Low Search Volume, High Reward: Rethinking Your B2B Keyword Strategy – Episode 148

Speaking about can't be bothered, couldn't be asked. When we work with customers, we can control the process of customer acquisition up to a point. We are trying to make sure that we've put something compelling in front of people who arrive from search or paid search or social or wherever, and then data goes into a CRM. Somebody pinged to say, this person is interested, has made an enquiry. What you do next is so, so important.

The idea that you can invest a lot of money on your website, sort of signaling really positive things and then not actually following up with.

Immediately.

Not following.

Up immediately, being lackluster.

You know, I see this even with some of our clients stuff going into the CRM, and it takes sort of four or five days for somebody to get back to them in really half assed way. It's frustrating as a marketer because you spend a lot of time setting up this sort of like idea of what it's going to be like to interact with this company. And then it's not sort of borne out by people's first contact.

Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface with me, Dave Robinson, and my colleague Alex Bussey. First of all, last week towards the end of the show, we did give a shout out to superfan Amy, and superfan Amy got in touch to tell us that the shout out wasn't there because our operative, not the talent, the person over there, had uploaded it to libsyn and there was a problem. So superfan Amy pointed it out to us and saw. Huge thanks to Amy once again for being a superfan and for helping us fix the broken episode.

So you wonder why Leslie deliberately sabotages this podcast. Then you call her an operative.

I know, I know. Well, talent operative, that's how it is that.

I'm not sure it's true.

Anyway, I kind of I kind of got me thinking about, you know, giving shout outs and things. And as you know, we're not sponsored by anyone, so we can do that. So did you see the email I put out about the actor at home curries. If you listen to this and you like curry and I mean, if you if you like curry and I love curry, I'd have curry every day. I love curry. Karen makes fantastic veggie curries and anyway. But actor at home a k t a r at home. If you just Google it, it's a Michelin star curries and they get made beautifully packaged and delivered chilled within three or four days of ordering them. And like, I don't know, for sort of seventy, eighty quid, you can get like eight or nine curries with nans and rice and the whole nine yards. And I kid you not, it's the best curry you'll ever have. It's fantastic. Curry delivered to your door, made by a Michelin star chef down in Birmingham.

See, they're idiots. People who pay people to, uh, you know, give shout outs in podcasts because you're doing it for free.

Well, yeah, I mean, shout out on our podcast to for people. It's not gonna change anybody's life, is it? Um, but I just, I just, it's just nice to give, you know, good people in this case, good food. Give it a good shout out because, well, if like we live in the country, you do we, you know, so if you fancy a really nice curry, you can make one. You can absolutely make a curry. You know, we make curries. I'm sure you do. But sometimes just to go to the freezer and take something out that isn't like something off the shelf at Tesco or the co-op.

There is nothing.

Authentic.

Yeah, there is nothing worse than supermarket curry. Yeah, it can.

Be a little bit bland. I mean, I think it's got better hasn't it.

I don't know, I.

Think it kind of has a bit. I mean there are some that are edible. If you really fancy a curry and you can't be bothered making one, and you certainly can't be bothered a twenty mile round trip to go and get one.

See what we do. And this is nothing to do with digital marketing at all at this point. More of.

This podcast.

Isn't a food podcast today, apparently, but we just make base gravy. So you're familiar with this whole like the British Indian restaurant sort of trick, which is to make huge vats of base gravy. And then we sort of portion it all up in little bags and put it in the freezer.

More chilli, less chilli, more this, that, that bit of coconut for that. And then that's exactly it. Yeah.

And it literally sort of like ten minutes away from a curry whenever you want it.

But ten minutes and twenty four hours, it's always better a day later, isn't it? It's always better a day later.

Yeah.

Anyway, I believe you've come armed with some ideas for once.

Well, I mean, I don't know. I have a few things I want to talk at you about.

Well, I'm quite happy to be talked at.

Wouldn't overegg it? Is that because you've got no notes this time? Watch, watch. Oh.

Right. Go on.

Well, one thing that I think has. Oh, dear. Shall we just stop there? This came up weirdly. It came up at a meeting that you and I were at, um, last week.

Okay, that narrows it down.

And then it came up again today. Um, and it's just this whole idea of, um volume in, in what we do. So obviously we're a B2B marketing agency. Most of the clients we work with are B2B companies. But to be fair, I think probably, I don't know the stats for. But a significant proportion of businesses are B2B, right? Significant portion of businesses. Um, people get really fixated with numbers. They're like, oh, uh, this idea you've just had, I had a look in, in SEMrush or, you know, whatever. And it seems like only sort of like ten to fifteen people a month search for that. So it's not really worth bothering with. We shouldn't bother, you know, we should put our attention where the numbers are and that sort of thing. Um, I hear this all the time. I think people get really fixated on it. They want to do things where there's volume, where there's lots of people. Yeah. Um, and something happened this morning where basically we set up a LinkedIn marketing campaign a couple of days ago for somebody, and we set it running. They sent me a message about a day later being like, oh, I've had a look. And it's like only fourteen people have seen the ad so far. Maybe it wasn't worth it. Maybe we should pick different keywords. Maybe we should, you know, broaden the audience. Maybe we should add more industry.

We should panic immediately after pushing it live, rather than waiting for a week or so to see what happens.

This morning there were seventeen views on the adverts, which is still an absolutely microscopic number. But one of those seventeen turned into a view, a visit that lasted sort of twenty odd minutes and then into an enquiry. And lo and behold, you know, out of seventeen you land a contract worth sort of twenty, thirty grand. Wow. Um, because we are not ever really playing a numbers game. It's not about volume. And I think, you know, it's a really difficult thing because so much of what people say about marketing is sort of, I don't know, designed to give you this idea that what you're doing is you're trying to get out there in front of as many people as possible and have maximum reach and let as many people know about your business as you possibly can. And people get really fixated on this. In reality, the number of people actively looking to buy your products and services at any one time is probably really small. So when you're looking at keywords with a sort of like ten to twenty a month volume, you know, rather than being like, oh, well, that's really small. I won't bother with it. You should probably be like, well, that's actually where my potential customers live, I guess.

Yeah, I don't disagree with that. And I think if we peel it back just for a minute, um, and for the, uh, for people who don't, well, people who maybe have a little bit of an understanding of keywords, most people in business kind of understand the concept of keywords and search engines and appearing when people type things in. But let's just peel that back and just go into a little bit of detail. So the, the idea with, with, um, you know, using Google as a source of business is to develop an understanding of who your ideal customers are, what problems they've got, what their type physically type into a search engine when they're trying to solve those problems. And then you endeavor to get in front of them, um, in the search results. And so hopefully they then go, oh, that might be a solution to my problem. Click. They land on a page, you tell a compelling story on the page and try and create engagement. And that's it in a nutshell, isn't it? And so, you know, what you've been saying eloquently is that sometimes, like the research suggests that only four or five people a month might type a certain thing into the search engines. Therefore why bother? Yeah, but if four or five people a month type something in and you get to speak to two of them and you sell products that that, you know, you're rather a contract, a piece of work is worth twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, etc. thousand pounds, then surely it's worth it.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's also that, you know, getting, getting, like I say, getting sidetracked by the big numbers, there's an attraction to the idea of like, oh, I'll put my advert out and ten thousand people will see it. And I think, you know, we're talking about this in a B2B sense, but even in a B2C context, you know, where you're selling, say hair straighteners or, or trainers, say if you're selling expensive Adidas trainers that are two hundred quid a pop.

They're.

Cheap. That's cheap. Well, we.

Look at the LV once, didn't we, when we were doing the research.

nine hundred and ninety.

There were eleven hundred quid for a pair of trainers.

But if you're if you're. Okay. Well you know, that's great. So if we've got some Louis Vuitton trainers that we're trying to sell, and you think, oh, well, these are black trainers and ten zero zero zero zero people a month.

Do you do maths at school?

No, I.

Did.

one hundred thousand.

ten hundred thousand. That's a great number.

One hundred thousand people a month search for black trainers. So we'll advertise on black trainers and you'll get lots of eyeballs on your page. But none of them are from people who want to spend a thousand pounds on a pair of trainers, because that's not what the sort of language those people use. You're on a hiding to nothing. And you know, there's a real attraction, I think, psychologically baked into marketers where, you know, you see the big number and you often see how cheap it is to advertise on the bigger searches as well. And you think, oh, that must be, you know, that's my opportunity there. I'll get in front of thirty thousand people, I'll spend ten p a click and it's just junk.

We talked about that last time, didn't we, about signalling and how using that cheap those cheap platforms and appearing on on crappy websites using, you know, display advertising and so forth. Or I guess even if you are using PPC, you could still signal that you're a thirty bob company, couldn't you, by using PPC. Wrong.

Well, Google shopping especially is really dangerous like that because you run the risk often when you sort of end up ranking products on Google shopping. So you'll see sometimes on the top of search results, a little carousel with various products in them. If Google thinks you're shopping for a specific thing, and the danger there, of course, is when you start using Google Shopping, you sometimes don't realise that your product is about to end up next to a load of competing products, and all the prices will be right there underneath. And you can. I've seen people make some disastrous mistakes where they've priced things like per unit. So it's like, oh, you can buy this for five point nine nine. And then their competitors products, you know, their next them in a ten pack for fifty quid or something like that. And it suddenly looks like one looks exclusive and the other looks cheap and it's all just a bit of a mess. So yeah, I do think you have to be really careful where you position.

And just while we're on the subject of keywords, a thing that often confuses people used to confuse me is the idea of long tail search. So people, you know, automatically assume that what they mean. What is meant by long tail search? Are search terms with lots of words in them.

Because. Because long.

Yeah, exactly. Well, it doesn't mean that it's often the case that long tail search phrases have got quite a lot of words in them, but that isn't what it means. It just means phrases that are not used very often. Right. So, you know, if you think of a graph that goes up sharply and then tails off and never gets to zero, the tail is the bit that never gets to zero as it goes off. There's always some subtle variation on a search term that one or two people a year might use, and that's long tail search. And you can't really optimise for long tail search. It's difficult to optimise for it because then you are into the realms of, you know, if you were, if you were trying to rank for something, literally only got typed once or twice a year into a search engine, which would be unusual. I know that that's a fool's errand. So what, you know, what we're really talking about is having comprehensive content that will hoover up the long tail of searches by by dint of talking about the subject exhaustively.

Yeah, well, that's exactly it, isn't it? I mean, we don't optimise for long tail search by producing a page for every possible permutation of a of a phrase, right? But you can sort of, you know, because by definition, nobody else is really optimising for those phrases either. You can often get away with producing a single piece of content that will end up ranking for ten or eleven of those sort of really long, specific, detailed phrases. Yeah. As long as you're sort of mindful of, of mentioning them and using them.

Mhm. Mhm. Okay. Going back to, uh, going back to my favorite, current favorite subject signaling, we've got contacted by somebody looking for sponsorship. No, it's a, it's a person in Scotland, a female. And she plays foot golf.

Foot.

Yeah. It's it's a it's a niche sport. Um, however, she does play at an international level as goes off to Turkey to play. And apparently I mean, you know, got, you know, it was they were talking about some competition that she played in and Scotland got, you know, knocked out in the quarterfinals by the USA. So I think so it's a global thing and it's kind of quite a big thing. She plays apparently as an annual a Four Nations tournament. Ireland, Wales, England. Scotland I think. Um and you know what she's looking for some sponsorship. Not a huge amount of money. You might have seen the email. It came in to the Edinburgh.

I'm pretty sure.

Email address. Yeah. So it's very easy to dismiss it. But she was only looking for like three hundred quid. Get our name on a shirt, you know, promote it on her Instagram and all the rest of it. So here's the thing. What? What do you think that would signal.

That we're really into footgolf.

But, you know, in some respects, it's like it's niche. It's somebody who's dedicating a lot of their own time to trying to do well at something. And he's trying to make ends meet. And, you know, if we stump up a few hundred quid to help sponsor and we get a mention on a shirt, or if we get a mention in a, is that going to hurt us? Or is that actually.

I don't think it hurts us at all. I think the mistake people often make with sponsorships is they'll do something like that, like give a few hundred quid, or one of the ones I've seen in other agency do is sponsor a kids football team and then literally never shut up about it. Yeah. And which signals a strange sort of desperation in my eyes. You know, it's like if you sponsor somebody, give them the money, be really happy for them. Be thankful that your name's on their shirt, and then just get on with your day and.

Get on with your life.

Because it's got to look like you're really invested in helping people achieve their dreams and that sort of thing. And I guess to a degree, interested in sort of, you know, women's sports especially, I think is a is a field at the moment that a lot of people are sort of grabbing onto as an opportunity to sort of signal that they're open minded, that they're forward thinking, all that sort of stuff. I just think you have to be really careful not to flog it too hard, because that's when it gets a bit sort of cringey. People that look to be doing philanthropy.

So at the moment I'm trying to decide whether to sponsor the Aston Martin F1 team or this this Lassie who's doing the Footgolf. Should we go for the Footgolf?

I mean.

Should we go for the football?

I'd like to be paid this month. So. Yeah, let's go with that. I don't think you'll be. Yeah. Aston Martin formula one team. Yeah. What's that like a billion pounds a day or something?

Yeah, it'd be way more than that, I'm sure. Um. Okay. Um, now I've got something which I wrote down for the last podcast and I can't remember if I covered it. So if I quickly summarise, can you, can you, you won't remember either.

I've got a memory like a sieve, but I'll do my best.

Okay, so relationships and I've written down why trying to push your way in might be a waste of time.

No, I don't think we did cover.

Are you sure I didn't cover it? I think that's why I mentioned superfan Amy, because Amy works for an insurance broker, and I got approached by somebody saying, have you got any insurance needs? You don't remember? Now, I did mention.

It.

Maybe. And like, you know, the point I was making is like, sometimes it's worth doing a bit of research and finding out whether it's worth putting any energy at all into trying to, if you I'm talking really, I guess. I guess about account based marketing where you're thinking we we we'd like to work with that company and like you're trying to get in and all the time. Um, the, their best mate runs an agency and has always done all of their work and always.

Will's team sort of thing.

I mean, we've got a situation with a potential customer haven't we? Um, where the incumbent I think is a one man band actually, but the incumbent, um, has been with the company for a long time purely because he's, he's like best mates with the guy who owns the business and like, you know, you're kind of like wasting your time if you try and push your way in, aren't you?

I think so sometimes I don't know. It's a tricky one though, isn't it? Because sometimes that sort of stuff does play out. I guess you're playing a numbers game at the end of the day.

We keep saying that I do.

I think it's true.

Where it also applies though is, you know, set aside Relationships. But where it also applies is where there is a confirmation bias. So for example, um, the chief marketing officer recognises that marketing marketing collateral. You know, website social profiles, general online presence is poor. But the CEO thinks that digital marketing and websites is just a load of flannel, a load of nonsense. And then trying to, because we've often been in situations, I guess, where we're kind of allied with the marketing person trying to convince the powers that be. And we've got a situation a bit like that just now with the long standing customer who's using a lot of internal resource and only using us for the bits they absolutely can't do themselves. And we're a little bit worried that it's not going to go well for them, aren't we?

Yeah, absolutely. But I mean, even the situation you were just referencing where, you know, the incumbent company is sort of bezzie mates with the CEO there again, you know, marketing manager that wants shot of them that has been agitating for that for quite some time and that fully understands the value that replacing them will bring. And I think it's, you know, I guess when you're talking about that sort of account based marketing approach, one of the things that I think I've been grappling with, with a couple of clients over the last year or so, is that you are ultimately dealing with individuals within a company rather than a company, as you know.

Always about.

People. Yeah. And I think people often make the mistake with account based marketing of looking at things like, you know, oh, this is the company we're going to approach and this is how we're going to approach the company. And this is the company's values and the company's interests and the company's weak points. It's like, well, fine, but we're generalising and what you're actually doing is putting something in front of a specific person with their own individual motivations. And I think that's it. Really like what you're, what you're looking for is an in with a specific person who, you know, has a vested interest in getting rid of the incumbent party or is, you know, want something different.

We've been on the receiving end of that as well, where somebody has come along to a business that we've been working with for a long time. And they, you know, they've come with an agenda where they want us out and their mates in. Sort of thing. You know, we've, we've fallen foul of that ourselves.

Well I think there again, you know, that approach is I mean it's it's a it's an underhand approach. It's not an approach that I particularly enjoy being on the receiving end of, but it's very effective. You know, if you know that you can you get the CEO who is nervous about these things and you can agitate a little bit and you can sort of sow discord and you can ask piercing questions. And, you know, it's a very easy thing to do, especially in agency land. It's very easy to rubbish and other agencies work or to point out flaws or because ultimately what a lot of business owners don't do is, is sort of invest the time and maybe they don't have the time, but they don't invest the time in sort of understanding what an agency is really doing. So it's very easy for someone else to come along and say, oh, they've done that wrong and they haven't done this and they haven't done the other thing.

And yeah. And do you think it's fair to say that we tend not to take that approach?

I don't think we've ever really taken that approach.

I don't think it's I don't think it's good business. No. You know, you can you can certainly like, say, like we can improve, we can definitely improve the situation in and this is what we'll do rather than like say, you know, well, because of fourteen years of Tory mismanagement.

But again, you know, back to the signaling thing there. I think this is very like the, the warning that people give to people who, um, get with cheaters, isn't it? It's like if you, if you help somebody to cheat on their spouse with you, you can never really trust them in that relationship because you know, they're going to be prone to the same approach again. And I think if what you signal is that you're sort of the kind of agency that sneaks around behind the scenes and points out flaws in people's work, and that is always going to be even if the client says, okay, fine, I'll come with you, I'll give you a shot. Their impression of you is always going to be that you're that sort of sneaky, underhand agency. Um, and I don't think that's a particularly good footing to be on.

I don't either. I mean, I, I to be honest, I think, I think you have to be kind of desperate if your, if your approach is to Rubbish what somebody else has done to try and um try and what is, what's the word I'm looking for?

Well I guess like, well I don't know, persuade people to ditch their agency.

That's a lot of words. That's not a word. I could have used a lot of words. I just said words. And eventually my point would have got across. I was looking for the word.

It's the shotgun approach. Yeah, but no, I mean, I think there's enough there's enough companies out there who know their marketing is rubbish and desperately want to improve it, that you don't have to go sniffing around for that sort of thing.

Yeah.

Yeah, I'm sure this happens in all industries. I'm sure even in aerospace, there are people running around behind the scenes and saying, oh, I could undercut so and so by X percent and provide these parts at half the price.

And so that got me thinking. That got me thinking or that has just got me thinking. Um, so we've got, um, we've got a few opportunities which are, you know, the, it's out with the client at the moment for them to sort of decide, you know, like there was the, you know, the organisation engineering company down in um, Yorkshire, and they narrowed it down to three agencies, us being one of them. We went to see them. We've given them a excuse me, a proposal and then we've heard nothing for quite some time. Um is it possible that they think we're not interested because I haven't badgered them and said, how's it going? Do you need any more information? Because my, my approach with these things is invariably to make sure everybody make sure that the, the prospect has got all the information that they need and then leave well alone. I just tend to do that. I'm not sure if that's right, because, you know, I think about like organisations that try and flog us stuff. And I guess that's the difference. The try and flog us stuff. We're not trying to flog them anything. We're trying to help them evaluate whether or not we're a good fit for them and whether they think we can do a good job for them.

But this is the problem with all of this sort of communications, and I think it's all communications in general sort of fall into this trap, don't they? A sales person listening to this will be like, oh my God, you didn't follow them up after three days, and then nine days and then twelve days. But but but like, they'll forget that you exist or, you know, and then to which your reply would probably be, well, if they forget we exist, we don't care about them in the first place. But it is like any communications, everybody can interpret the behavior in their own way, and you can't predict how people are going to interpret the behavior. Right. So you're in a sort of weird black box situation where if you reach out, they might think you're desperate. If you don't reach out, they might think.

You're not interested.

Yeah. And you can't predict that. So all you can really do is, I guess, just be consistent and sort of pick a pick a strategy.

And my strategy is just, and I hope it isn't construed as, you know, can't be bothered, can't be bothered following up. Isn't that interested.

But I'm sure it will be occasionally for sure. It's just that, like I say, maybe yeah.

Depending on how they operate, maybe they operate. I think like we'll send a proposal out three days later. We'll ask for an update. Five days after that, we'll ask for another update. And that's how they do things. And they're like bemused that you're not doing the same. Maybe.

I guess the thing is with most institutions is that they sort of believe in whatever culture they have. So if they're the kind of organisation that's chasing up all of their potential clients every three days and you don't, they'll be like, oh, well, they clearly can't be bothered. But if they are slightly more grown up, then yeah.

Yeah. Speaking about can't be bothered, couldn't be asked.

Couldn't be.

Asked, couldn't be asked. A couple of examples recently. Um, I think it's important. You know, when we work with, with customers, we can control the process of customer acquisition up to a point. And we are trying to get them in front of people digitally. We're trying to you know what? I'm going to trying to make sure that we put something compelling in front of people who arrive from search or paid search or social or wherever. And then, you know, data goes into a CRM, somebody's pinged to say, this person is interested, um, has made an enquiry. Um, what you do next is so, so important. And a couple is a couple of examples for you. So as you know, Karen and I are renovating a cottage at the moment. Uh, the plan is to rent it out as a holiday cottage. So we're looking at holiday cottages dot co dot UK, cottages dot com, Airbnb, all of these things.

Triggering a lot of people.

Two pals, two pals of mine. Why?

Well, because you've not given your home away to some first time wannabe homeowners.

No. You know. Well, yeah. Just full disclosure, the only reason we bought this cottage is we share a driveway with it. And. And it should never have been a standalone property. But through some mistake in the past, it finished up as a separate property. And if you looked at it, if you saw it, you'd be like, well, that's kind of in your garden, what the hell's going on there? And that's the reason we've done it. If it had been next door to us, we wouldn't have bought it. We had no aspirations.

To doing very glib. I'm just pointing out.

No, I know, I.

Know.

You make a valid point because I've always been. Yeah, I've always been. I've always been quite vocal in the whole like, yeah, I've got some spare money. So I'm going to buy four terraced houses and, you know, rent them out at five hundred quid a month. You know, I think there is a problem in this country with with the way that we that property is owned and everything else. I've got I've got an issue with it and I can I would, you know, take the criticism that we've got this place. Um, and, you know, it's, it's, uh, it's a house that would be, you know, it's tiny, but I mean, somebody could certainly live in it. But, but that would mean that we're, you know, sharing it by jowl with, um, with somebody else. And we don't want that. So, um, so anyway, we're in this situation, so on one of the companies is, uh, you know, I spoke to some pals who've got, who've got properties, holiday holiday rentals, and they said they use cottages dot com. So I've got two cottages dot com. So you go to the website and it's full of like, oh yeah, we can do this for you. We can do that for you. We can manage it for you. It's less hassle. It's great for busy people because you can just do it yourself on Airbnb and manage the whole process yourself. So we've got cottages dot com. So it promises just to kind of wrap its arms around you. Great. Fill the form in immediately. Almost got a call, you know. Yeah. We'd like to come and see the property. We can give you an estimate, and then we can discuss when it's going to be ready because we're renovating it at the moment. And, and it's all kind of, you know, really upbeat and great. So and made an appointment, you know, I ping Karen. Yeah, this guy's going to come on Thursday at ten o'clock and he's going to come and see it and give us any advice, any thoughts as we finish the renovation off, etc.. But he immediately canceled the meeting. This was done by somebody else. It was he was he was based down in Perth or somewhere. Um, and so he immediately that's Perth in Scotland for our international listener. Um, he immediately, uh, cancelled the appointment and changed it at a time that suited him to a foreign appointment, just a telephone appointment, at which point I cancelled it and said, I'll get back to you later, mate. Yeah. Now, the irony is we'll probably will go back to them because I believe they're quite good. But the whole user experience for me was just.

Like tarnished by the salesperson.

That's all the work. And the only way I could describe it. Um, hopefully they'll redeem themselves. And the second example is I'm a member of the Caravan and Motorhome Club because we've got a, you know, a modest motorhome. And there's a thing that they have called HCL certified location sites, five pitches. Farmers set them up, people with a bit of spare land set them up. It's just like you can park there, you can plug into that electricity and you can get your water from that tap over there in the corner of the field. It's really kind of low rent stuff, very simple. And we were looking at maybe putting one up at the golf club because there's, there's some land up there and the golf club, um, would generate good income for the golf club, um, which needs, you know, needs it needs a solid revenue for, to make the club viable. So I contacted the caravan and motorhome club and again, sort of web pages kind of enticing you. It's this and it's that and, and then you actually contact them and say, well, you know, just, just, you know, ask some basic questions. And it was all kind of like, well, that's not to do with us really. You better speak to the council about that. And yeah, you can if you need any help, just give us a shout. But, um, yeah, so the information's on the website. Good luck with it, by the way. You know, it's just like awful.

Absolutely. So this whole idea.

I've just written on my notes, you know, couldn't be asked and it just fed in from whatever we were just talking about previously. And I can't remember what that is. And I can't be arsed even thinking about what it was, but.

Wah wah wah. Um.

Yeah. I mean, you know, the whole idea that you can and people talk about brand voice a lot. They talk about brand values, the idea that you can invest a lot of money on your website, sort of signaling really positive things, you know, being like, yeah, we'll take good care of you. Everything will be fantastic. And then not actually following up with that.

Immediately, not following up immediately, being lackluster.

Well, it's like as soon as a real person gets in contact with you, the experience immediately contradicts.

Is that the weakness?

Read well.

As soon as real people get involved.

I think unfortunately, yeah.

It can go one way or the other. You can speak to somebody who's just knocks it out the park, and you really feel like they're wrapping their arms around you and looking after you and others who are just phoning it in.

Yeah. And if that guy had turned up on Thursday, you would have never quit. You know what I mean? Like, if he'd followed through on the promise that the website made, you'd have an entirely different story to tell about cottages dot com or whatever it was. Um, and I think, you know, I see this even with some of our clients and I'll be very careful to obscure here, but, you know, even they see all the time stuff going into the CRM and it takes sort of four or five days for somebody to get back to them or they get back to them in a really half assed way. And we can set up a call if you want, you know? Yeah, just just ping me your details. And it's like, you know, you can it's frustrating as a marketer because you spend a lot of time setting up this sort of like, uh, ethos, this atmosphere, this idea of what it's going to be like to interact with this company. And then it's not sort of borne out by people's first contact. And I think that immediately destroys any chance of changing somebody's sort of first impression later. Um, well.

We live in a world where immediacy, whether you think it's a good thing or a bad thing is a thing.

Yeah, absolutely.

If I'm buying something on Amazon, then I'll click the little prime button. I don't want to know about somebody that's going to deliver something in two days. It arrives tomorrow. Or you don't get my business. Totally unreasonable, a completely ridiculous. But that is the world we live in. So from personal experience, the number of times I've lost count, the number of times I've contacted somebody who's sent an enquiry in and they have, the first thing they've said is, oh, wow, thanks for getting back to me so quickly. I really appreciate that. Some people have even gone so far as to say, thanks for getting back to me so quickly. You're now top of the pile, you know what I mean? Because I've actually you're the third person we've contacted, and you're the only one who's actually bothered to get back to us. So we make a point of getting back to people quickly.

You do. And it's an interesting thing because when I first joined, it was one of the things that really stuck stuck out to me because I think prior to being here, I'd always sort of believed that agencies that could get back to people quickly same day, especially like because it's often you that responds to emails, right? And you're the managing director. And I thought, oh, that's grandiose title. That's, uh, that's a sort of positioning, a messaging problem. What we're saying to.

People is, can they be if the MD can get back to me within five minutes.

We've got spare time. You know, we don't employ someone specialised to do this. I'm sitting there monitoring the inbox because I really want the work. But one of the things I think is really interesting is the feedback that we actually get from people all the time is, oh, thanks for being so responsive. Oh, it's really nice to work with people who are responsive. And I guess it's that thing where if you sort of assume how people are going to respond to something like that, you can make a tit of yourself.

Yeah, but we lost a bit of work recently because when, when they put us on the spot and said, how long is this going to take? I said, well, six to eight weeks. And they were just like, you couldn't possibly do this work. I've done this. I've built ten websites in my career and it never takes six to eight weeks. You must be.

Yeah, like I've.

Worked with clowns.

Up until now. And yeah, I don't.

Believe it up till now. And I refuse to work with somebody competent.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I can also see why somebody who's had an absolutely terrible time with cars wouldn't believe when somebody said, oh yeah, you know, your Lexus will last for fifteen years, I get it. But again, we're just back to the fact that you can't predict how people are going to respond and what we meant to do in that situation lie overegg it. I mean, it's just, yeah, you're trapped ultimately, aren't you?

Speaking about getting back to people, I had a thing a couple of weeks ago. I think I shared it with you where somebody said to me, oh, did you not get my message on Saturday? I was like, no. And I looked at my voicemail and for some reason or two, in their wisdom, had decided to put a password on my voicemail or forced me to set a password up or something. Anyway, it just said, you need to set a password up. Oh, right. Okay. So I did it and then immediately got about ten voicemails that had been left that they hadn't told me about, uh, including, I think one from a, from a client that was nearly four or five days old. And one more importantly, actually one from a potential, um, metal detecting permission that they must have thought I'd lost interest, which is rather annoying. Anyway, so yeah, so this, the whole, the whole voicemail thing. Um, kind of, um, yeah, it kind of irritated me because yeah, it was, uh, it was exactly that thing where I, I kind of do tend to get back to people quite quickly. You do? Because I kind of like that myself, I suppose. But I guess it depends. You're right. Some people you know, manana, manana, you know, and they'll be quite happy if you get back to them in three or four days and wouldn't think any any better or worse of you, irrespective of whether it's three or four days or three or four hours.

Yeah. I suppose you're back to the whole sort of like dating thing, isn't it? People like people who are like them. And I guess that's the same for any sort of communication style. And if you're sort of on it hot to trot and they're like, oh, I wanted a couple of weeks to think about this and like bounce ideas around and it's just not gonna work out.

I do think like, you know, you can automate responses. Obviously we tend not to do that, you know, like we received your email. Thanks very much. We'll be in touch as soon as possible. I just well.

That feels really disingenuous to me.

Really lazy.

I complained about something quite recently. I think it was off.

I can't imagine you complaining about everything. You're so happy go lucky.

I love a complaint. You know, I'd love to, I don't I don't get angry very often, but I love a strongly worded email.

Oh, is your keyboard warrior, ladies and gentlemen.

I think it was Ofcom.

The worst kind of warrior.

Was it Ofcom or off what the energy regulator was off what? The energy regulator really irked me because I sent them an email and I was like, uh, complain, complain, complain. Got the automated response. It was like, somebody will attend to you within three days. I was like, cool, sick for days past livid. I was like, where is this email? I don't promise something and then not.

Deliver it automatically. Promise something you'll never deliver. That's that's never going to, I guess, with them every everybody who contacts them. It's a complaint pretty much, isn't it? And they just can't be arsed. Must be an.

Absolutely thankless job. Yeah. But still, I mean, you know, just back to the whole signalling thing, really, isn't it? Don't say you'll do something. I mean, overpromising and under-delivering is like, the worst thing you can ever do, I think. Really?

Um, the other way around is great.

Yeah, absolutely. If they'd said it'll be a week and then it got back to me in four days, I'd have been ecstatic.

Well, maybe last time I spoke, it was about the um getting the superfast broadband fibre to the premises. You know, I said about the word premise. Well, I got a shout, I got a shout on Friday night and it was to a lock fast premise. So we had to go and bust in to let the ambulance service into a house. And that's, that's what the shout came through on the turnout sheet lock fast premise.

Did you rattle off a quick.

I nearly didn't go. I thought, no, I'm not going. I refused to go because of the grammar in. In the turnout sheet.

I was too busy thinking about the premise to attend the premises. Yeah.

Don't get me.

Started.

That's two podcasts on the trot where we've talked about premise. We won't talk about premise anymore. I promise nearly. Oh forget it. Okay. Right. You said you had more than one thing on your list.

I was looking for an opportunity while you were talking for the last sort of five or ten minutes, because this is sort of related to what we were just talking about.

Are you looking for a way to shoehorn it in?

Yeah, that's the one. I didn't find one.

So you're just gonna start a new sub subject dong?

Well, it's sort of what we're talking about motivations and how people perceive things. And I was reading because like you, I've been on a weird sort of behavioral science sort of kick. And there's a really interesting book called The Illusion of Choice. I don't think we've ever mentioned it.

I think, yeah, I it rings a bell and I think it rings a bell. It rings a bell because you mentioned it.

I think it's by a guy called Richard Shotton.

Yes, yes.

He talks a lot in there about motivations. But one of the things that I think is really interesting, and that has been sort of challenging my thinking over the last week is this idea that, um, people don't understand their own motivations. So one of the key weaknesses in marketing is that we often guess at what's motivating people and we'll say, okay, well, we're pretty sure these people are motivated by risk or, oh, it's all financial. That's all they care about. We have to hit them there. And then the sort of the glib counterargument is, oh, why don't you just go and ask your customers, you know, why don't you go and do more audience research, market research, that sort of thing. And he has a really interesting point about this, which is that you can ask people what motivates them, and they will invariably tell you something that they think is true, but it's very rarely what actually motivates them sort of subconsciously. And he has this really interesting thing about doctors. This study that he talks about where basically they asked a load of doctors, like what makes you prescribe generics over brand name prescription medications? Like what's the difference? And they're like, oh, it's evidence based. I review the evidence and I decide on whether or not the generics are as safe, as effective as the brand names. And if they are, then I'll then I'll recommend them. And he said, cool. That's like, you know, that's a really good feedback. And then they ran a test where basically in the prescribing forms, they prescribe medications on a drop down. So they'll click a drop down and it'll come up with a list of all the possible medications that fit the bill. And the brand names are at the top. So they did a test on fifty percent of the doctors where they switched it. So the generics were at the top. And then suddenly ninety eight percent of the doctors in the tests group are prescribing the generics over like thirty percent in the other group. And they weren't really motivated by whether they thought the generics were safer than the brand name medicines at all. They were motivated by how quick it was to select them on the dropdown list.

That is incredible, isn't it?

And he's like, you know, you ask them and they'll say, oh, it's all evidence based. It's based on what I've read about the subject. In reality, they're trying to get through their day a bit quicker. They're pretty sure all the medicines are safe enough.

Yeah.

Or they wouldn't be on the list. So they just pick whichever ones closest. And it's that sort of thing that I think is, is, is sort of, you know, you sit down and you're writing copy for somebody and you think, right, I've really got to drill down into what motivates this customer. And it's like, you know, the things that you think motivate people just often don't really matter that much. And you can, you know, get to a certain point where they're satisfied that pretty much all of the different services or products that they're choosing between satisfy the basic need. And then you're just down to things like convenience or how it makes them feel or that sort of thing. And I just thought it was really interesting because it's not I mean, there's no answer for it. You know, there's no real way to sort of extract what people subconsciously want. But it's that whole idea that you shouldn't really just assume, and you certainly shouldn't take people at face value when they tell you what motivates them.

Yeah. In other words, there are so many variables at play when we do what we do. It's no wonder that we spend a lot of time trying things, and then when they work, we do more of them. And when they don't work, we stop doing them.

Yeah.

Effectively, rather than anything more scientific than that.

I think so, and I think that's the whole the power of just sort of testing different ideas and different theories until you land on something that works because you can't guess it, you can't know it. So you have to sort of experiment until you get there. And he has a really interesting point about this, which is that like, fundamentally the instinct that man has spent sort of hundreds of thousands of years sort of honing is, is the instinct for preservation and safety primarily, often social cohesion is a part of that. As in, you want to be liked, you want to be loved, you want to be surrounded by people that think like you do. And then after that, everything else is a little bit of a crapshoot. So fantastic if you know your product is the safest or the one that's most likely to insulate them from risk, but otherwise you're sort of a bit in the dark and you have to just sort of bash your way to the the answer.

Remember I mentioned that that nudge podcast, which I like the podcast itself and the episode with Tom Goodwin, where, you know, ninety nine point nine percent of adverts are crap. Um, and he talks about along those lines in that, you know, he said, how do you, he said, we're obsessed. We're in an era obsessed and an age obsessed with data and knowing things and basing everything we do on what we know. But he said, look, you know, how can you, you know, how can you know what the ROI is of a nice office or a, or a beautiful website or a, or how can you know what the ROI is of wearing nice clothes to the office? There's loads of things that we do in business where we don't really know what the ROI is, but we just have a hunch that it probably doesn't hurt. Sort of thing.

Yeah, I think it's a really good point. It's a really interesting point. The other thing I think is that marketers are really prone to that, that idea of like group think of like safety and doing what other people do. Um, and we've talked about this a little bit before in the podcast about messaging where the sort of default for a lot of marketers is just to do the same messaging as all the other people in that space are doing, you know, to look at competitors and think, oh, okay, because we're as sort of, um, open to that bias as anybody else, if you like, you know, we want to be safe too. We want to do something that delivers for the client and doesn't put our neck on the line, which is weird because good marketing is almost always, I think, a little bit risky. So yeah, I don't know how you wrestle that down, but.

No, no, I don't either. I guess you it's down to the relationship you have with the client and you can have these exactly, exactly this conversation and say you think it's worth taking a risk and being different to everybody else. And what do you mean? Well, how about we look at this and try. Oh, that sounds like it won't work. Or it sounds really edgy, too dangerous, too edgy for us. And then, lo and behold, you might see a competitor do something quite similar. And it and it and it takes off and does really well for them. And you're like, oh yeah, we kind of thought we might, we should have done that. Just talking about doctors. There's something interesting on the radio at the weekend. I mean, apropos of nothing with respect to digital marketing, but there was a there's an eminent physician, uh, he's now on record and was interviewed on the radio and they were talking about overdiagnosis and saying, it's actually, we're at a point now with our health services where we know that much back to what we know. We know that much about what's going on in bodies and things. And we can detect like tiny little things that are going wrong in a body. And then we diagnose them and we're turning people into patients where they might have something wrong with them, might even be a cancer. And like, it's never going to spread. It's never going to grow. It's not actually doing any harm. But you turn, you turn that person into a, into a victim, into a, into a patient, into somebody going through quite traumatic treatment and stuff like that. I mean, given that your good lady is a pediatrician, I mean, do you have any views on that? The the idea that we may be starting to get to the point in medicine where we're over diagnosing because we know so much, even though there's a lot we don't know.

I have a really strong view on this, actually. Well, we've talked.

Is it is it something you want to talk about?

Maybe I'll bare my soul. Why not? You know, I've discussed with you before the whole ADHD thing, but this again, I.

Think came up in the discussion.

We fall into this problem where, you know, and it's the same with autism and a lot of these conditions where we're talking about broad spectrum disorders. So they exist on a spectrum and lots of people sit on that spectrum somewhere.

And display.

Traits.

Traits.

And the in my mind, you know, the thing should always be when it becomes medically necessary to intervene, when it is, you know, impinging on someone's ability to lead a full life, then by all means, but what tends to happen at the moment is the barest hint of any sort of symptoms are diagnosed, and then somebody is put on a sort of medicalised pathway. They're given very specific treatment options, and they begin to think about themselves in a specific way, often as, let's say, a patient or as somebody with a medical condition, rather than just a person experiencing life. I don't think it's particularly helpful at all.

But no, I mean, a friend of Karen's was, um, uh, without going into any of the details, was, was, um, told that to have a procedure done that would be put on the waiting list. And the waiting list was just a shade over three years. It was actually communicated to them in weeks. You know, it was like three hundred. It'll be one hundred and seventy eight weeks or something until we can actually do this for you. She got it done the following week privately for thirty bob.

Yeah.

You know, our health service is in a bit of a two and eight, isn't it?

But I think again, with, you know, with doctors, I mean, one of the things that I think is really interesting is that they are also really prone to this whole risk aversion that infects everybody. We're all we're all subject to it. But there again, I think an awful lot of this overdiagnosis thing does come down to that desire to not make a mistake. Right. To to not miss something, and it's much easier to be like, oh yeah, you probably have this condition. Um, here's a treatment pathway than it is to simply be like, well, on balance of probability, I'm gonna stick my neck out and say, you're fine. Off you go. Because that's risky. It's scary. It's frightening. And I think it's, it's sort of naive to think that everybody isn't equally prone to those sort of fears.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And just a quick morne about, um, about leave forensics. We're having conversations with lead forensics and we're now introducing lead forensics to some customers where we've got some data, and we want the customer to see the data and have a, have a look at it and see whether they think they could make use of it. Um, and I again, I think I might have mentioned this last time.

About them trying to charge us or not refusing to price it for us.

That's right. Yeah.

Yeah. Well we've now got um, I've got a meeting with them this week where. Oh no, it's next week I think isn't it. I added you in I think. Is it, was it Wednesday this week. Maybe Wednesday this week. Anyway they've now booked a meeting. So once they've looked at the data and gauged how interested we are in the data. We'll see what they come back to us with with respect to pricing. I did get the pricing spectacularly wrong because I had it in my head. It was like twelve hundred quid a month or something. And because it had just gone up and up and up, whereas a little bit of digging around on the web, and it seemed to suggest that two to three hundred was kind of what you can generally negotiate unless you're getting data that's extremely useful. But yeah, I was a little bit, I just thought like being an agency, you want us to resell your product. They would have immediately come back and said, yeah, hundred quid a month for agencies, irrespective of what data you get out of it. You know, we charge you one hundred quid a month. You can learn how to use it, help you sell it for us. That'd be great. But no, none of it. They're just still cloak and dagger.

It's really interesting. I was talking to somebody who's in e-commerce over the weekend because in our last podcast, we did talk briefly about the whole pricing, whether you should or shouldn't price for things on your website. And I was having an interesting conversation with somebody over the weekend, and I don't really know whether I agree with him or not, but he was basically saying that obviously he.

Was just.

In Reddit or.

Somewhere.

No, no.

No, it's an actual conversation. Yeah.

He's in B2C, um, high volume sort of business to consumer stuff. And um, obviously, you know, we're, we're sat in a B2B world in our world, it's unusual, I think really unusual to give pricing out at the door to say this is how much we charge for these services. He made a really interesting point, which is that in B2C, pricing is a massive part of your marketing advantage, as in pricing allows you to position. And if you took the pricing away, like if nobody knew the cost of Marmite versus the cost of peanut butter, nobody would ever be able to choose which one was more valuable. Um, and that, you know, you can play with pricing as in slightly increasing it over, inflating it, deflating it in order to move your position within a market. And he was saying, it's really weird that B2B companies sort of don't understand that or don't realise that. And I don't really know if it is that simple. I don't know if you could necessarily.

I think we, you.

Know, we put prices, there are some prices on our website. We put them there more to.

You know, Ward off to ward cheap.

Yeah. People who have got budgets that we can't work with, he said diplomatically. And that's not because we're super expensive or anything else. But it doesn't matter how great your online presence is and what your client list looks like, and what your case studies look like. You still get people coming along with, with, um, you know, not not much of a budget expecting that you can maybe help them.

It's interesting though, because if you put a bunch of agencies on the shelf, um, you know, I'm thinking like local agencies around us, but you can broaden it out if you put a bunch of them on the shelf and you literally put like per hour. And I know we don't charge hourly, but if you put a per hour sort of abstracted price next to each of them, it would massively change how you thought about those agencies. I think, I think you'd be really surprised at what some of them are charging.

I imagine.

So. And yeah, I don't know. I don't really know where I sit on it. I just think it's quite an interesting idea that actually pricing is a sort of weapon to be used to your advantage, rather than something to shy.

Away, something that will come up. If that creative group that, um, that's been proposed comes together. I have said that I'm happy to be part of a.

Um, a steering group.

It's more of a not it wasn't quite steering was it? Was it? It was like. To suss out whether it was something viable or not.

Yeah, I don't know. I've always wanted to be on a steering committee.

Steering.

Committee, very grown up that like things you can only say when you're naive and young, I think. Isn't it?

Possibly. Yeah. Um, last one last week I spoke about um following on really from what I said last week, we spoke about how we are not ever in a position where we're trying to flog somebody, a website. Um, you know, we're generally speaking, if you can hear that in the background, it's just a kettle. Sorry, somebody's making a cup of tea. This is digital marketing from the coalface. As we keep reminding people, we don't try and we don't record it in a soundproof booth. Booth. Um, so this idea that we're never trying to flog people a new website, what we're trying to do is help them generate business online. And that might involve a new website or it might not. It might mean we can adapt what's there. And sometimes we know some subtle changes to what's there can make quite a big difference to the business that it generates. But, um, we all saw over the years have also come up against this situation where they've just redone their website, and they're absolutely not open to having any conversations about doing anything to their website because they've just spent a small fortune on it. And that situation is really sad because what's happened is they've been flogged, something that just isn't fit for purpose. But, but they're now wedded to it because either they like it or they're just wedded to it because they've spent a lot of money.

On it, and often they won't be able to tell.

Still not what they need.

Which of the two it is. Yeah. This jumping the gun thing that a lot of companies do. Okay, I'll go a step further. I think it's a it's a real flaw in the way people think about marketing engagements in general in that they want because they're worried that an agency is going to come in and tell them how to position themselves, how to brand themselves, what to say, what to do. They will try to preempt the agency by doing all of this groundwork. And we've seen it recently. We've been in a couple of discoveries fairly recently where people like, don't worry, we've done all this. We spent the last three months figuring this out internally, and now we've decided that this is what we're going to do is a little bit like me offshoring all of my money into some dodgy Seychelles bank account and then going to financial advisor.

This is a dodgy no.

I'm saying that if I put all my money in an offshore bank account and then went to a financial advisor and said, don't worry, I've already decided to hide to sequester all my money, but I want you to figure out how to not, you know, I'm not going to get sent to prison, you know, make sure I've done everything properly. You know, it's this weird thing where, like, because they're so nervous and twitchy, they just spend all of this time and it is often running in circles. Like, let's be honest, because if you had the capability to work out how you should brand your company, how you should position it, what the website should look like, what the website needs to contain, what it needs to say. You wouldn't need a marketing agency. That strategic Thinking bit isn't something that's going to be sort of foisted on you for fun. It's because it's really hard and it needs to be done properly.

Is that because people still think about marketing in terms of being the colouring in department?

Yeah.

Julie mentions that quite a lot.

Or like there's just this innate bias that says like, oh, well, if I'm a successful businessman, of course I know how to market my company. Of course I know what a tagline should be. And our slogan should be and our logo should look like, and this is the feel that I want to put across. And there's something deeply personal about it for a lot of people when they're really shouldn't be like, it's just a business decision in the same way that pricing is a business decision, or you know, how many product lines you have as a business decision. Try that again. Business decision. But yeah, I don't know. It's really strange and it's very frustrating. I am getting increasingly frustrated with it because the amount of times you have to tell people, well, you've wasted your time or you're about to waste a ton of time. Don't you know, let us be involved. And it's not an arrogance thing. It's not like we have to have our say. It's just that ultimately we'll spend a lot of time and a lot of their money sort of unpicking the mistake instead of just getting it right the first time.

Okay, so the takeaway is, um, you know, find it, find an agency that you can really trust.

Yeah.

And then you know that they're not just trying to generate some business for themselves and, um, you know, redo something that you've just redone just for the sake of it.

But, and introduce them early in the process. And don't be afraid of, you know, I think we'd much prefer, for example, to be involved on a sort of consultative basis prior to an engagement, you know, even if you're going to have three months of internal meetings to decide on something and then build your new website or whatever, by all means bring somebody in right at the beginning of that process and just say to them, you know, when, when the website comes across the line, you'll get it. But we want you to be involved early on because otherwise you can't. Yeah. I don't know, you just can't really help people unpick things properly otherwise.

Mhm. Mhm.

Well.

Enough of this crap that's pretty dull this week.

I think. Well that's. You're selling it.

It's been alright, I suppose. Hopefully there's little bits of it have been interesting. Um you've been listening to Digital Marketing From The Coalface with me, Dave Robinson and my colleague Alex Bussey. If you thought this was moderately tolerable, um, please feel free to tell somebody you don't like about it so they can be moderately bored as well.

Right. That's enough of you. Stop it.

I actually enjoy doing it. I mean, you know, I still I still enjoyed the podcast. I just think it wasn't quite as lively as last one. I quite enjoyed the last one. Yeah. Oh, by the way, if you listen to the last one and you did get to thirty four minutes and a bit and it stopped. If you read, if you reload it now, you'll get the whole thing. We've fixed it.

I'm sure everybody will rush to do that.

Well, yeah, I should, I did mention it at the start didn't it. So it's fine, you know, because like I say, fifty three minutes into this one, nobody's listening anymore, are they? No, no. If you are, let us know. Okay.

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