We've been in that position many times where we've got customers right now, where they've got somebody who's in-house, you know, salaried person, and we're kind of helping them understand different aspects of marketing and helping them do some of the stuff so they don't have to include it in the retainer that they pay us.
Which is great. You know, pay us to do the strategy side and let somebody get on with the doing. And that's absolutely fine. On the other side of that, they could employ a very senior marketer to do the strategy and then hire an agency to do the, the doing. But you can't ask somebody to do all of it. You either need a junior person and somebody to help them with the strategy, or a senior person and somebody to do the implementation.
Okay. Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface.
You're getting better at that. That was twice in a row.
I was going to on purpose say it wrong. I was I think my favourite idea was Digital Coalface From The Podcast or something like that.
Coalface Marketing From The Digital Podcast.
Yeah, it's been running a while. What is this? We're nearly at one hundred and seventy.
one hundred and sixty, one hundred and sixty nine, maybe. Yeah. Yeah, I'm getting there.
One hundred and sixty nine episodes of drivel.
Yeah. We're just talking about how funny people falling over and walking into lampposts. And maybe we should.
Is this.
The podcast.
Equivalent of people falling over and walking into lampposts? Maybe. Could be. Um, second time this week we've sat down to record a podcast, which is good. Well, for us anyway, because we enjoy doing it.
Good for us.
Maybe not so good. Yeah. And you kind of teased for last episode on Monday. I think we recorded it. You had some kind of burning issue which you wanted to discuss.
So just thinking.
Share.
If you're an engineering company and you think you actually want to hire a marketing person, where do you go? How do you approach it? Do you hire somebody very, very junior and give them a lot of direction?
Probably.
Is that right?
No.
Do you hire somebody with a bit of experience?
Which possibly.
Possibly.
Or is that right?
Yeah. Is that.
Right? No.
Or do you hire somebody very senior?
No. No.
Okay. So do you not hire anybody at all? Or what you're saying is you need several people.
No, I think I think engineering companies and we've seen it time and time again. They get it catastrophically wrong. Yeah. They either assign marketing to somebody, somebody who's got another job in the same way that they assign them. Just put a blog post live about this. You know, I can't remember Colin from accounts does our website. You know what I mean? It's like, that was Brian from procurement. Well, you do read it.
Um, no, I actually haven't read it. I just saw the title and thought I'm not reading that.
But, um, you know, the point is. Yeah, you're absolutely right. Engineers, I think by and large kind of struggle to take things seriously that are not engineering.
Yeah.
Yeah. And I think there's, I think, you know, the ones that see past that are the ones that experience, let's say more success. Obviously, there are going to be exceptions, but most large engineering companies brand themselves well. Market themselves well. But the smaller engineering companies that are, you know, run by the founder still, they they are just notorious for not seeing the value of good comms.
Yeah. And we've spoken before. You could hire a very senior person and have them spend their entire time making PowerPoints.
And we've.
Discussed that.
Before with one particular person in mind who didn't last very long and went somewhere else, where she is doing an absolutely stellar job and the company is going from strength.
And the marketing department seems to have quadrupled in size. Mhm. But you could also hire somebody very junior and very cheap and get a load of tactics, Basically get a lot of LinkedIn posts and not much else, unless you're putting an awful lot of time into directing them. But you know, that also probably isn't the right thing. I did have a look at some like job ads for like engineering companies.
Oh, this would be interesting. So I hope.
Yeah, there is a variety. Most of them seem to be looking for people with about three years experience, which sounds fairly sensible, but the job descriptions within that really, really vary. I'll just have a quick look. So there's one here. This is somebody to join a marketing team. Somebody with three years experience in a with a B2B background join a marketing team. This is the offshore wind industry. I think the main offshore wind industry. But there you go.
So they must have had somebody quite junior doing the advert.
Probably proofreading the advert. Um they're looking for email marketing, B2B social media ability to create graphics and marketing materials. Experience updating websites. Experience creating video content. Proven ability to manage attendance at industry events. Experience of working with HubSpot, Canva and WordPress. That's a lot of job for one person.
It's far too much job for one person.
Yeah, so that sounds.
So they're looking for a Swiss Army knife. They're not looking for.
Yeah.
That's somebody who's very good at something.
That's a very.
Looking for somebody who's moderately good at lots of things.
Yeah. Email marketing and creating video content and WordPress. That's three.
Different jobs. Put that into context. Leslie does all our video stuff. That's pretty much all Leslie does is video stuff.
Which is the other thing I want to get to later on. Okay. And they want formal qualifications in fields related to marketing, HubSpot, Canva or WordPress, and formal educations in fields related to software development, AI, offshore wind, marine operations. They're They're wanting some myth. This all unicorns.
People telling lots of lies on CVS to try and get their foot in the door and blagging it and getting AI to help them blag it, and then they'll get the foot in the door and then they'll realise, yeah, I mean, it's, it's almost like, I mean, if you said to them, if you said to any of those, any of those companies, right, you're going to hire an engineer. So you want someone who is, uh, a structural engineer. Chartered. Yeah. They need to also be a mechanical engineer. Chartered. They need to be an electrical engineer. Chartered. They need to be an instrumentation engineer. Chartered. And they also need to be able to bolt things together. Weld things together, solder things. If you said that to them, they would laugh at you and say, that's ridiculous. You're never going to find. And that's exactly what they're doing.
They're filling forms. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's a crazy job. So I thought that was a bit like you were never going to find that person. Yeah. Another one here.
Just just before you move on from it. Do you not think that that smacks of putting like zero effort into understanding what they need? Yeah. So they've just gone scattergun. Well, they've thought we need.
To.
Make sure they can do all of these things, because I've heard that all that stuff's important. There must be somebody who can, you know, create great video, right? Great content, take great photographs, who's.
Got qualifications in marketing and qualifications in software or offshore wind? How does that work?
Yeah.
Are you looking for someone?
Sometimes. Well, maybe to be fair to them sometimes. You know, you've got people who. It's raining. Um, you've got people who are, uh, like salespeople. Yeah. But they happen to be, you know, chartered mechanical engineers, but they've moved into sales or business development. So you can get, you know, a mix kind of thing. But what they're asking for is just nonsense. Everything they everything that person does, if indeed they find somebody which they want, will just be half baked crap.
Yeah. They've got a list of all the things that they can't do at the moment. And they've, they've decided they can only afford one person, basically.
Yeah. Because they don't take it seriously.
Yeah. That is absolutely not taking it seriously. This one here. There again, they're looking for graphic design and video editing skills. Proficiency in Adobe, a scientific or engineering background and experience in crafting content all in one person. Again, they want social media platforms. They want content creation. I mean, so that's less crazy, but it's still.
It's still.
A big.
Range of what they will get is the people who will apply for that. Because if you saw that, you'd go, well, I can do that and that, but I can't do that.
That can't do that.
And you would as an honest person, you would go, no, I'm not going to do that. I would be the same. Oh, that's a shame. It's like recently a tender opportunity came through. Cheeky buggers never even got back to us as well, which really bloody annoys me. But then after courting us and saying, would you be interested in seeing the RFP and everything else, the RFP came through and it said must be minimum of, I don't know, diamond or platinum, HubSpot partners. Yeah. So I, you know, I wrote back to them and said.
We're not, but we can do it.
We can't do it. I didn't even say that. I just said. Basically, you've said in this document and that you need to be this level and we're gold, and we could talk for a long time about why we're gold partners and not platinum partners. It's because we actually do stuff. We don't just flog software. Yeah, that's it in a nutshell. Yeah. But, you know, we could have tried to blag it, but like we look at that and go, they've said, this is non-negotiable. You must be at least a diamond partner. And we're not. So we've sort of, you know, we're really sorry. And it's a gig we could have absolutely nailed. It was a big gig, but we could have absolutely nailed it. What they're going to get with that is the good people who are out there. The honest people are going to go, oh, well, I don't tick all the boxes, whereas the blaggers, they're gonna they're gonna wing it and then they're gonna finish up with somebody who stays for six months, produces not very much and costs them money. And then they think, oh, marketing's a pile of nonsense. You know, everyone who comes that we hire, you know, they don't last five minutes. Yeah. Because, I mean, you know, I've spoken about Heather Barnett before who does stuff on Tick Tock and that sort of thing. She says, you know, we want, you know, you're in marketing, therefore you can do this and this and this and this and this and yeah, I don't know.
Yeah. So next one, we're looking for an experienced marketeer with a proven track record in B2B marketing. Great. Okay, here's the tasks. Working with the sales director sales team. So it sounds like there's not a marketing person above this person. Sounds like this is the only marketing person.
Working with the sales team.
Working closely with the sales director.
In an engineering company.
Yeah.
Which is quite often going to be old school. Uh, yeah. Just like, um.
When not working on marketing activities, you will work with the operations director and support the team providing support to office admin and general business.
Okay. Office admin in general.
So there's something that's not taking the marketing seriously.
Mhm.
Because they want self-start. They want somebody who can do, um, B2B, which isn't B2B. YouTube, LinkedIn ads, B2B. What's that? Yeah. You know, that's not a thing. It's not the same.
At.
YouTube and LinkedIn and Google Merchant Center, AdWords, Google campaign, e-commerce and webshop. eBay and adopt and manage all activities at exhibition shows and events.
Um, that's a skill all of its own. And event management. You know, you've worked in event management.
Oh yeah. And support the office admin when you're not busy.
When you're not busy. When would that be? Yeah. The one day a week. The one day a year when you're not busy doing all the crap that they think you can do as one person.
That is, oh, I'm not sure if this is the same one or not, but, um, strong background in B2B marketing, digital marketing, social media website, YouTube, online and printed marketing materials, CMS again, CMS.
Is that what it says? Yeah, just just CMS. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. No particular, not any particular CMS, just CMS because and that again, it's that's like somewhere they've heard the term CMS, the person that puts the advert together. So, oh, they must be able to do CMS. Make sure, make sure they can do CMS.
And B2B.
And B2B. Yeah. That's right.
Yeah, that made me didn't make me smile because that's like, that's really not taking it seriously. Yeah, you'll do a bit of marketing and then you'll just like help the admin team.
Well, what do you think about it? Um, when you look at the level of retainer that we get working with the customers that we get, you know, so some chunky, you know, multiple thousands of pounds a month that companies spend with us. And the reason, you know, they could look at that and say, wait a minute, we're paying, we're paying them five grand a month or whatever we could be, we could hire somebody and, you know, for five grand a month, we could hire somebody quite senior. So why are we giving all that money to the agency? Yeah, this isn't a pitch for agencies, but it makes you understand by giving us five grand a month, they have access to you and me doing strategy and search and managing all kinds of aspects of their digital marketing. Um, they've got access to Leslie, who does video specialists. They've got access to Amy and Rob and Dave, who can do amazing things with dev. They've got access to Diana and Rob, who do incredible things with design. You know, they've got access to Karen who can produce fantastic content. Yeah, for one who can.
Build apps in about five minutes.
Who, who can, you know, write you a web app or solve some gnarly server problem. They've got access to all of that expertise with like from one fee with no holiday pay, no sick pay, no pension contributions. It's, I mean, it makes absolute sense. And thankfully, you know, you know, like most companies or many companies anyway, realise that. And like, interestingly, if you think about some of the companies that we've started working with recently, one in particular who has never done marketing before and never worked with a marketing agency before. I mean, they're an amazing client. They absolutely love working with us. And the whole experience is because suddenly they've got access to all of this stuff that we can do that they would never have got if they'd gone out using some half assed advert like that to try and get one person to do it.
Yeah. You employ one of these people there? I was maybe go back and think about like, what level of support you need at each level. But there's a couple. There's one one more I think I wanted to go on. Oh no, there's a couple more. Go on. This one. Experienced marketing executive to join our marketing.
I'm just gonna check my email while you're doing that. No.
Help the company achieve their ambition. Previous marketing experience.
The company achieve their ambitions.
Well, I'm just. Yeah. No. That's fine. I mean.
Well, it isn't. What? Go on.
Previous marketing experience. Blah blah blah. Experience in handling, handling customer complaints and queries. This is an experienced marketer and.
Isn't it all that kind of stuff, is it? No it's not.
No, it's customer service.
It's customer service, you know. Yeah. Sorry.
But you want an experienced marketer, but you want them to be experienced in handling customer complaints. That's, you know.
That's the thing is, yeah. Again, I suppose if I'm looking at that advert, I'm thinking, all right, so you're actually advertising for somebody to handle customer complaints. Why not sort of figure out why customers are complaining and and fix that and hire somebody to fix that.
Well, just.
Somebody to speak to angry people. Yeah.
So yeah, and here's another one. Wanting them to be able to, to use Canva, Adobe Figma for design and content creation. Also knowledge of the Atlassian ecosystem and tools like Confluence and Jira. I don't even know what they are.
Oh, they're project management tools. Oh no. Jira. I'm thinking of Jira. Yeah, that's a project management tool.
Yeah. SEO and website.
WordPress as well.
So SEO website, preferably WordPress. Also Canva, Adobe Figma. Again, you're wanting SEO website and design in one person.
SEO and design in one person is a very rare thing. I mean, you're either not very good at either of them or you're blagging it.
And writing.
And a good writer as well. Yeah.
That's tricky. Yeah.
So they're really like making it difficult for themselves. But the thing is, you know, in a tight market, and let's face it, the economy is tight. Yeah. And people pouring out of university with with various qualifications, they're going to get people rocking up. We were going to give it a go and imagine what they're going to produce. Imagine the kind of absolute tosh that they're going to produce.
And for if I think the thing is, you know, if you maybe just want to stick your toe in the water, hire a junior person, you can do that. If you have an agency to do the strategy.
And help them.
And guide them, put the plans together and go, right. You know, here's a plan. Now you go and add this website, or you can post this on LinkedIn, but you know, somebody else actually guiding them and almost training them.
Well, the right agency will do that. And we've been in that position many times where like, we've got, we've got customers right now where they've got somebody who's in-house, you know, salaried person. And we're kind of helping them understand different aspects of marketing and helping them do some of the stuff so they don't have to include it in, in our, in the retainer that they pay us.
Which is great, you know, pay us to do the strategy side and let somebody get on with the doing. And that's absolutely fine. On the other side of that, they could employ a very senior marketer to do the strategy and then hire an agency to do the, the doing. But you can't ask somebody to do all of it. You either need a junior person and somebody to help them with the strategy or a senior person and somebody to do the implementation. But I think it's recognising that there are actually two different things.
Well, what's quite interesting is I think sometimes, um, the kind of people who might be, I don't know, men of my age who've worked in engineering all their lives and run engineering companies or engineering companies, and they really want somebody. I don't understand all that stuff. You know, they want someone who can who understands the buttons. They want someone who knows which buttons to press because they think it's hard to learn that. And it really isn't. It's all about the content. It's all about what you produce. It's not about learning, learning to click the buttons, and with AI, it's becoming even less important that you know how to click the buttons. As I was saying to you earlier, like they've just introduced in Google Analytics. So you can just, you don't have to say, right, how do I create a report that shows my best performing organic pages over the last three months? You just say the AI. That's why that's the information I want. And it'll just go and do it. Thank goodness.
Because Google Analytics is.
It's always been a good, isn't it? Yeah. Well, I guess because they're constantly working on these. That's one of the problems with software. And I'm seeing it now with core work. Well, not just core the cloud desktop app, but, you know, the software developers, the lunatics who are running the asylum. Yeah. You know, that they just keep doing, oh, let's try this. Let's get rid of those really handy, easy to use three tabs at the top that go to like chat core work code and like, we'll change it. I was like, how do I change? How do I accidentally typed three.
Little.
Symbols I hardly ever use? But it's like, how do I get back to core work? And I couldn't find it. Oh, what are the three icons I have never seen? But wait a minute, tiny.
Yeah, and they're not. It's not obvious what they mean either.
Yeah, I mean, that app's getting updated. I don't know, two or three times a day at the moment. It's just unbelievable. Yeah. And they've just brought out opus four point seven as well, which will basically mean it'll chomp your tokens even faster than opus four point six. I mean, I'm a bit lazy. I use opus four point six nearly all the time and I shouldn't, I should use one like I should use. Um, I don't know what they call it.
It's the one that defaults to. And that seems to be a pretty good job.
Yeah, I know. Anyway. Um, yeah, so I think it is a really interesting but interesting.
Topic, I think.
But is it more so? Is it emblematic if that's the right word of the state of marketing, you know, in, in B2B engineering type companies?
Um, I just read something about some research that had been done and, um, they interviewed like six hundred marketers or something, I think it was in America. But, um, they said that three quarters, three quarters of them are doing the job of more than one person. Mhm. So yes, it does seem to be the case that it's like.
Three quarters of them. Yeah.
Yeah. You're the marketing person. You will do all marketing. Mhm. Um, regardless of the fact that it's like there's so many different skill sets involved and yeah, I obviously don't know how many, how much support they've got, but I think it's just really important that, you know, people hire a marketer, you can't expect them to be able to do everything. You've got to go, right. You know, you, you're responsible for the planning and you get agencies in to do the specialist stuff or you're responsible for the doing. You get consultants in to do the, the strategic stuff. But hiring a marketer, one person is never, ever going to capture everything that you do. No. And, and I think there's just too many of these jobs that are just like, well, the person's going to come in and they're going to do the thing that they're used to doing or the thing that they're good at and that they can't do everything.
Well, they're setting themselves up for failure. Yeah. I mean, the companies are setting themselves up for failure. And they're also the people that they hire. They're setting them up for failure as well.
Totally.
Yeah.
And it's not.
Fair. And you know, that's why I suppose. And you know this better than me. You know, that marketing, um, has like perennial, it's the perennial struggle or it just seems to just be like the poor cousin. I mean, sales, I suppose people get, you know, it's like, oh yeah, like Susan in sales has brought in two million quid's worth of work. Isn't that wonderful? And, and the fact that that was, that was, um, enabled by the amazing work the marketing department has done is kind of lost on them. It is. But, you know, it's not always the case. I mean, you know, not plenty of examples of, of engineering and tech companies who completely understand the importance of getting their brand right and getting their message right and their story right. And, and the whole, you know, the whole piece.
So yeah, it would be really interesting to sort of look at the most successful ones and measure them like the size of their marketing departments. And if there's any correlation whatsoever.
Mhm. Well, here's the thing though. Have you have you. Is that bit sort of concluded. This is very much related to it. Um, it's almost like we planned this and honestly, we didn't. But there's, there's an item which, which I wanted to sort of chat loosely about was, uh, the MarTech, the MarTech stack problem.
Yes.
Um, and just to explain what we mean by that is there's, I mean, there are so many marketing tools. If you look at a company like us, an agency. So we run our website and our own marketing on HubSpot. Uh, we use SEMrush for analyzing websites, our own and customers websites. We've recently bought utterly AI for helping us with understanding what prompts, um, people are using for both ourselves and our clients. Um, we, obviously we use an accounts package. I think it's, we use zero. We use Monday for work management. Um.
Red man, which is our own.
We, yeah, we've, we've written our own, which actually is the solidifying, unifying kind of piece of the whole jigsaw because it can pretty much talk to everything, talk to HubSpot and zero and Monday Do and I don't know anything else that we need to use. I mean, it will probably talk to, um, SEMrush and I think it might talk to utterly, I don't know. We've also got.
Zapier.
Utterly. I asked them if they were looking at MCP and they said they were.
Yes, that's right. And we've got Zapier for the things that don't talk to each other, to make them talk to each.
Other, talk to each other.
I've got Zapier talking between HubSpot and Monday.
So, I mean, one of the challenges we had with with Red.
We've got all the Google, we've got Google Drive, gmail, Google Chat, Google Meet, all that stuff, all that. So that's all our tech stuff.
So that's like, you know, like the Google stuff, I suppose is, is like, you know, the shared drives and getting shit done type type environment. But the, the, I think maybe in our, in our situation, maybe there isn't too much fragmentation. Sounds like it is because we've mentioned all those tools.
But yeah.
There's not too much overlap. But if you think about red man, I mean, some of the guys, some of our guys are like, well, why are we using Monday and Red man the two Until we've developed ourselves. Because red man is not a project or a work management tool. It's a deliverables monitoring tool to make sure that we're delivering what we say will deliver and make sure we're profitable.
Making the right amounts. Yeah.
That's right, that sort of thing. So, um, but you know, basically, you know, what's what the, what this report, this new industry reports and I don't know where the report came from, but anyway, um, it's probably made up by AI, fragmented systems, overlapping functionality and poor integration, creating operational chaos. Um, so, and if you think about that enquiry that came in not too long ago from the, uh, the, the start up in Edinburgh. Yes, they've invested in HubSpot and sort of played around with it and then gone, oh, I don't really know what this does.
Not doing what you think and it's sending the wrong emails to the wrong people.
Well, I mean, yeah, HubSpot will always sell you HubSpot as in like, it'll do everything for you. Well, yeah, if you know what you're doing, it'll help you do your job and it'll do everything for you in that sense, but it doesn't like do everything for you.
Set it up.
Pressing a button. Yeah, that's what that sort of thing. But I do wonder, you know, like what you were saying, you know, the first piece you said about, about people, um, being set up to fail and not lasting long because the average person in marketing, what they don't last very long, do they?
Couple of years.
Couple of years. Yeah. Whereas, you know, you might find like that same engineering company, there's an engineer over there, you know, um, you know, girl and woman, man and boy or whatever you want to say. And the whole career almost spent there because like, why would they go anywhere else? They're doing what they love to.
Do.
But marketing not so. No, but if they're setting people up to fail with these absolute bullshit job specs, then somebody comes in and does something with the tools. HubSpot utterly. Whatever it is they're doing, the next person comes along and, oh, well, I.
I've used that. I've only used.
Ahrefs, I don't know. Oh, we'll buy that as well for you. And then suddenly they've got two things. And, and then they, it's just. Yeah.
And they leave and nobody has a password for the first thing because the person's left and they can't get into it. And also nobody knows the password to the the Facebook account. Yeah. Because it was set up by this junior person on their own Facebook account. And they never shared, they never added anyone else to it. Somebody leaves and nobody else can get in. And it is absolute chaos most of the time.
Yeah. It's almost like a bitter experience that was coming, was coming through.
There may have been through that once or twice. Yes. With um companies buying other companies. And then um the person that actually set up the, the Facebook account is no longer there and somebody using their login, but then you, um, you try and change something and it has to send a text, the person that set it up in the first place, who probably doesn't even have that phone anymore or doesn't have that email anymore, and you just get stuck and you can't move forward. It's the way it is all set up is so chaotic. Yeah, yeah. Which is mainly Facebook's fault, not really the people's fault, but also.
Totally agree.
That there's like, again, not being taken seriously. Just let somebody dabble in it and not make sure that it's set up properly.
I think there's also and I think this is not just marketing, but there's also a tendency I've been guilty of this, um, like a new tool comes along and you, you buy into the hype, you think it's going to really make a difference. So you buy it. Yeah. And then, you know, we had this conversation about utterly AI. And I've noticed that I think it's their CEO has reached out a couple of times because I think he can see, you know, I think it's probably telling him, well, these guys have bought it. They've used it a bit. They haven't been in there for a week now. And he knows if we don't go back in there and use it, we'll think, why are we paying two hundred dollars a month for that? Let's stop paying for it. So he's like, I'll audit your account for you. And but, you know, a genuine offer. He's like, I'll help you understand if there's any bits you don't understand and help you get real, real value out of it. But it would be very easy for us just to have that in the background. We've recently been auditing Unbounce.
So we're just going to say that.
Because it's a great tool for building.
Landing pages.
A lot. We used it a lot. And then we just figured out, well, they've kept bumping the price up. We're now paying over three hundred dollars a month for it and we're hardly using it. Yeah, well, now we're trying to figure out probably using something like Astro. So we'll just build them in Astro instead and get rid of Unbounce altogether.
Yeah. And also a lot more of our clients are now using HubSpot, which has its own landing page section. So we don't need it so much. And we're, you know, and as we move people on to HubSpot, then we don't need to have the landing pages on Unbounce because we can have separate landing pages in HubSpot.
I mean, the unbalance might come in handy because it might be that we potentially that, that, that conversation that started in late December or January or February, um, which.
Google.
I think they've decided they've, well, they have decided they want to work with us, but they're still kind of like taking forever on a, on a Google ads campaign to actually, you know, to get to actually get.
Budget authorisation process seems to be quite complicated for that.
one. But I think again, that's, that's a marketing person. I think she's fairly new at the organisation who's like fighting with with the rest of the organisation having to justify every penny that they spend and try and get buy in from people who are, yeah, reluctant, if you like to invest in, in the marketing and comms side of things.
And yet they've presumably employed her to make these decisions about where's the best place to, to promote them. And she's concluded that this is what she wants to do. And now she's not getting the budget to do it.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Okay. Go on. Have you got.
Yeah. I was gonna say we basically the first two hours of this morning, we spent, um, doing photo shoots in the.
Office and all I heard was lots of laughter.
Yeah. Well, you know, you've got to look smiley, but no, it was, it was good fun. And I think we should have some nice photos because we were all genuinely just sort of chatting and interacting and mainly looking at bridesmaids dresses for Amy, who's getting married next year. But, you know.
Not even this year.
No, no, this is the the longest wedding planning ever I think. But um, yeah, we, we took photos. I was just going to say it's, um, the reason we're doing it because when we first built our website, we had just stock photos on and it just didn't, didn't feel like us at all. It really didn't work. So we took a load of photos in the office and put them on the website. But we've got a big website and we've got a lot of pages, we've got a lot of long pages.
And we needed more.
We just need more photos, a bit more variety.
So but it's amazing in a, in an age where everybody has got a really good quality camera in their back pocket. Yeah. Finding specific images can often be so difficult. Yeah. We've got, you know, we've got a client in the automotive industry and we, you know, we need pictures of skinnies and daffs and man trucks.
And all that.
Kind of thing. And it's like, you go out there and the stock availability is not brilliant. In fact, it's probably an opportunity for us if we actually shoot a load of pictures to use to use with that client, we should actually probably put them. At the very least, we should stick them onto onto Unsplash. Yeah.
But yeah, there's there's a lack of photos.
There is.
But we've got quite a lot of clients who are really reluctant to to do photoshops, photoshops, possibly photoshoots, photoshoots and then Photoshop them. But yeah, photoshoots of their actual people and it just makes such a difference.
Well, one client in particular, Dundee based. Yeah, fairly fairly new client, not quite that new anymore, but fairly new client. And we got um the Aberdeen based photographer Ray Smith to go down and I went, I went down as well to sort of make sure we were going to get what we needed. And, uh, watching him in action was, was absolutely fantastic. The way that he transformed the space before he even started lighting and shooting was, was great. It was lovely to see. It really was. And the, the output from it, I mean, they were blown away. Yeah.
They're great.
I mean, it's so, so good. You know, there's one thing, you know, we we've got a client, you know, we're further down south and we've tried to persuade them to get professional photographers in and they haven't. And, you.
Know, I don't think there's any people on their website.
Very few know, very few maybe on the homepage, but very few. And it's, it's desperate. And it's, I think it's we live in an age like we were talking at the beginning of this about, you know, the, the marketing person, the Swiss Army knife marketing person. Um, they would probably expect them to take photographs as well because like photography has been downgraded. Now you can still go to uni and study for four years to be a photographer. It's an art form.
It is. And good photographers.
Are worth their weight in gold. The fact that we all think we're photographers or we're all we can all take a photograph. And there's a world of difference between taking a photograph and being a photographer.
And it really doesn't have to be that expensive. And like, you know.
It's like a one one hit. Spend a thousand quid. Yeah. And you'll get so many great assets to use on your website and in all of your marketing, marketing materials.
We've just spent two hours this morning taking loads and loads of photos. And yeah, we're going to get absolutely tons out of that. It's not, it's not vastly time consuming.
But it was obviously exhausting, I think, because Amy, Amy said she was about to pass out because she was so hungry.
Yeah.
Egg and bacon roll. Sorted that out.
I went and got a croissant from the bakery next door, and she was honestly giving me daggers when I was eating it. She was like, you can't eat that in front of me. She was so hungry.
But despite the, um, sack of M&Ms being opened and banded and thrown around as well.
There's a lot of food in this office.
Well, Diana's visiting. She's over from America just now, working in the office with us.
Yeah. That, um, that is actually all e-numbers and not much food, but it's very addictive.
Very addictive. Yeah.
But yeah, it's just it's not difficult. It's not time consuming. It's not expensive to get decent photos taken and makes the world of difference to your website because there's, there's certain stock photos. You can go on someone's website and you can go on another one and the same photos just come up time and time again. You know, we've used them on people's blog posts or even on people's websites. If we don't have photos and you're like, oh, that's that guy again. Oh, I've seen her before. And it just becomes very samey. And really, you know, for a yeah, a thousand, couple of thousand pounds and a few hours of your time, you know. Seriously? Two hours. We got tons done this morning. It doesn't have to be painful. And you can just, you know, bring your website to life and make it very personal and people can actually see who they're dealing with. I don't know why people need to. I mean, I understand that people don't like seeing photos of themselves, but we're not you're not doing it for them. It's not their wedding photos. You're doing photos so that people visiting your website can see real people. If they have a Zoom call with you or a people don't even use Zoom anymore.
But I don't know. I mean, we don't we use.
Google Meet.
We use Google Meet. I mean, people still bump their gums about that. Oh, I'm not used to Google meet. I'm used to teams or send us a teams link.
Then Google meet easier.
I think that's.
Completely another conversation. But um, you know, if they go on a video call with you, they're going to see what you look like. If you meet them face to face, they're going to see what you look like. Just take a photo and put it on the website. It's all right. It's, it's not about, you know, how wonderful you look. It's just about this is a real person. Here's a group of real people. Here's the people you're going to be working with. Yeah, they are real. And, you know, swallow your pride and, and get on with it and, and get photos that actually make your website your own and reflect who you are. I think it's just really, really important. Clearly, I know it is though. I mean, we just it's such a battle.
Yeah. I mean, we do work with people, work with businesses. And, you know, there's like, there are certain people in that organisation I'm trying to think of. There was a company we worked with and I think everybody was on the website, but except this one person who absolutely refused, I don't want my picture on the website. I'm not going to go on there. And it's there. You know, it's obviously their their right, their prerogative to do that. But, uh, life's too short. Yeah.
It really doesn't matter. And, you know, unless you're in victim support or something. Fair enough.
Mhm. Well, yeah, I suppose there is.
There are.
That's it. Maybe it was Donnie Brasco or something like that.
There are reasons and fair enough. But on the whole, you know, it's fine. You know, nobody's judging what you look like. They just want to see that they're dealing with real people. If it's all shiny people that are all really glamorous, you're gonna think it's not real anyway. You're gonna think it's AI.
What are you trying to say? Try to say that, like, as a team, some of us are a bit rough around the edges.
I'm gonna phrase this very carefully. I'm just saying that we don't look AI. We look natural and authentic.
Mhm. Mhm.
Some of us do. I certainly do. I even took my took my glasses off today.
Yeah.
Nobody recognised me when I came in. The other thing I was going to talk about was the escape room that we did.
Oh, right.
We never spoke about that.
Well, I never went. Obviously you didn't. I did the, um, the honourable thing and stepped back because they only allowed six. Yeah. Yeah.
Um it was, it was really good.
Um Karen said she enjoyed.
It as a team building thing.
Is it building or bonding.
Is there a difference?
Yeah, I think so. Remember we used to work with a team building company and they went into great detail telling us the difference between the things you do as a group, and it's just fun. It's like bonding. And like if we went camping.
Probably.
Bonding was just bonding and having fun. And it's a great, it's great. But, you know, team building is a slightly different thing. Team building, you could actually do a session with people that you, you might not even like them that much, but you could actually learn to work well as a team. Along with the escape room, you did have to work as a team. We did. So there was a team.
I mean, there was yeah, it was very much teamwork. It wasn't just all, yeah, going bowling or whatever. You did have to work as a team because there was like different puzzles and there was some very logical you had to follow clues and logical things and the devs were quite good at that. Okay. And there was other things where you had to think really quite creatively and bizarrely, the the creatives were quite good at that. So it then the, um, the content people were absolutely useless at everything. But no, it was.
Because I'm somewhere between a tech and a creative. I've always felt.
I'm.
Kind of a, I think I'd be rubbish at it because I'd be no good at either of those things. Just kind of okay at both of them.
Yeah, I kind of I was kind of there. I was, I was running around trying to help everybody, whereas other people were kind of going with what they were stronger at. Um, but it was really interesting. And we made it, we made it out. We had about seven minutes to spare. So we did really well.
And the failure and the failure rate is quite high or the success rate rather success rate.
Was only about.
thirty eight percent.
Thirty eight percent of people get out and we got out.
Where was this? Give him a plug.
It was breakout games in Aberdeen. Okay, good. Really really good.
And it's down underneath the arch.
It's underneath the arches next to Union Square. If you're if you're not if you're not in Aberdeen, that mean absolutely nothing.
No. I think probably most of our listeners are in and around Aberdeen probably.
It really was a good.
Aberdeen, UK, by the way, American listener.
Or Japan, not Japan. Aberdeen and Japan. No, not Japan, Hong Kong, is it?
Oh yeah. That would make.
Sense. Isn't an Aberdeen harbour or something in Hong Kong. That's what it is. Um, it's not that one either. But no, it's a really good team bonding, team building exercise. It does make everybody work together and there was a lot to get through. So we did have sort of split up and some people were sort of in one room.
Not hugely time consuming. I mean.
It was an.
Hour. Yeah. You go down first and they feed you.
We got yeah, we got sandwiches.
And then the room itself is an hour.
Yeah.
So we had half an hour.
About half an hour to have food and then then an hour in the room. So no, it doesn't take that long, but um like you do certain things and then then one sort of secret room opens and then once you've solved some things in there, another secret room opens, but then you need things from one room to solve the next room. Okay, so, you know, it's really complicated. Whoever works these things out as a weird brain, but, um, we did have to sort of split up into groups and, and really use.
Our time in order to do it in time. You have to sort of.
There's no way we could have. We could have all kind of worked through one thing at a time, because you also had to be one thing, solved another thing, which then solved another thing, but you kind of needed bits from different places. So it really did need people to be, you know, doing bits and pieces and splitting up and working to their strengths.
And the next team bonding we're talking about possibly I'll be talking about King George at the club. Yeah, I'll ask him if he wants to do like a Bake Off style. Yeah.
We're talking Bake Off or, um, MasterChef.
Because we did contact some companies who claim to do that, and they didn't get back to us.
Baking.
Or something.
A baking thing. And then, yeah, they never got back when I was asking which days they were available and they never replied. But yeah, we were talking about like Bake Off or MasterChef without the creepy presenters.
Oh yeah.
So yeah, some sort of cooking slash baking type thing would actually be really fun. But we decided that, um, rather than just doing a cooking lesson, and having some element of competition would probably make it more fun and make us all probably all fall out, which would also be more fun.
Yeah, I'd definitely, I'd be interested in doing the cooking or baking or whatever one. That'd be quite good.
Yeah, I think I think.
It would be good. We just bought a new range cooker because we've been refurbishing the kitchen and we've got um, it's got an induction hob.
Oh yeah. They're amazing.
Yeah. I must admit I'm quite impressed.
I've seen them. I've never, I don't think I've ever cooked someone maybe on holiday so fast. I mean but you touch them and they don't. They're not hot.
No. Well they are because the the thing the heating a pan of water. Yeah. So the pan of water obviously has got heat which it transfers into the into the surface. But it's not like, you know, like a ceramic one. If you boil a pan of water, if you put your hand on it, you burn yourself. I managed to sort of like do that after it had boil some water because it was just the residual heat coming out.
Warm. Yeah.
But it's not basically it's magnets and it excites molecules or whatever it does. I don't know. But yeah. And when you turn it off, it's like gas. It kind of goes off.
Yeah. And it and it heats up instantly.
Yeah. I know that Amy in a, in a when her in her brand new house, which she doesn't live in anymore because she's bought an old house now and she's living to regret it. But anyway, but she had. Yeah. And she was saying so yeah, it's good. So but but, but I'm gonna maybe try and, and do a bit more sort of bikini cooking type stuff. Probably. Yeah. Probably won't. Yeah. Karen's a bit of a domestic goddess. So she kind of does stuff and I think.
A bit of cooking. Did you.
Not. Uh, I mean, I've got little signature pieces like I'll make, uh, Cornish pasties proper.
Oh, really?
Two the Cornish pasties recipe.
And when did you make the pastry?
Yes. Yeah, with strong flour.
You're right.
Yeah. You get strong flour from Strachan's. I get the beef skirt from the butchers next door.
Right.
And then you get obviously whatever is neeps and tatties and things, and you have to cook them all. The reason it cooks the way it does is everything's the same size and all that. It's. Yeah, in fact, you've just made me think. I remember you speak to Alan after we finished this podcast and said, get me some skirt because you have to order it. Oh, really? They don't get cast as awful. I think they don't really. They don't really stock it anymore.
They don't put that much in. It's more potatoey, isn't it?
Um, yeah, I mean, I could probably, maybe I've never tried a veggie one. I could maybe try a veggie one. That'd be quite good. But yeah, I get little moments where I like, I.
Like.
Figure things out and I'm like, right, I'll do them. Yeah, I've been quite pleased with them in the past.
I think that would be quite fun because it's something everybody can do. You don't have to be strong or fast or outdoorsy or anything. You know, everybody can can stand in and.
At some point we will obviously go to Deeside Activity Park and do the karting for those who want to.
I don't think I've ever done, but.
I think you'd enjoy.
It. I've done like.
You laugh a.
Lot. I would be so slow.
If you're enjoying it, it really doesn't matter.
I can't even do Mario Kart. I'm terrible at Mario Kart. I once got a Mother's Day card from my son, and it was one of these mnemonic things that you do at school, you know, I think was mother or something. And all the words and the T of mother was terrible at Mario Kart.
So you will.
Um. Yeah. If I can't do Mario karts, I I'm terrified of actually doing a real kart.
I think you'll enjoy it because the thing is as well, I'll have to find out from the boy up at, um, there about how they do it, whether or not you could say, right, you could have a, you know, a group of people who are a bit unsure and a group of people who.
Yeah, that's true quite fast.
There's quite it's great fun because it's safe. You're very low down. So even at slow speeds, you feel like you're going like the clappers. So it's good fun.
There's tires all around.
That is more team bonding than team building, though.
Yeah. Yeah. It's every man for themselves. Every woman for themselves.
People. That's right. It's supposed to work as a team. Yeah. Um, but anyway, we've obviously digressed away from digital marketing, and we must be getting bored. Well, it's Friday, it's Friday. I'm sorry. Even though it's drizzly. I'm thinking playing golf, uh, with your youngest, aka your husband.
Yes. The youngest. Yeah.
And, um, kind of, uh.
Yeah, it's not, it's not chucking it down.
It's that rain that soaks you through, as Peter would say it is.
It's that. Yeah, it just kind of constant and very wet. Drizzle I caught on.
Oh yeah. I've got I've got all the gear. No idea. Like most golfers.
Yeah. Yeah exactly. It's a very expensive sport.
The golf was good last weekend. And the Masters.
Oh yeah.
I guess I watched most of it.
He watched pretty much all of it. I think it was on the whole weekend. Yeah.
So good. Yeah. Not easy watching Rory, although thankfully he did win. But the usual rollercoaster ride watching him.
I think watching him.
Lose a commanding lead and then get it back and.
Watching Andy Murray at tennis very well.
Yeah, I suppose yeah that's right. Yeah.
You would never do it the easy way if you could do it the difficult way.
Yeah. I suppose when some people like like they just they're their favourite tennis player is like the person who wins all the time. Like when, when Federer was in his pomp, like I support Federer when he's gonna win, everyone knows he's gonna win. Anyway, um, we'll come up with some more subjects. I'm probably not in on Monday, so probably won't be recording on Monday. Um, but, uh, we will come up with some more subjects and mixed in with chit chat. Yeah. Which seems to be the, uh, the modus operandi now.
Which is fine.
I do actually listen to these podcasts. I know that sounds I know that.
Sounds a bit odd.
Well, it does, but I because I like conversational podcasts, you know, as opposed to like six ways to blah.
Blah, blah.
Yeah. You know, I like things like that. And I find myself putting it on to kind of proofread it, proof listen to it. And I kind of just let it play.
You see, I'm gonna listen to it. And if it's no good, we won't publish it. And then you come back and go, it was all right, actually.
Well, it was all right in that it was two people having a conversation. And that's sometimes, even if you're not interested in the subject matter, can be quite interesting to listen to.
We've covered a lot of subject matter, so there must be something in there for everyone today.
Absolutely. Okay. Twenty to one. Great stuff. Right? Okay. That was, uh, Dave and Julie, Digital Marketing From The Coalface. Some of it was digital marketing. Some of it was Cornish pasties.
Some of it was coffees.
Uh, speak to you next time. Bye.
Let's get scratching.
Bye.