Make Do And Mend Is An Awful Digital Marketing Strategy - Episode 129

Something that comes up time and again is obviously lead capture. Online websites predominantly relies on web forms, and these are often badly configured, badly set up such that somebody fills in a form and that either disappears into a vortex, or

It lands in someone's personal email.

Or in someone's personal email who's on holiday for two weeks, or, you know, there's so many things that can go wrong with that approach. And yet it is so easy to use any number of CRMs. And there's lots of them out there, including HubSpot, to make sure that those enquiries go straight into a place where other people get notified and you can set some actions, make things happen, respond, put those enquiries into a deals pipeline. And it's so easy to do that. Welcome back to Digital Marketing ish From The Coalface. I say digital marketing ish because increasingly we're talking about all kinds of other nonsense, just life stuff.

It's from the coalface.

In these, uh, yeah, in these podcasts and videos. Um, which is, um, I think only natural. Good song name that band. It's only natural.

Crowded House wasn't alive in the nineteen fifties or whenever that was.

You're no doubt familiar with the, um, the scene from Spinal Tap where the miss order, the, uh, the, uh, Stonehenge model. And it's tiny. I, um, decided to order a coffee grinder, and I have to say I'm actually delighted with it, but I wanted a manual coffee grinder. Right. Um, and I ordered, um, a coffee grinder, and it arrived, and I kind of thought it was going to be the size of a two three cup type Cafetiere. And it's not it's like it's tiny. It's like it's, it's like about three or four inches high and about, I suppose not quite two inches diameter. It's kind of.

So it's like one cup.

Of coffee. Yeah, that's exactly it. It's only enough to make one cup of coffee. However, the process of it's got a nice little thing that holds the handle that you take the handle off and tuck it in the side for when you put it away. So you take the handle out, you take the top off, you put in some beans, fill it up with beans, and you can adjust the size of the grind. Decide how fine or whatever. Put the thing back on and you hold it and. You start.

Three hours later, you can have one cup of coffee, not.

Quite three hours, but it does take a little while. And then you've ground the coffee yourself manually. And then you put that in. And I don't know if when you make ground coffee, you you do. I don't understand whether this is anything. It's a thing I heard about the bloom. Yeah. So you pour a bit of water on it and let it seep into it, and I don't know what difference that makes. I'm not really sure. Probably, uh.

It's like aerating your red wine. Is it?

Is it okay? It's a sort of red wine I drink. You don't aerate it. You just take the top off and drink it out of the bottle. Um, so you kind of in it goes. And then so the whole process is, is kind of involved. It's kind of, it's a nice thing to do. So I did that this morning. As you know, I work from home this morning. So I went stuff in the top ground, the coffee. So I used a small cafetiere in it, went a bit of water, let it bloom, put the rest in, let it seep for a little minute, a little bit of milk in the cup because I wanted milky coffee, not black coffee. In it went sip and it was a lovely cup of coffee. And it was actually a nice just to kind of take my time and go through the process of making a really good cup of coffee. Yeah. Which leads me neatly on.

To.

Go on. What are you gonna know?

It's good. It's a good segue. I was gonna say, this is great radio theater. Not not such a great podcast so far, but well done. No, I was gonna say it's funny because I was waiting for you at quarter past nine this morning. You were like, let's have a meeting after scrum. And I was like, yeah, any minute it'll rock up. And then about twenty minutes later, you're like, here we go.

That's why. Because I did say, didn't I? I'm going to go make myself a coffee. And I went, I'm gonna do this like right from scratch, grind the beans and do it all properly. So it was good. I enjoyed it. Um, I suppose, I mean, it's a sort of half assed segue. I'm just making this up as I go along, as you realise. But, um, I got, I was thinking, um, about the, some of the work that we get to do and we've recently landed a really decent little gig, um, with a tech company and the website's awful, the, they've had a go at doing PPC and it's awful. Uh, their messaging is awful. Um, the company is fantastic. I mean, what they produce is very, very high tech. The product is superb. The people, the people we've met so far Ah, lovely. You know, very much um engaged in, in what they do. Um and ah um I'm trying to avoid the p word. Ah. Um I think genuine, clever, genuine, clever, clever engineers who enjoy the work that they do. I think it would be fair to say, uh. Oh right. They're passionate. Um, so the clever engineers who enjoy the work that they do, um, and they've kind of recognised, which is good that they need some help and, and um, they found us being an industrial and tech specialist marketing company, we fitted the bill. I think they were, they were speaking to a number of people. And then, um, and then they just said, you know what, this all makes sense. You know, we offered to go down and spend some time with them and they all went well. And we've started working with them and we're looking forward to, to doing that. Um, it's always tricky though, isn't it? And, and this, there's no real outcome, um, to, to this conversation other than in an ideal world, we would basically throw everything away and start again. But so often, um, we can't do that. Oh well, no, we've just spent this money on this website. It's, it's an awful website. But anyway, um, and we have to kind of fix things and adapt things and adjust things and, you know, what do you think fixing stuff as opposed to just starting over? Any views on this?

Um, it's good for clients, bad for us. I think it's probably somewhat akin to if you imagine.

How is it good for clients?

Well, well, yeah, not in the long term. It's good for them.

Short term in my opinion. But go on.

It's comfortable.

Yeah, yeah. All right. I'll take that.

I can imagine a situation where, you know, you would get a suit made by a tailor and it wouldn't fit very well.

And you have had a suit made by a tailor. When I was ballroom dancing when I was competing.

Did it not fit very well?

It had. No, no, because you go through a process superfluous. You go through a process, you get an initial fitting. They make some other adjustments before they put the right.

So I think it's a good analogy. This. So it's a long and arduous process. And you may, at the end of it, come out with a suit that doesn't really fit you particularly well, but because the tale is rubbish or you've interfered with the process too much, or he's been trying to measure you and you've been like, no measure here, not there. Whatever. Come up with a bad suit. You spent a grand on it. I can see a world in which you would want to take that suit to a different tailor and say, now please make this baggy and ill fitting suit fit me. And that tailor may well say, well, this would be much bloody easier if you'd let me start from scratch. And I get it. You've made an investment you want to maintain. You know, you want to get something good out of that investment. You don't want to start again. But yeah, I think ultimately what you're always doing is just sort of overcomplicating things. At the end of the day, we are always going to be able to do a better job. Any agency is going to be able to do a better job if you let them do the job from the beginning and sort of.

Yeah, I mean, I'm not saying that every time we get brought in to, to do a rescue job, um, that the underlying foundations are awful. Sometimes the foundations are okay.

Are they? I can't think of the last time it happened where somebody brought us a genuinely good website with a few issues, and we were like, yep, this is great. We can knock this into shape.

I'm sure there have been. I'm sure there have been.

Oh yeah, there's a property client. Oh, well. Yeah, yeah.

Well, that was even worse because they, they actually were in the final throes of having their site redeveloped. And if they'd spoken to us, we would have probably steered them away from what? The final solution? Yeah. If I'm allowed to say that is um, actually has, you know what they've used. Yeah. Didn't kind of make any sense, but I suppose like from an agency point of view, uh, when you're trying to build trust with a new customer, I've got another little anecdote when it comes to trust something that really pissed me off. But anyway, if I picked it up right, it really pissed me off. Um, but the little anecdote I suppose is, um, um, just bear with me. Um. What was I going to say? Tell me what I was talking about.

Oh, we're talking about reusing people's websites, uh, or bad websites.

So the whole trust thing is where I was going with that is, you know, it's like if you are in the throes of developing a relationship, you know, you've been on one date and, and bought some chips on the way home. I know I treat a girl, uh, you are not yet trusted. You're not in a position where they're gonna listen to you necessarily. If you say, look, all of this stuff is like, you know, we're going to make do and mend, which is not necessarily going to be the best use of, of, of your budget. Because by the time we've done everything we need to do, it's going to be a completely different website and it's going to take way longer doing it by trying to fix what's there as, as, as opposed to actually starting over and doing it properly.

You know what, though? The more we talk about this, the more convinced I am that actually the mature thing to do is to say right at the beginning of that relationship. Look, there's lots of things that are going to get in the way of success here. All of this presupposes that a website is sort of like a a thing, a sort of commoditised entity that you have built for you. And then you do stuff to, to make it work. And, you know, you can market a bad website. And that's true to a degree. But when you're talking about lead gen websites, when we go through the process of working out, you know what your market wants to see how to position your solution, how to then translate that into a fully functioning website, or if all of that work is done for you by somebody else who has not done it properly, there's not really that much you can do to make that work. You are going to end up rebuilding the website either by stealth or after waiting for two years and somebody seeing all. You know, my rankings and traffic have dramatically increased, but I'm still not selling anything. Why is that? And we have to say to them, well, it's because the the fundamental, the thing you're marketing was never good enough to do that. Like you're always going to have to have that conversation at some point. Mhm. Yeah. So I don't know.

Yeah. I'm not sure either. It's it's, uh, it's always, it's always a conundrum. Um, I mean, we've, we've certainly, we will definitely hear people towards the right solution, but they may just, you know, they often dig their heels in, they just often like, oh, well, no, I hear what you're saying, but we've just spent X on this therefore. Well, yeah, you know, we're not gonna bother.

One of my things that I've, that I wanted to bring to the table about, about the same client actually, um, which is about this whole idea of sort of not not appreciating or allowing you to self to understand what you don't know. And I think that's sort of key to what we're talking about here, but it's key to another part of this engagement where they've sort of decided they're very clever people, as you say. Um, and they are at the top of their game in terms of the product that they make, but they sort of decided that they understand how their market buys things and how they're going to position their product and what sort of language people are using when they're looking for their solution. And they this sort of a little bit of resistance around letting go of that and appreciating that we're bringing sort of experience and a perspective that could really benefit them. And I think we're.

Not bringing it in a bloody minded way. No, no, we we recognise that they are the subject matter experts, whether it's the client we're talking about. And I know who you mean or whether it's another client. Yeah, absolutely. It's very much a partnership thing.

It's it's based on trying to actually understand how people go about looking for what they're selling and, and how people behave online and what people do. And it's really easy when you run a business, especially when it's a niche business with a very specific audience, to sort of fall into the trap of thinking, well, I know what my audience wants, I know what they need. And it's this and getting sort of very blinkered and not being willing to sort of relinquish that and say, actually, you know, we don't have the the experience here or the knowledge here to actually sort of make these judgment calls. And I think the same is very true of building a website. You know, it's very easy to say, well, I've invested all this money in a website and I think it looks good because that's the other thing we run into a lot, right? It's people who businesses who have had a website made that suits what they want. You know, they've gone with a laundry list. They're like, I want to look really flashy. I want to look high end, you know, all that sort of nonsense.

I want to look professional.

Yeah.

Whatever that means.

Yeah. And then somebody built them a website that caters to their demands rather than what their market needs to see. Um, and then they come to us and they're like, well, I don't want to rebuild my website because I like the way it looks and, you know, fundamentally misunderstood. Because your website is obviously not for you. It's for your potential customers. And you get people who are sort of really locked into this battle of, well, I like it. It looks good. This is what I think. And it's just it's just having the humility sometimes to say, look, actually, I could really do with a second set of eyes on this. I'm going to step away from this and let these guys decide, you know, get to the bottom of the problem.

Well, I think a good example of that is ourselves, because quite a number of years ago when we rebranded, we were working on one aspect of the branding, which was the logo, and we've got the skills in-house to do that, and we've done it for lots of companies, but we were just too close to it for ourselves. Yeah. So we got an external company to look at it for us. And they did it and it stood the test of time. I mean, we are talking about possibly changing it, possibly evolving.

forty years later or whatever.

I mean, yeah, that was, I don't know, maybe ten years or something like that and something of that order. Maybe not quite, but thereabouts. It was a long time ago that they did it and it stood the test of time, and it served us well. And we were just too close to it. But then so we trusted somebody. Well, this is me. We trusted somebody else.

This is a bit like the fact that psychiatrists always have psychiatrists, isn't it? It's like you can't sort of administer the medicine to yourself. And I think that's.

Like on The Sopranos, where Tony Soprano's psychiatrist is filmed talking to her psychiatrist. Yeah. That actress appeared in a film I watched at the weekend, um, called The Union, which, which was it's a bit James Bondy. It's a Mark Wahlberg. So you can imagine what it's like. It's just like ridiculous. It's a ridiculous film, but if you just fancy a James Bond esque type piece of entertainment where impossible things happen and the bad guys get it stuck to explosions. Yeah, it was actually really good fun. But she was in it, and I didn't actually, at first I thought, it is her. Then I thought, is it because she looks, you know, quite a bit different a few years on from The Sopranos and a very different type of character she was playing. She was playing Mac's mom, and then she was very good in it. If you want a piece of like pure escapism with lots of people getting blown up, then The Union is on Netflix, I.

Think, terribly relevant to the discussion. And you've mentioned.

Psychiatrists having psychiatrists, which took me to a psychiatrist being the psychiatrist in The Sopranos, which took me to the actress in The Sopranos. Being in a film with Mark Wahlberg called The Union. It's a perfect connection there.

This is a psychiatrist watching this may have something to say about ADHD. That's all I have to say. Um, no. Yeah. But but, you know, it's interesting because I think as well, I mentioned to you a couple of weeks ago, a client of ours, a very long term, very long term client, but a relatively long term client who brought in a new marketing manager. And she made us go through an exercise that I thought was going to be dreadful. Turned out to be really helpful, but very skeptical about sort of marketing fluff, as you know. And the whole point of it was that it was this sort of positioning framework, and it made you go through and assess your capabilities on various fronts. You know, like, how well do you understand your target audience? What language do they use, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you went through all of these questions and it sort of made you sit back and reassess, you know, where you were, what assumptions you were making and what sort of knowledge gaps there were. And it was a really interesting process, just because I think, like you say, sometimes you get too close to these things and you actually really do need to sort of take two steps backwards and say, what do we actually know? And I think it's really hard to do if you are a business owner and you're trying to market or, you know, on a budget or you're trying to market frantically and you're trying to get somewhere and you don't want to sort of sit and take a step back. But it's what's needed sometimes.

Mhm. Does that I've one of my notes. Um, and it's only because I've been sort of watching and listening to, to brand related stuff recently, but I get a sense of what you were talking about there. You know, the connection with brand. Yeah. Um, is kind of like just it goes right through it, doesn't it? Like a, like a stick of rock, like cut it in half and, you know, business in half. And it should be all about the brand and the brand being the way that you are perceived in the marketplace.

Yeah.

Yeah. Um, the, my, you know, my favorite definition of brand, um, as you know, as everybody here knows only too well is like, you know, it's what people say about you when you're not in the room. What's people say about you when you're not in the room? And I think that's, that stands the test of time. But, uh, there was a brand guy, a really good brand guy on tick tock. And he came up with an interesting one recently. And I did share it with you, if you remember. Uh, and he, and he was saying he was talking about the importance of brand and what brand is and trying to explain it to people. he said. You know, you go in, you go out, you go into a coffee shop, you sit down, somebody walks in, buys a coffee, sits down, opens up their MacBook. What are they doing? And you're like, well, I don't know, probably something creative there, right there. You know, whereas somebody else walks in, they open up their Dell laptop. They're crunching numbers in a spreadsheet. They're doing something incredibly boring and writing a horribly boring document, whereas the person with the MacBook is doing something creative. And that's what Apple have always been about. It's always been like, you know, it's to it's to stay out of the way and give you a tool that lets you be creative and do amazing things. And they are a statement, you know, Apple products are a statement. You know, the laptops, the iPads, whatever it is. I mean, we've got the iPads out there. I've got an Apple Watch on my wrist and my phone and my MacBook are over on the other desk. I mean, you know, they've got me hook, line and sinker. And that's not because I particularly want people to see me opening my laptop in my, sorry, not my laptop, my MacBook in a coffee shop and think he's a very creative looking person. It's not that at all. It's just I guess you get suckered in, you get. You get sucked into it.

Stories.

Plus it's better kit. It just works.

Well, that's the story.

Which is the main, which is the main thing. But yeah, you're right. I mean, I've written this storytelling and it is. And when we're, you know, working with, um, customers, um, you know, when we're, when we're sort of fixing stuff that's, they're often getting the story right. Is, is, is just a huge part of that. And even if the underlying kind of design and technology that they've used for their, for their online presence is a bit rubbish if we get the story right and, and, and position them properly and, and get them thinking along those lines then, right. We can make stuff work, aren't we?

Right. It's interesting though, because I think one of the things I've sort of come to grapple with, um, I mean, the client in question, for example, that I was just talking about that made us go through that whole sort of like marketing framework exercise. They're in the process. Um, and it is a collaborative process, but they're in the process of slowly sort of morphing their sort of story or brand if you like. You know, previously they were the provider of software that was better than everybody else's. And they're moving to a place where they're the people that are there. When you have a really tough challenge to tackle, and you need some very specific niche software to do it. And I think that's a good sort of transition. But I think the thing for me that I'm slowly coming to realise is that it is a transition that all of these stories, you don't sort of like come up on the finished article. The right story straight away. It's always a sort of process of evolution. And that's okay, because I think in my sort of marketing brain, I always want to come up with like the right answer, you know, the definitive version of this brand, the definitive version of this headline or whatever. And I think it's okay that these things do take time to evolve and they go through several iterations. I mean, we were talking about this in the last podcast, but this is something that, you know, for us, it's taken us ages to get to the point where we're sort of like very definitely a tech and industrial marketing company. And that's okay that that's taken twenty years. You don't have to sort of like jump straight to the finished article and you probably can't. You have to go through lots of rounds of revisions and improvements. And it's a sort of glacial.

But that's like a, a human level. That's what people do, you know, when, you know, when your identity, you know, I'm not quite, but more or less twice your age. So I've had way longer on this planet to kind of develop a sense of who I am. And I'm still kind of learning. I'm still adapting, I'm still, you know, I'm not trying to force anything. I'm just kind of actually, as you get older and you'll find this is you, you actually accept who you are more readily than when you're younger, where you're trying to be something that you're probably not.

But I think also what you come to accept is that there isn't a sort of like definitive quick three word summary of who you are either. Because I think that's the thing, as I you're right, I don't have very much experience to draw on, but certainly, you know, sort of early twenties only to be, you know, there to be a very finite, definitive version of me. And as I get older and sort of accept that people.

You went through a phase where you were thinking you wanted to be an academic, you saw yourself as a as a sage like character. You know, I'm not serious. Yeah, well, you've got that. Um, only because you can't grow a proper one, but it's, um, you know, you want it to be, you know, probably a professor, you probably wanted people to, to learn from you and then you would write papers and you would be this kind of well, you know, sage like, as I've already said. Yeah. Uh, persona.

Um, and then I grazed a first class degree, took umbrage and f*cked up. So if you're not gonna tell me how clever I am. Oh, God. Yeah.

Yeah. Did you get a first?

Not quite. Two marks in my final.

You didn't get a first? It was a simple answer. The answer was no. Grazing it, you know, if you'd grazed it. And it was like.

Oh.

Physics or nuclear science or something. If you'd grazed that, I might. But, you know, to graze a first class English degree. Jesus.

It's not hard, is it? Jesus. What was I.

Thinking? I'm sure it isn't. Yeah, because you're talking to a guy who got a B in English language. So, yeah, I'd have probably aced it, you know. All in all levels. That's more I just extrapolate that. Got to be at all levels or.

Probably would have got first. Probably could have been professor of linguistics. Yeah. What do they.

Do? I'd have been the best at it.

No, you're absolutely right. And it changes as you age. The the, the story that you're telling, I guess, about yourself to yourself or to other people. And. Yeah, I think the same is very true in business. But I think it's interesting because I think a lot of people are not very comfortable with that idea. You know, they want to have the sort of best and definitive version of their business right now. And they're not on a journey necessarily.

Yeah, it's a really good point that I like it. And I think, you know, drawing the parallels between businesses and people because obviously businesses are.

Just people, aren't they? Yeah.

Um, and I suppose, yeah, I mean, early days of Red evil, I was probably more inclined to go down the geek route and be more gone down a software dev type route as opposed to a marketing route. I'm glad we, we took the direction we did, and we still do plenty of software development as well anyway, but, um. Yeah. Anyway, Christ knows how we got down that route, but, uh.

It's a Monday afternoon actually.

Did bother your ass to, to write some stuff down for this week's podcast. So hopefully you got something interesting in there.

Uh, well, I mean, the Google it isn't.

I'll just stop you in your tracks.

Yeah. You. Yeah. Uh, the AI search results rolled out.

Tell me all about it.

Three days ago. Well, have you seen have you noticed them? That's the first question.

No.

So they've officially rolled out now. So you type something into Google. They've officially rolled out in the UK. They were out a while ago. In America you type something into Google and it little AI thing pops up and tells you everything you need to know about it. Except. Except it doesn't. It's only there for searches that Google thinks are informational. Okay, so like what is or, you know, sort of defining words.

Does this mean that what is content on people's websites is now defunct?

Uh, well, this is the thing.

You're never going to get traffic is what I'm asking.

Potentially. That's what everyone's worried about. So that's the sort of wider context of this debate, is that Google are rolling out AI search and everyone's like, well, people will just use the AI search now instead of looking in results. Um, there's a few things with that though. The first is that it basically just copies the first search result or the featured snippet, which is really weird. I've been playing with it quite a bit, and it's like, if you Google something like, what is the life span of a goldfish? Um, a weird one, I know, but bear with me. You get the AI snippet and then you get straight underneath it, the featured snippet, which is from the RSPCA website, I believe. And it is basically identical, all the same information. And then I went through a list of sort of medical conditions. Um, same thing just literally takes the first Google search result and sort of grabs some information from it, which seems a little bit lazy. Um, and also a little bit pointless. You're not seeing it.

Maybe I just did a, what is search on Google and I just got the usual search results.

Uh, yeah. It's weird. It's really inconsistent. So it's more like if the intent behind your search is to try and find out what something is. So if you so if you Google, what is the life span of a goldfish, it doesn't work. But if you Google goldfish lifespan, it kicks in.

Oh, I'm going to do that. Then goldfish lifespan joining at home, boys and girls.

You can all see for yourself. Um, yeah, it's just a weirdly bad feature. Um, it's basically just sort of doubling up the first search result.

Oh, so that there. Yeah, that just looks like a featured snippet.

That is the featured snippet for you. That's interesting, but that's exactly what I'm talking about. So that's for me. This is the AI one. So it says.

Have you turned the AI thing on or something? I haven't.

Nope.

Okay. Just just typically.

Inconsistent. Yeah. Inconsistent. Maybe they're testing something. Yeah. Generative AI is experimental. So yeah, it says basically goldfish typically live ten to fifteen years, but some varieties can live up to thirty years with proper care. And that is exactly what the featured snippet says. Okay, so it's just completely pointless. It's just pushing everything down the page, basically. What's really weird about it is that on some of the searches I was playing with, you get the AI snippet, the featured snippet, some ads, some people also ask some videos and then two organic search results. And that is it. So so it's sort of getting to the point now with the introduction of this AI stuff, where some Google search results are just not really terribly informative anymore, and there's almost no space to actually rank standard content, which is like, so I did it with what is HubSpot? Um, which I also have open here because obviously that's something we've tried to rank for before, right?

We do rank somewhere for that. Yeah.

Yeah. We used to rank on the first page. We definitely don't anymore. So what is HubSpot? You get an AI overview and we may have to do some stuff in post here where we put screens up. So it's not very boring for people. But then you get yeah. So you get the AI snippet, you get Hubspot's own website, all of this stuff. All of this video. A little sad organic listing some short videos. Two more organic listings and then some pictures. And that is it. So good luck ranking for that. But but it's interesting because what I think this is what this means really for us, for people trying to market their website is you really do now need to start thinking very seriously about other forms of content. Like that first page of Google is a couple of featured snippets, a bit of AI content, and then a load of video. And if you're just producing sort of traditional written blog posts, articles, white papers, you're not going to get a look in there like it really does. Now favor, I think a lot of these search results, people who are experimenting with short video, people with longer YouTube videos, you know, by all means write content. That's sort of fodder for the AI things that are designed to, to sort of be dragged out. But the idea of just sort of sitting there and churning out endless informative content, I don't think really holds up in the face of that. Um, there are a couple of other interesting things though, like the AI overview also has like a little learn more section down the side where they pull out content that they think is useful and that is other people's content. So I guess there's an opportunity there. Yeah. And also there are links in all the AI stuff where it's like sourcing itself. So I guess I guess that's where the future of sort of traditional content marketing lies is in trying to produce resources that the AI will grab and say, this is useful, I'll link to this. Or people might also be interested in this or rank it. But certainly, I think, like you say, the idea of sort of producing what is content that is just a sort of thousand words on defining something is it's not dead yet, but it's certainly going that way, I think. Mhm, mhm.

I actually did find that interesting.

You have a gold star or is that a silver star? Yeah, yeah.

Silver. You can have gold. That wasn't quite gold standard.

I'm afraid I'll try harder next time.

Um, just a little bit of practical advice. You know, last, uh, last episode, I think it was last episode or the one before we did, uh, tools, free tools that just install them on your website because you'll find the information that they can give you a very useful. Um, I just thought we'd do a very short piece around making web based lead gen easier. And it was something, um, Stuart had said in there, we, we were having a meeting this morning before he legged it in his, uh, in his campervan. But they.

Do work hard here don't.

We? We do. Yeah. Um, he talked about how he liked, he used, um, Salesforce in a previous job. He'd used dynamics in a previous job. And he's used HubSpot with his own consultancy and obviously uses HubSpot with us. Um, and he said he didn't like dynamics. He didn't say much about Salesforce other than it wasn't being fully used. The only experience I've got of Salesforce and I think I'm right might be wrong, actually a long, long time ago. I downloaded the community edition of sugar CRM and I'm not sure if Salesforce bought sugar CRM. Um, I think customer relationship management systems, um, came out a long time ago and fell flat on their face. People didn't get them, they didn't use them. They spent a lot of money on them and, and basically then didn't use them. Um, in some instances, I think it was, uh, old school salespeople, you know, preferring their yellow post-it notes to something that gave visibility to what they were actually doing.

Yeah.

But, and we've had a few false starts with HubSpot CRM over the years. But for the last quite a while, we've been very much just funneling everything into the CRM and it makes everything so much, so much easier. So something that comes up time and again is obviously lead capture online websites predominantly, uh, is uh, relies on um, web forms and, and these are often badly configured, badly set up such that the person somebody fills in a form and that either disappears into a vortex.

Or it lands in someone's personal email.

In someone's personal email, who's on holiday for two weeks, or, you know, there's so many things that can go wrong with that approach. And yet it is so easy to use any number of CRMs. And there's lots of them out there, including HubSpot, which is the one we like, um, to make sure that those enquiries go straight into a place where other people get notified and you can set some actions, make things happen, respond, set some to do's, you know, put those enquiries into a deals pipeline. And it's so easy to do that. Um, so I just thought it was worth pointing out if you've dabbled with CRMs before and found them less than useful. And and, and sadly, you've wasted a lot of money and time and money on them. And I would advise if, if web based lead gen is something that's important to you and your business, that you revisit it and go for a CRM where you can embed forms on your website such that the enquiries go straight into CRM and then trigger some actions so that stuff gets done.

Yeah, I think it's probably really overly simplistic take on this, but for me, it seems like the rule with tools like this in general is like, it has to be really simple and you have to automate the shit out of it. You cannot ever just take something out of the box and just say, right, we've got CRM now, and you've got to sort of think through that whole process. I mean, we, I mean, I don't know how long it took us to get to the point where our pipeline did what it wanted, it wanted what we needed it to do, rather to give us the information that we needed. But you have to get there. You have to work at it and sort of set everything up in such a way that it becomes sort of effortless. Otherwise it's just a drag.

Yeah, but but seriously, I mean, things like HubSpot out of the box, if you don't customise them at all, if you're not using a CRM, the out of the box and customised what you see is what you get just here it is. And, you know, just start using it. And you don't even have to install it because it's a SaaS solution anyway. And it's free does what most companies need. It does what most B2B organisations need. You know, it captures enquiries. It, it lets you put them into a deal so that you can progress them and get people to communicate with the company that's made the enquiry. And then either you win it or you lose it. And, you know, and it just it doesn't make excuse me, it doesn't make any sense not to do it.

Yeah. And it's.

I don't.

Think HubSpot is free.

I'm not sure if you can embed web forms in your non HubSpot website. If you use the free version of the CRM, I'm not sure. But what you can do is you can set up your WordPress or your Joomla web forms or whatever content management system you're using such that HubSpot listens for them and then intercepts them. They get they go to wherever they're supposed to go, anywhere, you know, but it intercepts them and puts them into the CRM for you without you doing very much. Um, so, um, that was just a short kind of, uh, cutaway, if you like, um, to say, um, if web based lead gen is important to you and your organisation, then there are some very low cost and even free tools out there, which make the whole process way more slick. It makes the person's first encounter of your business positive as opposed to I filled in a form, I sent it and I never heard from them or it took a week before and by the time they got back to me, I'd already spoken to the other company who used the CRM and got back straight back to me. I mean, let's face it, we get all the time, we get these comments like, oh, thank you for getting back to me so quickly. It's not, it's not now. And again, it's like nearly every time we get an enquiry, we respond very quickly so the person knows we've received their enquiry and that we're progressing it, and we send them a link so they can book a meeting. If it's an online meeting or we say, are you free to chat, let us know when it suits you, all that kind of stuff. And it's almost every single time. The initial response, thanks for getting back to me so quickly. And so it's not difficult to differentiate yourself, whatever business you're in from the rest, just by responding reasonably quickly.

Using a CRM.

I had a situation very recently where I was, uh, I had an issue with the motorhome, which I fixed myself. I fixed two electrical problems myself in the last couple of weeks. How clever am I? I think I'm now an electrical engineer especially. Um, yeah, not an idiot.

Not me struggling to fit a light the other night.

And I put a message down to a sergeant who do a lot of the electronics for motorhomes. They the control panels and the, and the, and the actual black box that Oxo such as such, your electric electrical system, etc. so I obviously don't know what I'm talking about. And I put a message to them saying this had happened or you know, what do they suggest? And it took them nearly three weeks to respond to me. And the response was, um, we can't service that thing for you anymore, but we can replace it with a newer model, or you can just buy a switch from Rs components and replace the switch, which is what I'd already done two weeks ago. And it took them three weeks to get back to me, you know, and, and so now you're thinking, well, now I'm thinking because I was looking at a different control panel to replace the one that's in the van, more preventative than anything else. The one that's in the van's working fine and it's about one hundred and forty quid. And I thought, yeah, you know what? I think I'll put a newer one in and then it kind of safeguards against failure, etc.. AM I going to do that now? Not really. No, because I'm not very positively predisposed towards them anymore because it took them three weeks to answer a simple question.

That's the thing. We were talking about storytelling earlier, and it's just about the impression you give. I mean, I have a similar story to that, only it's a year old about my boiler. I've talked to you about this thing before. It's a pellet boiler. It's a pain in the ass. Mhm. Um, endless things that can go wrong. It's German made, so you can guarantee that it will fall over when it's least convenient. And it will cost you a small fortune to fix it. As is the case with all German made things. Um, but there again, you see, I emailed Akufen because I was having a weird issue where I was short cycling and I emailed them like explained all the parameters. I was like, I've tested this, I've tested that. These are the, this is the sequence that it goes through. This is exactly what happens every time. And it's happened fifteen plus times. What do you suggest? And nothing happened. Nothing happened. They never got back to me. And then like with you a couple of weeks later, they got back to me. Except it wasn't Akufen. It was some guy called Mart replying on his personal email address, and he was like, oh, sorry. Like I'm all over the place at the moment. Like, I missed your email. I missed your email, but it may be this and it might be that and it might be the other thing. And it was the weirdest thing because up until then, in my head, Akufen had been a bit like Audi or BMW, you know, it was.

Like this.

Pinnacle of German engineering, this big company, they make all these, like, industrial sized pellets.

Turns out it's a bloke in his shed.

Absolutely. And then it's like, time to like, you know, when it comes time to think about replacing this boiler. I will not be going back to Oxford because my impression of the story that they tell is that they're sort of a bit slapdash, not very professional, and don't really have it together.

But you've got, you know, Matt at gmail dot com now, if you've got any issues with it, and he might reply in two weeks. So what's the problem?

Yeah, it's just like, you know, just.

Put your big coat on. If the, if the, if the boiler fails until Matt gets back to you.

Oh dear. Um, and you know, and yeah, at the end of the day, he fixed the problem. One of his suggestions worked. But you don't trust them anymore. And I think that's a problem. It's so easy to lose trust. It's so hard to regain it. Mhm.

Yeah. And a lot of the stuff that we're working on businesses with, it's all about building trust. It's about proving capability. It's about Showing you no strangers. Why? You're a good a good opportunity. You're a good. Um. What's the word I'm looking for? You're you're a you're a good option. Yeah. When it comes to finding a solution to their business challenges, which.

You'd better be able to deliver on when you land the gig, which is.

Yeah, absolutely.

I guess that's the good thing about working in marketing, right? We only have to get to the point where the customer is, you know, paid the money, commissioned the client the first time, and then we're sort of we sail away and we say, oh, look, what a brilliant thing we did. It's on them to then sort of deliver on that promise, I suppose.

Yeah, yeah, up to a point, I suppose. What um, what else have you got?

What else have I got? Uh, well the other thing I have is just about, um another Google thing. You can, you can go to sleep now if you like. So interestingly enough, a couple of days ago, Google just got granted a patent on a new sort of way of ranking websites. Um, apparently they applied for it like a few years ago. They've only just got it. And it's around this whole concept of information gain, which I don't know if you've come across yet. So the whole thing about information gain apparently, is what they're looking at is when somebody goes to Google and type something in what is, for example, what is HubSpot, blah, blah, blah. Obviously, the sort of first thing that Google wants to do is serve them content about what is HubSpot that answers the question. The next thing Google wants to do is anticipate what they'll need to know next in the sort of information chain, if you like. So you might go from what is HubSpot to how much does HubSpot cost? And the idea with this information gain sort of patent is that it's on a sort of way of, of, of sort of formalising that process so that they can upregulate or rank content that seems like it's going to answer the next set of questions more efficiently. And I think obviously we don't know a huge amount about it yet. It's really sort of up in the air as to how important it is or how much it will affect the algorithm and all that sort of thing. But the important thing is that Google is starting to look at not just the sort of keyword, but the intent behind it and what people are likely to do after that fact. And they're trying to curate a sort of experience that feeds that. So you can go to Google typing what is and it'll be like, here it is. And also this is what you need to know next. And also when you've done thinking about that, you'll probably want to read this and sort of proffer you content that answers all of your questions. Okay. Um, which I guess what people are talking about in marketing circles is how we can sort of leverage that and use that and start baking that into the way we think about content and about this whole idea of not producing content for the search, but producing content for the intent behind the search and the journey people are going on and what they're liable to sort of need after that initial query.

So this sounds like an extension of the AI or part of the AI search results largely.

Well, the patent is largely around the way AI is going to handle that sort of information gain sort of or sort of chain of information and requests. Yeah. Um, but it is sort of an algorithm tweak if you like. It's a, it's a shift that's going to happen in the way that Google starts ranking content. I guess the idea being that people who produce content that does more of the whole sort of I buyer journey or whatever, that gives you more of the information you're liable to need, will suddenly start performing much better and being recommended more often. So it sort of behoves you to go away and think not just sort of, well, somebody, somebody typed in like, you know, how long does a goldfish live? Well, they might probably want to know how to extend the lifespan of their goldfish or, you know, how to buy medicine for their goldfish or whatever. Whatever you're trying to do, I don't know, maybe trying to keep this thing alive for a century or whatever, and then just sort of.

Till it's big enough to eat.

Yeah, maybe you see some koi that are pretty big, I don't know. Um, but yeah, again, just a sort of slight tweak in the way we think about content and what we're trying to rank.

I guess I'm not looking at my watch because I'm bored. I'm looking at my watch because I've got a meeting at half past three and it's twenty.

twenty past now. Yeah.

Um, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Does it? This doesn't come under the category of super hyper turbo charging your content or anything like that.

It's super charging six things you can do.

Yeah. This is definitely something that you think might be useful.

Yeah. I think this.

Is not going to be it's it's not going to affect how Google rank content.

Not initially, but eventually. Yeah. And I think that's the sort of idea like I, one of the best ways of framing it that I read was somebody on search engine journal who was saying that think more about, you know, writing for a specific intent and a specific journey rather than a specific keyword. And that's the shift that it's not going to happen tomorrow. But in the long term, that's what you want to be thinking about when you're creating sort of helpful content.

Okay, I've got a whole subject there, which I'm actually, I'm going to leave it till next time. Um, because it's.

That's called a cliffhanger.

I think. Yeah. Well, I think it's more than whatever we've got, you know, we've got max ten minutes. In fact, we haven't, because I've got to make a cup of tea before the meeting and finish this meeting.

And heaven.

Forbid, thoughts. It's interesting. I'm looking forward to the meeting because it's about the, um, it's about Global's Dax system, which is, uh, a way that you can advertise on radio shows.

And.

Podcasts. And, and because there's a lot of on demand stuff now, the opportunities to advertise are increased because it's not just the finite live slots that are available. It's the whole kind of, you know, people want to listen again.

And which also means you've got lots of options around targeting intent and stuff.

Well that's right. Yeah. And it's something we've kind of flirted with. We had one client who's done rather well using radio advertising. Um, and, but this is, it's really quite cost effective from memory. So I'm interested. But what was interesting was I'd said to Julie, like, let's investigate this. And she went, oh, I was sat next to the guy from global, uh, at a networking event in Edinburgh last week. Yeah. And so, um, she just shared his contact details anyway, so she pinged him and we're going to have a chat at half past three about, about, you know, I think in the first instance, we might have a fiddle with it ourselves because we tend to experiment with ourselves. See what, see what's out there.

That's a, that's a small soundbite that, taken out of context, sounds very bad. Yeah.

I don't know. Does it really sound bad?

Well.

Sounds like you don't talk about in a digital marketing podcast, but I don't think it's necessarily bad. Um, okay. Um, anything else? Just to, just to round this one off.

No, I think.

The week ahead, we've got a busy week ahead.

I've DIY filled week ahead. I'm on holiday at work.

I'm fiddling with yourself.

I'm on holiday.

You're on holiday Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Yeah. That's right. I'm, uh, heading down to Edinburgh on Thursday for another networking event. Like it's at the, um, at the Royal Botanical Gardens. Is it in Edinburgh? So it's like the summer Edinburgh Chambers, summer get together sort of thing.

So it's like plant themed networking.

It's yeah. It's more well, yeah, I think it's more of a drink and a laugh than, than any sort of serious networking, but it sounds like fun. And the fringe is on to Edinburgh will be buzzing. So I'm looking forward to that. I'm going to go down on Thursday. Um, other than that, there's quite a lot of new projects kicking off at the moment, which we're busy with. In fact, that's what we're going to be doing after this podcast, eventually after the global meeting about the DAC system. But, um, okay, Digital Marketing From The Coalface. That's enough drivel from us for this week. Um, we'll, we've had, this is like the third week on the bounce. I think we've managed to keep this thing going.

So it's almost.

Nodding as well. So yeah, so, uh, what we'll do is, and I've already got the first subject for the next one. Oh, I'm getting ahead ahead of ourselves here. Um, so it's, uh, that's it for now. Thanks. You've been listening to me, Dave Robinson and my colleague Alex Bussey, all put together nobly by Leslie.