like sort of narrowing that down. And we've been going through that process, right? We've been for the longest time, we've been like a B2B marketing agency and we thought that's specific enough. We don't want to sort of limit ourselves. And then after a lot of soul searching, we've ended up in a place where we're like, well, actually the people, we really execute well for and the people we want to work with are actually tech and engineering companies. And potentially even narrower than that, because maybe tech is too broad an umbrella. And I just think it's, it's something about that process that people really benefit from, like the clarity you get from working through that stuff sort of exhaustively gets you to a place where when somebody turns around and says, right, you know, pitch to a captive audience of your ideal, you know, potential customers, what exactly is it you do? Do you do, and why do we need it? You can actually just sort of very simply answer that question. But yeah, I guess that's it really.
I mean, a lot of the work we do is about helping businesses understand exactly that. Exactly. You know what problems they solve, who they solve them for, how those people are, you know, how they how to get them in front of those people, etc.. So why is this one perplexed you particularly or them? It hasn't perplexed you. It's just it's perplexed you that how perplexed they are that they can't actually.
Politely.
They can't communicate.
Yeah, well, it's just that thing, isn't it? I think a lot of the time in this podcast especially, but but even more broadly, when people talk about things like business storytelling or like framing or explaining what it is that you do, they talk about it in a very sort of loose and wooly way. And often, you know, the thing that strikes me is often when you ask clients, well, what is it you do? And who do you solve the problem for? Their answers to? Those questions are often very loose and very sort of like, oh, well, we, you know, we do this thing, but we could do it for anybody or, you know, it's like really rare that you talk to somebody and you say, who is your target market? And they say, oh, well, actually, it's like people in the transport industry who have this problem and that and that's it. Like, but that's the point where I guess in my eyes, to be able to market effectively, you really need to get it to that point where you know exactly who your audience is, exactly what you do. And no, I don't think it was particularly that I was perplexed. I mean, we, we worked through it quite quickly together and sort of came up with the answer and the pitch and the way we were going to solve the problem, but it was more just that sort of like when you sort of shine a light on this stuff. A lot of the time people are very ill equipped, and that's not a criticism. I think it's because it's like.
Well, somebody is ill equipped, but that's not a criticism. It's quite funny really.
Yeah, but well, no, it's not because I think an awful lot of people are just too busy doing the job and, you know, marketing to the people that are, you know, already know they need the thing or whatever to actually sit down and think, okay, how would I sort of elevate a pitch? What we do, how.
This illustrates why for marketing to be very good, then the very top people need to be involved in it. Yeah. Because it's very unusual for, say, a CEO not to really fundamentally understand what their business is about. In fact, if they don't, then they're definitely in the wrong job. And that's why delegating marketing down to somebody who's like six months out of university and has now been designated, you know, global head of whatever nonsense. You know what I mean? Just just to give them a title and say, right now, get on with that. Whatever it is I just told you to get on with. It's it's it's like it has to come from the very top. Well, certainly for good business storytelling, you need people that understand the business intimately.
I think this is exactly the point, isn't it? I mean, it's not even just six month old, you know, you know, university graduates that have only been there for a day or two, even when you sort of delegate to a marketing manager. But that marketing manager isn't tied into, you know, the sort of the reasoning. They're not they're not one hundred.
Skin in the game.
Yeah, absolutely. Because I think all of this stuff, I mean, that's why you end up with these, especially with like in the engineering and tech space, you hear a lot of people say we're innovators, you know, what do you do? We innovate. And it's like, that's that it doesn't mean anything. But there's a lot of that that happens. I think when, like you say, the CEO doesn't sort of pitch in and say, well, hang on a second, this is what we actually do. He gets sort of very marketing y, sort of buzzwordy fluffy straplines.
Well, we've seen a lot of that just now, aren't we, with the.
Yeah.
In politics.
Yeah, absolutely.
Keir Starmer's gonna fix all our problems by growing the economy.
Yes.
Oh, for goodness sake. All you've got to do is grow the economy. And by the way, I'm not supporting the Tories by saying that because they're a bunch of clowns as well. But I mean, you know, what I'm saying is like, you're talking about understanding purpose and all the rest of it and being able to communicate that. Politicians don't do that at all. Not if you really listen to what they're saying, as long as you're not trying to just get them, you know, like, like trying to get a gotcha moment or whatever, if you just absorb what they're saying and think about it for a minute, then it's very easy to realise that they haven't got a clue what they're doing.
Well, it's because being specific and precise is, is sort of like anathema to what they're trying to do, isn't it? It's like the more specific and precise they are, the more they can be held to account for it. And the more people will say, well, hang on, how will that work? Or, you know, what exactly will you do? But I think the same is also true.
A lot of sympathy for politicians. I think it's a difficult job. But yeah, I do. I do hear what you're saying.
But I think the same is also true of a lot of businesses. You know, they're so busy trying not to pigeonhole themselves. They're so busy trying to leave the door open to, you know, well, you know, even though we predominantly work with subsea engineering companies, one day an American, you know, um, aeroplane manufacturer could come along and we could technically sell them apart. So we won't say anything too specific on our website in case we alienate people. And I think especially in our space, that's a really sort of endemic problem. It's everywhere. It's like people just do not want to say what they do and who they do it for in a really simple way. I mean.
I mean, I think a lot of companies do, and they're the ones that are doing well because, because they're because what they're saying to the world is very easy to understand. Yeah, this is, this is the problem we solve. You know, we've gone from like, you know, we're, we're an inbound marketing agency. We're a company that can help you grow to, we build lead gen websites for tech and engineering companies. We'll help you grow using digital technology.
But that's and it comes back to the whole time. Poor thing again, doesn't it. I mean, you know, at the end of the day, it's like understanding. I mean, I think part of the decision making for us when we decided to go down that route was the realisation that actually, if a potential customer was on our website, they weren't going to spend a lot of time trying to work out who we were and what we did. You have to sort of just say it very simply, very quickly, and give people the sort of, uh, almost like the credit, I suppose you're saying like, right, look, here you go. Here's the information you need. Now you make a decision. And I think when people don't want to do that, they want to sort of hold back and play hard to get and make people work to find out what they do. They sort of underestimate the fact that people are going to be there for ten, fifteen seconds. They're not going to dig around.
The challenge that, you know, the challenge for us, uh, we thought would be that we would potentially miss out on opportunities when we set our stall out to say, this is very specifically what we do, the sweet spot for us. But what we're finding is that, well, so far is that people we're putting together, we're putting forward a very easy to understand proposition. And the right people go, ah, right. Yeah, I yeah, we need to have a conversation, you know, and I think that's, um, you know, across the board, not not just for agencies like us, I mean, as a business, be very specific about who you help, how you help them.
It's a similar thing with this article that ended up that's going in this journal because, you know, it started out being a conversation about, you know, really ultimately what we're saying is if you use our software, it will make your stuff happier and therefore they will be more productive. That's it. It boils down to that. And I think it's quite uncomfortable for a lot of people to think, okay, but but, you know, if somebody doesn't buy one step of that argument, the whole thing goes out the window and you and you lose the potential for sale. And there's that instinct to be like, oh, it could do this and it could help you like this, and it could help you like that. And to try and sort of like spread bet, almost like hedge your bets on the value of what you're trying to do and not just sort of stick to a single sort of proposition.
I mean, in the olden days, we talked about jack of all trades, didn't we? And it was a term which meant like, if you're not being specific about what you do, if you just well, I can do a bit of this and a bit of that and a bit of this, you know, it doesn't really work. You don't get anywhere. You don't get the good gigs if you're a jack of all trades.
I don't think you get the sort of sustained growth that people really want. Do you? Because what you're going to do is sort of hope that you get a few people who are not turned off by that approach and that are sort of like, oh, well, maybe these guys could help me do X, Y, and Z. But you're never going to get the people who are, you know, very certain that they want a specific type of person. I mean, I think we've seen this, haven't we? We get approached now and we, we get gigs with people who really would only work with a specialist, right. Or would only be interested in working with very specialist company. Whereas you just never going to get those gigs if you're busy being the, you know, the B2B marketing agency that can do everything.
Well, here's an example. I mean, just before I wish I could stop saying I mean, just before we came on air, just before we, um, started recording this, an enquiry came in and it's somebody in the health and fitness arena. Mhm. Um, and they've got a WordPress based WooCommerce e-commerce website that flogs stuff you see.
Not just the kind of gig we love.
Yeah. And and, um, you know, long story short, it's not for us.
No.
Absolutely. I have to have this done in the next week, and I've got four hundred products to add. And it's like, yeah, we were just literally sat here waiting for your email to come in. We had nothing else to do. And by the way, that's not what we do anyway. But they're not our fault. We are, because they did a search in Google and the page they landed on basically said to the world, we are WordPress experts, which we are. We know the software inside out and they desperately need a WordPress expert. So they've just gone well, they've looked at no other page on our website. And I've said this many, many times, people come to your website from a search. That's the only page they look at. They think, yeah, you can solve my problem, or they bugger off and you don't solve their problem. But they thought, you can solve my problem. So, you know, I've got to go back and be quite polite and say, look, nice, nice to meet you sort of thing. But this isn't for us. And he'll he may go, fine. I've contacted ten other companies and two of them have already come back to me and offered to do it, fix it for me for thirty quid. Um, or they might come back and say, well, why not? Your website said that's what you do, you know. So Yeah. Instead of creating a potential advocate, you know, we've now created some somebody. All right. In the grand scheme of things, this person is not going to have a negative impact on our business. But potentially, you know, that person could have could have had a different experience and then passed those on to somebody else because, oh, well, I found these guys, but actually they specialise in what you do, not what I do. And they might be able to help you because they certainly look like they know what they're doing sort of thing. So we weren't specific on that page. Google just did what Google does and go, well, you were looking for this. These guys do this. Off you.
Went. I think that's the real value of this stuff. And I'm sure, I'm sure that Stu would be able to articulate this better than me. But there's something to be said for, for being able to, you know, drill down into your sort of purpose and exactly what it is you're trying to do. And then, like you say, feed that back through into your website. And it should really be sort of in every element of your marketing, right? Because there's a huge benefit to, like you say, putting people off before they get the wrong idea and being very specific. People think, oh, I'll lose business.
You shouldn't be scared of. That is the point you were making.
Yeah, that's exactly it. Like you're going to lose leads. You're going to lose enquiries. By doing that. I mean, if our if our WordPress page said, you know, WordPress sites for tech and engineering companies starting from ten grand.
And by the way, we don't really do e-commerce.
Because.
It bores the hell out of us.
Um, and also, by the way, we don't really like WordPress because it's a bit rubbish, but, you know, but you know, you definitely get less enquiries and that feels bad. We wouldn't get fewer and fewer. Thank you. Yeah. We wouldn't get.
You with an English degree.
We wouldn't um, our revenue wouldn't be impacted by it at all.
Got an English degree or a degree in English. That was bad English, wasn't it? Having an English degree? Because that's like what your degree was done in the in the English language as opposed to French.
Well, to complicate things even further, what I have is a literature degree, not a language degree. So it's even more useless.
Do you spend three years wandering lonely as a cloud?
I could tell you lots about romantic era poetry and Victorian literature, but not an awful lot about language or how it's used. Um, but yeah, where was I? I.
What you, hopefully you were wrapping up because you weren't really sure how to articulate it and you've spent twenty minutes not really articulating.
So yeah, that's fair. That's a fair criticism.
Was it that it really in a nutshell.
Yeah. But I think it's way more important.
Is it is really important. But I'll tell you how important it is when we work with businesses and they're working on messaging, they often really, really struggle with it because they want to say, we do this, we do this, we do this, we do this. We do know we just want like five or six words to explain.
That's it. Yeah.
That's it. I can't do that. All right. Okay. All right. A very short sentence and we'll give you that. We'll give you a very short. Can't do that either.
Yeah. Well I think.
Some businesses might be wildly complex. I mean, if you said like in a nutshell, tell me what would group do? One of our customers is would group. I don't mind naming them because they're massive. Um, you know, if somebody what do they do? You can say engineering experts, engineering specialists and engineering problem solvers, but they've got so many aspects to their business that, you know, is difficult. But most businesses, you can distill it down kind of. Yeah, mostly anyway to give people at least the essence of.
And you should certainly try and again, you know, I don't think wood group are really trying to land clients or articulate what it is that they do. You know, they have a different set of.
You don't they just.
Now?
Are they? Yeah, I think they're like, I think their market cap is about one point six billion yen dollars. Um, and I can't remember who's trying to buy him. Somebody is somebody made an approach and it keeps getting rejected. No it's not enough.
Nice position to be in. But yeah, I mean, I think definitely when you're trying to attract business online, being able to really sort of like drill down and articulate what it is and what value you bring quickly is really important. And yeah, don't be afraid of putting people off.
And to segue into one of the things I was going to talk to talk to you about, um, in order to do that, you need, you know, a fantastic website that talks about the problems that your customers have got so that when they go searching, they find you and then maybe reach out, get in touch, just like the guy did ten minutes before we started recording this. Uh, we were speaking to a prospect this week. Uh, really exciting prospect. I do hope that we manage to, um, get them as clients. Um, but when they were talking to us, they were telling us how, um, the IT department are kind of the gatekeepers of their website and like, they have to kind of get things passed the IT department when they want to do things on their website. And that just got me makes sense.
It's computers and.
The internet and that's exactly it. And there are still so many businesses out there. If you talk about generating business online, then they immediately think it's something to do connected with the IT department. Yeah. And it isn't. It absolutely isn't. And these this is a very big company as well that we're talking about here. And, you know, when you look at their current web presence, it's very clear that the IT department are in charge of it because it's it's aesthetically, it's not it's not offensive. It's it's quite nice. It's okay. But from a from the point of view of a business generation, lead generation tool, it's absolutely hopeless.
It's interesting, isn't it? Because if you were going to, if a company were going to approach an advertising agency and engage them to do billboard adverts or TV spots, you can be one hundred and ten percent sure that the CEO and probably a couple of other members of senior management would want to rock up and talk to that advertising agency and make sure that the pitch was right and that they were going to advertise them in the right way, and that they were going to say the right things. But when it comes to your website, which I would argue is way more visible than a billboard or a TV ad, you'd think it does get sort of delegated down to sort of like, yeah, almost as if it's a piece of software, you know, a bit of kit. And it's, it's strange because it really is the sort of, you know, the most public facing aspect of your business nowadays. I mean, it's the first thing anyone's going to do when they hear about you, you know, irrespective of whether they read it in sort of like a pitch document or they see it on an advert is go to your website. And, and yet, like you say, trying to get sort of engagement with the with the people at the very top of these businesses is often quite challenging.
It's one of one of the reasons is that a lot of websites are still using, you know, software that's installed and maintained on a server by the IT department or possibly an outsourced IT department, as opposed to one of the many fantastic SaaS solutions like webflow, HubSpot, squarespace, etc.. Um, and I think as people, maybe businesses move more to these SaaS based solutions so that the comms team can own the website and own everything about it because, you know, the tech stuff is outsourced to the SaaS company. And, you know, you price the cold, clammy hands of the IT department off the website because it's got nothing to do with them, then still.
Improve it.
Then. I mean, of course I love it. I mean, I even worked as an IT support when I was at the University of Aberdeen. That was one of my one of my jobs at the university. I worked in it supporting the biomedical sciences department, science department managed to wipe data off hard disks and things like that. And so I was obviously I wasn't cut out for it. But but but yeah, I did do quite a lot of stuff along the lines of IT support. No, I mean, I've got nothing. But, you know, I've got a lot of time for, for the IT department, but like, get your hands off the website. Got nothing to do with you.
There's a lot of confusion, I think, about who this stuff is really for. I think, like you say, digital marketing is something for management to engage with really. It's not something you can.
With that logic. You know, the IT department are people who work in it are the only people who write books because they because you use a word processor and it's technology and it's software. So it's an IT discipline. Nobody else should use it.
When.
It's just like, you know, the communication medium is, you know, of the website is it should be with the comms team or your external comms team or whatever. Anyway, we've talked about that a lot of times. So but yeah, it was just, you know, I guess I mentioned it because like, yet again, we had a conversation where the wrong people are kind of the gatekeepers of the website. The website is not doing anything for the business. And, um, and it's probably one of those where it's going to be tricky to, again, price their cold, sweaty little hands off it. Um, I shared a TikTok video in in Google chat with the team this week. You probably didn't get a chance to look at it, did you?
I'm allergic to TikTok.
Uh, well, they were they were talking about the TikTok algorithm. And, and you're right. So if you think about social media, you put things on social media. And if you've got a following of like twenty people, it doesn't get any traction. Sure. And you know, it's all about trying to build up the following. So this is the essence of what the guy was saying. I thought it was a really, really good little video that he that he put together. And it was interesting to me anyway, which is why I wanted to share the information. So generally speaking, you've got to just do whatever you can to build up a following. And we've always talked about like that following might be people who are not engaged with you at all. You know, I've got one thousand followers. How many of them actually look at the stuff you put up and comment on it or engage with it or whatever, or um, not really anybody, but, um, but it's all been a numbers game. Whereas what? Tick tock. Apparently the way the tick tock algorithm works is you put something up and they will immediately show it to two hundred people. And if any of those people engage with it and comment on it like it, they go, okay, then we'll show it to another thousand people. And if they engage with it, they'll show it to ten thousand people and so on. So. But what you know, what it means is you don't need to build a following to get your stuff looked at. It just needs to resonate. Now, I'm not saying, you know, you should go out there and create viral content because you can't create viral content. You can only create content and sometimes it goes viral. It's not the same thing. But it seems to me like really fair because it's not fair. If if somebody creates something that's genuinely good and deserves to be shared, but doesn't get seen because they're not a celeb with, you know, a million followers or whatever. So I think, well, I like, I like if it's true what he's saying, and it doesn't surprise me if it's true, because I've seen it with some of the daft little videos I've put together. And then like within no time at all, it's had ten thousand views. And I'm like, how did that even happen?
Yeah, I think it's also interesting, isn't it, in that it also means that you can't produce one good video once and then sort of coast on that fame. You know, you have to basically you live or die on the basis of the quality of the last piece of content you publish.
Each piece of content stands all on its own and can potentially be transformative for your business if it, if it, if it's something that people actually like, because if people do like it and interact with it, tick tock will keep showing it to more and more people.
But it also, for me, it sort of, um, I think the really interesting takeaway for me from that is that you can't do what an awful lot of businesses try to do, which is just be sort of persistent and consistent with social media. Like you see this a lot on LinkedIn, and I think it's a huge mistake there too, where it's just like if we just do something regularly or often, it will somehow magically transform into success. You know, it's never very interesting. It's never very good, but we'll just do it lots. And then it'll somehow, you know, manage to bring us in business or grow our following or whatever it is you're trying to achieve. And I think it's really interesting, isn't it? It's like, just don't do things unless it's actually good. And if you're going to do it, do it properly, put a lot of effort into it, but don't try and necessarily sort of repeat it continually, because I think that's the real trap with a lot of that sort of social stuff, is that people do just try to. Yeah, it's just like churn, you know? And that's a huge mistake.
Leslie and I were talking about this earlier, and I'll disagree slightly with what you're saying, because I do wonder, and I'm happy to be proven wrong or just disagreed with, um, that the consistency is an element because you're trying to figure out what might land and what might not land. So I'm not, you don't have to be consistently produce the same shite. Yeah, I don't mean that consistently trying things and then something. But even if something lands, it doesn't mean doing it again means it'll land again. Oh, you did that before? Yeah. You know, it's like I did this.
I mean, yeah, I get that all the time on TikTok or YouTube shorts, which is my preferred version of that, which is like, yeah, it's like, I've seen you do this before or something very similar to it. And now I'm not interested. Right. And that's annoying. So yeah.
I very quickly, or rather, I have very quickly gone from like, oh, this is so good to like, I hope I never see that again, you know, really very, very quickly because it's like, yeah, done now.
Yeah. I mean, this is, this is true of all aspects, isn't it? I mean, you see it on people's blogs too, you know, you'll, you'll go, you'll visit company blogs sometimes and you'll see that they've, you know, they've obviously stumbled across like a hit piece once and then they've just sort of like tried to churn out endless variations of that hit piece and you're like, ah, this just doesn't it looks awful. Yeah. It's yeah.
What I find, you know, like the best comedians, um, in my opinion, the best comedians are observational and they say things and you go, I've done that, I've seen that. I felt that, you know, and I do think that that's happening a lot on tick tock, that I'm seeing videos that are basically telling me about something I've experienced in my life. And then you go, oh, wow, these, you know, this person's experienced exactly the same thing, whether it's, I don't know, a social situation or whatever it might be. So that observational element seems to do quite well.
Well, it's what works on me. I mean, it's interesting you should say that because I was watching a thing the other day and it was literally like a digital marketer being like, I have always struggled to build good leads quickly. And I'm like, oh yeah, like we've all done that. Do you know what I mean? It's like, and I think that's, that's back to that whole sort of like good practice on the internet. I guess if you want to take something actionable away from this is sort of like, you know, do actually try to solve real problems that you have that other people in your industry have and be useful, I guess, and try and sort of game these things.
Because one thing I would say to anyone doing TikTok stuff is like, if your video starts with, hey guys, Then just don't do it. Because honestly, it's like. It's like, all I need. Hey, guys. Gone. You've lost me immediately because it's somebody trying to sell me something. Yeah. You know what I mean? I just hate shit like that.
It's funny, isn't it? How transparent.
Maybe. Maybe people your age don't mind it, because I think.
I think we do. Well, it's interesting, isn't it? Because this goes back to the whole, um. Right panel blindness thing, doesn't it. Do you know?
Go on. Explain.
So basically, like loads of eye tracking studies on people of my generation. So that's specifically people between sort of like thirty and forty. Um, we don't see the right hand panel of websites. So you can put anything in there, like really shocking stuff in there. You can put like get a free card.
Because traditionally adverts have appeared in the right hand panel. So we've just so we've.
Literally been trained to completely ignore that. And I think it's the same on like TikTok and things like that is that like younger generations will just like, not even here. Hey, guys, do you know what I mean? It's just like you're almost completely unaware that it's going on because your brain's just filtering it all out, which, yeah, I think is a real problem with things on TikTok because I see them all the time, stuff that I'll just skip straight past because I'm just sort of one hundred percent sure it's not going to interest me. And people put time and effort into that content, but it's never going to land.
Yeah. But I suppose that's why it's important to understand, um, demographic. Yeah. Who are you trying. Who you're trying to who your content is, who you want it to land with, I suppose. Um, talking about age related stuff, I was, I was listening to, um, a HubSpot video. Oh, and the young lady.
Was very enthusiastic and very.
American. Usual thing, you know, twelve year old experts, but, um, everyone's twelve now when you get to my age, but, um, it, the, the, the American, uh, woman who was doing it, she had like to me anyway, really badly voice was badly affected with vocal fry and I was, and I, so I did a little bit of research around. Is it just me that it really irritates me? Like it's an affectation. It's a learned behavior. It's not something we do. You know, fry is part of our voices. If we're going into, you know, into, into the, into the lower, um, registers, we might find, uh, we get a bit of fry in there, but um, actually didn't realise at first that it has a name i.e. vocal fry. And then it talked about how it's predominantly women and it's predominantly a certain age group, women and, and how people seem seemingly under forty are not that bothered by it. It just just washes over them. People over forty, which I clearly am. Um, it really grinds my gears. And it was interesting just digging into.
So is there like a, is there a reason? Because like you say, it's a learned behavior.
It's a learned behavior. And I think it comes possibly from like celebrity. So celebrities have done it. So like one and then people copy it and then, well, you know, I mean, I do remember being young. I mean, the thing about when you're younger is, is that to, to a similar extent at any age really, but certainly when you're younger, you want to fit in, you kind of conform. You look at other people, you mimic other people. You see somebody you really like their style or something about them. So you copy it. And I guess the fry is just the same thing. You know, it's like, oh, I really like that person. You know, he or she, they sound like they don't give a shit because they talk like that. Yeah. And so I'm going to do that. I'm going to do it. And we all do it, you know, but you know, it's, it's um, anyway, you know, it opened up a whole kind of thing of research. I found it fascinating. I found it really interesting.
I love those internet rabbit holes.
Yeah. And it was exactly that. It was an internet rabbit.
You look up in like four hours have passed and you're like, oh yeah, I know.
I know, um, something happened this week and I wasn't aware of it until I started getting messages on LinkedIn. Uh, and I got, I got congratulated for my twenty first anniversary of working at red evolution. Bloody hell. And seen as I started red evolution. That means that red evolution is twenty one years old. And I do remember it was June two thousand and three. So it doesn't surprise me because I'm quite good at maths. That June twenty twenty four is actually our twenty first anniversary. See what I did there? Um, we haven't made anything of it yet. I said to Julie once. She said, she said to me straight away, like, well, why didn't you know? And why didn't you tell us? Because we could do something with that.
And why didn't you know?
Yeah. But it also when I was sat down here because, you know, sometimes I'm working downstairs now and for no good reason other than it's got a nice outlook. And I kind of like looking out the window. Don't get any work done, but I look out the window. Um, but it got me thinking because I was sat there thinking, okay, I started this business twenty one years ago and twenty one years ago. Well, you two guys were still at school. I mean.
Yeah, yeah.
twenty one years ago you'd have been what, eleven or less? Yeah. How old were you have been eleven. Eleven. So you were an eleven year old in France. You were an eleven year old somewhere in Leeds. Mali. Mali. Um, and I was, you know, on, on my own, sort of like starting out this business and now I'm.
Like, oh, shit, what have I done? Yeah.
And surrounded by, um, you know, I'm surrounded by people who are not entirely, but but predominantly, you know, like were still at school when I started this thing and it doesn't seem like that long ago. I mean, if you really think about it, if I really think about it rather then I realise it was quite a long time ago. Yeah. You know, so, um.
And a lot's changed in those twenty one years. I think that's the, that's the most sort of like interesting and significant thing is it's hard to think what the internet was like when I was at school. I vaguely remember being taken to a technology centre so that we could sit in front of computers and see Google, and we were encouraged to search for things on Google. And I remember that being like a massive novelty thing, and it must have been about eleven then. And it's crazy to think that we've gone from there to this. I don't know if positive or not, but I mean.
I think if I if I sat down and really thought about it, it'd be quite interesting, I think, for me to write down all of the mistakes, the things that I could have done better, which would have accelerated the way that the business was.
Businesses go to Molly, find Alex, employ a young.
Employ eleven year old Alex and eleven year old Leslie. Yeah. Um, but I mean, there's for me, I guess it's been interesting because I've, you know, going from like a spare room on your own to having, you know, eleven twelve of us now and, you know, clients who are billion dollar listed companies. I guess it's a buzz. It's a buzz. I mean, we're very much on a, on a journey at the moment and growing quite significantly. We grew in the year, the year to April twenty four. We grew something like twenty three or twenty seven percent significant growth in the twenty three, you know, April to April twenty three to twenty four tax year, there was significant growth. And, you know, based on the stuff we're working on now and the enquiries that we're fielding and all the good stuff that's happening, I can only see that, you know, you know, growing considerably more. So, um, yeah, you know, it's, it's an exciting time. Um, but it's, you know, when you get an anniversary like that. And I wouldn't have remembered necessarily if it hadn't been for these LinkedIn messages coming in.
All old people forget their birthdays.
I know that's.
Right. We do. We do.
Absolutely.
There's an element of willful ignorance.
There is. There is for sure. Um, so yeah, I might, I might just give that a bit more thought and might be some interesting anecdotes from the last twenty one years for the next podcast, maybe.
I think it has to be something like that though, doesn't it has to be quite lighthearted and funny because nobody really wants to hear, oh, look how successful we are. You know, it's funny because I was writing a client's new About Us page the other day and I was, I was like, the first sentence of it was like in business for forty years. And I was like, does anyone really care? It's one of those weird B2B. They might, they might, yeah, they might in credibility, but it's just one of those things.
So yeah, I think when you're trying to get a message across to strangers, I think it's probably not a bad thing to say. You know, we've been doing this for quite a while. In fact, we've been doing it since then or for this many years or whatever. It doesn't necessarily equate that having done something for many years means you doing it well. Good Yeah no I agree. You know, I've I've mentioned this before. Like does experience mean good? Not always. Sometimes it does. Maybe quite often it does. But sometimes it absolutely doesn't.
I think experience.
The Tories have got fourteen years of experience of being in government. Are they any good at it. Um actually no. Um will there ever be any better. Um actually no.
Well that's a tricky one.
They had fourteen years previous to the current lot, having fourteen years, give or take. They did.
And you can't say anything bad about Tony Blair's run, though. Um, actually, this will get hate. All this will get hate on tick tock if I say that. On it being a massive fan of Tony Blair.
Who is.
You? Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah. It's funny. Yeah. Tony Blair, I mean, I obviously it's interesting because there was something interesting I heard last week and they were talking about, you know, the whole Britpop, Cool Britannia and all that. It all happened before Blair.
Absolutely.
It's actually associated with Blair, but it had all happened before Blair came to power. No, he was he was.
A super uncool individual as well.
Yeah. Well, yeah, I was.
Trying very hard to be cool. Mhm. Yeah.
Making you not think Rishi, Rishi Sunak sounds like Blair. It's almost like he went to the.
Tries.
To voice coach.
Yeah. There's a there's a whole thing because Cameron's the same, right? I think they sort of tried.
Cameron's got quite a distinctive accent, I thought.
Yeah, but the way they talk, like the way they frame things and that it's almost like sort of like people talk about like the sort of Blair playbook and the way sort of like framed soundbites and things, and they do all sort of emulate him. But yeah, I guess it's.
I listen to Sunak on Nick Ferrari's LBC programme earlier this week, and I've got to be honest, he came across really well. Uh, he's a good speaker. I don't I don't vote Tory, but but Sunak does, I think, come across well, whether or not what he's done has been good, bad or indifferent or whatever. Um, it was interesting listening to him and you know, you've got people fawning in usual, you know, whiny ass Brits like my life shit and it's your fault, you know, that kind of bullshit. I mean, I just can't abide that stuff, You know, it's it's funny because I'm, you know, I know there are people out there that need society to help them and protect them. The welfare state has got a job to, you know, it's got a job to do. But the way that politics is framed, it's like everybody out there is struggling. Everybody's poor, everybody's using a food bank. And I'm sick of hearing it because I'm a working class bloke and I don't have anybody in my circle of friends or in my family or my extended family who's not doing okay. They're actually all doing just fine.
It's a struggle, but not a bad struggle. I think that's the thing. Well, I think if you want like a masterpiece in sort of like marketing and framing the whole food bank thing, like whenever you read a BBC news article, it'll always be like, you know, food bank use is up six hundred percent. Here's a nurse we found that uses a food bank. And then just underneath that, it'll be like, she's a nurse that works two days a week and has seven children. And it's like, just as.
You said that, not me, because you can get the hate and not me.
Just your average nurse. Then it's like, come on.
Every story is so much more complex than the superficial sound bite you see on the news or hear on the radio, isn't it?
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah. But, um, yeah, I thought I thought Sunak came across what one of the things that Sunak comes under attack for, which really grinds my gears, is his wealth. You know, I could not give a fck how wealthy he is. I'm only interested in if he can do a good job. I don't care that he's super wealthy. I don't necessarily think that because he's super wealthy, he can't do the job he's doing. I just think it's absolute horseshit and that the politics of envy I can't be arsed with, and I'm not I'm not a super rich person. So I'm not like, you know, like sort of saying that from a, from a position of like, oh yeah, I've got loads of money. I think Rishi's great. And just because he's got loads of money, it's not, it's not that at all. I've never been like that. I've never felt envious of people that have got a lot of money, even when I literally had nothing.
No. There's a weird thing though, isn't there? Like, yeah, it's strange. People either seem to be really envious of them or they seem to like really sort of venerate them like they're super heroes because they've.
Equally, I will not venerate.
People. I find it really strange how sort of like we cannot just sit in the middle and say, okay, well, this person, you know, maybe there was some luck involved. Maybe there was some skill. They're pretty rich, cool. Like fair play. Yeah. It has to be one or the other. You know, you want to burn them or you want to be them just.
Yeah, everything's in the middle. Somewhere in it. In life. Um, okay.
Well, that's insights from the cold.
I know, I mean, you can't not stray into a little bit of political debate.
We're in.
Election season. I mean, you know, Leslie's behind the camera and Francis going through the same turmoil just now. It looks like, uh, like is it? It won't be Marine Le Pen who becomes president or prime minister, will it? It'll be.
Her. I mean, it will be someone from from her party.
Yeah. Yeah. That's right. What they call again. Remind me. Did you understand a word of that sounded like.
Bad right wing people.
National gathering.
Yeah, well, it sounds innocuous. Sounds nice. Yeah.
Yeah that's right. Yeah that's right.
That's how you do it isn't it. National Picnic Party.
Again, that's something that I think, you know, if we just finish the political debate thing, I think many people either believe or choose to believe that the UK is uniquely in turmoil and chaos. And if you look just over the channel, France the same, if not worse, Germany, I'd say the same, if not worse.
Everywhere in Europe.
People only want to believe, you know, if they're trying to get their team and they're trying to get their tribe into number ten. So they just want to narrow it all down and put the blinkers on and not look at the bigger picture. And let's face it, the reason that Labour were turned, you know, turned over and and lost power was the global financial crisis.
And the Iraq war.
And the.
Iraq War. Again, a large international problem was itself.
Their involvement was self-inflicted, you might say. But and again, not to defend the Tories, but, you know, taking over at the end of the global financial crash, twenty fourteen, oil crash, various referenda, self-inflicted, and then the Covid crisis and then the Ukraine war crisis. And if you want to ignore all that and pretend that none of that has had any impact on us, and I think all politicians do or political parties do is, is, is arrange the deckchairs while the global.
Just stuff happens.
Global stuff happens, you know what I mean? And well, and the Lib Dems watch the people who were actually arranging the deckchairs in case they need a hand arranging the deckchairs. You know, if we talk about Labour and Conservative and then, you know, like, yeah, come on, give us a hand with these. There's a few there's a wind's blowing. Now it might be easier if you if you help us with this, but you know, surely there's an element of truth in that.
Well I think it's quite frightening. It's like the whole great man theory of history, isn't it? It's like, this is a really reductive way of looking at history where you can say, well, things only happen because really powerful people do shit like Hitler comes along, everything changes. You know, Winston Churchill comes along, everything changes. And it's actually, you know, there's an opposing view of that, which is that actually the people are sort of irrelevant. Somebody would fill that vacuum. Global events have created this crisis. And I think it's quite frightening, especially with politics, to just sort of like, look at it in the round and say, well, actually, it doesn't matter who's in power, you know, Covid comes along, the economy's going to crash. You know, the American banks start going bust left, right and centre. The economy's going to crash. And it just doesn't really matter what we do. You know, we're at the mercy of these sort of like financial trade winds or whatever.
And I kind of do think that I think that's I think that's a fatalist to think that, well, it's like literally doesn't matter. It'll just bounce from one global crisis to another.
Absolutely.
But I mean, we've got like Putin and Kim Jong un now, like best buddies, aren't they? And he's going to supply missiles and all the rest of it. I mean, where's that going to end up? Well, America are not just going to watch that and go, yeah, yeah that's fine. You know. You know, North Korea just, you know, give all that all the ammunition you like to, to, uh, Russia. We're not we're not interested. They're going to be keeping a close eye on that. You'd have thought.
It's an interesting thing, isn't it?
Because I'm international politics now.
I'm not fatalistic about it at all. But I do think that if you were looking at these events seventy years in the future, from seventy years in the future, it would all look very similar to the build up to the outbreak of both world wars. You know, it's lots of small regional conflict connected to larger sort of global shifts. And where does that end? I mean, probably it all fizzles out, but conflagration. Yeah.
Maybe, I don't know. Um, are we.
Very.
Off to see Nick Mason this weekend? Nick Mason, Saucerful of Secrets very good with Gary. Gary Kemp on on lead guitar and vocals.
Well, now you have.
Aged Mason on drums and a bunch of very talented musicians filling in the gaps. Looking forward to it. Actually, it's all early Floyd stuff that they're doing.
The weird stuff.
Yeah, yeah, the armadillo in Glasgow, so I've seen some good reviews of the tour so far, so I'm looking forward to it. Um, okay, so it was about forty five minutes ago. We were talking about digital marketing. We kind of gone into politics and all sorts, haven't we now. But I don't really care. It's fine. It's good. I mean, it's we're at the coalface of digital marketing. And at the moment everybody is talking about politics. And so at the coalface of digital marketing, we're talking about politics would.
Be foolish not.
To. It would be foolish not to. It might prove to be foolish to have done it.
And at least we didn't do that thing that we could have done, which is like ten things you can learn about marketing from Rishi Sunak.
Well, you can learn nothing about marketing from the Tories, can you? I mean, they've just made an unholy mess of the whole campaign.
The splashed across the front page of the BBC. Another corruption scandal.
Oh, that's another.
MP.
You want to bet on. Like when the when the election is going to be.
Couldn't get any more wrong if you tried could you. Bless him. Yeah.
All right. Uh, you've been listening to Dave and Alex blathering on about digital marketing and politics, and we'll have more of this drivel next time.