Why Google Ads AI is Bleeding Your Niche B2B Budget And The Brand Cost of Hyper-Aggressive Re-marketing – Episode 169

There's so much to get wrong with Google Ads, and Google Ads reps will help you get it wrong and spend more money. I'm not saying they're doing it with malice. They're doing it because they're very much focused on the software.

Yeah, they're trying to get people to use the tools.

And if you're running Google Ads yourself, you're not using an agency, that's all well and good. Just make sure when Google phone up that you recognise they're not necessarily doing it with malice, but they may well be trying to get you to use features. And they can be quite persuasive about that. Because it's clever. It's AI, and it'll figure out...

It knows, yes.

Just tell us the page and it'll figure out what traffic you need.

It'll make the best of your budget. It'll figure out who's going to convert. Well, it can if you've got thousands and thousands, but not if you've got small numbers.

Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface.

Good morning.

It's one of those seat-of-your-pants podcasts because you've not got a lot to talk about.

No.

I've not got a lot to talk about.

Oh, well, we'll think of something else to talk about then.

Well, I know we will. Yeah, no doubt we will. The sun's shining.

Oh, it's so nice. It's lovely. There isn't one cloud in the sky. It's absolutely incredible.

Have you managed to see the—is it the Lyrids?

Oh, the meteor shower thing? No, it's been too light.

Yeah, the moon's been out a little bit.

The sky's been really, really light. And I'm not prepared to stand for twenty minutes in the dark.

You need to wait till midnight onwards as well, when it's completely dark.

That would not be happening. I wouldn't be making any sense whatsoever if I'd been up till midnight last night. And I make little enough sense as it is, so that's not happening. But yeah, a nice sunny weekend, a bit of gardening, golfing for you. Not me. Running, walking.

Yeah. All the above. Looking forward to it. I might go out on my motorbike as well. Speaking of which...

Okay, here we go.

I made the mistake of... There's a thing you can get for motorbikes. It's called a Quad Lock. It's a really secure mount for a smartphone. You fasten this thing to your handlebars or other bits of the bike, and then you put the thing on and lock it.

So, like a map or whatever?

It shows people going off-road and bouncing around.

Oh, right.

It's very secure. Obviously, people use their smartphones on motorbikes for satnavs and things like that.

Yeah. I was following a bunch of bikers the other day, and I'm like, where do they put their maps? How do they know where they're going?

Well, my BMW's got a satnav.

Oh, really?

It sits just above the speedo and everything else. It's got quite a posh satnav on it. But you can't get a posher satnav than a smartphone. They're superb.

Yeah. They're bang up to date.

Well, the reason I mentioned it is that I looked at a Quad Lock. I thought, yeah, even though I've got a satnav on the bike, I've got other bikes that haven't got one, and a Quad Lock might be a good idea.

And you could move it from bike to bike.

Potentially, yeah. You could either move the mount or get multiple mounts. You just lock it onto whichever. And everywhere—and I mean everywhere—I go now, I'm getting inundated with Quad Lock adverts.

Oh, it's painful.

Facebook has more or less become unusable because every other thing as I scroll is a Quad Lock advert. So my question is: who decided—and maybe it works, which is why I'm asking—that if somebody shows interest in something, the best approach from there on is to completely and utterly pester them by following them around the internet to try and get them to buy that product, even after you've bought the product?

It's the after you've bought the product that drives me crazy. Obviously, if you buy it from one company, all the other companies don't know you've bought it. But even the company you bought it from doesn't really know you've bought it. Yeah, it doesn't quite work like that.

But I guess what I'm asking is, does doing that, this remarketing work, in the extreme, where you're literally bombarding the person who showed even the tiniest bit of interest in your product? Maybe this isn't a big deal in B2B, but it's digital marketing generally.

Absolutely.

This isn't new. But I do worry that it's getting worse.

It does seem to be worse.

Getting attention online is getting harder. And therefore, when you get even the smallest signal, the plan of attack is: attack!

Yeah, it's very noticeable. As soon as you enquire or click through to something, for a few days you're completely bombarded, until the next thing happens. And it gets to a point where you think, this is just ridiculous. This is stuff that isn't relevant to me. If you're looking at a course, you start getting courses that are miles away, at the other end of the country. And it's like, well, I'm not interested in that. That's completely irrelevant. But Facebook does encourage you now, instead of being really targeted and homing in on a very specific audience, it prefers you to go really broad, and it works out the audience. So until it's worked out the audience for that particular ad, it's going to throw it to everybody and see what sticks. That's how it learns.

They are, even more than Google, Meta are basically saying, "Look, give us your money and we've got it from there. Just leave it to us. Don't try and interfere. We've got this." I assume Quad Lock have done that: "Okay, great. Here's 'X' thousand dollars, $100,000 or whatever the hell it is." And I might still buy a Quad Lock. I'm not desperate to A Quad Lock. I might look at other brands. I don't know, but...

Are you not getting other brands as well or are you getting just Quad Lock? You are getting other brands as well.

I'm getting other types of mounts. But you often talk about how marketers ruin everything they touch. If you think back to its inception: we've got this thing called remarketing now. So, if somebody shows interest in your business, we can follow them around the internet and discreetly suggest, "Have you... Remember you were interested?"

It was a reminder every now and again.

And that has turned into just absolutely manic...

Many times a day. Every time you go on the internet, you're seeing this stuff. It's utterly pointless opening your phone because everything is just one thing.

You can click the three dots, can't you? And say, "Don't show me this again."

Yeah, "I'm not interested."

I think that's quite effective. But I understand that these platforms only make money from advertising. And I'm bored of talking about it, but...

They're not skint, though. They don't need that much. One thing I always look at if we're running ads is the frequency. You can see how many times the average person has seen the ad, and if that's edging up beyond four, five, six, then don't bother. But that's for the particular creative. I presume you're seeing different variations of the same ad.

Yeah, I suppose.

So the frequency for each one is maybe two or three. Then they're showing a different ad, and you're seeing different ads, but all for the same thing...

I've singled Quad Lock out, but we bought some furniture for the kitchen from Cotswold, and they did exactly the same, following us around and all the rest of it. An interesting one is, we've got a holiday cottage. I know you have as well. And I've seen, because I've looked at our holiday cottage on Cottages.com, it's followed me around the internet.

Yeah, me too.

I know you use Airbnb and it thought you were going somewhere because you were looking at your listing, and suddenly it's like, "Oh, you want to stay here?" It's like, "I own it."

Yeah, I don't think so.

It's the inaccuracy of it. The whole thing about digital marketing is, you can tag it, it's really accurate, and you can get lots of good data. All that's true. But if you do it badly—and I think a lot of people, possibly even most people, do—all you're really doing is digital annoying.

Little notifications, though, like from Amazon: "We think you might like such and such." Right, what does Amazon think of me? I've had balaclavas.

I think a balaclava for you would be a good idea. I'm kind of with Amazon on that one.

I've had archery equipment.

Oh, shit.

I've had some other sort of weaponry. Who does it think I am? And what the hell have I bought that gives it that impression? I have absolutely no idea. I'm baffled by the things it's showing me. And if I've just bought something, it shows me more ads for the same thing. If I've just bought a table, it's like, "We thought you might like a table." But you know I literally bought a table last week. How many tables do you think I need? Amazon is really bad. It's way, way off track.

I am a bit of an Amazon junkie because we live out in the sticks. If I need something, I just reach for the phone, and it arrives the next day, more or less.

Otherwise, we've got an 80-mile round trip.

To not get what you needed in the first place, because shops are rubbish now.

And you have parking and all the hassle, and it's going to take up a whole day. So, yeah.

But I think...

Like it or loathe it, Amazon is really handy when you live out here.

Yeah, definitely. And because I buy frequently from Amazon, when I haven't bought something for a couple of days, it's like...

I think it sees me as an Amazon junkie. "He's always buying Amazon stuff, so feed his habit. Show him things he doesn't even know he needs." To be honest, I see the emails come in: "We think you might like this." I just swipe and delete them without even opening them.

I just think they're hilarious because...

I don't know, I could be getting really weird ones as well.

Yeah, I'm usually quite curious about what it thinks I want this week. I'm totally not in the market for a balaclava, and I can't think why I would be, because I'm not planning to rob a bank any time soon with the archery equipment it's trying to sell me.

What about your other job? You know, the SAS?

Oh, yeah, that one. But we don't talk about that. Amazon doesn't know about that.

No.

Or it obviously does.

Here's another example of that. Caron's car is a VW Up. Great little car, but the infotainment system in it's rubbish. There's a cradle for your smartphone and a USB connector, which is all great. But when you put it in, you can't say, "Just do Apple CarPlay on the phone, and then I can do all the..." That would be too straightforward. Basically, the phone just decides, when you turn it on its side, it starts showing things. So we're driving along, and there's a picture of two women in bikinis. I'd plugged my phone in to charge as we were driving, and I think it was something on Facebook. When you scroll through Facebook, you get a video carousel.

Yeah, the Reels.

Yeah. It was obviously something in there.

Okay, yeah.

And before anyone says it: no, I don't go on Facebook to look at scantily clad women.

But why would it show you that while you were driving?

Yeah. No idea.

It obviously knows you're driving. So why is it showing you Facebook Reels while you're driving?

You would think it would know I was driving. It's not quite advertising, but it's trying to show me content it thinks I might be interested in while I'm in the car. I'm driving along with Caron, and it comes up. I just laugh and say, "Oh, yeah, what do I want to watch next."

If you didn't know each other very well, it could be really weird.

It could be, with a complete stranger in the car. You plug your phone in because you want to charge it or put the radio on, and suddenly it's showing images which are maybe inappropriate. I don't know.

Yeah

It's like the lunatics are running the asylum. It's absolutely crazy. We haven't mentioned AI yet, but we will now. The beauty of the internet in its infancy, when Google started to become a thing in the late nineties, it was suddenly putting the power back in the hands of the consumers. We had control, we had choice. And yet now it feels like that control's gone, unless you spend a lot of time clicking the three dots to say, "Don't show me this again. Don't show me this again." Algorithms are doing things, and I don't know. It just seems crazy.

It seems out of control. It's over the top. It's just too much.

And you can understand why governments are looking at banning under-sixteens. I dont know what I think about that. You had under-sixteens; you would probably have found it quite difficult to keep them off social media.

At the time, it was still quite new. Well, not that new, but it wasn't as prevalent. They were never bothered about Facebook. That was sort of dead and gone. They say they don't use Facebook. They do. You see them commenting on stuff, but it's not a big deal. They were very much the Snapchat generation, using that mainly to communicate with a small group of friends.

But the out-of-control nature of it makes me understand why governments—I mean, they've done it in Australia.

I would hate for them to be twelve years old right now.

Yeah. Very difficult, because they desperately want it. And yet it's difficult to accurately control.

It's way worse than when my kids were that age already.

Already and it's not that long ago. Torrens is only, what, 20? 22?

22 last week, 22 last Saturday. So, yeah, it was a wee while ago. I know they were under thirteen, and they should have been thirteen to have Snapchat, but they were very much, "Well, how do I communicate with my friends otherwise?" Where we live, in the middle of nowhere, they couldn't knock on someone's door. So there was an argument for having that connection. But until they were thirteen, I had their logins and I was checking what they were doing, and that was the deal: "Okay, you can have it." but Torrens ' Snapchat was in my name. I think it wasn't invented until my daughter was a little older, but he was using my Snapchat account until he was old enough to have his own one, at thirteen. There is definitely scope for a cut-down version so they can speak to their friends, but with parental control, so you can see who they're speaking to and delete people. I think that they can communicate is great. During Covid and this was a big thing, my son was fifteen, sixteen, and suddenly stuck at home in the middle of nowhere, with just us and his big sister for company. But he has an Xbox, and he was on his xbox every night chatting to his mates, playing games, communicating, playing together online. And it was...

It was a force for good.

It was an absolute godsend. I was never happier than when I was going to bed and could hear him effing and blinding in his bedroom with his friends. It couldn't have made me happier, because he was having a social life.

He was getting some social interaction.

He was relating. He was having that interaction with people. If he hadn't had an Xbox, it would have been absolutely dreadful.

Yeah. Broadly speaking, I think the communication systems the internet has brought to us are a force for good. They're incredible, inevitably used by bad actors and angry people. And I still think we are learning how to use them effectively. I don't mean that necessarily in a business context. I mean in a social context.

Yeah.

And we're still doing bad things with it because we haven't learned all the good things. Think about the telephone. It was a wonderful invention, but some people still figured out how to use it badly. Heavy breathers, prank calls and all that weird shit that went on.

We're all in WhatsApp group chats where somebody doesn't quite get it.

Absolutely, yeah.

So, yeah, there's always the...

So anyway, I guess the takeaway is: by all means, leverage these remarketing opportunities and think about the clever things you can do that work. But you can also get on people's nerves. Big time.

Yeah.

Right. What have you got?

Yeah, it's an interesting one. It was something we...

Well I hope so because that wasn't.

Something we were talking about when we were looking at our own website's menu. The general conversation was, well, people don't really use the menu because if they're looking for something, they'll land on the landing page. They'll land on the page of the product they're looking for.

But then I read something: obviously, with AI Overviews, they're not necessarily landing on the landing page. People are asking a question, and they would normally have ended up on some sort of educational blog post that answered the question. They're not doing that anymore. They're just landing on Google AI Overviews or ChatGPT, or wherever. They're getting the answer there. Then they may go to Google and say, “Okay, find me this product,” and land on your page. They may go back to the overview and say, “Where did that information come from? Okay, Red Evolution.” They put Red Evolution into Google, land on our homepage, and suddenly they're having to use the menu to find the page. And I was like, “Oh my God, that throws everything upside down that we have been saying for years.”

So we're saying the citations in the AI aren't always to the actual piece of information it's citing.

If it's a citation, that just means, "and Red Evolution is somewhere you could get it."

Because it's just brand citations as opposed to specific pages.

So even when they link to pages, it's not always the right page. It's not always the right place at all. They get the information presented to you first, then try to find links that match what they've said. So instead of people going, “Right, I want marketing for engineering companies,” and landing on our specific marketing for engineering companies page, they're going, “Who does marketing for engineering companies? Red Evolution.” They Google Red Evolution, go to Red Evolution's homepage, and then have to go to the menu to find the page. “Oh shit, that's not how we've structured it.”

I dont think we ever actively would have developed menus and thought, “Well, it doesn't really matter. Nobody uses them”? We're always creating menus that make it easy to navigate a website, including a sitemap, for example.

But we've always said that people are more likely to land on the page than find it from the...

Well 99% of them still are. But you're saying, as we go forward, it could be...

It's going to be...

We are going to see fewer people landing on specific pages, potentially.

Yeah. They're going to be coming in a different way. Blog posts are basically going to be fodder for the AI engines. Nobody's actually ever going to land on a blog post because they'll get the information they want from the AI engine. The blog post is just there to get the engine to mention you.

To cite you. Yeah.

But people are, in the long term—which is probably about three weeks—going to land more often on your homepage and try to find the bit they want, rather than always landing on the relevant page. So that could be a big change.

So site search is probably a big thing as well. It's probably worth bringing site search back.

Oh my God, yeah.

Because that didn't really get used, so we started phasing it out. But it's maybe worth reintroducing.

Yeah. If it's a big site with lots of pages, and you can see that people land on the homepage and don't quite know where to go next, then you might have a little AI thing: "What are you looking for on this site?"

Yeah. It's interesting; people are used to asking AI, etc., and you've got the next- well, not the next step up; it's a step backwards, I think. You have got the AI agents which are on individual websites with "How can I help you today?" And I say they inevitably don't help you. They inevitably give up and say, "Oh, I'll get a real human to come and talk to you." Is that fair?

Unless it's a very simple question.

Yeah, yeah.

Although people do use them if they've used up their credits on ChatGPT. Certain websites have really good bots, and people use them to answer—is it Chipotle or somebody? Rather than, "How much is a bit of chicken there?" they ask really detailed questions: "Can you review my CV?" And it goes away and does it, because it doesn't know. And some of them are being used as....

They're using somebody else's tokens to get their own job done.

Basically, yeah.

That's interesting. I hadn't thought of that.

Some brand website chatbots are good enough to answer questions way beyond chicken-related questions. I'll see if I can dig out something on that, because it was really funny.

Okay. Google Ads.

Google Ads.

We're fans of Google Ads. Are we fans of the interface that changes every four minutes? Probably not so much. It's got better.

It's not the worst. It's better than Facebook.

It got worse and worse, and now it seems to be getting better. So much so that when I'm using Google Ads, I actually find what I need. And I think, is that right? That was far too easy to get to, the thing I wanted to look at. It seems to have improved quite a lot. They must surely have realised people were getting fed up with the complexity of the interface when all they want them to do is spend money.

Things are still in weird places, but they haven't moved for a while. Bing's interface is nicer to use, even though, obviously...

Nobody uses it.

Yeah, but it is more intuitive.

Unfortunately, nobody uses Bing. We support the use of Bing Ads because sometimes the numbers are a lot lower.

It's cheaper, way cheaper.

It's way cheaper because the numbers are lower. But the quality can sometimes be good.

If you're targeting big corporate enterprises.

They've locked them into Bing, sort of thing.

Yeah, but it's nicer to use.

What I was going to say about Google Ads: you had a conversation last week, and I've had plenty of conversations with Google reps. And they keep pestering us to use inappropriate features. That's the wrong word, "inappropriate". Features that aren't useful for the type of Google Ads that we're running for very specific, niche B2B industrial engineering applications.

Yeah. The conversation last week....For one client, we're running a campaign around a very specific geographical area, people who would actually use their services. It's maybe half a dozen postcodes. Very specific.

Okay.

The Google rep had done some research and, fairly obviously clutching at straws, worked out that some postcodes had a lower cost per click than other postcodes, based on very small numbers. The suggestion was to split the campaign into two campaigns and have different maximum costs per click for the different postcodes, all of which are really close to each other. There's no logic to that. There's no reason why one part of Bristol would have a lower cost per click than the others. You could look at it two weeks later and it could be completely different. But this was the best he could figure out to improve the campaign. I think they feel they've got to suggest something.

Well, I think that's it. There are two camps among the Google reps who phone up companies and agencies like us, who do PPC for our clients. And they only really understand B2C, and they want you to use AI, turn this on, turn that on, and let the algorithm take care of it. Then there's the other camp who, when you speak to them, say, "Ah, right. Okay, I see what you mean. We're talking really low numbers, very specific. You're probably right. The AI isn't going to have enough data to learn." They're very straight-up about that but they are a minority.

He didn't push me towards the AI, which was something. I made it very clear that it's low volume. This is not happening.

The AI tools within Google Ads are good if it's got the volume. Generally, that's a B2C thing—business-to-consumer—as opposed to what we're doing, business-to-business. I wrote quite a lengthy blog post, which I think I published at the beginning of this week. It's worth looking up on our site. It talking about niche Google Ads and PPC campaigns: what to do, what not to do, and not just give them the money, switching on AI and hoping for the best. You have to be really controlled. We've just got a new client, and we're working on a PPC campaign for them. It's very expensive clicks. It's niche software used by enterprise-type businesses. They're targeting the US, and we have to be all over that like a rash.

It's going to be totally manual.

If you chucked AI Max or whatever at that —it'll just obliterate the budget. I think, speaking to them, they said they'd previously spent nineteen thousand quid on clicks and got about six enquiries, or something ridiculous. It was absolutely ridiculous. It sounds like they were paying for clicks that were completely...

Very possibly.

They were never going to work. They're doing something similar with another agency, who are doing a very bad job, it seems, on their LinkedIn. They're paying for LinkedIn traffic, which so far isn't converting. It's early days, so anything could happen. But when we looked at the landing page they were sending people to...

It's very confusing.

There was six or seven different things you were being asked do.

Yeah, different CTAs.

This is such a mistake people make.

"Don't make me think" is still the first rule of websites.

Yeah, Steve Krug's book: Don't Make Me Think and Dont Make Me Think 2. He brought another one out, didn't he? I think we've got both of them in there somewhere. We did have. But what you have got to think about if not aware and you're thinking of running PPC and you're in a B2B niche, you're going to pay sometimes ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty dollars per click. For one click. You could pay fifty dollars easily. If you're paying that and you immediately confuse people...

Right, you're paying fifty dollars a click. What do they need to see? You need to look credible. They need to see social proof, and you need to give them an offer. Offer them a demo. Eugh, but that's how it works in the SaaS world. Prove that other people are already using this software, so they wouldn't be idiots if they decided to use it.

Yeah. Make them feel comfortable.

The one we were looking at, it said, above the fold, "Book a demo" or "Book a workshop".

Yeah. What's the difference? I genuinely don't know.

Or "Read this Blog" or "Download this thing". It was like, what do you want me to do? Then we did some research, looking at their competitors, and straight away we found no-scroll pages.

Just "Book a demo".

Yeah, information, social proof, "Book a demo" or "Book a chat", or whatever it is. I've strayed a little from what I was talking about. But there's so much to get wrong with Google Ads, and the Google Ads reps will help you get it wrong and spend more money. I'm not saying they're doing it with malice. They're doing it because they're very much focused on the software.

Yeah, they're trying to get people to use it more.

And the tools, and...

They're trying to help, but sometimes it's like...

They just don't understand.

"We can't find anything to tell you. But we can see the cost per click in different postcodes is different. That's the only thing we can find, so let's do that." But because we had actually made it very manual, having gone with AI Max and found that even for that market, which isn't really B2B its more B2C..

If you're running Google Ads yourself and not using an agency, that's all well and good. Just make sure when Google phone up that you recognise they're not necessarily doing it with malice, but they may well be trying to get you to use features and they can be quite persuasive about that. Because it's clever. It's AI, and it'll figure it out. Just tell us the page and it'll figure out what traffic you need.

It'll make the best of your budget. It'll figure out who's going to convert. Well, it can if you've got thousands and thousands, but not if you've got small numbers.

All right. That's that little rant over. What have you got?

Going back to the landing page thing, we've always said to clients making adverts: one message, one thing. With an advert, you're interrupting people. It's in a magazine or online when they're trying to do something else. You have to only say one thing in that advert. We've had a lot of clients like, "Buy this thing. And also we do this, this, this, this, this." No, no, no, please....just..

Just do one thing in the advert. It's so much more powerful. Kit Kat don't say, "Have a break. Have a Kit Kat. And also, you might not be having a break. You might be working and eating a Kit Kat, or driving a car and having..." No. One message. So if the ad only has one message, the landing page also should only have one message. The ad is "Buy this software". The landing page should direct them to the next thing they should to do. Don't just go, "But what if that person...?" No, you've got to use the 80/20 rule. If 80% of people want a demo, that's what you want. If you think what they want isn't to book a demo, do that thing. But just do one thing.

And it's guesswork. A lot of marketing is guesswork. Maybe most, I don't know. It's experimentation, absolutely. With this PPC gig we've just landed, we're going to start off really simple. If we're getting click, leave; click, leave; click, bounce—whatever you call it—then we'll review it, rather than going in with a really long page and lots of different things on it and watch what people do. We're going to try a really simple approach for starters. One thing I don't understand when it comes to adverts is on-radio adverts. I listen to talkRADIO, I listen to LBC quite a lot. Say for example we had an advert: "Red Evolution. Industrial Marketing Specialists. Been around since 2003. If you're an engineering company, give us a call." And then "Your home is at risk..." or some crap at the end. Well some of them go, "Terms and conditions apply. See our website," and others do a whole long blurb about terms and conditions. Why do they do that?

Because some industries have to.

Well, yeah, but it doesn't seem like it's the financial people who do it and others who don't. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason. If they have to, surely that rule should be changed. Number one, nobody listens to it. You can't listen to it, because it's too fast, and it's clearly ticking a box. That can't be good for consumers can it?

It's completely pointless.

And by the end of the blah blah blah blah

You're not listening.

You have no idea what they were advertising.

No. It's so weird. There should be a much better way. I've always thought that.

But the better way seems to be, "Terms and conditions apply."

Yeah.

And we all know terms and conditions apply. When you were talking about landing pages, it's almost related: it's this idea of hitting people with all that noise at the end "Oh, that's alright, we've ticked that box. Great." You've also lost the consumer. You've lost the person.

I think it is a regulation thing. We've got financial services clients, FCA, financial services and every single page has to have "Your home may be at risk", blah, blah, blah. Even a blog post or a page about something else still needs all this blurb. Not only that, we've had situations where we've put it at the bottom of each page, then "Oh this page is a longer page, it's had to be further up". So you've got to move it around, which means changing the whole website to move it around.

People who make a living out of busybodying on stuff like that, in the full knowledge nobody's reading it, it's not helping anybody. All it means is, if somewhere down the line something goes wrong, "It was in our terms and conditions." Whatever the hell is that. It's so annoying.

But going back to landing pages and adverts, you're absolutely right. We've seen the temptation so many times. When we worked with the Aston Martin specialists, they always used to get twitchy because we created classy magazine ads. Lovely ads, lovely photography, a very clear message, which would make anybody who needed work on their classic Aston Martin think, "These guys are classy. I like that." They'd go to the website and find out more about the business. But they wanted loads of other details, like the other adverts that were literally just noise and made them look like jobbing mechanics. We were trying to set them apart, and it worked but they were really twitchy about it. They actually did one, they tweaked one of the adverts and put it into the owners' magazine. Then we saw it and were like, "Oh, Jesus, what have they done?"

Yeah. Just keep it really simple.

Simple is good.

Think about the audience. They don't want to read all that bluff. If you're going to put it in front of them, make it nice to look at, so at one glance they know what you do.

Powerful imagery, clear messaging, clever messaging—as long as it's not so clever people don't understand it. Plenty of brands are guilty of doing that. Okay. Interesting one. Have you got anything else?

The only thing I had was, I was on LinkedIn the other day reading a few posts, and they're so samey. They're obviously written by AI, and there's a real pattern to them. There's always a few bullet points. This is one: "Most people think they're stuck. They're not. They're in a pattern they haven't recognised yet." Then it goes on: "That's not coincidence. That's conditioning." You've seen that. It's like, "It's this. No, it's this. It's not this. It's that." That's a very AI thing. Once you see it, you can't unsee it, and it just keeps popping up.

Do you use LinkedIn much?

I don't like it, it's just...

Who does?

Some people...

Do you think people who use it a lot genuinely think people care when they do the "So proud to announce that..."?

They've been downgraded, thankfully. There was a while where, if you didn't have a mental health problem or a tragedy in your family, you weren't going to get any visibility. But that has...

Has it? Have they changed the algorithm?

They have changed the algorithm, and there's noticeably less of that now. That's good, because the sob-story stuff was painful for a while. It was like, "For God's sake, that's not why I'm here. I don't know you. It's terribly sad you've had a personal tragedy, but I don't know who you are. Why are you telling me this?" That's gone down. The "We've done really well, we've done this" actually gets engagement, which is quite nice.

I don't think it gets genuine engagement. It gets platitude-type engagement: "Really pleased for you. Well done. Yay. Go you." People are really thinking, "Oh, wanker." Well, I think...

I think, I mean...

Well, that's what I think.

I'm going with, "That's really nice." People are congratulating people because they've done something.

I don't know.

But, yeah.

I'm interested in people's stories. I'm not interested in people telling me how great they are, how wonderful their life is. I think that's a thing with social media generally.

But I'm also not interested in them telling me how awful their life is.

No, that's the other extreme. But stories that are interesting. "We've just won a good contract" it's not really that interesting. We did some B Corp stuff, and that made my teeth itch a bit because nobody really cares that we're a B Corp except us, broadly speaking. But we did a little of that.

We didn't push it too hard.

Yeah, I don't know. I don't spend enough time on LinkedIn. If I do, I try to put something entertaining or educational out and staying away from the self-congratulatory "Proud to announce I've been appointed as..." type bullshit.

Yeah. It's all quite boring.

Nobody cares, I don't think. Anyway, maybe it's just me. Maybe I'm just horrible.

If it's somebody you know and they've done something, that's nice. But it tends to be full of people you don't really know. It's like, "I can't even remember why you're on my LinkedIn. I must have met you somewhere and somepoint. I don't know who you are, and I don't really care." But if it's somebody you went to school with or used to work with, and they've moved jobs or done something, I'm genuinely interested and happy to see it.

I saw something like that from somebody I actually like or know. But anyway.

Yeah, it's...

You're not going to convince me. I think it's a pile of pants.

No, I'm not a fan. I don't go on it for pleasure. I go on because I have to. Every year, I'm like, "Right, I'm going to use LinkedIn this year." Then, "Oh, do I have to? You can't make me."

When I go in, maybe if I've written a blog post I think is particularly good or useful, I'll share that. You guys take care of all that anyway generally speaking

Well, I'm putting stuff out, me and Leslie putting stuff on the Red Evolution channel. It's just a case...

And then repost it on our personal channels.

That's right, us having to repost it. LinkedIn company pages are becoming less obvious. It's very much the individual stuff that's getting pushed out.

Why would you go to a company's page? You could go to the website if you want to know about them. Their LinkedIn page is almost certainly going to have articles telling you how wonderful they are.

Yeah, yeah.

Unless it's like ours, where we just link to blogs and educational stuff...

But again, you can still find that on the website anyway. It's very much individual posts that matter and carry weight on LinkedIn. So if you're putting stuff on the company page, it's really important to share it from personal accounts, because that's how it'll actually get seen.

Good. When was the last time you were pestered by a utilities salesperson?

In the office? Constantly! We get them all the time. At home, no, because we don't have landlines.

We don't either anymore. They've kind of gone away, although I still get them on the mobile phone. In fact...

I don't answer unknown numbers, on the whole unless they trip me up.

Yeah, "Suspected spam"—red button.

I answered by mistake the other day. That was the Google rep who I ended up having a meeting with.

But in the office, we're getting them all the time. I assume that method of cold-call marketing must work because they all do it. They can't be employing all those people...

Yeah, they can't be....

They must get... It's a really difficult sell. I mentioned it because we work in B2B, which is often a difficult sell. You've got to get in front of the right people and everything else.  It's not just, "Check these new trainers out for £50." "I'll try them." It's more complicated. They call up, and the first thing they need to know is, "When is it due for renewal?" Who knows that? I've got no idea. Then it's, "Have you got access to the bill? Who takes care of it? Who are you with?" They've got to gather all that information, then persuade you to let them quote. Then you're going to hand over your utility bills to potentially an absolute clown show.

Somebody who's not a utility provider.

We're with Octopus for electricity here, and there's no gas. We just use electricity and water. We're with Business Stream for water, and they're an absolute clown show. After changing the direct debit, we're already four hundred pounds in credit with our water. They insist on taking, "Oh, we'll drop it to £110," and we're like, "We're using about £50 a month, if that." We don't use a huge amount of water. We've got cups of tea and a toilet.

And a tap that drips constantly.

A tap that drips a little bit. That's right. It's designed to drip, which is incredible.

So annoying.

This week, the guy phoned. I'd managed to get rid of him last week, then he phoned up: "I said I wouldn't phone back till Friday." I'd slipped up and said, "You need to speak to Caron for that." Oh, no. Then he phoned back, and I said, "Look, I've had a think about it. We're with Octopus. It's fine. It's not going to make much difference whoever we're with. We don't use a huge amount of electricity." Doesn't mean the bill isn't huge, because electricity is more expensive than gold, I think. "Oh, that's a real shame, because I can get you some quotes this afternoon." It's like, no. It's so hackneyed and old and boring and tedious. I don't like hanging up on people...

I know, it's a shame because...

Or just hanging up without saying, "Bugger Off."

And there aren't any jobs. If they've got a job doing that, it's because...

I'm always polite to cold callers because it's a tough job.

Yeah. Nobody's doing that job because it's their dream job. They're doing it because they need a job.

Being an agency, we get pestered by companies who want to do our outreach, which is effectively cold calling. "Do you want to buy some inbound marketing?" They've maybe got ways to sell it. Thankfully, we get decent enquiries coming through anyway because of the tools we're using. But I wonder, is there a shelf life on this whole cold-calling thing?

It is hard, because, well your phone lists suspected spam, mine doesn't, but I rarely answer if I don't recognise the number, because you know it's going to be somebody trying to sell you something. Younger people, in particular, never answer their phones. So how can you make a living out of cold calling if people literally don't answer their phones anymore?

It's almost like that industry refuses to acknowledge, "You know what? This is done." Or I suspect it must work.

It must do, because otherwise they're going to go out of business.

Yeah. Certainly, there's a lot of cold calling done to try and get you to buy their cold-calling service.

Yeah.

For us, anyway.

Yeah.

I was more interested in how often people have been contacted by a utilities person and actually ended up getting a really good deal and everything went really well.

Yeah. I don't know.

Speaking of things not going well, just to finish off—and it's digital-related—I was trying to pay somebody this week. For some reason, because I did it at ten past nine on a Monday night, it got flagged up. This is somebody I'd already paid some money to. I'm paying them some more money, but it got flagged as fraud.

If it was two in the morning, I'd get it sometimes. I had an online shopping payment put through at two in the morning, and it got blocked. Okay, fair enough. That's quite weird.

Yeah.

But nine at night, really?

No, that's right. It did actually say, the banking app flashed up and said, "This has been flagged. It might take up to four hours for the payment to be released." At eleven o'clock the next day, I finally got a call by their fraud department to make sure it was a legit payment.

Why did they think it was?

Meanwhile, I've got to contact the person I'd told two minutes ago, "Right, I'm sending the money now." I've got to contact them to say, "Oh, the bank..." And I was thinking, will it sound like I'm making it...?

Sound like you're scamming them now? Exactly.

For God's sake. But I said to the guy when they phoned, "I appreciate you looking out for us and trying to spot these things. It's great." At the same time, I was thinking, did you really need to do it with that one? I'd already made a payment to them.

Yeah, it's...

Heyho, heyho...

I think it's a positive thing, on the whole, that they block payments that look iffy. But it's automated, based on rules. Most of them are right. It's always going to catch the odd one. It's like your spam filter in your email, isn't it?

I love technology. I love what we do. I'm blown away by it all the time. But the complexity its brings into our lives... We were laughing about two-factor authentication the other day. When are we going to have five-factor authentication? "Now go to your window and wave." Where's that going to go? Because Google will get cracked at some point.

But Google though, you're in Google, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Meet—all of them. You can be working away in Google, using Google Chat and Google Mail. You go into a meeting on Google Meet, and it goes, "Please verify who you are." You have to enter your email and password, then get your phone. It always does it when you've got a meeting at nine o'clock in the morning and you click on it at nine o'clock...

I think Googles sitting there going, "Oh, Julie's about to go into a meeting. Click."

"She's running late. It's nine o'clock on the dot. She's just made it to this meeting in time. We'll make her log in again, and then we'll make her..."

It's when my Mac decides the fingerprint won't work. "I want the password." My Mac password is this long.

Oh, no.

And you know, it's like, fingerprint in, fingerprint in. And it's like, "No, I want your password this time."

Yeah.

I was in there two minutes ago.

It's still me. That's the thing with Google. I literally just sent an email and have been putting messages in Chat. Why do you think it isn't me when I try to go into a meeting? Or you were halfway through writing an email yesterday, and it logged you out. It was me when I started writing this email. It's still me at the end. Why do you think it isn't?

Maybe that's it. Maybe that's the mystery. Maybe they've randomised it so you can't predict it, keeping the crims on their toes. I don't know. Anyway, we've talked about all kinds of things today. Some was digital marketing, as usual, and some wasn't, as usual. I can't think of anything else just now. I'm quite happy just to...

Yeah.

That's enough. It's, what, six minutes past eleven?

Sun's still shining. Still no clouds.

It's good. It's going to be twenty degrees today. Fantastic.

Oh, love it.

Lovely. All right. We'll speak to you next time. You've been listening to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. Julie, see you next time.

Bye.