Stop Selling "Solutions": Should Engineers Run Your Marketing? Bridging the Technical-Marketing Divide – Episode 165

I got an email today from a company and three paragraphs, and I still had absolutely no idea what they were telling me. I just couldn't understand it. They just didn't explain it at all. It was too much. You know, we'll solve problems and blah, blah, blah. But like what problems?

The engineering companies, the tech companies that we work with, industrial companies, they can almost be too far the other way. We can do welding, we can build things together. We can design things that are safe, buy from us.

You get quite a lot of them go global solutions to world class problems or something you like, right? That really helps. What sort of problems are you solving? What sort of solutions can you give me? You know, they sometimes just, you know, the word solutions. Yeah. Absolute no, no. The word solutions is when you put in if you can't think of another word.

Right. Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Podcast.

No, you've done it again.

Digital Marketing From The Coalface.

Started really well.

Yes. I'm drinking my, um, very something.

It's supposed to energise you or make your brain sharp.

It's an innocent right. Who are a B corp? It's like a B Corp. Me drinking another B Corp's product.

Like it? Yes. Very good. Very on brand.

I immediately feel more virtuous.

Right. Excellent. And, um, so what's the podcast called?

The podcast is called Digital Marketing From The Coalface, brought to you by B Corp, Red evolution B Corp. Did I mention we're a B Corp.

No no no. What are we are we a B Corp?

We haven't really leaned into telling the world about being B Corp, have we? Other than now.

We've mentioned it. I mean we we talk about I.

Went to that thing at the Scottish Parliament.

Yeah.

Holyrood I was quite I quite liked it when I went there.

You like mixing with other B Corp people? Or did you.

Like the building? I like the building.

Yeah, and I thought.

I got to be honest. Confession time. I thought I'd quite like to be an MP.

You've mentioned this twice in a week. Now this is quite worrying.

It's not going to happen obviously. But I mean, I you know, the funny thing is, I mean I know we're kind of going off a bit of a tangent here.

As.

We all continue. Yeah, we always assume. I've always assumed. Right. Because I'm a working class bloke, you know, life's good because of where I am in life now that.

You don't count as working class anymore.

See, I think it's where you're from. You don't change just because you get a few bob and get a nice house doesn't mean you're not working class. Anyway.

Anyway. Anyway, we could have this conversation another time, I don't agree.

I know you don't. I know, but you're a middle class lass who just basically had everything handed to her on a plate, and I had to work really hard for everything I got. Don't you dare say that didn't happen.

Violence.

So, um, but I was I actually did a phone in once. Or rather, I phoned in to LBC James O'Brien, who's a bit Marmite. Bryant. James O'Brien as a presenter. Obviously he's a bit you know, he's a shock jock. He's there to annoy people and get them to phone in and rant. When I he was talking about he was talking about class and working class and all the rest of it. And it was funny because I said, well, you know, I just as a matter of fact, I was telling him about, you know, how I'd got to where I am now sort of thing in a roundabout way. But I'd said, you know, I left school at sixteen and served my apprenticeship in the shipyard. And as I said, you know, I left school at sixteen. He kind of went, oh, you know, I feel for you, mate. Oh it's awful.

I was like.

What are you talking about, you moron? I mean, it was brilliant. I mean, I served my time in the shipyard. I did four years of night school and did qualifications and had a great time. It was a solid foundation. Yeah, but what I was trying to relate to him is I think the thing about being working class, which almost in my view, defines being working class, is that you're wracked with self-doubt. Now I know that not working class, non-working class people can be wracked with.

I don't think it's exclusive.

It isn't exclusive, but I think I think it's particularly prevalent, if you like, which is not a very working class word. I think it's very particularly prevalent.

So it's prevalent.

I think it's prevalent in in working class people. When I moved to Aberdeen in about nineteen ninety ish, for whatever reason, the first people I started meeting outside work were people who were very definitely not working class, who had very definitely, you know, middle class, maybe even, you know, I don't know, upper middle class, whatever, you know, their parents had a few quid. Yeah. And they just had a kind of confidence about them that I never had. And it really struck me. And I think that's the thing that I think if you're I think working class people can suffer from this kind of, you know, the easiest way to describe it is when the business was in its early days, and I might be sat in a boardroom of a big company because we'd gone there to because we're working with them or whatever. And I just expected at any point, someone would like, what the what's he doing here? Get out of. Get out! What are you doing? You know what I mean? Like, oh, I've been found out. I'm just a busker, you know? And I did, like, one of my pals I met Louisa, I mean, she was very definitely middle class and and, um, from middle class family and, you know, but she kind of said, yeah, that whole kind of feeling that you're busking and you're gonna. And someone's gonna find you out.

She imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome. Thank you. Yeah. But I think, I think a lot of people feel that. And I think I think women feel that as well because, um, you know, you should. Should we edit that bit out? Leslie. Yes, yes. She's going. Yes.

Um, I dare you not to.

I think, you know, I've found myself in situations where, like, I'm in a big boardroom full of blokes in suits and I'm the only woman there and probably at the time was quite a lot younger than them and feeling like, you know, really out of my depth. And you kind of either have to go with the shut up and keep quiet or really thump the table sort of option to to make an impact. And it is, it's weird sort of feeling like the, the different one in the room. And I don't think it matters if it's like, because you're working class or because you're female or whatever it is, but I think it is a strange situation to be in. And that can lead to imposter syndrome. If you feel like you're not the same as everyone else in the room.

I agree with you. And the thing is, you know, I started learning to play the drums when I was eight and I played the drums my whole life. And I play in a band and I play the drums and I sing and I talk to the audience, and I'm perfectly happy doing that. You want me to stand up in front of five hundred people and speak? Yeah, I'll do that, I don't care. I was at Robert Gordon's last week doing a guest lecture. It's only a small group of students, but you know. Yeah, just do it. No problem at all. So it's not like I lack confidence, but I definitely suffer from from imposter syndrome. And that's like kind of the main reason why I sort of think to myself, you know, when I think about being an MP, I sort of think, yeah, but people like me don't become MPs. And then we.

Look at a woman from the Green Party, you know.

Well, yeah. I mean, there's all sorts of reasons why the Greens would have wanted would have won that particular seat.

But it means that, you know, there are people I actually.

Think I mean, we're talking we're talking like very seriously about the potential of Angela Rayner becoming the prime minister. Yeah. You know what I mean? Who left school at sixteen or had a kid at sixteen and just very much from a council estate and all the rest of it. I don't personally think it would be a good idea if she was prime minister. I don't think she's got the experience.

Or.

The background.

But she also has experience of what a lot of the normal people in the country are going through, whereas all the people that are politicians who have come from these, like, you know, really posh schools and things, they have absolutely no idea what the rest of us are going through. So people who are just normal, it would be better if there was more normal people as politicians. I'm not saying you're a normal person or that you should be a politician, but in general I think more so.

It is people like you and people like me that become politicians just to go, actually, I want to go and try and make a difference.

People who have done normal jobs and raised families or, you know, just, you know, made their way up the career ladder or whatever it is and have just, you know, experienced a normal way of living and can see what the issues are rather than somebody who thinks they might know what the issues are but are looking at it from a distance, it surely makes more sense.

A counsellor once and she said that she was talking to somebody who'd just done their PPE, politics, philosophy and.

Economics, something like.

That. And they were like, I don't know, twenty one or something like that. And they just wanted they wanted to be prime minister. That was it. At twenty one, they wanted to be prime minister. And she was saying, well, you know, why not go out and get ten, fifteen years experience and run a business, be work for a business, do something, have a family, whatever.

Experience.

Something, come back to it then, you know, but no, no, just absolute nonsense.

You've got to have have had some problems so that you can see what problems need solving.

You know, the only problem is that if I did, I would have to stand as an independent because I couldn't align myself with.

Any of the parties.

I know I really couldn't.

Absolutely couldn't make your own party. And then, you know.

Dave.

I'm sure there must be more Uncle Dave before. Yeah.

Anyway, um, I don't know really how that relates to, um digital marketing.

Absolutely.

No it doesn't, but you know, we come into these podcasts, um well you come prepared, I come totally, completely.

Blank.

Totally.

Unprepared in front.

Of him. Me and Alex used to do the same thing. We used to kind of come in and like, sometimes I'd have a couple of bullet points. Sometimes it was a completely blank piece of paper, and we kind of stare at each other. And then suddenly you start talking. And the part of the reason I have, I say that stuff I've just gone through and just rambled on about nothing is sometimes it kind of causes us to move into something. Yeah, that is sort of relevant, I suppose. I guess. Um, that hasn't, but he was worth a try.

But we were talking about, you know, solving problems and being out there trying to understand what the problems are and solve them and look just like marketing.

Just like.

Marketing, just like marketing. I had one actually maybe slightly related, but it's actually not particularly related. But we could probably shoehorn it in. Um, the thing you're selling compared to what? The thing that people are buying. Okay. Um, you know, you're selling a drill, but people are actually buying a hole or you're selling a shovel.

That's not been debunked. Hasn't somebody come up with a theory where that's nonsense? I mean, I think it makes perfect sense.

It makes sense to me. I mean, it's more to do with think about how you're communicating the thing that you sell. It's back to what we were saying about like being led by marketing and being led by engineers. You know, we've got this thing that does, um, goes at seven hundred miles an hour and whizzes around, you're like, no, but I just want a hole in the ground, you know?

And well, if you pick that apart, you know, when you buy a drill, they don't want a drill. They want a hole in the wall. But when they went to hole in the wall, they don't want a hole in the wall. They want the screw that goes into the hole in the wall. And they don't want the screw that goes into the hole in the wall. They want the picture that hangs on the screw to be on the wall there. Now, I have no idea whether you could unpick that and make anything from it, but maybe that's what the person was driving at who said.

Oh no.

It's not true that it's it's.

Not what you.

Want either. You know, kind of thing.

True. Yeah. Ultimately, I want a picture on the wall.

But it is good that because it directly relates to to the work that we do. Yeah. Getting to the the essence of what people actually want. Yeah. Like, for example, if you're an engineering company, do they want the fact that you've got, you know, Asme nine welders and you've got, you know, pipe fitters who have worked with, you know, Inconel flanges and they can do all of everything that you need to do. And they know how to like repair valves or do they just really want a safe pair of hands because like, you should be able to do all that stuff anyway. If you're, if you're even in the room, you should be able to do it to the right cord of welding. You should be able to do your guys and, and girls should be able to bolt things together safely and repair things and do all that. It's whether do I actually believe you? And it's like, are you the safe pair of hands? Because that's, that's kind of a concept, I think that we try and communicate to our clients.

Totally.

There are there are plenty of agencies out there who are shinier than us. And there are agencies out there who've, you know, got a lot more money than we have, wherever it comes from, in order to try and, you know, build an agency and make it look like they're all things. But ultimately, you know, we've always kind of traded on the fact that we'll own problems, we'll fix problems, we'll come up with great solutions, we'll generate great, you know, messaging or content, you know, like we are a safe pair of hands.

And we know what we.

Communicate that reasonably.

Well, do it properly. We're not going to just wing it and, you know, leave you in, in a mess. We'll, we'll get things done and, and sort them out.

So sorry. What were you.

Saying. Yeah. Yeah. About the, the speed and the whole thing. But um, I think that leads on to the thing you were saying about being a safe pair of heart. You don't really need to spell out everything you do. Sometimes it's just like, you know, are these the sort of people that obviously are going to be able to do that? I was just rewording working with one of our developers and sort of rewording a bit of text at the top of a page, and he was going, it's too long, you know, can you cut that down into a few little bullet points? And I was sort of looking at it going, well, you know that bit there. People are people are gonna think that I don't think we need to spell that out. It said later on that's, you know, you're going to look at this, this company and think, well, you know, obviously they're going to have like a choice of sizes. I don't think we need to say that up front. That's trying to distill the the things that are important to say and the things that people will expect you to have. And they'll just maybe check that at the end. And it's trying to understand, you know, what, what the important bits are and prioritise.

Yeah. Agreed. And I think if you're not constantly reviewing that and thinking about that, when you run a business or when you market a business, if you work for a business, then you're not doing your job properly. Because, because we are certainly doing that all the time. Yeah, I'm playing around with, I decided to, um, turn on some PPC again for one of our services. And I played around with the, with the wording first I need to change the presentation of it. And Amy's just done, you know, created a module for me so I can put still, you know, still images in banners so I can play around with it with some of this stuff. But I noticed the PPC clicks have started coming in and they just seem to be hanging around a bit longer. They just seem to be staying on it a bit longer because the message I think now resonates better. Yeah, because it seems I think it's addressing the thing that they're the problem that they're trying to solve. Because, you know, I've certainly been guilty of going, you know, round, round in circles with it almost. You go from like saying like, we do this thing really well, if you want this thing, buy it from us to like something that's more ethereal and a bit more, you know, like wishy washy and a bit, it's.

Difficult to find the balance with that being like, you know, here's a list of like features and, um, people arriving on the page and going, well, I still don't know what you do. I got an email today from a, from a company and three paragraphs and I still had absolutely no idea what they were telling me.

I'm assuming paragraph four didn't even get read.

That there weren't.

What I mean is, you get that far on oh, to hell.

I just couldn't understand it. Uh, really? No. Still have no idea what it was they were trying to sell me, so I just deleted it. You know, it's way too hard. And even if it had been of interest, they just didn't explain it at all. It was too much. You know, we'll solve problems and blah, blah, blah, but like, what problems?

Yeah. What do you do?

Yeah, yeah. Um, so yeah, I think it's, it's a balance between, you know, just.

I think.

The obvious.

The engineering companies, the tech companies that we work with industrial companies, they can almost be too far the other way. You know, like we can do welding, we can bulk things together. We can design things that are safe, buy from us.

You get quite a lot of them go, um, global solutions to world class problems or something you like. Right? That really helps. What sort of problems are you solving? What sort of solutions can you give me? You know, they sometimes just, you know, the word solutions.

Yeah.

Absolute no, no. This word solutions is when you put in if you can't think of another word.

I've repeated this many times in this podcast.

Yeah.

Haven't you know what I'm going to say. Tesco. No, no. Tesco had an aisle and in the aisle the thing said Meal Solutions and that's it. The word solutions is now dead. Yeah, I've.

Been saying it for years.

I hate the word solutions. I hate the word passion because passion. Everybody's passionate, aren't they? Oh, I'm so passionate. It's like, yeah, get lost. Yeah. I just I can't be doing with it. It's just lazy.

Solutions is particularly lazy because.

It means self. Take the word passion of our homepage.

Yeah. It means it means nothing.

Nothing. It's the language that people use solutions passionate about, blah, blah, blah. We care about our customers, all of that stuff. It's what it's what people whose next idea will be their first will come up with in terms of messaging, isn't it? It really is. It's just zero effort.

I mean, I think it's always the review, the thing you've written, you just go, okay, so what?

Yeah.

So what is that of any interest to me whatsoever?

I think it's one of the best things. Yeah. I think I don't know if it was you that said it to me first or I read it somewhere first, but like, you know, look at whatever you're doing and or listen to what anyone's saying and think, right? Can I legitimately say, so what in response to that? And if you can, then it's waffle. It's pish. Yeah. Okay. Do you want to throw a subject out there because you did send some through and I know I've been, I've been blogging like a maniac.

Yeah.

And I think you've maybe picked up on some of the stuff I've been talking about, but it might be a bit dry. I mean, that's why it's in a blog, so you can just read it or listen to it. You don't have to read our blog. You can just listen.

No. Great. How exciting.

It's not even it's not even like a Dalek.

No, the voices aren't too bad. I mean, not like you've sat and read them and recorded them yourself like an audiobook, but they don't sound awful. Wouldn't it.

Be great if we could make it.

Like Donald Trump?

Make make Donald Trump read our blog posts. If I could practice my Donald Trump impersonation good enough. And if I could be then asked to read a blog post.

If you could practice it good enough.

I was listening to him. I was listening on the radio. It was honestly the stream of consciousness that comes out of his mouth is just unbelievable. So he's talking about the, you know, operation. What did he call the war?

The Iran war?

Yeah. What did he call it though? He called it epic fury, didn't he?

Did he.

It's called Operation Epic Fury.

Actually, that's not bad.

But yeah. Yeah, it was amusing.

So um, question coming from.

So it's back to boring stuff. Can't we just talk about rubbish.

It is.

Okay. Go on then.

Based on the blog post and the other podcasts, should engineers be involved in marketing or kept well away from it?

Oh, very much involved in it.

But not.

As subject matter experts.

Not in charge of it. No. No. Yeah.

Nowhere near it. And and I think that the the gigs that we enjoy the most are the gigs where the, the, the, the techies, the engineers who really know their stuff really let us do our job.

Absolutely. Yeah.

Because it's great to do it. It's, it's great when they're receptive as well, you know, because some, some engineering companies, some engineers, some people who run engineering companies will go, oh, well, you ain't put that if you want just sounds like flowery, flowery nonsense to me. But, you know, because they really don't buy the whole storytelling messaging kind of approach to business. And but yeah, I think as subject matter experts, um, if they're enthusiastic about their subject, that's a real good thing. So they very much should be involved because their enthusiasm helps us be enthusiastic about telling their story.

Yeah. So how should it work? Who should be in charge of the whole process? Us.

Well, I don't really care.

Yeah, some of them. It's tricky because some of them have like a marketing department or a marketing person that is supposed to be doing seventeen hundred jobs. Mhm. Um, which is another topic I want to speak about. Um, I.

Love it when you come with all these topics that you always do.

Somebody has to. Um, so I think it depends if they, if they've got a marketing department of any description or if the, the engineers are running the show and I think it makes a difference.

Well, yeah, you can tell one hundred from one hundred miles if an engineer is running the show from a marketing point of view, you know, you can tell straight away when you look at their website, promotional materials, listen to even if you listen to if they do podcasts, even if you do that, it'll all be very straight laced.

And do any engineers do podcasts?

Oh, I'm sure hundreds and thousands of them do podcasts. Yeah. You think? Yeah, absolutely. I would think so. People podcasts about everything that's.

Like this sort of stuff.

This rubbish.

This is.

True. But no, it's a really good subject. So did you conclude that engineers very much should be involved, but they should let also let us do our job.

Said could spark a lively back and forth between technical and marketing perspectives.

Yeah.

Mhm. But we both agree.

So let's think about some of our clients. So you know, if you think I mean, we never we try not.

To name.

Clients in. But, you know, we've got like, you know, one of our clients, huge company, billion dollar company and their head of marketing is a very capable lady who we know quite well because she's worked in lots of other businesses.

You mean.

Yeah. And she's brought us in and yeah, I mean, you know, their messaging is excellent. The way that their company is presented is excellent because the engineers, the techies let her do.

Her, her and her team, which is and her team getting bigger.

And that's.

Right. There's quite a few of them, but they also need us because even with quite a few of them, they there's bits of expertise that they don't have. Yeah. And it works quite well because we're just sort of addition to their team, so they can call on us when they need us and they can do the bits that they can do.

I tell you, what would be quite interesting would be to investigate how long marketers last at engineering companies, whether, whether, you know, because like it's quite common for people to stay a year or a couple of years and then move on. You get the outliers who've like been there since God was in short pants and they'll retire there. And, you know, but somewhere in between. Um, I just wonder, you know, what the average because I wonder if like enthusiastic marketing professionals who are very good at their job would find it just too annoying.

I think it depends on the engineers. If the engineers are, you know, there's a company that we're working with. I had a meeting with this morning. You know, they're they're all kind of techie people, but they're really, really excited and enthusiastic to get on and do the marketing kind of for the first time ever.

And they'll say things like, like, we just love working with you guys. We would never have thought of this. We could never have come up with that design, with that message, with the overall package of communications that you've put together for us. They really appreciate it. So that is just.

If you're.

A.

Marketing person working with that sort of engineers who that sort of engineers.

That's a good England.

So people like if you're working with people like that who are basically like, you know, you're the marketing expert, we're the engineering people. We want you to come up with ideas. We want you to, to find a way of doing this. And they're really open minded. And I think, you know, I think it would be a great job and you'd probably end up kind of building a department or, you know, staying for a long time. But if you're in this sort of job where they're like, no, we don't want to do that. We don't want to do that. Just let go and go make an exhibition stand and put some, put some pictures on LinkedIn. Then then you're gonna last five minutes. And that's, you know, that's completely reasonable because that's not marketing, as we may have mentioned once or twice. That's right.

Um, I think something that's worth mentioning is that, um, engineers by and large are very practical people, quite often mostly plain talking problem solvers.

Yeah.

You get some engineers like in any profession who are, you know, just dicks. But yeah, broadly speaking, problem solvers, good communicators, you know, maybe not good communicators from a marketing point of view, but good communicators in the general sense of the word. You know, case in point, as you know, I'm very much involved in trying to get a Boyne Bridge either replaced or limited use of the bridge that we've got because of the structural issues with it. And we've got, um, we called fixer Boyne Bridge Fab. Um, and we've got the fab management group, which is about sixteen seventeen people. And then we've got a subgroup which is we call the fab technical team. So we've got like some of the people from the management team are also in fab Fabtek and they are almost not quite all, but mostly engineers.

Yeah.

And sometimes we've had teams meetings, we use meet. But, you know, we've had an online meeting because one of the team is actually, you know, down in Dumfries and Galloway, which is quite, quite a stretch from where we are to come for a come up for a meeting. Um, and quite often like Karen will be in the room when I'm having the meeting and she's just listening and at the end of it she'll say, I just love listening to those conversations because she finds them interesting. Yeah. The people are trying to find practical solutions to problems. They understand the technicalities, but they can communicate those technicalities in simple language and, and the discussion, you know, it's just healthy and it's really, it's really good. And, you know, so, and I know that, you know, I know that Karen won't mind me saying this. I mean, she works a lot with engineers. Yeah. You know, she'll, she'll set up calls in order to get them to do a brain dump, for example. She absolutely loves it. She loves she loves it if they're enthusiastic. Yeah, it's all about that.

Yeah.

You know, it doesn't matter whether it's engineering or whatever it is. If you're working with people who are enthusiastic, it's always more fun.

It is. And if they're open minded and they're not going to go, well, I want to do it this way and that's it. And I'm not, you know, I don't want to listen to how you want to do it. I want to do this. And, you know, there's got to be if they're if they're working with us, they've got to be working with us for the reason that they actually value our expertise. And they're not just wanting us to do exactly what they said and put it on a website.

And this isn't because we're precious. It's not it's not because like, oh, you've hurt my feelings. You didn't agree with my idea.

It's just not it's fun.

It's just it's not much fun. You know, if, if, if you, if somebody is doing an awful job of something, but they're calling the shots and you've got no choice. You know, it's just like, why am I here? You know, like, just do it your way then.

Yeah, exactly. And it's nice if you can have a conversation. We go, we say we should do this. And they're like, well, actually this, this actually ties in with how we present ourselves better and we go, well, how about this? And, you know, you work together and find a compromise. That's brilliant. You know, just us always going, do it this way. And they go, yes. Isn't actually that interesting either. You know, a healthy working relationship where everybody's having an input and you're the sort of end result is better than what one person would have been able to produce. And that's a really nice way of working.

Yeah, I agree. What other dreary subjects have you got?

Again, slightly related, I've read a couple of things recently and basically, you know, marketing as we call it, you know, marketing, communications jobs, you know, there's, there's paid advertising, there's social media, there's content writing, there's a huge amount of different sort of skill sets in a marketing job. And a lot of these companies advertise, you know, for a marketing manager and they expect one person to be able to do all this stuff. And then they go, we couldn't find anyone. Well, no, because that's absolutely impossible. You're either going to be a generalist marketing manager with the skills to supervise an agency or a specialist who can look after the bits and pieces. But you're never going to find a marketing manager who can basically do your strategy and planning and manage everything, and also run your ads and do a bit of design and take video and edit video and everything else. There is not one person out there that can do all of that properly, and they wouldn't have time to do it anyway.

Well, two stories in relation to that. Number one, Heather. I think it's Heather Barnett on Tick Tock. Worth. Worth looking her up and she does little skits where she plays two roles.

She the B2B marketing one. Yes. The blonde lady. Yes, yes, she's absolutely brilliant.

She is very good. Yeah. I always I like to see she doesn't seem to have a massive following or anything else.

It's clever.

She's clever. She makes some really good points and um, always relatable. Yeah. It's Heather Barnett isn't it? I can't remember. I think it is. I'm pretty sure it's Heather Barnett and um, yeah, she just, she kind of just like one or two things a week it seems anyway. Yeah. But but she picks up Exactly. On what? On what.

You're saying.

Yeah, but going back to the very experienced lady who works at that company and does a fantastic job, she, I, in one of her previous roles didn't last very long because she went in as this very experienced person and they were like, great, could you do this PowerPoint for us?

Yeah.

What?

Yeah, that's exactly what I was saying. She was, she was being expected to do PowerPoint presentations and they weren't using her vast experience.

That was an engineering company as well. Needless to say, yeah it was.

Well yeah.

We don't know yet do we. Yeah. Um, an engineering company. Yeah. Who owes a lot of money.

Yeah. Yeah. It just kind of goes to show maybe. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, I think, um, you know, people, if they are trying to recruit a marketing person, they've got to kind of think, do they want somebody really experienced who can then bring in specialists to do the, the really detailed stuff? Or do they just want a junior person who can bring in maybe a more experienced agency to guide them and they do the doing. But you're not going to get somebody who can do all the strategy and is prepared to sit in color and PowerPoint presentations and do.

And this is I think this is, you know, one of the things with AI is you could get a reasonably good person leveraging AI could do an okay job across a lot of that stuff. But I think the real danger there would be like, you know, right, you're, you know, you're a marketer, you know, here's a subscription to Gemini or whatever, you know, and so we want you and the AI to do all that stuff for us now. And, you know, they're just going to probably churn out pretty awful stuff, I would imagine.

Yeah. There's only so much you can do there because you there's no original thinking involved.

Mhm. That's right. Okay. That was even duller than the first subject. What's what's the next one?

It's your turn.

I haven't got anything you know, I haven't. Oh I've got I actually wrote what I wrote down. There was a few sessions, a few podcasts where we were plugging and mentioning, uh, notebook LM yeah, quite a lot. I'm kind of stuck in a bit of a loop with notebook, and I kind of use it for almost one thing and one thing only, and that's distilling big documents into a twenty minute podcast. Um, and, you know, just, it's just like a top tip from the podcast. If you're not using notebook LM and you have to consume a lot of information and maybe somebody sent you a large document and stick it in a notebook. LM get it to create a podcast of it, and then you can listen to it in the car, on the train, out running, whatever you want. Just a really useful tool.

Yeah, I got that a new client and I was like, you know, look at their entire website and, um, tell me what they do in a little podcast and it's quite handy to upload.

Documents, get it to look at websites, get it to watch videos, you can get it to do all sorts of things. And, and it will, it will, you know, it's funny because the one I'm doing at the moment, or rather, I said to you, I think even yesterday or the day before, so I haven't used notebook, I've used it twice since then.

All right.

For distilling. Excuse me. Large documents. One of them I haven't, um. I got a thing through and it was, um, agency adoption of AI. Okay. It was one of those where you have to put your name and email address in to get the download. So I got the download and I've thrown the download in and I've got it to produce a podcast. Haven't listened to it yet, so I'm looking forward to that. And maybe that'll make a good subject for the next podcast, talking about, you know, how, how, you know, agencies are and not adopting. Apparently adoption is really low in agencies five to ten percent. Yeah, something like that.

Adoption.

Well, why.

Did they.

Listen to it or read it? You know, I give it to you if you want to read it, but I'm just going to listen to it. I'll share the album with you.

Yeah, fine. If you.

Want.

To, because.

I think there'll be some podcast stuff in.

It. I can't see that there's any agencies not using AI, but it depends what they mean by adoption. Are they meaning like to, to, to sort of do their processes or do they mean just to, to help them write stuff or it depends what, how they, how, how they define that. Yeah, no, that's a funny one because it is owned by Google. But when you go into Gemini, it's not, it's not there as sort of part of the it says, you know, Nana banana for you doing images and.

Integrates.

For videos and stuff, but it's not sitting in Gemini going, use notebook LM for this.

But you can now use, I think you can leverage Gemini with it to go out and do the research for you and then feed that back into the, into the, into the.

But yeah, just kind of forget about it because it's not sitting in Gemini. No, it, it seems to be a completely separate thing. And there's sort of some overlap and I don't know, it seems to sit out on a limb and not have a as much. I don't know, just forget about it.

You clearly don't know.

No. No idea. No idea what it's for.

But yeah, I just it's I just thought I'd give another shout out to it. There's so much more you can do with it. You can get it to create presentations and all that kind of stuff. But I'm not using it for any of that stuff.

But there are other things.

Really.

That.

Really using it quite effectively. And, and the other sort of AI related top tip is if you're using, um, if you're using Claude and you're using things like connecting it to your gmail and your calendar and HubSpot and all that kind of thing, that's fine. And there's like, there's loads of like native connectors. If you just go into the connectors.

And connected to gmail and something else.

Well, the top tip is if you want those, the MCP connections to do more. Then if you do it through Zapier. So if you use basically, you can use Zapier as the main MCP. But then on top of that you say, right. So now I've made. Now Zapier is connected to Claude using the Zapier MCP. You can then use it to, to, um, do more with gmail calendars, HubSpot and all of that. And the Zapier integration does way more simple example, if you use the native gmail, um, integration, MCP, you can't tell it to send you an email, right? You'll write it for you, but it can't actually send it and do stuff. But whereas that one can can literally just say to Claude, you know, book my calendar for this time and then send an email to the person and explain what we're going to be talking about, which is, by the way, is this, but flesh it out and it'll just go off, send the email, set the calendar thing, and just do it all for you.

Because I tried to get Gemini to do that. And it.

Just.

No, it said it was doing it. And Gemini should be able to because it is, it's supposed to be integrated. But yeah, you can use Gemini from within your gmail, but you can't really use gmail from within Gemini.

What was interesting is within the Zapier MCP, which is almost like a catch all in. And then there are eight thousand or five thousand, five thousand, five thousand apps that can talk to Claude through Zapier. MCP yeah, it's just mind blowing. It's incredible.

Like Zapier, Zapier.

Yeah, it's not cheap. I mean, you're sort of whatever.

It was to do the paid for.

Oh yeah. Yeah. I think well, yeah, I don't think you get anything with the free, but I think I pay like a couple of hundred quid a year or something and that gives me like fifteen hundred calls a month or something like that, which is not bad. I mean, it's, it's, you know, the call usage has certainly gone up because I was, I wasn't using Zapier a lot. We've used it with some offline conversion tracking and things like that, you know, putting stuff into Google spreadsheet into Google sheets and things. But, um, yeah, that was a really good one. So if you're, if you need to, um, if you want any more information, ping us, but it's dead straightforward. Just use, use the Zapier MCP, which is in beta. And then once you've done that, you just say, well, which tools do you want to actually connect to now through the Zapier MCP and yeah, really powerful.

Okay.

It seems reasonably reliable. I had one issue with it and I pinged them and they fixed it within ten minutes.

Oh really?

Yeah, it was good.

Zapier or. Yeah. Yeah. Really?

Yeah. It's good.

All right. Excellent.

Top tip.

Cool.

It's the only one you're getting.

Do you want to keep going?

Can do. Yeah.

Well, I was at a networking thing on Tuesday. Oh, yes. Um.

Flouncing around down in Edinburgh.

Absolutely. Yes. Flouncing around. Uh, I was speaking to somebody who was sort of in the training area. And we were bemoaning the fact that, um, when, when times are hard, it's marketing budgets and training budgets that get zapped first. And, um, you know, obviously investing in your people and investing in your future, um, customer, you know, outreach is quite important if times are hard, but people are like, no, I don't have any money. And, and they always cut these things first because, you know, they're, you can run the business for a short time without them. I don't really know what the, the answer is, but I think people still see them as a cost rather than, uh, you know, investing in your future.

I think you're.

Right. Or unessential.

Yeah. I think, um, I think going back to Heather Barner, I think some of her, um, TikToks have been around that subject, or maybe it was somebody else who wasn't doing kind of, you know, informative, but and, you know, hers are informative and funny skits that she does. There was somebody else who was talking about, about this. It might have been her though, thinking about it, but just just talking about how you actually know, you know, what? It might have even been Rory Sutherland talking about the actual value of marketing because it's so kind of it's so intangible a lot of the time.

You.

Know, you have no way of knowing that that next gig that we get was entirely because of something that we did with SEO or something that we did with paid search, or just the fact that somebody six months ago saw something and thought they know what they're talking about, those guys, and then they finally get in touch with you. Or it's very difficult.

And it's very unusual that it's one thing in our in our line of work. I mean, yeah, if you're like buying, you know, a new hairbrush or something, then fine. It's like one advert and you'd be, oh yeah, I'll have that. But what we're doing, you know, it's going to be an advert and you know, some content and somebody mentioning you and then a LinkedIn post and it's going to be a whole heap of stuff. And it's very difficult to sort of.

I've gone into some detail on that in some of the most recent blog posts that I've written. You know, how the, the complexity of this, like, you know, the, the, the buying cycle, if you like, which could be minimum six months, could be eighteen months in B2B and engineering and the like. It's just.

And how yeah. How do you know where that's come from and what's influenced it? Because it's kind of started from somewhere and nobody's actually going to remember where by the time they get to the end of it. Yeah. And along almost along the way, you've got so many opportunities to, to mess it up. You know, it's almost like the probability of them, them actually buying from you gets less and less and less because you, you know, you, you could easily mess it up because you forget to get back to them or they don't like what you said or the pricing or the sales guy does something wrong or, or they run out of money or they change their minds or, you know, you know, just before they're about to sign it, they get bought or there's so many opportunities for it to fall apart along the line, isn't there?

There is. It's almost like the complexity of the engineering companies that we work for, you know, the complexity of their sales process almost feeds in when they're looking at hiring us. I mean, we know we've got company I went to see just before Christmas. You know, they're not not interested. But it's now April nearly. Yeah. And they still haven't come back to me and said, right, let's get on with this now. Yeah. You know, and but you know, I do know that they haven't like gone somewhere else or they're no longer interested. It's just I don't know, in their world, things just take forever. And maybe the way their brain works.

And we've got a couple of clients who were like, well, um, we're a bit short of cash just now. We need to pause. We need to like stop doing marketing because, um, you know, we're, we're tight for cash, which yeah, you get it, but a little bit of something would be a good idea just to, because otherwise, you know, you're gonna end up with like a year down the line, a big gap because of the, all the stuff you didn't do now.

Yeah. Yeah. I remember the, uh, the French company and they were saying, you know, they were saying like, oh, you know, the leads have dried up. It's like, well, yeah, use the landing page in paid search and you turn the paid search off.

Yeah.

What did you think was going to happen? You know, I know.

That they were really confused. Why are we not getting any leads? You switched your advertising off? Yeah.

Honestly. French people.

She was a step ahead.

I knew she was waiting for me to say it, so I'll have to say it. Yeah.

She would. She would have been disappointed.

You would have?

Yeah.

Good. All right. Um, well, you know, we've waffled enough if you want or if you've got something else that's really a burning issue you want to cover before we finish.

No, I mean, that was the other one. Really. We covered it accidentally about, you know, um the length of time it takes to, to make a sale and, you know, it's very hard to prove. Was it your marketing or what caused that sale? And the longer the cycle is, the harder it is to sort of connect it with a particular event or a particular thing that you did or a number of things that you did. Yeah. Measuring in in this sort of environment is really difficult. It's much harder than than I don't know why I came up with hairbrushes but selling hairbrushes, you know, you can say, well, I can see that somebody clicked on that ad and then bought the thing. Whereas with us, somebody clicked on the ad and they maybe got in touch and then they maybe went away again, and then they maybe came back two years later. But was that because of the original ad, or had they completely forgotten? And this was someone completely different? Not necessarily even the same person. And it's really, really difficult to to get that measurement in place.

Agreed. Plans for the weekend.

Oh no. Nothing.

Nothing. I'm looking forward to the weekend. Uh, going down to Perth to see a Gregor Fisher.

Oh, yes.

And an evening with Gregor Fisher at the. What's the big one in Perth called? The Perth Concert Hall Theatre. I don't know the theatre thing. Um, so I'm looking forward to that. I think it's just an evening with. So I think it'll be, I think, I think he's probably got some lovely stories to tell and I think.

Yeah, just.

Read any reviews from the show. But it is. Yeah, it's just him chatting as far as I'm aware.

Yeah. My daughter arrives on Sunday at some point, so I may not be available for podcasting next week. Yeah. She's getting she's getting a new car.

She's picking the car up on Sunday. They open on Sunday.

Don't know when she's picking it up because the, um, the system where she has to scan her passport and then scan her face.

Why do you need a passport to buy a car?

No idea. But anyway, um.

She picking the car up from France.

And the scanning system isn't working, so therefore they can't release the car until that works. So we were going to pick it up before she got here. But anyway, the system is not working. Therefore she might have to wait until she's able to be able to see her face in person or whatever. I don't know, something weird. But anyway, she's coming up and I'm having a few days off next week and she may have to podcast with someone else.

Yes, I might do, um, the talking about things not working. I've been just so annoyed recently with tech. I love tech, said it before, I love tech and notebook LM I love notebook LM so I prepared. Put a document in. Got it to create a podcast. Great. I've got a drive down to Vancouver meeting Magnus. I'm going to listen to this podcast. About twenty twenty five minutes is the one it produced about bridges actually, and got in the car, set it playing before I started driving, set it playing off a drive, just stopped. Oh, why? No idea. So you carry on, find somewhere safe, pull in, get up, press the button, get it. Starts playing again. Great. Just a couple of minutes. Stopped again.

Was it on spot? No it wasn't. No.

No.

And then.

Coming back.

Yeah.

Put it on play. And it just played all the way. Played right through. No problem at all. Absolutely. Just worked. And I was like yeah, that's good. And the second one which annoyed me is, as you know, we all, we all use Macs and we love our Macs. And sometimes I'll have my phone there, earphones in listening to Spotify on my phone.

Yeah.

And then the earphones just go. Oh, you maxed there. I'm going to connect to your Mac instead. I know you're like, what? I'm listening to music on my phone. But anyway, if you go into your settings, you can actually tell it to only connect automatically if it connected recently. Okay. If you know, if it's only just connected, then yeah. And then it's, and it sees them again, it goes right. Connect them because I just connected to them. You can turn that off. Okay. So then when you connect your phone and then turn your Mac on, it doesn't go, oh, your Mac said, I'm going to connect to that instead. Now, even though you never asked me to.

I know.

And Alexa keeps, um, keeps misbehaving now Alexa, stop. And it's like sort of stops and then carries on.

I want. Yeah.

What are you doing?

Yeah. One was refusing to turn off last night as well. Like Alexa shut up.

Is Alexa Plus has come out. I don't know what it does. Oh I don't know what it does. Maybe it just listens more.

Yeah. Maybe like actually does what?

It's don't care if he wants to listen to my boring life. It's welcome to.

We were complaining about gmail this morning and Google.

That's right.

Yeah. Um, every, not every time. But yeah, like I was in my, in Google, in my gmail, checking my messages, everything else. And then we have a morning meeting at nine o'clock every morning. So I.

Click every morning.

Except.

Friday. Thank you.

Um, that was.

What a pedant.

That was. Detail that the listener doesn't really need to know.

That listener now just disappeared as well.

So I'm in Google and in actually the same app where the mail, the chat and the meetings are all in the same sort of Google app. So I've been in chat, I've been in email, click the meeting button. It goes, we've logged you out. So log back in. It goes, is this really you? Can you press a button on your phone to say it's you? I'm like, how could it not be me? I was literally just in my email.

An IP address, which hasn't changed since since forever in exactly the same place, exactly the same time every day, morning meetings.

Every morning. And suddenly it's like, is this really you? Well, who else is it going to be?

After the scrum? I needed to have a quick chat with Karen. She's working at home. Came down exactly the same thing, came down, put my laptop on the on the desk downstairs where we are, where we hold meetings sometimes. And it logged me out. And then I'm downstairs. My phone's upstairs. Right. Okay. You need to prove it's you and click this thing on your phone. Right. Okay. Upstairs stairs, you know, and you find that at home. You sat there and you think, right, I'm gonna do this thing, and then you start going to buy something and then Barclays or whatever will go, right. You use the app on the phone, phones, the other end of the house.

Or you're trying to just use something on the TV.

I don't live in Downton Abbey. It's not like.

It's miles away. Yeah. You working class person. It's like I had to walk for three quarters of an hour to go and get my phone from the other end of the house.

Worse than that, it was in my other house.

Yeah.

Anyway, but yeah, but tech, which I love. Yeah, just.

Sometimes it's the dumbest thing. And then sometimes it is really it's Google.

It's the biggest name I know.

And it's just really not smart.

You've got Apple CarPlay. Yeah. It's brilliant. Yeah. But sometimes it just goes, I'm not gonna I'm not gonna connect. And you're like, and then I have to go and put the radio on and then go back to it and it works. It's like, yeah, this is the biggest company in the world with four hundred billion in the bank and their stuff doesn't work properly.

So what's what hope is there for the rest of us.

For the rest of us?

We spent all morning fiddling with the orange, the shade of orange on our dashboard of our our sort of in-house management system. So yeah, there you go. Yeah.

It's nice orange now, though. Yeah. And a nice blue.

Yeah. That'll do.

That'll do I think. Yeah. We've battled on now for nearly fifty minutes. So yeah I think that's enough for Leslie. Maybe Leslie's got to listen to this show again.

Again. She edits it more than once. First of all. Yeah.

Okay. Thank you. We'll be back. Um, I'm sure I was going to sign off. Yeah. This is, uh, you know, Dave at Red evolution, who are a B Corp signing off at at the end of another Digital Marketing From The Coalface podcast.

Well done.

Bye.