It's Not Hard, But It's Easy To Get It Spectacularly Wrong, Guess What We're Talking About - Episode 133

I wonder if the overarching issue is that marketing in general, and maybe the whole BD and sales piece as well, is perceived as simple. It's simple, fluffy stuff compared to like this difficult engineering that we're doing or this difficult, complex professional service provision that we're providing.

Well, you raise an interesting point. Do I? Well, yeah, because the other place where I've seen this exact same thing. Actually, now that you mention it, is companies that employ multiple different specialist agencies to do disparate bits of their marketing. So they'll have an SEO agency and have some PPC specialists. And, you know, my PPC specialists say this and my SEO specialists say this. And it's, it's again, that whole idea that you can sort of segment, chunk up your marketing, do a bit here, a bit there. And as long as you're doing something, it doesn't matter that there isn't a broader strategic direction. And I think you're right. I think people do sort of oversimplify it in their heads.

Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface, where we talk about digital marketing sometimes and anything else that crops up. We're getting a new toilet fitted downstairs, so we're upstairs just now, and we're all kind of in.

A crammed.

In crammed into a, to a corner of a desk because there wasn't anything else suitable up here, is there really? I, um, I'm delighted to, uh, say that Alex has put some thought into this, which is, which is more than I have. And he's got, he's got some stuff he wants to talk about.

I do have.

Some. So I haven't even seen the stuff you want to talk about. So I'm quite excited to hear what it is. And um, hopefully yeah.

Let's.

Uh, hopefully produce, um, something worth listening to as a result of that.

Well, that was two minutes of optimism, closely followed by.

forty minutes, only one minute and 20s, most of that was like just talking about the fact that the French have a word for blackmail. That also means sing or something.

Prepare for disappointment.

For those who prefer to watch rather than listen and bless you for doing that, you might notice that Alex has changed his appearance ever so slightly. What? This is the first podcast since you had your haircut.

My hair. Where's it gone? Yeah.

See, when you fell asleep with it in the office again, we kind of just sneaked up and did that thing that, you know. I wonder if he will lose all his SEO and digital marketing strength if we cut his hair off. Samson Samson esque. Yeah.

I said this to my wife earlier. I was like, oh, I hope I'm not like Samson and wear my hair comes off. I don't lose all my strength. And she's like, who? What?

Anyway, um, you, you, you have some stuff that you'd like to discuss. So, um, if you bring that up and we start with that. So see where we go.

The first thing is I think you'll probably recognise the client straight away as soon as we start talking about this. Um, but it was just about this whole idea of sort of, um, making sure that you're operationally And sort of organisationally ready for digital marketing. Okay. So we started working with a client, a client quite recently, a client. All right. If you're gonna pick me up every time, this will be a fun episode. Good lord. So we started working with a. Client quite.

Quickly.

Quite quickly. Client. Um, quite recently. Um, and they initially I think they, they, they were very up for the engagement. They were very excited by the prospect of digital marketing. They were very keen to.

And hadn't done much digital marketing before or hadn't done much themselves or they'd done it badly.

Well, I think they thought that they were doing some themselves and had sort of realised that they hadn't. Um, and that there were lots of opportunities. Certainly on the SEO side, there were lots of opportunities for growth and the, you know, lots of potential customers out there looking for what they did. Um, they were very keen to sort of start everything. Um, and then once we sort of engaged with them and started working with them, it became really clear that internally they were just not really in any way sort of ready. So there were lots of little teams, lots of stuff, lots of internal sort of marketing teams, um, but all sort of completely isolated from each other, completely disparate, not really communicating with each other. So we'd sort of come up with.

When you say marketing teams, do you mean like people responsible for selling the stuff that they do as opposed to actual pure marketing? So there might have been a mix of sales. BD marketing could be a.

Well, that's the, that's the slightly confusing thing. So what they've done is basically internally they have different teams for each product, each of their sort of software products. They have different teams.

I do know.

Who you're talking. Some of those teams are sort of like supposed to be purely marketing, but purely marketing for this product or that product. Um, and what basically started happening is, you know, we'd come up with a plan, the plan would get okayed, we'd start doing stuff and then somebody from a different team would come along and say, oh, we've just realised that we have like an SEO plugin that we're not using. Shall we start using it? Um, and I'd have to be like, no, no, no. There's a sort of overarching plan. We're working through it. And then somebody else would come along and say, oh, we're just about to employ somebody on our team that has SEO experience. Will they be useful? And it's like, you know, here's the plan. Here's the strategy. Um, and you just sort of, you find that you're constantly, um, sort of working to, to bring different people up to speed. Um, and to try and sort of get this strategy moving. You're constantly sort of going back and forth and saying, you know, have you been caught up yet? Do you know what's going on? Are you aware of this? Um, a classic example of this is last week, somebody came to me from one of the smaller teams and said to me, oh, one of our writers has just written this brilliant piece. Can you SEO it? And I was like, I was like, first of all, slow down. Like, we're not just going to take a piece of content and sort of magically, you know, sort of SEO it, whatever that means. What they meant is, can you optimise it for a useful search term? And as I pointed out to her, you know, we're sort of working our way through a calendar of content. There's a sort of a strategy in place. And yes, of course, we can sort of take a look at this as part of that.

But you mean we're taking a strategy first approach?

Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, that's generally how novel I know. Yeah. But but that's the thing that's amazing about it. And I guess that's the point I'm trying to make here is it's like you, you know, you can bring an agency like us on board, um, and basically waste a lot of the energy that we're putting into things and a lot of the money that you're spending on us putting that energy into things by just not really sort of making our approach. Your approach, if that makes sense. If we come up with a really strong strategy, but then all of your internal teams are still working away on their own individual strategies and aren't really aware of it or aren't really on board with it, then you know your work is still getting done and things are moving forward, but it's certainly sort of at the expense of productivity. That stuff, I think.

Yeah, potential for busy work getting done.

Yeah. Well, that's exactly.

Meaningful, useful work getting done.

And, and there's the obvious bit where like execution is lacking because you say, you know, here's a bunch of keywords. Let's go and optimise these pages for these keywords. Here are your meta titles, here are your descriptions. And then you know somebody that says, oh, that's not my remit. You know, I don't want to do that. You have to pass this over to this other person and explain and brief them again. And that's annoying. But also, just like on the knowledge side, I think it's really dangerous because like, you know, I'll have calls with that client where I'll sort of, you know, be on with three or four people and I'll talk them through something and at the end of it, they'll be like, oh, I get it. Now, you know how to optimise a page or, or how to think about optimising a page for search. And they'll be like, oh, I totally get it. Now it seems really sort of common sense now that you've explained it. And then, of course, because you haven't educated another three or four people in a week's time, you find out that they've been doing something completely different. You know, you know, the knowledge hasn't been shared with them. They've gone off at a weird tangent, they've misinterpreted something and they've done something completely different that you now have to sort of unpick and undo. And I think that like idea of having all these sort of like different teams internally probably makes sense when you sort of, you know, your company grows organically or whatever. But when you're trying to share knowledge across departments, it's a massive handicap, I think, to have all those different silos.

Yeah. I mean, what that sounds to me like is, is people satisfying themselves that they're as long as they're doing stuff. Yeah. Then that's all kind of heading in the right direction. You know, just to go back to what you said previously that it's like, like directionless strategy less approach. But and this idea, I suppose that like produce something. And then, and then the last stage is to, to do the SEO. Yeah. You know, we're not a pure SEO agency. SEO is a tactic, a tool that we employ as part of the work that we do because we want content that we produce to actually drive some enquiries, revenue, improve the general, um, sort of situation that the business that we're working for are in is in rather and it's, it's, um, I, I wonder if the overarching issue is that marketing in general and maybe the whole BD and sales piece as well, but certainly marketing is seen as perceived as simple. It's simple, fluffy stuff compared to like this difficult engineering that we're doing or this difficult, complex service, professional service provision that we're providing.

Well, you raise an interesting point. Do I? Yeah. Because I think the other.

first for the podcast, episode one hundred and thirty eight, and I finally said something.

We can all just take a moment to celebrate that for David, because the other place where I've seen this exact same thing. Actually, now that you mention it, is companies that employ multiple different specialist agencies to do disparate bits of their marketing, so they'll have an SEO agency and have some PPC specialists say, oh, but you know, my PPC specialists say this and my SEO specialists say this. And it's it's again, that whole idea that you can sort of segment, chunk up your marketing, do a bit here, a bit there. And as long as you're doing something, I've got some SEO guys working on my website, it doesn't matter that there isn't a broader strategic direction, it doesn't matter that they're not integrating with PPC guys and saying, you know, what keywords are you paying for, what content you need to support that? How can we shape the SEO around the PPC? It's all just, just do the marketing. You know, it's just as long as you're doing something and it's good. And I think you're right. I think people do sort of oversimplify it in their heads.

And to a certain extent, it's simple because if we take an example, so, um, we get employed, we get engaged by an engineering company, first steps. We try and learn about the business. We try and learn about what the business does and we learn about their ideal customers. We learn about their competition, their market, their geographic market whereabouts they can do business, etc. we're trying to gather as much information as we can. Um, we then want to try and understand the the problems that they solve for their customers. We then want to understand how those potential customers try and how they're going to encounter that business that we're helping when they're trying to solve that problem that they've got or the problems that they've got. And then we start to piece together, well, okay, it looks like the people who you can help are fans of TikTok or YouTube, or they definitely use Google a lot or whatever. And we start to piece it all together. And then we start to figure out how we can present, you know, a story to those people in the places where they're likely to be looking for solutions to their problems. Now, you know, to me anyway, none of that sounds particularly complex until you start to try and do it, and then suddenly it isn't as straightforward as it might at first appear. You know, so this. But I think that's where this idea of like, right, I've done this thing now you guys, what do you need ten minutes, fifteen minutes to SEO it and you know.

It somehow.

Magically.

It'll go on search for some keywords.

Well, I mean, going, you know, thinking about another client, um, that, um, that you will, you will recognise straight away, but they have, you know, made an almighty, uh, pig's ear of their, of their marketing.

Well, that could be all of it could be any number of clients careful.

So they made an almighty pig's ear of their marketing. Um, their investors are now getting quite, quite concerned, you might say, and saying like, where the hell are all the sales? And they're now they've turned to us, which is great. And we are helping them, we are helping them and we're going to continue to help them like, like we do with all our clients. We're in the trench with them, were trying to solve the problems. But, you know, I think it would be fair to say that that for them, um they, I think they think that, um, you know, it's magic wand time, you know, we've kind of made a right mess of all this stuff, but, you know, we're now paying you guys, in their words, a lot of money. It isn't really a lot of money compared to, you know, when you, when you actually look at what we're trying to do for them. Um, and, you know, what's, what's now happening is that they're more or less saying, right, we're going to give you this money, you better, you know, provide. And it's like, yeah, I'd love to be able to say like, if you spend ten grand with me, I'll get you. I'll generate a hundred grand's worth of business for you. I'd love to be able to say that, but it isn't as predictable as that. And that's that. As that's happened, that's come about because although they don't understand it, what they do think is it's not complicated. And, you know, if we put some money in, then we will definitely just get leads quite quickly back.

Yeah, I don't I mean, I don't really blame people for not understanding. I don't, but I think it's very like if I, you know, if I say to you now, like, what does a soldier do? It's like, well, soldier gets a gun and he goes and he fights and he shoots. And if you talk to a soldier, he will tell you that ninety percent of his life is spent waiting on a bench, you know, or in the back of a van or, you know, very mundane. But what we see is what we think that people do and what we don't see and what we sort of like cognitively, you know, sort of just never really internalise is that all of the work, all of the stuff that happens behind the scenes is actually what delivers the value. It's what sort of like, you know, the soldier, you know, the wider strategic, logistical, tactical stuff that goes on behind the scenes is what puts the soldier in a trench and lets him fight. Right. And I think it's very much the same with marketing. People look at the outputs and they think, okay, you know, I pay this agency and they make me blog posts or they put my ads up and that gets me leads and they don't, you know, what you pay an agency for is for all the thinking and the agonising and the working out that goes into producing an ad that generates leads. And it's not quick, any of that stuff. It's not an output, you know. It isn't something that you just go away and like clack your keyboard a few times. And.

You know, in simple terms, you know, if Mac, if you make marketing a distressed purchase, well, we're down a hall, the investors are jumping up and down. We need leads now. Then, you know, you, you've created a bad situation for yourself. And, and it's very unusual for marketing to immediately start generating, you know, heaps of opportunities sometimes, you know, there's, there's some things you can do, um, that that will help reasonably quickly. You can spin up PPC campaigns and at least get an offering in front of people reasonably quickly.

And it's interesting because, you know, with that, the client in question, that's exactly what's happened, right? That's, that's where we've gone is like create a landing page or create a PPC, a lean PPC campaign, you know, an efficient one. And we'll see what that drives. But yeah, I mean, I think the point is all of that stuff is, you know, at its core, experimental, all marketing is at its core, very experimental. You know, there is no magic lever, there's no magic button you can press to put a blog post on page one of Google search. You can experiment with things and you can try things and hopefully they work. But yeah, I think that I mean, that's the, the second note I had was that whole idea of like marketing as a distress purchase. And I think it is, it's so important to remember, you know, you cannot just spin up marketing in a weekend and sort of get leads and turn those leads into sales. It's just not going to work. I mean, you know, the, the, the mundane bits of it putting up an AdWords ad, you know, you know, creating a campaign, targeting a keyword, writing an ad, it takes about like three or four hours, probably all told, but you're not going to get anything good out of that because unless you've done the sort of seven or eight hours of research and prep beforehand, unless you really understand your customer, it's just not going to happen. I, you know, I think sometimes marketing engagements can be really efficient when there's loads of internal knowledge in the company and they're saying, you know, these are our customers, this is what they need. We're just struggling to reach them. And we can say, okay, well, you can reach them like this and let's exploit that channel. Fine. But most of the time it's yeah.

Yeah. And, you know, I don't want this to sound like, um, you know, like making excuses or anything else, but, you know, I think the, I think the point of this, this, this, this little discussion is that, that it, there's more involved than people might think with, with, with marketing. Um, and, and it's not a quick fix. And as long as you've chosen a decent agency, they are doing their utmost to, to kind of turn around the bad situation that they didn't create.

Yeah.

In the first place, they didn't create it unless, you know, you've got an agency, you've been working with them for two years and two years down the line. You know, it's like nothing's happening. You know, you don't get any enquiries. All the business you get is because you're out networking and you know, you know, Fred from that company and Susan from this other company. And, you know, that's, that's a different that's an underperforming. But, but agencies that are brought in when the situation is already a bit dire and try, you know, who are really trying to improve things. It's um, yeah.

I mean, I don't even know if you'd expect a sales team. Do you know what I mean? Because in my mind, it's sort of like marketing is a long term endeavor. Sales is a short term endeavor and that's oversimplifying it. And there'll be salespeople out there sort of grinding their teeth. But I don't even know if you brought in a sales team.

People don't listen to podcasts. They know it all already. They don't need to listen to anything.

They watch a TikTok video and that's it. They're done.

Attention span of a gnat.

Um, not that we're biased or anything. Um, but I don't even know if you, you know, if you said right, you know, investors say we've got to get fifty leads this month and you brought in a brand new sales team. You said you've got a month to get me fifty leads. I don't even know if that's you know what I mean? I don't even think they'd manage that. All of this stuff takes time.

Not with B2B because, you know, with complex sales, complex products, complex services, it's, it's, it's not a case of like, just like hitting the phones and ringing, ringing, ringing, ringing until somebody goes, oh, you phoned just at the right time. You know, you've got to be where your customers are when they're, when they're trying to solve problems. And this is, you know, I know we sound like a stuck record doing this and it's and, you know, it's not the only thing that you can do. I mean, brand awareness raising, you know, building your brand and everything else can be, you know, I've just done some research, um, just doing some research for an enquiry that came in from a removals company down in London. And, you know, very quickly I've established that there are competitors of theirs who've got a very strong brand proposition, and they're getting lots of branded search because for whatever reason, maybe they're advertising on an LBC or on the back of cabs and things in London or whatever, but they've managed to get a, you know, a brand raised to the point where people are looking for them. They've heard of this removals company by name and they're looking for them. That's great. I mean, we want to do that for all of our customers if we can. But the generic stuff that, you know, like, uh, you know, define problem, you know, looking for solution to problem, you know, without mentioning any brands, then that's, that's where, you know, a lot of the stuff that we do, that's where a lot of that stuff comes in. Anyway, I'm just rambling on now because I have no idea where this conversation started. I know what it's ending right now.

It's an interesting point. You raised that, though, because I think you were wanting to speak a little bit about that whole idea of branding. Weren't you around the the whole removals piece?

Yeah, I mean, it was it was interesting to me when I started analysing, I started looking at the, the companies of the people that have enquired, they've come to us with an enquiry, a couple of companies that they own. And so straight away, you know, I was kind of looking at what they were doing, looking at like, what happens if I search for this and who comes up and like, okay, so they came up this, this other, this other company, not the company who made the enquiry. I then interrogate using the, you know, SEMrush and tools like that. I can then interrogate their website. And quite clearly it was, it was obvious that they're getting a lot of branded search and they've done a lot of work to, to create a brand. So people are kind of beating a path to their door, not because they're just looking for anyone who can put stuff in boxes and boxes in vans and move a van from one place to another. They're actually looking for an organisation who can take care because you know the real problem, if you like, that they're solving, is like a company who will carefully look after your stuff, move it from one place to another, unpack it at the other end, and mean make it as painless as possible as you go through that trauma of spending more money than you ever imagined on a, on a, on a, on a, on a property.

Yeah. Always like twice as much as you expect, isn't it?

And the rest.

Yeah, yeah. No, it is really interesting. And especially in that space. I think there are probably a few other industries too, where it's true, like an awful lot of the brands sort of cheapen themselves, don't they? I mean, I always think the last, the last removal service I used was any van, um, which obviously like, as the name implies, pretty cheap and dirty. Yeah. Um, and it wasn't a great experience. Um, but I think so many of those brands are just sort of like, you know, you sort of hear the name of them and you think, well, that's going to be awful. Um.

So yeah, I mean, I think the question I asked you was, how successful can people be building a brand when the brand identity is? Like, we do removals or whatever, you know, Spud you like, you know, it's kind of like, you know, beef burgers are us. It's just like, if you're just being very specific, it's.

Literal, isn't it? It's literal.

And that is yeah, it's just.

Very like, this is what we do. Yeah. And I mean, the only exception I can think of where they sort of like, you know, sort of like, um, blasted past any sort of, uh, limitation is like British Airways, for example, right? Like that brand now is synonymous with a load of things that have nothing to do with that.

Or you could argue that the brand is BA.

Yeah.

Not British Airways like, but like petroleum became BP and they're not they're not actually called British Petroleum. They are called BP. And it means nothing. They're just what BP as a brand is strong. Well that's BA as a brand is strong.

But I think that's the point, isn't it? It's like a lot of these brands, when they reach the point at which they want to diversify, they don't want to be pigeonholed anymore. They have to find some clever way of taking their.

Easyjet, if you're gonna stay with the airlines is a good example because they've been hugely successful and, you know, started off as a budget airline. They're arguably still a budget airline. But you kind of it's like it's kind of a budget airline, but it still feels quite a good experience when you use them generally. I mean, I fly like once every blue moon, but when I do and I have used Easyjet in the not too distant past, it was a good experience. It was all fine, you know, I know it can go horribly wrong like it can with any airline, but what I guess what they did is instead of saying like, um, like cheap, cheap, um, jet flights or whatever, you know, they called themselves Easyjets or, you know, in their branding, you know, they made it quite clear to me that they're going to make it a breeze. It's going to be so easy.

But it's not.

Necessarily in a jet and it's going to be easy, you know, and I like that. That's good. So there's there are examples where being disruptive is, is, is, um, valuable.

Yeah. Although I'd still say like the real test of that is if like Easyjet opened up a chain of hotels, would you want to stay in them?

I did. I stayed in easy Hotel in Edinburgh. Yeah. Well because they do the easy brands used its car hire, its jets, its hotels. I mean I think they're into tons of stuff aren't they? Now the Easy Hotel was um. It was what it said on the tin. It was a bed in a tiny room with a, with a like a unit bolted on that was about the size of the bathroom in my motorhome, which had a shower and a toilet in it. And, and it was, it was clean and it was fine. And I would never use it again.

Yeah. That's right. So this is. Yeah. And this is the point I'm trying to this is what I'm getting at. Right. Although I guess you did try it the once. So yeah, you know, it wasn't holding them back that much, but I think that it's always a sort of limiting factor, isn't it? Especially if you especially if you go down the sort of brands that imply much cheapness, it's really difficult to sort of shake that association and persuade people that actually, you know, you've got something valuable to give them. And, and I guess that's the problem with all of these like removal companies, isn't it? Like you say, people are not buying removals. They don't want movers London or whatever. What they want is somebody to take care of their stuff. And anything that sort of, you know, is a little bit less specific opens the door to, oh, okay, maybe these guys are just like, you know, really careful, really established company. Maybe they're really historic, whatever it is that you can see in the brand. Whereas if it's just like Removals London, you're always going to assume they're just going to move your stuff and it's going to be quick and it's going to be dirty. And yeah, it's an interesting one.

It's about being made to feel safe, isn't it? What you've got to try and do is you've got to try and make people feel safe. I was down at the Edinburgh Chamber event last week. Um Karen came down as well. Um, and I was looking for a hotel. I generally use hotels dot com. And also people prefer Expedia and booking and stuff are basically the same company anyway. I think, but anyway, I was on hotels dot com and I saw one which was, uh, Destiny Scotland. And instead of a hotel, it's an apartment, right? So you get the whole apartment and I was. I was reticent because there's one of the things about hotel is when you, you know, if I see like. Like a hotel advertising and it hasn't got somebody on reception.

Yeah.

I just.

Think.

It could be dodgy. I just I just don't feel safe. I don't mean physically safe. I just don't feel like I'm going to have a good experience. And that was my concern with Destiny Scotland, you know, and what they do is like the night before, they send you an email and it's got the code to get into the door.

Which all just feels a bit too.

And then the code to get into. But for whatever reason, I just thought, you know what, I'm going to try it because it looked it looked almost too good to be true. You know, a nice apartment with, you know, with everything you need and everything else. So I booked it and we used it and it was fantastic. And I'm down to Edinburgh again in the not too distant future. I've gone straight back to Destiny Scotland. I've gone direct this time, I think, and booked them again because it was a great experience. Everything worked. It was I didn't feel at any point like, like, oh, the chord hasn't worked. You know, what am I going to do now? Sort of nine o'clock on a wet Monday night or whatever it was. Um, and so I've, they've, for me, I'm now over that barrier of like, oh, it doesn't quite feel like the experience I want to have. I want somebody to welcome me in and make me feel. Yeah. Okay. Here's your, here's your key. You're up there on the right hand side. And if there's any problem, this is we're here twenty four hours and all the rest of it. I've kind of got past that now, and I will certainly try and use them more going forward, because actually I don't like hotels anyway, so that is a much better experience. But I got a sense that they seemed to have like a very, you know, pretty decent following. They seem pretty well booked up. So, you know, they've got past whatever whatever hotel type people might think is, is gonna stop them using it. Yeah. But but yeah, again, it was all about safety. It was all about not again, not physical safety, but just feeling safe, like the experience was all going to be great sort of thing. And, and it's the same for most businesses. You want, you know, the people are going to want to do business with you if you make them feel safe, as soon as you do anything that's that's making them go question mark. You're making me think I'll try somebody else. And in agency land for us, that's a big thing.

Yeah, well, I was just thinking of agencies then while you were, um.

Rabbiting on about.

Telling me. About telling me about your Destiny hotel story, which. Yeah, one hundred percent Destiny Scotland.

Yeah. Maybe I'll get a free room.

I was gonna say you're gonna plug them one more time and just say Destiny Scotland. If you're listening, um, you can sponsor this podcast episode. Um, it's something that I think agencies instinctively understand because I've never, in all of my years come across an agency that's called HubSpot websites for you. You know, we, we don't, we instinctively, and some agencies have terribly wanky names. They have terribly irritating names.

I mean.

Yeah, yeah, giraffe, zebras or, you know, green lemon or whatever. But I think we.

Read evolution and there's a long, convoluted story as to how we arrived at that. And we have talked about rebranding and using something because we know we are concerned that it's it sounds a bit like one of those, as you say, wanky agency names. We're kind of stuck with it and we're not stuck with it. We like it and we've decided, you know, it's fine because a brand is more than just the name. But I know exactly what you mean.

And I think the thing is, like, what we instinctively understand is that a name doesn't have to be sort of fantastic. It doesn't have to be even particularly easy to remember. What it does have to sound is sort of considered and intentional. It can't just be, you know, we make websites or whatever because that is too cheap and easy and people don't want to buy from people that they think are just sort of spun up a company on a whim.

As you know, when we started this business back in two thousand and three, we were called Scott Webb, which because and it sounded great because we were a Scottish company and we built websites, which is what we did at the time. But even by two thousand and five, we were realising this is.

A limiting factor.

Is it Scott who builds websites in his bedroom? Scott Webb very limited. And it and it just thought we can't build a brand around that around that name. You know, we just can't do it. And so we, you know, we finished up, you know, like I say a story, I'll tell another time how we finished up at Red evolution. But um, yeah, this, this, um, going, this is going back to what we were saying earlier about how you build a brand when it's just like nuts and bolts arrows sort of limited really, you know, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. I think it probably is, but there's always examples of how it's worked.

Yeah. No for sure. I think you had one actually didn't you. About a plumber in London which.

Well yeah. Pimlico plumbers, plumbers, Pimlico Plumbers, um, have made a name for themselves. And more recently, you know, their founder, Charlie Mullins, has been somewhat controversial. But, you know, they built a brand around this idea of providing plumbing services in Pimlico, which is a, you know, a well-heeled area in London. So it's kind of worked for them. But I think it worked for them because Charlie Mullins put himself out there and, and created, um, like a personal brand, you know, and there is this, like we've said before about personal brand being important. You could argue that, you know, that our ugly mugs are part of the, our personal brand, you know, helps helps potentially helps the red evolution.

Brand does it.

Well, it all came back to this idea of people, um, not feeling affiliated necessarily with, with brands, even brands like Apple, you know, as the brand boss guy said on tick tock, you know, I'm not going to send Apple an email when I've bought myself a new car and say, hey guys, I bought myself a Porsche. Do you know what I mean? Or my kids going to Harvard or whatever. You know what I mean? I'm not going to do that. I might send Tim Cook a message and say that if I had a relationship with him. But you're never going to form a relationship with a brand as such, which is why personal brand with any business.

Is really.

Important, is important as well. Yeah. And I have no idea where we're going with that.

Well, I think it's a quite an interesting point because I think sometimes it's quite hard to separate, isn't it? Some brands are successful on the basis of somebody like, you know, Charlie Mullins or, you know, even arguably to a degree, Elon Musk, for example, you know, where like, you know, he's sort of dragging his brands along with him in some respects. Um, his brand is huge. His personal brand, and therefore the company is associated with become more successful. And I think sometimes it can be quite hard to tell, you know, is this brand successful or is, you know, the Steve Jobs effect, you know, where everybody really desperately wants to be associated with them? I don't know where.

Did this start? What did you what did you posit to start this conversation?

Um, do you know, I genuinely can't remember.

You've written it down. What was it?

No, no, that was ages ago. We were talking about, um. Well, the last note I have that we've talked about is the demand generation or lead generation not being a distress purchase.

Yeah. No, but when you, when we started this podcast and I said to you, like, write, give shout something from your list, the first thing on the list, what was it?

First thing on my list was.

That we spoke about.

Are you set up to sort of handle a digital marketing retainer organisation?

Somehow we've gone all the way through branding, personal branding, lead gen, feeling safe, the whole nine yards. Yeah. That's good. Okay. What else have you got?

The last thing on my list is last.

Whoa whoa whoa. The last thing on your list. You mean there was two things on your list?

There's three things. We just covered.

Them. I brought up the other one. It just happened to be something that you'd written down. I haven't seen that document. Don't give me that.

The camera won't lie. I see you craning your long neck.

I literally couldn't crane enough to see what's on your screen. And you've turned it slightly, turned it away from me as well, which I think is Amazon.

Don't you be stealing. These are really good.

On item three on your on your list of two items.

Well, it's just I've just put attributing success and then a little slash and common sense.

Are we talking about attribution?

Yeah. We are talking about attribution or lack thereof. Um, because, because basically like what I've come to the conclusion of over the last week is.

What I've concluded.

What I've concluded over the last week is that data is rubbish. I mean, this, uh, sort of this whole thing about attribution, it sort of hinges off conversation we were having.

Just explain what we mean by attribution. So a lead comes in and you want to know which bit of my spend generated it. Yeah. Right.

So this is the trap. Um basically this loads of people get obsessed with this idea that I want to know which channel and which campaign generated.

This not unreasonably. Um, so we can do more of the stuff that works.

It's not unreasonable, but I think it is a little bit unreasonable.

But you can't be not unreasonable and unreasonable.

I think it's not unreasonable until you're educated about how attribution works. And then it becomes.

We've talked.

About the class.

System earlier. Weren't we just you've just gone all hoity toity on me there. No.

I. But hopefully we'll get if we ever get there. Oh, if we can wait through this mire of insults. Um, a client that we've already referenced in this podcast.

Basically, we haven't referenced any client in this podcast.

The client we have.

Alluded.

To alluded to. That's right. Um, basically we had a conversation with them. Um, and, and while talking through their sort of stresses around this whole idea that, you know, their directors were pressuring them and they needed the leads right now yesterday. And, um, all of this stuff they were saying like, oh, we're, we're pretty sure that, you know, our old campaign was driving at least ten leads a week or a month, a month, ten leads a week might be a little bit excessive.

Um, given what they do.

Yeah, yeah. To which I said, well, the data doesn't really show that and sort of picked through the data with the client and sort of showed them that what the data suggested was that actually we had literally no idea what was coming from. But like a lot of people who are sort of like, um, just sort of upping their toes in the water with marketing. They make that classic assumption that everything is trackable, everything is measurable, and that therefore, you know, when something suggests that my leads have come from PPC. I can absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt, and applying any sort of common sense, assume that that's the case. And I think it's a really, really dangerous place that we've got to where, you know, partly we're to blame. Partly marketing agencies are to blame this idea that everything is measurable. You know, we have analytics tools out the wazoo, thousands of subscriptions to various bits of kit that tell us important information that we can therefore sort of take all of that information at face value, and that we should have access to it all the time, and that we can't make decisions without it. And it's a really weird thing because a lot of the time, like we see with PPC campaigns, you know, you can attribute it to direct traffic, say for us a lot of the time, because all the computer system knows is that that time when somebody filled out the form, they typed Red evolution dot com forward slash contact into their browser. Went to our contact page and filled out a form. And the computer says without a shadow of a doubt, that was from direct traffic. Yeah, and if somebody clicks on a referral link and comes to your website and fills out the form, you know, the tools will tell you without a shadow of a doubt, that person had never heard of you before until they clicked on that referral link and filled out a form. So you should give more money to whoever sent you that referring traffic. If it's such a dangerous thing because it completely loses sight of the human element, it completely loses sight of the fact that, you know, somebody came on organic, you know, via organic search on Tuesday, but that that person had first heard of you three years ago when they listened to an episode of your podcast and they read one of your blog posts two months ago, and they clicked on one of your ads. And but all of that's gone. You know, we just, we just sort of trust this stuff. We take it at face value. We're like, oh, well, you know, HubSpot or Google Analytics or Google search Console tells me, therefore it must be true. And when you're talking about thousands of pounds of marketing spend, I spend. I think that's a really weird place to be. It's like you just sort of take it at face value, and we know that none of that data is necessarily accurate or true. And you can you can tie yourself in all sorts of knots. I mean, the client in question wanted to turn off our campaign, which is now starting to generate some leads to turn their old campaign, which definitely wasn't generating leads back on because.

It had at some point in the past for some unknown reason.

Yeah. And because they thought, well.

It hasn't been for the last three months.

No. But the data tells us that that's what we should do if we want to increase sales. And it's just this weird trap. And it's really interesting because I think I was talking to you and stew about Rory Sutherland the other day, but he has this big thing about this, you know, that we've lost sight of sort of like common sense because we're so in bed with the idea of big data and, and analytics and, but, you know, ultimately, at the end of the day, marketing is a human thing. It's about people's behavior and it's ultimately about sort of raising awareness, building awareness, motivating people to take a specific action. And you can't necessarily look at any one point of that and say, well, you know, social media drove thirty percent of our enquiries, so we should spend three times as much money on social media. It's like, well, you know, last month, it just so happened that a bunch of people on social media were really interested in what you sell. But that's not ironclad, I guess, is what I'm saying.

One thing that businesses don't do either is they don't, um, quite often they don't ask like people. I don't mean like the first thing, you know. Hello, hello. Um, you know.

Where did you hear about.

What about here? Yeah. I mean, some people do that, but I mean, generally.

Speaking, that also annoys me a bit because I hear that all the time. People are like, well, we we've been asking all our customers and none of them said Google ads. Yeah. It's like your customers don't know what Google ads is. Yeah. You know what I mean? If you ask somebody, where did you hear about us? They'll say the internet because that's how normal people think about this stuff. You know, nobody's very accurate.

The internet. Yeah, yeah. That doesn't narrow it down.

No. Nobody's like, oh, well, I first saw you in an ad in Instagram and then I scrolled your carousel on LinkedIn. And then.

Yeah, I know, I know.

Nice try.

But you know, another conversation with, with another customer a few weeks ago. And it was, it was along those lines and you know, about whether the website was generating business. And so there's plenty going on in the business. There's a lot going on, you know, but but we, you know, we don't think we don't think like the websites generate any of that. So, you know, do you do you ask people? Well, actually, no, we don't. So we'll tell you what. Let's turn it off and see what happens. Um, you know, it's even if it, you know, even if the website only features in the process of elimination before somebody reaches out, either picks the phone up, sends a WhatsApp, fills in a web form or whatever, you know, it is difficult really. And that's why I think it makes sense to, to be the best you can be online. And, you know, anyone listening might think, oh, well, you would say that, wouldn't you? Because you're a.

Digital marketing website.

You want to sell a website. We don't do I we do that voice. You know, I don't have to do a voice do I've got a northern English voice because I'm from England and everyone thinks I'm daft anyway.

Although ironically, I'm also from the North of England, I think. Yeah, but you went.

To private school?

Yeah.

Your parents will have to pay extra VAT now, won't they, for the this period. You were at private school all those years ago? Probably.

My parents didn't pay for.

Themselves in knots with that VAT on private schools thing. They really are. You know, it was really funny this morning and I was going to send a message to, uh, to LBC. I was listening to LBC and there was a person on who sends their kids to private school, and then there was this other person on who thinks it's a great thing, you know, great that that um the labour are bringing in VAT because it's a luxury purchase and that's the whole point of VAT. Now, one of those people was an arrogant, ignorant, um gobby prick. The other one was kind of making a very recent point, which was which do you think.

Yeah. Well I'm gonna guess it was the private school parent was being reasonable. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's a funny thing. Private school is one of those things that is almost guaranteed to get an emotional response one way or the other out of people. And I don't really understand why, you know, it's cool. Like nobody's sneering at people for going to like a private hospital for their hip replacement. But if you send your kids to a private education, like It's like.

I, I have I, as you know, I don't have any kids. Um, and so if I'd say I'd, for example, stayed in the oil industry and I'd had a family, I would almost certainly have thought about sending my kids to private school. I would have had that conversation with my partner and her wife and decided whether or not it was it would be a good thing. And, you know, despite being a very kind of working class bloke, working class background, etc., uh, he's done good, don't he? And, and, you know, apart from all that, I have absolutely no issue whatsoever with people going to private school. I think, you know, if you want to spend your money, go and send your kids to private school, then do it. Absolutely. And I think this fat thing is just I think it's wrong. I just think it's bullshit. I think it isn't broken. Don't try and fix it. Just don't do your tax grab there. Go and go after, you know, whoever you need to do because I, I think what will happen with it and we've done it again. Going off the subject of digital marketing. I think what will happen is that something somewhere will break. Either the state school system will break, or the private school system will break. Something's going to break, and then suddenly there'll be all these unforeseen, unforeseen consequences. What your brain has foreseen a pretty foreseeable to be honest.

What your break is like, for example, like a big public school like Fetty's or, you know, Strathern or any of those places will be absolutely fine because they've got money out the wazoo. They charge you ten billion pounds twice.

You've used the word wazoo today. You just learned a new word.

Yeah, I just learned.

Did your three year old daughter teach you that word?

Um, they'll be absolutely fine. They'll float out of this. The people that'll suffer is like the private school that I went to, which was small. Um, I went on one hundred percent scholarship, you know, that's fantastic that they could offer me that they won't have the money to do that now. And that's, that's where again, it's always the middle. It's always the grey area.

Absolutely.

It's always it's going to be the little schools that sort of do a pretty decent job of taking a bunch of sort of either working class or lower middle class kids and sort of giving them a semi decent education.

I'm not blind to the argument around the idea that it kind of always should have been valuable, and we need to just make it so blind to that.

Put your finger on the scales. But the glee.

The glee in the, in the, um, in the voices of the people who think those rich people are getting it stuck to them is, is it's it's.

Yeah.

Abominable.

But again, you know, again there, you know, we have a weird sort of branding and marketing thing where somebody somehow has managed to persuade everyone that, you know, like, you know, private education is this, this thing, this, this sort of tremendously out of reach, upper middle class thing that you can't afford. And if people can afford it, then they're, you know, they think they're better than you and they drive Porsches. And it's like, if you actually look at the intake of like most private schools, it's just like regular people. Yeah. That's right. It's a, it's a clever trick. I think that stuff for sure.

Well, it won't be the first thing that they've had to roar back on since they came into power. Is it? They've already started rowing back on the non-dom thing, aren't they? Because apparently.

It's not actually going to raise any.

Money. Well is it. The OBR have said it's not going to raise any money but. But they were going to pay for so much with it. You know it's. Yeah.

You know and now he's gone.

I just yeah. Yeah. That's right.

It's quite funny.

It is.

There was um I was listening to radio four on the way in and again, you know, as you have to sort of caveat any criticism of the Labour Party with I'm not a Tory at all in any way, shape or form. Maybe I am now.

Well, neither of us are, but we are. We are realists.

Yeah. Um, you know, as I was listening to somebody from the Labour side giving an account on radio four, and they were like, you know, you've been in office for three months and like, nothing's really happened. And he's like, no, no, no, wait a minute. We founded the Great British Energy Company and we've introduced a special task force to get rid of smuggling gangs. And the news guy was like, okay. But like, first of all, what is great British energy? Second of all. know. Second of all, yesterday was like the hottest day on record for arrivals over the channel. So like, it's like basically you've done absolutely like the square root of f*ck all basically in three months. And I was just like, yeah, that's, uh.

It's a difficult and I would have some sympathy with the counterargument that like, well, you know, in the grand scheme of things, three months is, is no time at all. Um, but it's the stuff that they didn't have to do. I think that that's, that's more telling. Uh, you know, they just kind of seem to keep shooting themselves in the foot.

Do you mean you don't surely mean accepting thousands of pounds worth of free clothing or. Uh, yeah.

And, you know, some of the counterarguments to that have been hilarious because they've been talking about it saying, you know, oh yeah, it's only politicians that have to declare this stuff. I mean, as you know, I'm an on call firefighter, right? And we did a learning, a learning, um, a learning content management system and LCMs package two or three weeks ago where it was spelled out to me as a, as an on call crew commander with the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service. What is and isn't acceptable for me to do. Like, you know, if this happens, you must declare it. You cannot accept this. You cannot. It's just a nonsense. This idea we I invited a client, I was I was going to put a team into a charity golf day. So I invited a client. The charity Golf Day has since been cancelled because they've kind of tried to organise it too late in the year, I think. And but he came back to me and said, I'm really sorry. He said, I'm not allowed to accept that invitation to go and play golf with you. And so this idea that like politicians are the only people and.

It's absolute nonsense.

How do they not realise that was going to come and bite them on the ass? I mean, the political naivety of it is breathtaking.

Well, part of what's so frustrating about the whole argument is that, on the one hand, what they want to what they want to play is a political naivety card. What they want to play is the like. We didn't know that people were going to care about this. It's just some clothes. It's just a. Oh, don't all politicians take these things? And it's. What's particularly annoying about it is that they campaigned purely on the other sleaze. The the the conservatives were morally bankrupt. Elect Labour because they'll do things right. They are morally bankrupt, but so.

Far I don't think they all are. I think I think they are. They've got questions to answer for sure, for sure.

But you can't. It's this whole thing, you know, it's like if we start a marketing engagement by saying, no worries mate, we'll come in within the first month. You'll have a thousand leads, don't worry about it. And then we get their three months passes and there's two leads. We may rightly expect to be fired, but politicians, they always do this. It's like they will just claim, claim, claim, claim and then do something radically divergent from what they claimed and then act sort of surprised and offended that they're being held to account for their own claims. Yeah.

You know, I made the observation prior, you know, many months prior to, in fact, maybe even many years prior to the Labour government taking over, which they were obviously on a trajectory to do for quite some time, that they have never been in power during a period where public scrutiny, social media has been so prevalent and I thought they would struggle with it. And I think that's exactly what's happening. I think they're just kind of like, we didn't even realise people would know about this. Going back to the the thing about, you know, the clothes and the, you know, football, uh, boxes and all the rest of it. If in life and in, in, say, in business, I mean, in business, I could, for example, take membership at a golf club like Mirka in Aberdeen, nice golf club, beautiful links, golf course, uh, corporate membership, three and a half thousand quid plus fat. Um, and I could take that out. Uh, and then I could start inviting, you know, people, businesses that we want to go after. I could start inviting them to come and play golf so he could be taking out this corporate membership or a box at Aberdeen and start inviting, why am I doing that? Because I'm a nice guy. Well, I'm a reasonably nice guy, I think, but I'm not. I'm doing it to try and influence people so that when they have a requirement that that red evolution could service, they will think of me and we'll get an opportunity to do it. People do not donate to politicians and give them one hundred grams worth of clothes or whatever it was, without an expectation that they get something in return. Everybody knows that it is blindingly obvious.

Yeah. One of those gifts was, if you remember the use of somebody's city center apartment in London, and Keir then turned around and tried to claim that it was so that his son could study for an exam in peace and quiet away from the press, as if somebody had just, you know, who.

Was advising.

Him what.

Absolute.

I don't know.

Bell end is advising him to come away with stuff like that.

I don't know. Dreadful, isn't it? But then it's just like the naivety and the implied naivety on his part, and the implied sort of scorn for the public that they would buy this line, that somebody had just sort of like, okay, you must be really struggling. Here's my twenty grand apartment. It's all yours. Yeah. You know, it's just yeah, the whole thing.

The country needs labor to do. Well, we need labor to get their shit together and do a great job.

And I think they are capable of it.

And the sooner they stop saying fourteen years of this and the sooner they stop blaming everybody else. Everything's gone back and just said, right line in the sand. This this is the trajectory trajectory that we're on now. This is what we're going to do. This is why we're doing it. It's not about the politics of envy or anything else. It's about taking the country direction and stop with the grandstanding, stop with the bullshit and just get.

On with the job. I'm really inclined to agree with you actually. Like if you look at if you look at the people on the Labour Party benches, I mean, Rachel Reeves, okay, like she's had some gaffes, she's had some bad moments, but she's a very, very, very bright person. She is properly smart and so is Keir, to be fair to him, like they have all of the sort of pieces in place to do a really good job. But you're right. The problem is they're sort of branding and messaging is all sort of fixated on the wrong things, trying to be holier than thou, never going to work for you because, like you say, public scrutiny, it's unbelievable nowadays. And then blaming the people that came before you for everything.

Which is yeah, which is every boring, predictable party do that.

Yeah. And everybody expects it. Yeah. But it's not gonna you know what I mean? Like, nobody's gonna think, oh.

The Tories very quickly.

The Tories mismanage things. It must be the Tories fault. It's like nobody actually thinks that this is the thing. It's just. And the twenty billion black hole. I mean, again, they're twenty two twenty two billion pound black hole. Huge problem because everybody was saying everybody was saying except for the Tories and the conservatives and the Labour Party all the way through the election. None of these numbers add up. And lo and behold, they're like, oh, we've discovered this black hole. It's only knew there was a black hole and everybody knows that you knew. So just be honest.

You're unbelievably listening to digital marketing from the coalface as opposed to some sort of, um, centrist, um, political, uh, um, ranting podcast. But anyway, I think we'll call it quits. There will be, I think we've.

Can I get a quick bring back Tony Blair in there or.

You were his biggest fan boy weren't you?

Do you know what it may just be nostalgia. I just remember a brilliant era to grow up in. And Tony Blair was in charge at the time, and everything seemed much simpler and much better than. And that's probably very naive.

It's quite interesting because I agree, I agree with with that. And I, I, I, I think on balance, I think Tony Blair was a good prime minister. I think I don't I don't I don't have any any feelings one way or the other. But yeah, I think, I think I think he came in and during an interesting time, but people talk about, you know, the last Labour government and oh, the nineties and it was great and everything else. But they didn't come until July ninety seven, did they? No. You know, it's quite surprising when you know how late it was in the nineties when they actually arrived. Um, like things can only get better and all that. And that was like four or five years prior to them coming into power, wasn't it? Wasn't that the early nineties, that song came in yet you think that song came out, Labour took over, everything was like fantastic. Yeah, nostalgia and all that. Anyway, um, if you're listening, which I know you're not, but good luck and stop making such an ass of it. You've been listening to Alex and Dave. Uh, we'll speak to you next time.