Something that still surprises me every day, every week are the number of really good, solid businesses, some that were lucky enough to start working with, who are still, you know, years behind when it comes to telling their story online. What we're also finding is people who've got a reasonable online presence want to significantly improve it. And then we've got others, such as like one of the companies I went to see last week, decent turnover, you know, and, um, they just kind of lost the nowhere when it comes to digital. And it's clearly got the potential to significantly increase their bottom line.
What we're really seeing is increasingly, people waking up to the fact that they haven't been doing a great job, what it is that actually catalyses people to wake up and go out and start searching for this stuff, I don't know. I suspect a lot of it has to do with things like this. You know, podcasts, YouTube videos, digital marketers on TikTok, just sort of generally talking.
There's more of them. Yeah. Brand people, marketing people. Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface with me, Dave Robinson. And unfortunately, Alex is also back.
Hold on. I'll find his enthusiasm button.
No, there is no enthusiasm today. I'm. I feel, um, I've got my wrong glasses on. I feel I feel, uh, I feel grumpy, I feel gotta I can't be arsed doing this. Um, so yeah, it could be the like the shortlist podcast we've ever done.
We don't have to do it if you don't want to.
Right. Let's stop right now then. Stick it where the sun don't shine.
Do you want me to. Will it help you if I draw you a smiley face.
Or I'll draw myself a smiley face? Watch. Oh, draw a sad face. I've tried to draw smiley face and drew a sad face.
It's a swing and a miss.
I know. Well to you it's a happy face. And to me it's a sad face. Um, no. I've just had quite the week in a in a good way. Um I chose to offer a potential customer, um, a discovery session. Yes. A customer would like to work with engineering company, um, based right down in the South of England. That's as specific as I'm going to be. If they're listening, which they won't be, they know who they are. So, um, I went down, drove down to southwest of England on Monday and had a meeting Tuesday. And the meeting was like half one till. No it wasn't, it was half ten til half one. So I driven the length of the country to be there. The meeting spanned lunchtime. You see where I'm going with this? And what did we get for the three hours we spent with them? This isn't costing them any money at all, by the way.
Well, I'm assuming that you got a lovely spread and a nice lunch. And some little sandwiches and pineapple.
A cup of tea.
Pineapple cubes on sticks, a cup.
Of tea.
Was it a good tea?
Is all this stretch, too, despite travelling the length of the country to be there free of charge.
When you don't have a good marketing company, a good marketing agency on your side, you can't make money and you won't be able to offer people any sandwiches. That's the lesson there.
I just, um, I just thought it was quite it was amusing.
Yeah. The etiquette is funny. I think with, with marketing agencies that some people will sort of engage with you as if you're sort of a valued supplier, you know, you're with them in the trenches, they'll, they'll stretch, they'll buy you nice sandwiches. Others will. Yeah. I mean, I've been in meetings before where people are like, oh, we should probably get lunch. I'll just nip to co-op and grab some sandwiches, which is like. But at least it's something it's, it's some effort.
Well, the week before, as you know, I was down in Yorkshire to meet a potential customer. Great meeting customer I'd love to work with. Um, but they were clever. You see, being from Yorkshire, they scheduled the meeting for half past one.
Yeah. You've already.
Said. Hey. Oh, let's meet in half past one and then he'll have had his lunch and we don't have to provide him without something like that wouldn't they? That's what they would have thought.
That's what they sound like. And they do. Absolutely.
I told you, oh no, did I? I might have said this on the last podcast because I did a podcast while you while you were away cheating on you. You cheated on me. Yeah, I did, I did a podcast with Julie. No, but when I was, you know, because I've got this accent, I live in Scotland, but I've got this accent from the north of England, from Lancashire, actually, not from Yorkshire.
I like that, I like that you've got this accent like it's a sort of pet or something.
Yeah. I actually I, you know, I bought it, I got it off eBay, so I've got this accent and um, and in Scotland, like when I'm at the fire station or even just.
The piss out.
Of it and they go, hey, how are you doing? You know? All right, where's your whippet and all that kind of shit, you know? Which is funny, I don't mind, I don't mind, but when I was down there, I was waiting in reception and I did tell you this, but I don't think I did mention it on the podcast. And if I did, I don't care. Um, lady came through and spoke to the reception receptionist and she said something like, I love how you doing? You know, I love you. I, I, all right, all right, love. Something like that. Yeah. It didn't say duck. That's more Manchester is it? Yeah. You should know that.
Well I mean.
Anyway she said you know. All right love. How you doing sort of thing. And then she went up the stairs. She saw somebody else. She knew she was walking up the stairs and she went eh up like that. And there was no irony. That's just like that's what you'd see. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And it just made me smile because there I was sitting in an environment who taught what like I do. And, um, but it was that's just how they talk. I think it's quite, I think it's hilarious. The fact that I get, I mean, I've lived in Scotland now for what, thirty odd years? You know, I think it's hilarious that Scottish people take the Mickey out of people's accents. I mean, that's a that's.
A, we must do it the other way around.
Glasshouses situation.
Glasshouse situation. It definitely is, especially around here. Aberdonian accents are indecipherable. I cannot. I've lived here. How long have I lived here? For now. Three years. Ten minutes? No. Three years. I still don't understand. My postman. Every morning.
Oh, right. Yes. A conversation with you. And you just smile and nod.
Yeah. He engages me in conversation about the weather, and I understand maybe ten percent. I'm like, yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely. And then he looks at me slightly oddly because I've just agreed that it is, in fact, snowing.
Is there a marketing link there? You know, because like when well, when we when we work with customers, quite often they try and communicate with potential customers, with their potential customers. And they talk in riddles. They're talking double Dutch, they're taking techno speak and acronyms. And, you know, they don't use just nice plain king's English.
An example of this today, actually, where we were reading through something with a client and it was like the language was sort of tier one contractors, tier two contractors, tier three contractors. And the client was quite rightly like, this just needs to be simplified really. And we were like, yeah, you're absolutely right. Like it's contractors and subcontractors. But I think that sort of thing is endemic, especially in B2B. But I think a lot of the time it's a blind spot because you use this language like it's not jargon to, to people who actually use it day in and day out. It's meaningful and they're actually sort of signifiers and they forget that people outside of their small bubble don't actually speak that language. And you do just sort of see people all the time. They'll rattle off a list of things you should say about their product or their service. And sort of fifty percent of it is, well, remember.
In the early days of this podcast and every time you said like, oh, SEO cr buzzer, the buzzer went, didn't it? And I was like, no, no, no, you're not getting away with that. Explain what you mean. Just use normal words. Um, and I think we're, I think as a business, I think we're fairly competent at communicating, um, some of the concepts that we use in our day to day. Yeah. Um, in language that you can understand if you're not embedded in, in the industry, embedded in the discipline.
There's something, there's a, there's a wider point to be made here though, which is just that even if somebody does understand your industry jargon, you often move away from the place where language has any real emotional resonance. So to explain, we have a client who works as, you know, making HR software. We do. And there they talk a lot about, you know, sort of mitigating risk and compliance, sort of, you know, ensuring compliance and that sort of thing. Um, and it's perfectly valid language. It's language that their audience probably understands, but does it, when their audience reads it really resonate emotionally in the same way that actually just saying these things in plain English, English and saying, you know, just sort of like protecting your organisation or making sure that you don't run afoul of the rules or something like that, you know, language is really powerful. Um, but jargon is very rarely sort of emotionally evocative. It just sort of, you read it and you think, yeah, I get what they're going for here, but you don't think, oh, I really feel that.
It's a danger. That jargon, um, is often construed as people trying to be clever. Yeah. Trying to be trying to tick.
Boxes as well. Like I think that's the thing with the, I mean, I said to you the other day because you, you, we got an enquiry, you linked the enquiry in chat and I opened the website and the first thing I said is, if I see the word compliance written down one more time. Yeah, it's like there's jargon like that where people are doing it. So like, yeah, look, we're on board. We understand your needs. The buzzword is this and we're using it and it just, it's just flat. It's awful because all you're doing is regurgitating other people's words and it just doesn't really work.
It has traditionally been good at confusing jargon.
Absolutely.
And it's and I think it's fair to say that archetypal I.T. people take great pride in talking in riddles and jargon. Do you think.
There's a sort of me too thing about it? I think especially in it, isn't it? It's like we're on the same level as all those other really clever, geeky guys. Look, we can use the same language, and it makes you feel very safe because you're using the jargon. And if a potential client doesn't understand the jargon, then it's their fault. They're a bit stupid, really. And you can dumb it down for them, but it's not actually like that at all. The jargon doesn't really serve a purpose. It doesn't. Um, politicians do it too weirdly. Um, I don't know if you saw that thing.
Jargon less. I say less jargon and more evasive, but um, techniques.
But it's the mirroring, isn't it, that I find really like that thing that Keir Starmer did a couple of weeks ago where he was like, oh, we're gonna build baby build in reference to Trump's, we're gonna drill, baby drill. And it's like that thing where they just sort of like borrow soundbites off each other and they just become completely meaningless because fourteen years.
Of Tory chaos. Yeah, I keep slipping into, um.
Great impression.
On someone to.
Do that. But but yeah, I think the problem is if you're using something that's sort of like, I guess like memetic, if we're talking about linguistics, where you hear it a lot and you see it a lot, it's probably not actually going to do anything when somebody else sees or hears it, it's got no sort of intrinsic power anymore. It's just like, oh, I've seen I've read that before somewhere else. Um, and I think that's what makes brands really unmemorable. You know, you'll come across websites where you'll read the whole of the homepage and you'll be like, well, yeah, if you just feel a bit beige about the whole thing, I don't really know what they're offering. Um, and I think it all just comes down to the idea of sort of lazily recycling language.
Well, probably, um, we'll probably wander back to politics before we sign off, um, with this podcast, but, um, in the meantime, um, what have you got?
What have I got? Well, a little bit about politics, about the me too thing. Also a bit about AI. Um, and what it's, what it's.
I'm all ears.
What it's doing to search. Well, we, I mean, you know how much I love to bitch about AI. Um, but I actually have a slightly.
Something good to say about it.
Yeah. Well, something slightly positive to say about the well, know something that's strongly negative. Something positive.
Positive.
But there's a positive spin on it, I suppose. Yeah. It was just so basically um some, some people at a company called ignite, um, did a load of research and basically what they found is that, you know, how um, Google is increasingly rolling out AI snippets and search results. So when they started rolling out these AI snippets that appear above all the organic search results, sometimes above the page results and everything else, everybody was very worried. They were saying, well, you know, if people can see all of the information condensed at the top of the page, what real reason is there for them to scroll down and click on things? And to start with? They were only really putting these search results on, on, you know, sort of twenty percent of searches. It's now more like fifty percent.
So it's becoming, I would have thought it was higher than that. I rarely see search results that don't have an AI.
Yeah. And they're doing it for increasingly complex ones. So at the beginning it was very simple searches that it could easily answer. And now it's sort of like you can ask it quite complicated, sort of eight to twenty word questions and it'll generate a result. And as predicted, they're saying that basically sort of five or six percent less people click on things on pages where they've rolled out those search results. We know that, you know, that that's actually sort of proven and demonstrated now that it does actually depress click through rates. So if you're trying to rank for a search where there's an AI result, you're probably going to see less clicks for it. Um, but the other thing that was really interesting about it was they're basically saying that people are, especially in B2B, converting off the AI snippets are sort of a massively enhanced rate. So the figure they've given here is that four hundred and thirty six percent improved conversion rate.
Okay.
So if you're.
If you're featured as an AI contributor to the AI snippet, people are going through the website to see the actual full clip.
The citation engage. And for complex things like B2B services or, you know, I mean, the example they're using there is it to, you know, sort of like trying to find suppliers for it. Um, it's actually really powerful because people are seeing this stuff. They're thinking, oh, I want to know more about that. Clicking the sources and then actually engaging the company.
Do you think though, this is more about people figuring out what that, that AI snippet is? And actually the question that might be, is it like the AI snippet is encouraging people to go through to a website or is the AI snippet. Are people figuring out that the AI snippet is there because it's been nicked off somebody else's website? Oh, and by the way, you can actually go to the actual website like I wanted to do in the first place. Thank you. Click. And I'm now on the website. I suspect.
So. I suspect so because a lot of the AI snippets are still wrong, sort of. They just get stuff sort of objectively wrong and say weird things. And a hilarious example the other day where I was looking for like the main causes of main line breaks, because writing an article for a client in irrigation, and it just listed six things that were not at all the main causes of main line breaks. Like you've got this catastrophically wrong. That's just, um, but, but I think the point is, like you say, people look at the AI snippet and they think, oh, but the sources for the AI snippet are the things that the AI trusts and has found, and therefore they're credible, even if what the AI is sort of derived from those sources isn't necessarily correct. It's just a popularity thing again, isn't it? Your name is at the top of the page. You're featured as a credible source. And I think sort of internally, subconsciously, that does something to us where we think, oh, that company there are being quoted, therefore they must be the real deal.
How do we make sure that we're not in some sort of death spiral with AI? Because if we're relying on AI to look for content, and then that content is used to deliver AI results. But AI has also been used to write content, and it's using existing content to write new content, which is usually worse than the existing content. Yeah. And I mean, we can't, you know, we're not we use AI. I mean, Gemini takes notes in meetings. Fantastic. We'll use Gemini to help us in, you know, when we're writing some content, you know, if it's, if it's where we where we need, you know, some inspiration, for example, and you could use AI to write entire pieces of content, etc.. Um, as I've said before, you know, the guys coding are using it. AI is going, ah, I know where you're going with this. I'll fill in the rest. And they don't have to write all those ten lines of code by hand, because AI knows what they're trying to achieve and says, think you're trying to do this? Yeah, I am click done, you know, so there's loads of ways that AI is incredibly powerful in our industry and associated allied industries, if you like. Um, but yet we still.
Well, it's fundamentally.
Seeing like AI produced stuff, which is just like, as you say, it's just not very good.
It's fundamentally unreliable. And I think this is the thing, like in all those use cases that you're talking about, nobody who does that day to day would argue with the idea that sixty percent of its output is probably disposable. You know, it tries to write code for you. How often does it get it right? Well, it's certainly not as often as human does, but we sort of we're willing to overlook that because it's convenient and it's easy and it's quick and it's cost effective and often free. Um, and so we think to ourselves, well, you know, it's good enough, it's fine. But I agree with you. I mean, that whole idea of like, it's called the dead internet theory that, you know, we end up in a place where everything on the internet, including all the forum threads and the comments and the discussions, is just people sort of engaging LLMs to talk to each other and sort of produce lots of content for the sake of it. And I think it is a real worry. I mean, I think one of the things that I've seen, and I've seen a few experts commenting about is that what it is doing is sort of driving a resurgence in the sort of importance of authorship and people putting their names to things and saying, like, this post was written by this human being on this date. And just how.
Ridiculous though, that we have to do.
That. Yeah, absolutely. Well, but what's the alternative?
Well, everything that isn't written by a human being should automatically tag itself as written by AI.
Absolutely.
That would be the that would be the obvious thing, wouldn't it? You know, because that can do that. Guess what? Automatically.
Yeah. And and probably the AI should also limit itself to what it crawls.
You know, and the thing is, obviously that's totally spoofable. Anyway. You're written by John Smith. Yeah, absolutely. It wasn't written by John Smith. It was written by AI.
No, but I think I think yeah, I agree with you. I think the point more more broadly, though, is that people will only be willing to have their name associated with something if they're really genuinely involved in its production. And if somebody's produced an AI article like, say, I'm off for a week and you decide to produce some stuff and you say, oh, Alex Bussey wrote this, I would then be like, well, I didn't actually write that. It's that whole idea of it makes it more important for people to take ownership of their work, I suppose. But no, I think it's a real concern, actually, where we go from here, where people are just I mean, one of the things I wanted to talk a bit about because obviously we get some good traffic, I think, from the fact that our some of our stuff is cited by AI on some pretty big searches.
AI snippets. Yeah.
And there's a lot of advice going around at the moment. Like if you listen to any other digital marketing podcast, it's all about like how to make sure LLMs crawl your content and how to make your content AI optimised, which is my current least favorite buzzword. But I think there's a real danger in doing that and in starting to sort of regurgitate spurious content for the sake of being listed in a featured snippet, I think. Yeah. What you actually do? I don't know, but that is the way the internet seems to be headed. Mhm.
I've got really nothing to add.
Scary times.
It doesn't scare me. It bores me. I mean, it does. It absolutely bores me.
Do you not worry that. Because I mean, you've been I mean, you've obviously you've been involved in digital marketing for far longer than me. I mean, you've seen the internet appear as a phenomenon. Do you worry that you're seeing it disappear as a phenomenon? Like if it just becomes sort of useless?
No, I think, uh, AI is amazing and I think we will figure out how it fits in to, to our lives, um, how it fits into marketing. I think we're still figuring that out. Um, you know, despite the plethora of, of, um, experts who've figured it all out already and will and will.
Teach you how to.
Teach you how to do X, Y, and Z and show you how you can spend like only after work five hours a week by leveraging a. Are you talking about prompt engineers? Prompt engineers would be one of them. Yeah, that's for sure. So yeah, I rarely I think in my life, I've rarely looked at something and, and just thought, oh, this is the beginning of the end. You know what I mean? I think I think plenty of people have experienced significant change. Um, you know, whatever industry they're in, there are obviously things like, you know, coal miners, for example, experienced a very different, um, outlook, if you like, on their lives when, when, when the pits were closed. And so there are things that come along by necessity, um, that, that are taken away, but I don't know. I'm not, I'm not overly concerned by this. I'm just intrigued. I'm the same with social media. I'm somewhat ambivalent when it comes to social media. A lot of people are talking right now, um, on social media and, and.
And.
Traditional media about the how evil social media is. And you know, how we we have to control this and we have to control that. And I just kind of still think or I still think that we are kind of figuring out how to use it still. And maybe in twenty years time, you know, we'll be using it in a much more constructive way. People will have finally got fed up with being angry and shouting and swearing and abusive and everything else. Or maybe they won't. Maybe that's just humans. Keyboard warriors are always gonna do that thing that they do. You know, I never quite understand them, but, um.
I think we go through this all the time, don't we? We look back in human history, you know, it's a, it's a, a sort of catalogue of development gets made. Everyone talks about the great evils. It will, it will sort of force upon society and how it will ruin the fabric of cohesion, of civilisation and everything. And then it just turns out to be a bit of nothing, really. We adapt. Yeah, I don't know. I feel I feel slightly less optimistic, I think solely because I think it's just so easy. But I think it's a two fold problem Google has spent so long talking about. And it's not just Google, but Google has spent so long talking about how important it is to generate content. And then people have been given a tool that allows them to generate content for free. And they've got absolutely mental. And the internet is now full of garbage. And I just, you know, there's no button we can press to just dump all that garbage when we realise that it's rubbish.
What's it costing in terms of power generation?
Well, I mean, they're talking.
To have all that garbage.
This is the thing. And what the AI themselves. I mean, they're talking increasingly about Silicon Valley sort of tech companies investing in nuclear power, for example, to power their data centers so that they can make this AI generate rubbish that nobody wants to read. And the whole thing just seems utterly zero.
Sum game, isn't it? It just seems ridiculous.
And we've completely lost any sort of handle on it. There's no breaks.
So but you know, in amongst all that, there has to be opportunity for people who can not just follow the herd, they can actually look at it, leverage it in a quirky, effective way, or even choose not to leverage it. You know, there's maybe, well, not, maybe there will be. And there are opportunities for people who are smarter than. Well, this is how we do it now. You know, we, I just, I press this button and it created me a two hundred page website, you know, and, and.
Yeah.
I don't.
Know. I think the idea of people using it as assistants and to retrieve knowledge and, you know, people who are training them on their own sort of in-house data sets and stuff like that is quite interesting really. But yeah.
The applications of it are fantastic. There are some, you know, truly amazing applications of, um, of AI and more coming out all the time. There are also companies who are just tagging on the powered by AI to, to whatever garbage they've produced in order to kind of jump on the bandwagon, I suppose, and I don't know.
Um, well, that's the whole thing with marketing at the moment, isn't it? Digital marketing agencies being sort of like AI powered. And, you know, they'll help you to leverage the benefits of AI and they'll make sure you're not left behind. And there's a lot of that sort of ambulance chaser sort of language keeping creeping in where it's all sort of urgency and desperation. Yeah. Um, yeah.
So have you got anything interesting on your list?
Um, well, the other thing on my list is obviously the, the whole thing I was mentioning to you briefly before about Labour and their reform, their aping of a form of reform on social media.
We normally wander into politics. You've actually now started putting political questions down. Yeah, I don't mind. It's quite.
It has a marketing bent too.
Right. I'm interested to hear how you're going to shoehorn that in.
Well, it's just it's just. So basically the story is obviously Labour decided quite recently, I think last week to release a load of footage of, of border protection officers breaking down.
That Cooper was going out with them or something like that.
Very strong of her to, to go out and take part in these, uh, horribly sort of staged operations.
I mean, they've literally got twelve year olds advising them, aren't they, when they do crap like that?
Well, and this is sort of largely the point. So basically what happened is they did all these raids and then they, they bought a Facebook advert, or they paid for some Facebook advertising to go out onto people's social media feeds to show these snippets and to say, you know, labour are sort of breaking all the records on how many evil migrants they've deported. Um, you know, we're at three hundred a minute or something like that, but they did it fascinatingly in reforms colors. So all the adverts ditched all the sort of Labour Party branding, and they were the turquoise of reform and the dark blue font that reform used. And obviously the idea was we'll get in front of reform voters and they'll see the advert and they'll think, oh, something from reform. And then they'll see, oh, Labour busts. You know, immigration.
People always goes down.
Well it's fantastic. But but we see I mean we see this all the time in marketing. I think when I first heard about it, I was like, well, that is absolutely pathetic. Like what a pathetic thing to do. And then I was thinking about it a bit more and I was like, but I can, I can see exactly how they've got there. Right. Your competitors are doing something really interesting and really cool. They're getting loads of buzz from it. Everybody's engaging with them and you think, oh fuck. Like, I need to step into that space and do what they're doing and sort of copy them. Me too. Yeah, absolutely. Um, I just think it's really, uh, sort of straight a striking example of that. But every day clients will come to us and say, oh, you know, one of our competitors is doing this. Should we be doing it? Is it worth doing that? How do we get the same buzz and attention? But I think critically, the thing with the Labour story is as soon as you've heard it, it sort of leaves you very cold about labour. You think they're completely out of ideas. That's just desperately trying to be relevant, copying the tactics of a party that, okay, they've got, you know, however many thousands of votes, but they have like three elected officials. They're not, you know, we're not at risk of becoming a reform, you know, country any time soon, at least not for the next four years. And here they are sort of desperately pedalling, um, to keep up. And I think the thing for me is that that's what I always try to communicate to clients is that if you do that shit and you sort of say, oh, me too, me too, I can do what my competitors have done, and you change your language and you mirror what other people are doing. That is how you leave potential customers feeling. It's just sort of, well, that's a bit desperate really. Um, but yeah, it's just whether or not you agree with that, I guess, and what you think about it.
Um.
Yes, yes. Simple. Nice and concise. All right.
I don't know. Um, I, um, I hear what you're saying and I, and I don't disagree. I, I'm, I'm, I'm just a bit bemused by it all. I think I'm just, you know, that that particular thing. I knew nothing about that until you mentioned it about, you know, using their, their, um, brand guidelines using literally brand guidelines in, in their, in Labour's labour use that in their marketing. I wasn't aware of it, but um, I don't know, we just live in such crazy times that it kind of doesn't surprise me, because I know that I know that the Labour Party are, you know, definitely concerned about the popularity of reform. And and as we start to have the inevitable, um, um, by elections and the like, yeah, you know, that's when things will get really scary for them if they, you know, find that they're losing, losing seats, um, while, while all that's happening, but um, yeah, I'm, I'm kind of just a bit bemused by, by, by politics at the moment, you know, um, some of the, uh, hilarious things that Trump's doing and some of the hilarious things that he and his crowd are doing as well. And, um, I sometimes look at what's going on and I think, am I the only person looking at that and thinking, what a crock. You know what? You honestly think we believe this utter diatribe that you're coming away with. You genuinely believe that most people are believing it. And I started kind of sometimes coming to the conclusion that people are believing it. And, and not many of us are looking at it, no matter who the political party is and are thinking, you know, this is this is nonsense.
Do you think so?
Yeah.
Mhm. I'm not sure. I think they've completely missed. Actually, I, I was listening to a thing the other day about, um, you know, Labor's new thing where they're closing the route to citizenship if you're an illegal migrant. So they're going to make it the law that if you come into this country on a small boat, you can never be a citizen.
Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of like they did in Australia. So if you come in illegally, then no matter what your situation, you can never be a citizen.
Yeah. But like somebody was pointing out on the news that this is one of those things that sounds really good in principle. If you drive a white van and have a sort of flag of Saint George outside your window, you probably hear that and think, oh yeah, that's right, show them. But then somebody was pointing out, you know, the the bit where you become a citizen, that happens sort of like five or ten years after you come. So they're saying, oh, well, if you come here on a small boat, you will in ten years time. We won't let you. We'll let you settle. We'll let you take claim benefits. We'll let you integrate with society. But then we'll stop you becoming a citizen. That's not really a deterrent, because people fleeing here don't give a fuck about what happens in five years time. They're fleeing persecution or a terrible financial situation or whatever, but they're not thinking ten years ahead. So it's a really ineffective deterrent and a really good headline. And I think this is the thing I think I genuinely think a lot of politicians think that the average voter is very stupid and will buy anything like that and take it at face value and think, yep, Labour are strong on migrants because they said you can't have citizenship in ten years time. And I think people are just slowly waking up to that very slowly. But I do see more and more people sort of saying, well, hang on a minute, that's not going to do anything. I just think they've completely missed that. And I think this is what's happening in politics. I think this is why parties like reform are becoming increasingly popular, because the Conservatives and Labour just don't really treat people like adults. They don't treat the average voter like an intelligent person.
I agree with that.
Say, oh look, we fooled you with this headline. Or like Kemi Badenoch will say something ridiculous about how she eats steak every lunchtime and doesn't believe in sandwiches. And it's like she.
Doesn't believe in.
Science.
Apparently not. I don't know how you don't believe in sandwiches. They are a thing. There's a sandwich.
But she thinks they're a stupid thing and is very opinionated on that fact. And I genuinely think they think people just buy into all of this sort of like, uh, sort of reactionary identity led politics. And I think people are just increasingly tired of it and moving away from that. So yeah.
And I worked in Norway. Their sandwiches are open sandwiches.
That's not a sandwich.
It's like a sandwich. And then you forget to put the bit of bread on top. So it's.
Bread bread with.
Stuffing filling. I'm pretty sure you make a cheese toastie and that's what a sandwich would be. You don't put the. There is no bread on top.
Are you talking about toasted cheese rather than cheese toastie though, because a cheese toastie is a sandwich.
No it's.
Not.
It's just toast and cheese. However any combination.
I'm pretty sure if you look up sandwich in the dictionary, it says two pieces of bread with stuff inside.
Not if you look up open sandwich. Anyway um enquiries just now. Now we, you know we talk a lot now and again in this podcast we talk about digital marketing. Uh, and over the years we've talked a lot about digital marketing and we've talked about irrespective of AI and everything else. We've talked about laying your stall out, making sure that you're providing content, information that people are looking for and good things can happen. And, you know, we've been around now for twenty three years and we've generated most of our business because people have just found us because they've been looking to try and solve a problem. Um, right now I'm, I'm almost overwhelmed with inquiries. I mean, it's been phenomenal over the last wee while, the quality and, you know, and we're converting some of these into, into customers and it's the quality of the stuff that's coming through. I just wonder if there's, um, you know, the, the recent economic figures are there's a point, was it zero point zero one or zero point one percent? Point one point one percent increase.
Poor Rachel, dirty like that. You give her a credit.
She's on the front page of the BBC website again today because she claimed she was at the Bank of England for ten years and she was there for six years.
For fuck's sake.
So she's all over the papers.
She did play chess once, though, so she's obviously very clever.
She's obviously a grandmaster.
Well, yeah, she could have been. That was the story they were peddling for a bit during the election. Could have been. As a child, she was very into chess, like we were all supposed to go. Oh, she must be a sage.
Then again, I just wonder who advises people to, you know, to to spout stuff that can be demonstrably proved to be wrong.
Well, I think it's the kind of people who lead IT departments and then think that qualifies them to run the economy. Oh.
Yeah. Okay. Anyway, what's happening is, you know, we, we, uh, pivoted, I don't know, over a year ago and set our stall out to be very much for tech and industrial companies, engineering companies and the like. And as a result of that, we're now seeing like solid inquiries coming in. In fact, I've got a conversation straight after this, this meeting from, you know, as a direct result of that. Um, and I just wonder, I just wonder if there's like a general kind of feeling that things are on the up because it's very easy to interpret the news and, you know, economic forecasts as being a bit grim yet based on our deals dashboard in HubSpot and we've never been healthier. There's so much stuff coming through. Obviously, we're seeing it with clients as well. We're seeing lots of inquiries coming through for the clients as a result of the work we're doing for them. So it's not just like, you know, an isolated case or, you know, digital marketing companies have suddenly become very popular. And so we're getting lots of inquiries.
Well, it's interesting because obviously we'll have to have to be very careful about what I say here because I'll have to be very heavily anonymised. But I was talking to a client about exactly this yesterday. So we had a.
Client you're talking about Andrew.
Client Andrew client, uh, a client about exactly this yesterday. So we had a weekly meeting and they were saying like, it's really odd because we're sort of halfway through February now, and we've already had double the leads we had in January. Mhm. And I was saying so like pretty across pretty much all of the client accounts that I'm sort of plugged into seeing the same thing. December dead, January, December dead.
No surprise.
January pretty horrible. Pretty bad month for everybody. Yeah. February. Massive rebound, loads of inquiries, lots of stuff happening. And even just like general search traffic for like sort of transactional anecdotally seems to be up. So yeah.
So the emotional component of buying stuff is, is very strong. Lots of.
Texts.
Written on the subject of what, what the reasons that people buy things. And like most people, I guess, find January a bit of a struggle. I didn't this year. I was, I just went through January, sailed through January. And I don't know what it was. I don't know The new hobby. Metal detecting meant like I was out and about a lot more. And I just know it just just felt fine. It didn't feel overly long. It didn't feel overly cold or dark. It just got on with it. And it was lovely. It was smashing.
It was overly dark and.
Well, I didn't really find it. Just a head torch, a head torch. And that solves that problem.
That's your vitamin D, is it?
Head torch. But um, but yeah, I mean, we, we were fielding some nice enquiries through January, but, but yeah, February has just, it's been off the scale. I mean it really has.
Turned up the volume hasn't it. Yeah. I can only assume that you're right that underneath all the sort of doom and gloom that the media peddle, people are starting to feel more optimistic. Um, and certainly the way that people are sort of engaging with both us and clients seems much more sort of positive and sort of, yeah, we want to do this. But I think you're right. I think the emotional components really important even, and maybe even especially in B2B, where people are like, oh, am I really going to go out and shop for a new software system if I feel really crap or if I'm feeling pessimistic about our chances of business, I'm not going to go away and try and, you know, sort of grow or secure my supply chain and look for new suppliers. So yeah, I suspect you're right. I suspect there's a very strong and often overlooked sort of emotional component on the B2B side about sort of confidence and whether people feel like it's a time of.
An anecdotally across the accounts that you're involved with, you're seeing that broadly things are up.
Yeah, definitely. I mean, like I say, some clients have had as many inquiries in the first two months of February as they did throughout January.
first two months of February.
So the first two weeks of February.
January's got two months in it, but not February.
It definitely does. Um, yeah. And I think that's really interesting because obviously we're always, you know, sort of tweaking and refining and improving things, but you wouldn't ever be able to attribute sort of like, oh, you know, twice as many conversions to any one know, button or lever that we've pulled. So yeah, absolutely. A good time, maybe on the horizon. It'd be nice. It'd be a nice break from all the pessimism.
That was it. The was it the one of the agency agency hackers? I think it was the agency hackers report. It was somebody in that. And they'd kind of predicted that that agencies would be in demand.
Yeah.
Going you know, as we went into twenty twenty five just to help businesses navigate effectively because, I mean, that's something that still surprises me every day, every week. Um, the number of really good solid businesses, some that were lucky enough to start working with who are still, you know, years behind when it comes to telling their story online and, you know, leveraging all the opportunities that that are out there with respect to, um, you know, web and social and, and, um, you know, different mediums like podcast video, all that kind of stuff. They just don't seem yet to have grasped it. And I don't know whether there's more of those are actually, Engaging in the process or what we're also finding is people who've got a reasonable online presence want to significantly improve it, because maybe they've seen the benefits of what they've got. Yeah. And then we've got others, um, such as like one of the companies I went to see last week, big company, decent turnover, you know, um, and um, they just kind of lost the nowhere when it comes to digital and, and it's got, it's clearly got the potential to significantly increase their, their bottom line.
I think it's interesting, isn't it? Because I think ultimately what we're really seeing is increasingly people waking up to the fact that they haven't been doing a great job. Yeah. For a long time. And I don't I don't necessarily know who gets the credit for that because you can't necessarily, you know what I mean? Like you can, you can guide and inform and you can say, have you thought about, have you reflected on whether or not your website's really telling the right story or, or whatever, but what it is that actually catalyses people to wake up and go out and start searching for this stuff, I don't know, I suspect a lot of it has to do with things like this. You know, podcasts, YouTube videos, digital marketers on TikTok, just sort of generally talking.
There's more of them. Yeah. Brand people, marketing people. Um, yeah.
And like, we've talked a few times about the whole like Rory Sutherland phenomenon and things like him appearing in everybody's YouTube feeds will sort of, I guess, get the wheels turning and wake people up to the fact that actually, when I look at my website with fresh eyes, maybe it's not so good. Um, but yeah, it's certainly interesting as a phenomenon, people sort of waking up to the value of digital marketing is, is quite interesting.
Mhm. And then obviously what we were talking about earlier, which is like, what impact is it AI having on that? And is it watering it down? And you, you know, you're creating a fantastic online presence. You produce fantastic content just so Google can steal it and present it to people on their home page. And in the hope that those people don't have to visit your website, they can just, you know, get an answer to their question and move on. But, um, Yeah, I don't know. I don't know where that's headed. Um, anything else that you want to cover?
I don't think so.
It's been a pretty lackluster performance, to be honest.
Well, I'll work on it. I'll refine my performance. I'll ask ChatGPT to write me a script next time.
Actually, I'd be better off doing a podcast with Gemini.
All right, next time, that's what I'll do. I'll just be the mouthpiece for Gemini.
It'll be an improvement.
I will talk like this.
So everybody assumes that that's what AI talks like. But actually, when you get AI to like in HubSpot, you know, you can get it to narrate a blog post.
Yeah. That's because they've.
Stolen people's.
Voices. They've stolen people's voices. You think they've eaten their identities, David? Parasites. All of them. I mean, there is an element of that. All of these LLMs have been trained on huge amounts of publicly available but copyrighted data, including things like people's voices and likeness and that sort of thing, which is a shame. Mhm.
But I think we should stop you.
We can stop whenever you like.
It's kind of stopping.
All right.
Thanks for putting up with us. Next week, hopefully, I won't have driven for ten hours, so maybe I'll be a little bit more aware. And, um. And then maybe we can talk about, you know, some of these inquiries and maybe, maybe, um, pick them apart a little bit and say like, this is, this is because, you know, the tools that we use allow us to up to a point, figure out how they found us, what it took to get them to engage with us, how they engage with us, how that next step went when it comes to engagement, um, that kind of thing. So maybe do that with some of these, um, absolutely overwhelming number of inquiries.
We will talk about how many of them are attributed to direct traffic and how frustrating that is.
I know you're doing that thing, aren't you, that we've talked about that earlier just using gobbledygook. All right. Thanks for listening.
Bye.