Earlier this year, we decided to outwardly recognise that we have, over the last twenty years, developed expertise around helping engineering and tech companies.
We could market any sort of business. You have to sort of like take yourself a step back from that, don't you, and say, okay, well, just because we could do this for everyone doesn't mean we should. I guess people call it like niching down. It's not necessarily about closing doors. It's just about really sort of focusing your energy and attention in one place. The client you're talking about that manufactures very high tech, high end equipment wouldn't have come to us if we weren't being very clear about the fact that we were angling for their business. I think you just have to be bold and not be scared about closing those doors. Really?
So welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. In episode, I think it's going to be episode one hundred twenty eight, and it might be the shortest episode we've ever done. Because, you know, it's funny because we've had an absolutely manic week. It's been busy. We've had some really lovely enquiries in which we've been servicing. And, um, it's been, it feels like, like hardly time to come up for air this week. But when it comes to talking about digital marketing at the coalface and what we've been actually doing, it's like, right, you know, we talk about what we're actually doing because then it's like little insight into our world rather than just two ways to use Google productively, or four ways to leverage AI for powering your content and all that bullshit. So like, we don't tend to do that. So, um, but so what we do do is talk about what we're actually doing. And, um, I, uh, anyway, what I thought I'd do just to try and get the, um, get the, uh, the juices flowing was, um, talk about some of the tools that you absolutely should be using have installed and have access to the stuff that they throw out, the data that they provide. And the reason I brought this up, it wasn't really just like, um, you know, for ways to, to supercharge your website or.
Tools to supercharge your.
Website or two tools. Actually this podcast. Um, so some tools talking about tools. Um, no, but it surprises me still the number of times that we go to when we, an initial engagement, an initial chat with a, with a, with a potential customer, not even a customer at that point, a potential customer. And, um, and we might say, oh, so it'd be ideal if we could have a little look at your Google search console data, for example, and they kind of look at you and go, yeah, yeah, yeah, I think we've got Google Analytics. No, no, no, not, not not Google Analytics, Google search. And it's kind of, you know, and that's fine. I mean, there's no reason that everybody should know about this stuff, but there are some kind of very fundamental basic things which we can do which, which are completely free of charge, um, which we can, which will help you understand a bit better What's working and what isn't working with your website? Um, so I thought I'd just very quickly rattle through them and, uh, simply again, simply because this came up quite recently at an initial chat with a potential customer. So Google Tag Manager yes, is an obvious one. I've got to be honest, we were a little bit late to the party with this because we've got Tim geeks here at Red evolution. We would kind of just do it the long handed way and we'd go in and, and put, put, um, you know, tags and things into websites, you know, like drop snippets of code into website headers and that the long handed way. Now I'll start straight away by saying that isn't all that Google Tag Manager does, but it actually does that really well. In most cases. We were speaking to a, um, a, a, a C, or we.
Were C, r o solution. And also I think they were saying, don't.
Use Google tag manager, drop a snippet of snippet according. But generally it does so. I mean, broadly speaking, you know, tell the boys and girls, what does Google Tag manager do?
Alex well.
You're not a geek, so you explain it in simple.
Language, I think. I'm not sure whether that was a vote of confidence or not. Um, well, let me say first of all lets you install snippets of code from other programs. So all the other tools that we mention here, I think you can install through Google Tag Manager, right? And so that's the first thing it lets you do is sort of like automatically insert things into the top of your web code, your website's code. Yeah.
So tracking tools and tools that look generate heat maps and tools that record visitors using screen grab software and things like that. They all need a little snippet of code added to your website in order to work. And it used to be the case that geeks would have to do that and drop the code into the HTML in the head area of the HTML.
And I think I'm right in saying that. Well, with Tag Manager, the first bit of code for Tag Manager does have to be dropped in by a geek, doesn't it? I think that's still it does. And then after that you can use Tag Manager to sell.
It doesn't it doesn't. It does if you're using, I don't know, you know, certain software, but if you're using things like I think HubSpot and probably Wix and Squarespace and everything else, even the tag manager code doesn't need to be manually dropped in. You just need the, uh, a little, um, like an identifier, which, which tag manager gives you, you put it into a box, press save and that's it. You've added tag manager, you. So even that's made a lot easier. But it does mean that once you've done that, if you want to install other things, you just do it through tag manager. You don't have to go anywhere near your own website. It's like, it's like, it's like a bit like a container if you like. And it does loads more than drop snippets of code into your website. And that's where it gets really interesting. But I don't think we need to go into that. We're not, we're not here to do a Google Google Tag Manager tutorial.
Probably not. The only thing I'd flag is another really important thing that it does that not enough people use it for is tracking events and things on your website. So obviously when somebody clicks a button or fills in a form or downloads something, you can hope that whatever analytics or tracking software you're using is going to pick that up and interpret it correctly or using Tag Manager, you can do things like flagging specific actions or specific clicks, or, you know, somebody filling in a form and hitting submit as an event and then pass that information back to something like Google Analytics. And that simply just gives you control over what you're tracking and allows you to get really granular with, like I say, tracking things like somebody filled in a specific form versus somebody potentially filled in a form somewhere on your website.
Yes, I'd love to say eloquently explained, however. Um, all right, so that's the obvious one. Google tag manager. And then you've got Google Analytics quite often referred to now as GA4 fourth generation. So it's no longer it's changed quite a bit. And Google Analytics a very high level. It'll just show you who's looking at your website. Sorry. It'll show you how many people are looking at your website, which pages they're looking at, where they came from, how they found you, how long they stayed, all that kind of stuff. Um, again, does way more than that, but it fundamentally it's nice, even if all you ever use is the real time analytics map that is, that is part of Google Analytics for. So at any point you can click on, click on it and see a nice, pretty picture showing like how many people are on your website, what pages they're on and where they've, where they are, where they're based, you know, geographically sort of thing. So again, free of charge, Google tag manager, free of charge, Google analytics free of charge. The very important one, um, which we, um, often find people are not using is Google search Console. Something you've blogged about recently spoken about a little bit. So like I say, keep it light.
Keep it light. Um, it tells you so analytics tells you about what happens once people reach your website. Google search console for organic traffic does the bit before that. So how they found you in search where when you appeared in search where you ranked, and it'll show you that against sort of pages or keywords. So you can look at Google Search Console and say, okay, for my, um, for my service page about widget building, um, what search terms do I actually rank for? How well am I ranking? How often do people see that page in search? Um, and that's, you know, sort of, I guess in explaining that it's immediately obvious why that would be useful, but it is a really good way of finding out both, you know, where you currently are and also where you're potentially missing out on tons of traffic because you can see, you know, where you're almost ranking on page.
one shows you how you're making it easier for your competitors to grab the business that you could potentially have a go at.
Yeah.
In simple terms, okay. And finally, in this, in this, um, this, uh, short introduction to some sort of essential tools, which don't cost you anything and are well worth making sure you've got installed. Um, I know this isn't the same thing. Look, a studio, but we used recently, you know, started experimenting quite a bit with looker. And I heard Julie say earlier that she'd been putting some reports together to help with automation of reports and things like that. So this is I'm not sure if it's free though, is it? Yeah. It's free. It's not. We haven't got access to it because we are a Google workspace plan or anything free. Right. Tell tell everyone what that does.
Uh, well.
And is it necessary? I mean, you don't have to be, but you don't have to be a geek in order to create quite useful and nice looking reports with it.
Do you? So that's exactly it. So I mean, the idea of Looker studio is, is that you can bring in data from any other tool like Search Console, which we're just talking about analytics and AdWords. And you can just.
Bring in events and things, you know, events from, um, from tag manager would go into GA4 and then you'd bring them in. Yeah. Of course.
Um, and the idea with Looker studio is obviously that it lets you sort of bring all of your data together in one place and create a sort of heads up display or a, you know, a dashboard that updates in real time and also lets you sort of combine data. And I guess that's mostly useful where you are using a lot of different platforms, but you need to show that data to somebody and they need to sort of really quick top level overview, and they don't want to dig around in six different bits of software. So that's also really useful.
It used to be called something else didn't it.
Used to be called Data studio. Yeah.
Which it sounds much better. Yeah. And now it's called Looker Studio.
Yeah. Which sounds a bit weird and creepy, but they were just, they were just going down the quirky perverts sort of avenue. Okay.
I don't know where you got to. Quirky perverts from Looker studio, but.
Do you not?
Okay. Um, so yeah, just just some, some free tools that will tell you a lot about what's going on and more importantly, what's not going on on your website. You know, it takes all the guesswork out of whether, you know, understanding whether or not your website as a business owner, your website or a marketing lead, whether the website is actually adding any value to the business.
I think it's probably also worth pointing out that with that sort of group of four key and like you say, completely free tools, you will probably know everything you need to know. One of the things that I come across a lot when I'm talking to clients is they're sort of like, oh, well, you know, we can see some of the data, but obviously you guys with your SEO subscriptions will be able to see loads more. And there's always this sort of like, you know, idea that because we pay for subscriptions for things like SEMrush or SEMrush and tools like that, that we somehow have, you know, tons more data and we know loads of things that you don't know. But the honest truth is like those four tools will probably give you all of the data you actually need to market your business. It's, there's no real need to go and pay for expensive stuff. I mean, certainly in Google Search Console, the data, although there are problems with it, is way more accurate than the data you get from something like SEMrush about search volumes or traffic to a certain search term, that sort of thing. So Yeah.
Okay. Hope that was, um, moderately useful. Uh, these, like I said, they're all free tools. Um, and, you know, speak to whoever looks after your website and say, oh, install these and they should be able to take care of that in like 30s flat. And you could then start to see lots of potentially useful information. Oh, okay. Did you, um, did you see any of the Olympic closing ceremony?
I did not see any of the Olympic closing ceremony.
Okay. Did you see any of it? Leslie? Your French. This was a big deal for France.
But not a big deal for Leslie.
Did that. Did somebody say that Tom cruise stunt went a bit wrong? Did it? Did he hurt himself or did he not? I'm sure I saw a headline somewhere. It was probably clickbait. He probably didn't hurt himself. He probably went perfectly because he's a nutcase and he'll jump off any building. He will do anything you ask him to do. Don't ask him to do it if you don't really want him to do it. Um, I don't know. I think I think the Olympics have been a success. I didn't see a lot of the Olympics. I did see some. I watched the women's weightlifting on Saturday or Sunday. It's the only time ever you get to see weightlifting on the telly is the Olympics obviously. And it is although like ostensibly like, yeah, somebody walks onto a stage and lifts and everything.
To say, is it great?
I find it weirdly fascinating because it is, uh.
Is it just the tension between whether or not their arms like pop out like one of those old.
I just find it incredible that humans can can lift the kind of weights that they lift. And, and it was, um, it was interesting watching them psych themselves up. Sure. Um, and, uh, I suppose one of the highlights as well has been like the, some of the quirky things that have been in the Olympics, like the, um, breakdancing. Yeah. And you alerted me to that, but since you alerted me to it, it's obviously it's been all over social media. I'm still trying to understand, um, whether what she called rear dance or something.
It's called Reagan.
Reagan?
That's right. It's way cooler than dance.
Yeah, I think Ray dance would have been better. Yeah. Um, so Reagan is is this been like, some sort of experiment? Dude, I according to her, I mean, she wasn't.
I think this is sort of like one of the key things.
You're aware of it. Are you aware of it, Leslie? Of what she did break dance. The Australian break dancer. Well, yeah.
Maybe. Maybe maybe she decided it was a joke after.
Well, so this is. It had to be a joke. If you've seen any of the videos. I put one in our Google chat yesterday and it's worth looking at it.
I'm not so sure, man, but I think this is one of the key things about living in the in the twenty first century and in the sort of information age that we're living in now. Like how quickly did that story about, you know, laughing at a funny breakdancing competitor turn into like, this weird sort of misinformation wall? Like it was a joke. She didn't mean it. She was trying her hardest. She was a plant. It was all like, you know what I mean? Like every conspiracy or like that weird story about it that you can think of. And like, the honest truth is, nobody really knows. The interesting thing about her is that she is weirdly a PhD and a professor in sort of hip hop culture. So if it was a joke, it was a particularly poor one, I think. I'm not really sure what actually happened, but it is quite interesting that, like you say, everybody seems to have an opinion about what she was doing and why she was doing it. I think, yeah, the Olympics is a really interesting thing as well. Talking about the Olympics in the news, because did you see the stat about twenty seven percent of British people think they could qualify for the Olympics? Yeah. So it's brilliant. Well, this is the thing that's so fantastic about it. They don't really know. So it was like a survey that people did and they asked sort of thousands of people, you know, do you think in, you know, four years time, if you started training today, you could qualify for the next Olympics? And twenty seven percent of British people think they could? It's even higher among young people, like eighteen to twenty five.
That doesn't surprise me.
There's like thirty nine percent of people reckon that they're like a world class athlete in waiting, which I think is a damning indictment of how overconfident we are in our own abilities.
Well, the young people anyway.
Yeah.
Um, yeah, I just I just thought it was interesting. I guess just because, like you say, the whole the breakdancer person, you know, it's become like a, a social media thing. Yeah. And it's, you know, I, I don't know. Obviously, social media is so important from a business point of view. And I think most businesses are still struggling to, to sort of harness it and leverage it. I mean, you know, I think the received wisdom is like, if you treat social media like a platform to post adverts, you'll fall flat on your face. Yeah. If you use it as a way, like we do with this podcast to actually open up and talk about, you know, what your working week looks like, what your, what your job's like to actually do. And, you know, talk about from the coalface type stuff, you stand more, more chance of maybe succeeding, although our stats wouldn't suggest that to be to be the case. We don't care that nobody listens to this. The few people that do have a lovely. I'm sure.
Lovely. Yeah. We love you. Even if you think.
We're a couple of dicks.
If you're.
Listening.
Well, one of the things that's really interesting as well, I think that the inherent unpredictability of this isn't it? It's like the Olympic moments that become sort of memes or, or really famous are really, you know, you could never predict them in advance. And you couldn't even at the time, like, did you see the thing about the Turkish shooter you'll have seen?
And it was just nonchalant. Wandered up, went black, black, black and one or something, did he?
Yeah. Yeah. Well, he came second, I think. I didn't even think he won. And it's one of those weird.
Things of all the cardboard on the side of his head and all the weird.
He was just like, there. And he's like tracksuit and just sort of shooting at targets. Yeah. Um, which is kind of funny. It's kind of great, but you also wouldn't predict that it'd become one of the sort of defining moments of the Olympics. Yeah. And I think that's one of the things about social media, isn't it? You just cannot tell. And I think we've said this before, like, because you've experimented with Tik Tok and stuff and you just can't, you know, you come up with what you think is a funny idea, doesn't get anywhere. You come up with something just off the cuff and everybody's like, wow, that's amazing. That's right. Very.
And certainly with things like Tik Tok, it's so easy to go na na na, you know, it just just keeps swiping.
Absolutely.
You know, and I've said this before, you know, you get these videos and, and it's like, you know, don't swipe, don't you know, and you're like, gone, gone. You know what I mean? Or they start hammering at you straight away, like, you know, like, you know, like you need this in your life gone.
I think loads of people misunderstand Tik Tok. I mean, we were having this conversation with, um, in regards to a new client recently, weren't we as well about the same thing? Like loads of people think that Tik Tok is like either somewhere to sell or somewhere to post funny things for kids. And I think the content that really sticks on Tik Tok is stuff that is like either unintentionally funny or taps into a moment or that is like genuinely interesting. Yeah. I think a lot of people like really misinterpret what entertain means and interesting.
Yeah. I think the term is it's one of those horrible words that's made up edutainment.
Yeah.
You know, um, but but, you know, it's got some merit and I think, I think that's the thing. And, and, you know.
That's a phrase just to point out that's definitely been workshopped by some like worthy Labour education secretary somewhere.
We were with, um, a potential new customer. And, you know, we're quite excited about working with them and they provide um equipment for um ram Raman spectroscopy. So there you go.
Someone correct you in the comments I'm sure.
Yeah. No doubt. And um, when we were in, we had quite a long meeting with him last week and uh, it was a good, good, productive, um, meeting that, uh, that we had me and Stu and, um, we just mentioned about this Raman spectroscopy and, um, tick tock and it was like, you know, the two things like poles apart.
Surely these are like PhD scientists.
So we do a quick search on tick tock about romance. And before we finished typing spectroscopy. It's come up like predictive. Click it. There's somebody explaining Raman spectroscopy.
In a lab.
Coat. No, they weren't in a lab coat. It was a woman who was explaining. And we didn't actually put the sound up. We just looked at it and it was subtitled and stuff, obviously. Twenty seven thousand likes or something like that. And God knows how many comments and shares and bookmarks. And, and I think the thing that, you know, if, for example, you run a fabrication shop, then if you did some videos on showing somebody doing a really highly technical weld, which sounds like who'd want to see that? You would be amazed.
Absolutely.
As opposed to like somebody stood there in a suit going, we can weld things. If you need something welding, come and see us.
Show.
Show us. Show us some of the funky stuff that you do. And however dull it might seem to you, it'll be interesting to somebody.
Well, my TikTok gets clogged up all the time by. There's a stonemason in, um, you know, York Minster, the cathedral.
I think I've.
Seen this guy, a teenage kid, and he's just doing like, very cool stonemasonry. And you're weirdly compelled by it. Like, why? Why am I interested in this? I don't know, but I think that's the real power of TikTok. It's like you say, slice of life, genuinely sort of educational and entertaining doesn't mean sort of contrived or forced or.
And you and to go back to the point, and the reason I kind of introduced the idea of the Olympics, there was a phenomenal amount of work went into the Olympics, opening ceremony, closing ceremony, not to mention all the athletics and everything that went on in between. The closing ceremony, which I watched. It was it was technically and creatively fantastic. It was just something I thought. And that's, you know, it's had its critics, but I was blown away by it. But if you asked me now, tell me about the Olympics. I'm just going to talk about some Aussie woman hopping around like a kangaroo, pretending she could break.
Down Snoop Dogg.
Doing.
Weird.
Shit. Yeah. You know, it's just like, I don't know, you know, you never you never really, you know, like the stuff that that takes so much time and is thought about and would have been planned and practiced for the last four years. I can't I couldn't really describe any of it to you. Huge. Four huge steel rings finished up getting hauled aloft by a crane or whatever, and I can remember that bit, but all the bits leading up to it, the fantastic athletes that were leaping around the stage doing incredible things and all the rest of it, you know, I just.
What's the key takeaway here?
The key takeaway is the key takeaway is that I suppose that it's it's sometimes the kind of inadvertent, weird things that, that just capture people's imagination that, you know, so if you're thinking about your business and like, what's some of the stuff that goes on that people might be interested, interested to, to, to, to watch or read about or whatever it might be a way to think about social media in a more constructive way. This whole edutainment thing.
Yeah. And I think probably this is an argument, maybe for handing off the sort of social media side of things to to somebody that isn't necessarily stuck in an office doing marketing stuff. I mean, that's one of the things, and I'm not taking a swipe at internal marketing managers here at all. It's a, it's a very challenging thing.
When the Mike's not on.
It's a very challenging thing to have your boots on the ground and do your actual job. But it's one of those things where I think sometimes a lot of our clients certainly sort of slightly lose sight of what it is that the company actually does and how interesting it is because it is, you know, you're sort of closeted from it and it becomes just sort of an academic exercise. We provide ex service, forgetting that actually people are doing stuff on a shop floor. That's actually quite interesting. So yeah.
Yeah. One of the, one of the sort of segues from that is, and I mentioned, um, that we were speaking to this potential new customer, highly technical company earlier this year, we kind of decided to outwardly recognise that we have, over the last twenty years, developed expertise around helping engineering and tech companies, market themselves, find new customers, grow business, grow their businesses, etc.. And, you know, we just decided, I don't know, March or whenever it was, you know, I kind of decided and dragged people with me a little bit. I know some people were more sold on it than others. Some people were a bit concerned about it. You know, we firmly set our stall out as a company who help engineering and tech companies, um, generate business online, you know, find you, you know, make sure you knew potential customers, new customers, find them online. Um, and this, the, you know, the conversation down in Edinburgh on Friday was very much driven by the fact that they'd seen the fact that, well, we specialise with tech companies, so probably worth speaking to these guys and it's turned into what certainly feels like a nice gig. Um, I just wondered what, what your thoughts were. You know, we're sort of six months into this journey now where we've, instead of just doing it, we've actually decided to say we do it. And in fact, I think going forward. I mean, I've got a networking event down in Edinburgh next week and, you know, I'm inclined to answer that. So what is it you do with. I run an industrial marketing company. Yeah. And just, just kind of completely own it. And it felt a bit odd at first didn't it? It's like, oh, what about like, well, look at this client and this client. We wouldn't have got them if we'd said this a year ago.
Well, you know, it's really interesting because I was locked earlier this week, you were waiting for me to join a meeting to discuss something with this new client about this new client, rather. And I was sort of locked in a client meeting that overran by about half an hour. And it was very frustrating for you. I'm sure it.
Wasn't. I couldn't care less.
It's not what you were saying at the time. Um, you were saying, how could I possibly do my job without you? And, you know, um, we were having exactly the same conversation in there because they are, um, they've brought a new marketing manager in. They're in the process of sort of rediscovering who they are, um, and sort of working out exactly what their sort of core value proposition is and why people should work with them. And I was sort of waxing lyrical about the journey we'd been through there as well, because ultimately, you know, for that client, for example, they can like, we can do so much for so many people, right? You could, you know, if somebody came to us tomorrow with a, I don't know, I want to say pasta manufacturing business because, because that actually happened quite recently. But we could market any sort of business, anybody that came through the door. And you have to sort of like take yourself a step back from that, don't you, and say, okay, well, just because we could do this for everyone doesn't mean we should. And I was sort of talking them through this whole process and the thought pattern of sort of, I guess people call it like niching down. Um, and about the fact that it's, it's not necessarily about closing doors, it's just about really sort of focusing your energy and attention in one place. That client, for example, a very good with very, very complex and difficult to, to manage situations. They can do all the rest of it. But if they position themselves as somebody who provides that really complex stuff, it's going to persuade those people and we're in the same boat, right? Those the client you're talking about that manufactures very high tech, high end equipment wouldn't have come to us if we weren't being very clear about the fact that we were angling for their business. I think you just have to be bold and not be scared about closing those doors. Really? I guess. Yeah, we definitely will lose out on some work.
So what I'm really wondering is, and I think you've answered it, is are you still feeling pretty, pretty, pretty confident about the move that we've made to kind of.
Yeah. I think we could go further with it now, couldn't we? Really, I think it's something that we could bake into pretty much everything we do.
What we only do engineering and tech companies that their name starts with L something. So is that what you're trying?
No, I just mean we changed our homepage message, but there's still the whole of the rest of our website.
Yeah. I mean, there is some consistency, um, which I've been sort of chipping away at, but yeah, I think there's a lot more that we could do now, certainly in the resources or insights section. I mean, you know, maybe we need to do some more stuff in our podcast about it and some, some more stuff in our blog about it.
I think it has to be really to be convincing.
It has to be TikTok.
Part of the fabric of what you're doing, doesn't it? I think one of the things that I always find quite sort of, um, not not perplexing, but I find quite off putting is when somebody's sort of, you know, positions themselves as like, oh, I do this and then suddenly they can do everything else as well. Do you know, do you know what I mean? It's like, you've got to sort of stick to your guns. Yeah. And really bake that message into everything you do.
Yeah, yeah. I think it's, um, that's when it gets to be a bit of a challenge. And I'm not just talking about us, but if you any business, if you've decided who you are for and you're trying to focus on that, you know, when other opportunities come along, just like in life, opportunities come along. And should you do this, should you do that? And you know, saying saying no is empowering, but it's also hard.
It's a, it's a really extreme example of this. But we have a client, um, who obviously won't mention by name, but they do, um, sort of tapping into.
You'll beep it out as usual if you do.
I don't make mistakes in this podcast we're talking about. Um, they, they tap into live, um, oil and gas or, or whatever sort of process lines, um, and sort of let you block and divert them and that sort of thing. And they manufacture fittings to do it. Um, and technically because they can manufacture the fittings for that hot tapping process, they can also manufacture the fittings for anything else. And we were having a discussion with them recently because they have a page on their website that says we can do all sorts of oil and gas fittings. And I was saying to them, when was the last time you actually did something that wasn't a specific type of fitting? And they're like, oh yeah, but we can do it. And, and it's that sort of, I get it. I one hundred percent get it. I can see it. They could probably.
Make mountain bike frames.
Probably. Yeah, they.
Probably.
They've.
Got people who can weld. They've got designers, but they're not gonna.
Yeah, exactly. It's like, what do you actually want to do? And, and sort of pitch yourself in a way that means you can land that business and forget about the stuff that's going to get in the way of that journey. I guess it's very easy to say that from the privileged position of, you know, not having any sort of skin in the game, as it were. But yeah, that's.
I mean, from our point of view, all we really did was own and, and start bleating about something that we were already doing. It wasn't like we were looking for a niche and then decide, right, let's go after it. And like trying to persuade people, it was easy for us to transition because we had such a great track record of working with engineering and tech companies, because it's kind of what we were doing. We just weren't saying it.
But that's true for. I think that's true for the overwhelming majority of companies. Could be. And it's like this whole, you know, like the quest for the unique selling point or the the sort of differentiator. And it's like that, that knowledge, that understanding, whatever that differentiator is, it's already part of your business because you don't do things the same as your competitors. You don't serve exactly the same market. You have strengths and weaknesses, and all you really have to do is look at them and say, oh yeah, you know what? Actually, we don't provide. We're not just an IT service provider. We're, you know, a shithole IT service provider for small and medium businesses. You know, operating in this area, it's it's already there. You just have to sort of drill down.
It's a funny one though, because a lot of IT companies, as they grow up, the natural transition for them is to say, we're only interested in businesses that have got thirty or more seats because that, you know, they financially, it's not worth a business that's only got five people to, to, to provide.
The.
Office. Three sixty five and all the support and everything else. So they, they basically niche based on size, but they'll, they won't niche based on the type of business generally.
But I bet they could niche on, you know, tech specific, tech specific sort of, you know, there are angles that you could mine for. And I think that's the thing if you, if you're really being honest with yourself about where your strengths lie, there's already a sort of built in differentiator that you're just not aware of probably.
And for all our American listeners who say niche instead of niche, just the word is niche. Just rewind. Just so you.
Know.
No, no, don't actually stop saying niche and say niche instead.
Um, and, and route instead of route two.
Yeah. It's funny because Steve in Australia, I mean, Steve's from Barrow the same as me. He's been in Australia for the last thirty odd years or something like that. And he says in data and router data. Yeah. And he's a barrovian like me. He talks like me. But he says those words.
Putting on airs.
Having said that, I've lived in Scotland now for over thirty years and I use Scottish words. Obviously not a Scottish accent, but I use Scottish words.
What are Scottish?
Do you use any Scottish words since you came to live here from France? Yeah.
What a Scottish.
Are you mean? I'm trying to think, I say I.
But what other Scottish words are there.
Well I we that's it.
Dubs I've got. I genuinely can't think of that many Scottish. Yeah. There's lots of.
There are. Yeah. Oh. Who was I talking to recently. And they were talking about something being fine you know, are you aware in in England Amy says. Yeah, in England, if you say something's fine, it's like, it's all right, it's fine. It'll do. In Scotland, fine means fine. It means it's lovely. And I was talking to somebody and they were saying that their daughter was on some sort of exchange, and she was down in England, and she'd been, uh, being fed by this family all week. And after every meal, like, you know, did you enjoy that? Yeah, it was fine. It was fine. And at the end of the week, the lady said, do you not like any of our food? And she was like, no, it was lovely. It was great. I loved it, but she. But you just said it was fine. You know, it's like, no, it doesn't mean that where I've come from.
It's like, if you ever speak to a German person, there's a really funny, sort of weird cultural thing about that where they never get excited about anything. Um, and my wife's sister is married to a German and it'll just be like, yeah, it was edible. It's just a massive, massive knob, but it's not. It's just a cultural thing, you know, it's just they just don't get that excited about things moderately.
Okay, I like that. I like that it's talking about moderation and moderate. Um, there's been a lot of chit chat online and on LBC and probably on the BBC and stuff like that as well about social media moderation.
Yeah.
Any thoughts on that?
Dead easy. I mean, all you have to do is just go, you know, if Facebook and Twitter could just try a bit harder.
To do what?
Moderate their content.
Moderate their content.
It's easy. It's dead simple. I had I had a politician on the radio say that it's their responsibility. They should moderate their content. Yeah. Why don't.
They. And it's easy. Let's face it. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. It's it's a funny one isn't it. Because misinformation online is a big deal.
What are you going to do. Fact check every post.
That's what exactly I mean we need organisations. We literally need organisations to fact check what politicians say in Parliament. Mhm. So why, why, why are we getting our knickers in a twist about about social media as much as we are. I'm not saying that misinformation is a good thing when like even in the I don't know, not the word sacred, but I'll say it, the more sacred place from a societal point of view would be Parliament, where laws are made and society is governed. And in there they tell barefaced lies every day. Yeah. And there's a. There are organisations like Full Fact and and the BBC's fact checking service and channel for fact checking service that fact check what our actual politicians say in our actual Parliament.
I'll also say that, like social media has become the lightning rod for this issue. Everyone is like misinformation spreads like wildfire on social media. This is not a social media problem before Facebook and, and I guess arguably sort of Myspace and stuff like that existed, people were using the internet to disseminate nonsense much quicker than you can disseminate it in, in, in the real world. And, you know, this is the thing we hold newspapers to a very high standard. They are regulated, admittedly self-regulated, and could probably do a better job of that, but we hold them to a certain standard. We don't hold any sort of blogs or online news sites or anything to any sort of, you know, journalistic integrity or standards for fact checking. People spread that misinformation on social media. Fine. But if it wasn't social media, they'd just be emailing it to each other, texting it, or whatsapping it. You know, if you banned Facebook tomorrow, it's not going to slow the spread of misinformation because the problem is fundamentally what the internet does is democratise information. It allows anybody to put up a website that says anything, and you can't really police that. And then other people can share and spread that knowledge or, you know, disinformation, but you can't try and put that back in its box and you can't say, oh, it's social media. That's the problem, because social media is literally just the vehicle by which this information is disseminated. You know, we just live in an age where people really do have to get much better at questioning the validity of what they're reading thinking.
That's the answer. The answer is to make sure people recognise that if they see somebody who looks credible saying something, don't believe them. Don't just take.
It at face value.
At least don't take it at face value.
But that's a great life lesson. I mean.
It is generally speaking, whether whether you know, you know, when I was a lad we used to get our misinformation on parchments. Obviously, you know these.
Here.
Yeah, yeah yeah yeah. That's right. From the town crier. You know you're a pigeon. Rubbish. Pigeon would swoop in town. Crier. That's rubbish. You're talking rubbish again.
But but you know, on your point about not trusting anybody, I mean I think one of the best bits of one of the best examples of misinformation in recent decades was that thing about David Attenborough filming polar bears in the wild in a zoo in Berlin. It's perfect proof that even the people that you think are the most trustworthy and reliable people in the world will lie to you. And that's not to say that, you know, David Attenborough is a bad person. It's just to say that you just shouldn't take any of this stuff at face value. If it's a product that's being, you know, put out for entertainment purposes or to persuade you or whatever.
Yeah.
Question its validity. Don't just sort of buy into it.
Yeah yeah yeah. There is an example of that which I'm not going to go into it. I'll talk to you when we finish because I found it. It was something too edgy. It was. Well yeah. It's just. Yeah. Um, I tell you, I mean, and businesses, businesses are often fact checked because, you know, when businesses put adverts out, there's a big news story just now about, about Steven Bartlett diary of a CEO guy. And he's, and he's yeah. I mean, you know, apparently the adverts didn't make it clear that he yawns. Huel and Zoe do you know what I mean? So he's like saying, oh, I couldn't live without this stuff. This stuff's great. This stuff's lovely. It's like, yeah, you own the direct financial. So basically those adverts which were all over social media, they were running on Facebook and various places. They've all been pulled because, you know, the advertising standards will will actually stop businesses from telling outright lies in adverts. If enough people complain, I don't know whether they actually monitor, they maybe do, I don't know, but you know, But when it comes down to you and I talking on social media or anything, I don't really know how you police it. It's about as easy as saying to BT, you need to monitor all phone calls in case people are saying dodgy things over the wires. You know what I mean? Which is impossible. Yeah. And you know, the sheer volume of stuff. That's not to say I don't recognise that there are people who, and plenty of them probably who are reading social media and thinking, oh, this is terrible. This thing happened. And, you know, like there's been a lot of, you know, which we won't go into. There's been a lot of stuff in social media and because of all the riots and everything else and all that kind of, you know, which were which were sparked by misinformation. Yes, apparently.
Um, but but there again, you.
Know, is a big problem, but I don't know.
But again, is that a social media problem? I mean, riots have been sparked by misinformation long before social media was a thing. It's you know, information travels faster now. I think that's all you can really say about it. Yeah. And the Steven Bartlett thing is a really interesting thing, because I think it just goes to show that like pretty much everything that you are watching or consuming online is a product and somebody has something to sell you, you know, whatever it is, whether it's an approach or an idea or a.
Or whether it's, um, you know, I'm a fan of LBC, the radio, the radio station, but you know, if it's somebody on LBC who's who, who's got a clear left wing or right wing wing agenda, I mean, they'll, they'll present information in a way that supports them.
Of course they.
Will.
So it's human nature. And I think it's particularly I mean, interestingly enough, I think it's particularly profound in our industry because here, you know, if you Google like, what is SEO or how to do SEO in twenty twenty four, you will find a bunch of information from a bunch of different people, which purports to be the absolute truth. And most of it is wrong. And that's, you know, it's just sort of a given that if you browse the internet for something, what you'll find is probably a lie. It's the same as if you look for reviews for a household product. Those are all paid for. You know, you're reading like witch's top ten vacuum cleaners. It's like they are absolutely. There's The.
Witches used. They've got brooms.
Witch as in witch with the question mark, not witches. Witches do use vacuum cleaners.
They don't. They use brooms and then they fly on them.
That was in the nineteen twenties. They've upgraded. But you know, what I'm saying is people get, you know, even reviews of products online. There's a financial incentive. They're, you know, they're not real reviews. Nobody's. And chances are, nobody's even used the product that that they're purporting to review. So yeah, pinch of salt.
Okay. Um, lastly, and considering we had nothing to talk about, we've been talking about nothing for forty minutes now, that's not bad. Um, lastly, uh, been quite a lot of conversations going on around the office, uh, about some of the work that we do and how difficult it is to figure out how to charge for it. Okay. So I've kind of put a note here how to charge for fundamentally open scopes of work, problem solving. Like this thing isn't working. Could you guys look at it and fix it or and by the way, how much will that cost? Yes. And it's difficult. And, you know, we, we, we still seem to have the same conversations that we were having this time last year and the year before and the year before that around this stuff. Because it seems to me that with things like problem solving, fixing bugs, fixing, fixing software that's broken, or, you know, websites that are brought or website tech stuff in websites that's broken, not just not not normal web stuff, which is easy to diagnose and fix. Um, you know, the premise, if you like, is that if you charge by the hour, then all that does is reward ineptitude.
Yep.
And penalise people who are super efficient and super bright and see a problem. See, see the fix very, very quickly and fix it for you. You know the old story about the guy that charges five thousand quid for fixing the, the plumbing system in, in a in a factory by tapping it with a hammer. But you know, it only took you five minutes. Yeah, but twenty five years of experience to know where to tap it sort of thing, you know? I know everybody knows that story, but it's that that kind of thing. Um, you know, if you, if you say, right, we're just going to charge a flat fee, you have to make sure that that flat fee is sensible for you if things take forever to sort out.
Um, which.
Yeah, which is then somewhat unfair to the client if it actually, you know.
Yeah. I don't know how you wrestle this down. It's difficult.
It really is. We seem to go round in circles with it. And the reason I brought it up is, is like, I think it's any, any, anybody that's involved in it. Excuse me in a problem solving business. I mean, you could argue a lot of businesses, if not most businesses.
But it's not it's not commoditised.
It's not commoditised. It's like there is a there is a problem. I mean, if I said to Leslie, right, you know, here's twenty videos and we need, we need a video, you know, we need to use those assets to build a video that just blows people away tells a fantastic story. It's not a case of taking twenty videos and going like 30s of that one 30s of that one, glue it all together, put some, you know, music at each end of it and go there, yeah, I've done it. You've got to try and figure out like, you've got to watch all the videos, figure out what they all do, understand all the story that they're telling. Try and find where the thread is through all the clips in order to tell the story. There's a lot of time and effort that goes into it. You know, if Phil gets a client saying this, this, this is broken, this, this piece of software is broken. You know, as Phil often says to us, because he's quite blunt, he's like, well, you know, I've never done it before. How the hell do I know how long, how, how long it'll take? What, what we need to charge for it. I've never done it before. And then, you know, you can often spend longer trying to figure out what it's going to take to fix something. And then if you just go on and fix it. But at the other end of all that, there's a client who's saying like, well, I kind of need to know what this is going to cost, you know what I mean?
And you can see it from their point of view one hundred percent. I mean, nobody likes a situation where, you know, you ask your lawyer to resolve something and they give you an invoice for sixty thousand pounds because they've written ten letters and spent forty hours reading or something. Yeah, absolutely, I get it. I just don't.
We tend to use fixed prices when we look at a problem and give a price for solving it. And, and, you know, I guess there's an element of swings and roundabouts with that. But, you know, right now we've got a situation where a client has put, um, a list of, I don't know, twenty or thirty things in a, in a GitHub, um, issues in the, in the issues section of GitHub, um, which is like, think of it just as a, as a journal of things that need to be done. If you're not familiar with GitHub, sort of, you know, a client's restaurant. Yeah.
That's right.
And, and they've said like, we would like a quote for this and an estimate of how long it's going to take. And it's like it's a list of things that are that we've known each of.
Them is variable.
And that's because it's not because we're a new business or we're just out of university. It's like every day, people that solve technical problems do things they've never done before. But the people who are buying those services want to know what it's going to cost.
I suppose I guess the argument for, I don't know, a business that provides a commoditised service, not a product. It doesn't work with products, but with a service where you're saying, okay, this will cost X amount. What they would probably say is some of those jobs actually take way longer, but you just take the hit and then you adjust your prices so that they're, you know, somewhere in the middle of, you know, what it could take and what it will take. And it's tricky because I feel like whenever you do that, you're right. You're ripping off the people who can do it for in five minutes. But I think that's probably just the way it has to be. I don't know.
I think I'd be interested if anybody could bother their ass to actually reply and say, well, this is what we do. Or, you know, this is we just charge an hourly rate. And if somebody really, really, you know, we charge more for the people we know are more difficult, are better at their job and less for the people that maybe take too long. And maybe it's as simple as that. I don't know, but it doesn't. It seems you do seem to go around in circles with it, and you very rarely get a straight answer. There's nobody really, I don't think anywhere has absolutely nailed it. I don't think so. I don't think they ever will. Anyway. I just thought I'd bring it up just to just to kind of round off this, this little chat. So you've been listening to Dave and Alex on Digital Marketing From The Coalface. Um, we had nothing to say this week. So, um, that's why it only lasted oh forty five minutes. Um, we will try and keep the cadence of this up. We did one last week. We did this one this week obviously, and um, we're trying to get back on track and make these more, more regular again after, you know, a bit of a bit of sloppy, um, um, timekeeping on our part in terms of producing these podcasts. So if you are enjoying them, let us know. Um, we might even consider having guests on again. Yeah, maybe not though.
They'll just sell you things.
Maybe not.
Try to sell us things.
Maybe.