It's Official, Your Corporate Speak Marketing Blurb Is Killing Profit – Episode 171

There was some research I was reading about this morning. Concrete phrases are more memorable than the sort of wishy-washy abstract phrases. Okay, so, rather than saying 'we are the best solution for increased efficiency', say 'we have software that saves your marketing team three hours a week ', and people are 'Oh, that was the ones that saved three hours a week'. You're never going to remember the one that said, 'We are the solution for increased efficiency'. You'd be like, what?

I know. How often do we come across this, though?

I know, I sort of started looking for like an example closer to home. And I did find an ex-client whose home page on the website says, " Leveraging our specialist capability for the energy transition". I'll give you five minutes and see if you can remember that.

Welcome back to.

Digital Marketing From The Coalface.

Well done.

Yay! Got it. Right.

Yeah. Good start. I've got one really exciting new project, but that's for later, so, um, ask me about it later.

Okay. I'll remember.

Really? Quite exciting. Okay, good. I think it's an internal project, I hasten to add, but still very exciting.

Excellent.

What have you got? Lots. Oh, you've got loads of things written.

Lots. Yeah, lots of things written down, but I'm not sure how many legs any of them have got. They might just be like, all right. Or we might manage to actually craft some sort of conversation out of some of them.

Good. As long as our, listener base gets one little bit of value, then it's been worth us babbling on.

I think there is a little bit of value in here. The rest of it is probably just babbling. There was one thing that leapet out, I guess during the week was...

You have to talk into the microphone.

Do I have to? That's boring. Yeah. People talking about the death of the internet because it's all just.... that's a huge dog.

And a very big owner. Sorry, owners.

It's all one happy family.

I think it's one huge dog and two huge people dragging it around. Go on. Sorry. I don't think they're listening. I think we're safe.

No fat shaming people. People and dogs are walking past. Oh, dear. Right. Okay. So, yeah, the death of the internet, basically, because AI is going to create all the content, and then AI is going to do all the commenting on the content, and AI is going to distribute the content, and AI is going to promote the content and....

Create the videos from the content.

Yeah, create the videos, and then comment on the stuff that it's put out there, and it's all just going to become completely pointless and eat itself.

Training on its own garbage.

Yeah, basically. So. Apparently there are people now...

Like Alex mentioned that a long time ago we were talking about something and like, how do we get around this problem of these ever-decreasing circles, this kind of downward spiral? AI training.

Yeah. There's only gonna be one training. One fact in the end, because it's all just gonna be...

It'll just be forty two. Yeah.

I make up a fact and then I go and write some content about that fact. But people are apparently creating agents to go on and comment on Reddit for them. So if you're creating the content on Reddit with AI, and then you're creating agents to go and comment on the content on Reddit, then it's just a load of bots speaking to each other. And what's the point?

Aren't platforms like Reddit kind of taking steps to make sure it's not just bots having conversations with bots?

Surely it has to be.

Um, yeah.

Apparently.

If you look at some of the absolutely inane comments that get posted on social media, including Reddit, it's clearly human.

Yeah. That's true!

There's, only a human would actually just get angry because they don't agree with something somebody said or whatever. Or, you know.

Threads is the best for that. The comment sections and threads. Threads are brilliant.

Threads. You mentioned threads. Go on.

You can lose hours just like sitting, eating popcorn and watching the.

Are you a threads fan then?

I don't use it very much, but you know, when you're on Instagram or Facebook, sometimes it like points you to a thread and you end up clicking in and um.

That's exactly what I was going to say.

And then you find something that's like somebody said something really stupid or triggered some sort of conversation. And there's just like thousands of comments and people on threads are very funny, very witty, and they humans.

Are not as nasty as some of the others then.

No, it's all really nice. It's like nice Twitter.

In that case, why is their advertising not nice? Because what they do on Facebook is they post like a screen grab of a thread and you can't quite see the end of it. And you click on it thinking it'll reveal within Facebook it takes you to threads and it's just so annoying.

It's, I see why they're doing it.

I have got an account, but I can't be arsed with it because of that.

But threads. Great fun. It's what it's like what Twitter used to be at the beginning, people actually having conversations and everybody. Well, the ones I follow, everybody's actually really nice to each other and there's none of the really nasty stuff. Well, there is, but a lot less of the garbage.

Is the nasty stuff not, to a large part, though, down to the topics?

Yeah, I think so.

They're contentious topics politics, religion, all the usual suspects. If it's stuff like that, it's always going to get nasty.

Yeah. I mean, the stuff I'm following on threads isn't the same stuff I think that I was following on Twitter before I gave up on it. And so I'm maybe just following nice people.

Yeah.

But it's great. There's just some really funny stuff. And people just being really witty and even the brands, you know, the Aldi's and the National Trust. And there's a few brands on there being really quite clever. The National Trust they just talk about scones and John Lewis is the same. They're really smart and you know, National Trust, whatever conversations going on, they just managed to turn the conversation. The answer is scones, you know, and they just do it really, really well. And, you know, you don't mind that it's not a person because it it's subtle and funny.

You don't mind that it's not a person?

Like it's the National Trust. It's not an individual account. It's a corporate account if you like, but whoever's doing it, they're really smart and they've got their kind of tone of voice and they've got their messaging spot on. And, you know, Aldi, Ryanair, some of them are doing really good things out there. They're really smart and witty. They're not promoting themselves, they're just sort of taking the piss. Slightly. But, you know, in a kind of....

What was it pitched as, threads, when it came out? Was it supposed to be like a kinder, nicer place? Wasn't Bluesky supposed to be that?.

Yeah. But I don't know if it's really taken off. I did create an account and then completely forgot all about it and never did anything with it, but obviously threads because you do get sent to it from Instagram and Facebook from time to time can remember about it. It's not when I was kind of going open, but when I end up in there by mistake, I kind of end up lingering because it's quite fun. But yeah, it's much nicer.

Okay, so threads is something that I might revisit. And it's interesting that it seems you're saying it's a nicer place. I mean, I do flirt with Reddit. In fact, what I did on Reddit, a few weeks ago, more than a few weeks ago, I found a really nice coin when I was out metal detecting. So I went to a subreddit about metal detecting, posted the coin and it was like, I think the first time ever I had a really positive experience on Reddit because people were "oh, really nice coin", "Where did you find it?".

That's good.

Yes. It's that and chatting about it. And it was all, yeah, it was all very nice.

Yeah, I think it does depend on the topic and the group.

I mean, I'm in a motorhome forum, not on Reddit or anything. It's not a subreddit. It's just a forum Motorhome Fun. It's called, it's a great place. Yeah, it's a great place when you want answers to questions like it might be a question about a trip or places to go, or issues with the van and all that. The knowledge in there is off the scale. It's superb. When I was, um, refitting all the windows to our motorhome, I actually got a guy contacted me and sent me photographs of when he did it on an identical van.

No.

Exactly.

So helpful.

Exactly how to do it. What you'll get when you pull it out. This is what you'll find. You need to take this. But it was all with photographs and everything. It was amazing. Yeah, it was really good. And you know, the power of user-generated content is great. But where I think a lot of brands trip themselves up is they go in there and just say "Hello, do you want to buy a car?". You know, it's just like straight away. They kind of try to flog stuff as opposed to contributing. And that's why they get pushed back and that's why they go, oh, I went and read it once and it was horrible. People were unkind.

Yeah, definitely. And if you're an idiot, people will tell you you're an idiot anywhere, whether that's threads or...

Not to your face very often, thankfully.

No, a lot of stuff on threads actually is like Americans asking really stupid questions about Britain. But some of it, I think is set up so that you get lots of comments of people going, "No, we do it properly over here" and spelling stuff and it is just a lot of fun. And it's all done in a very sort of, kind of, you know, even if people are slagging someone else off, they do it in a fun way.

And you're saying that B to C brands are using it. Are you seeing any B2B brands using threads?

No, not where I'm hanging out anyway. There might be, but I haven't investigated.

It's probably worth an investigation, isn't it?

Yeah. I think it's beginning to go that way, which means it'll just become horrible soon. But right now, it's still alright.

It will become horrible if the brands go in there and just start saying, we're really good, buy shit from us, which is what people often do, or the people in companies, B2B type companies often do.

But yeah, it's an interesting place and very much what Twitter used to be, before it self-combusted. Which wasn't what I was talking about. I was talking about Reddit, but yeah, there you go. I don't think it's very AI. It does seem to be humans actually providing the wit on threads.

On threads.

Yeah. Reddit. Yeah. Presumably there is some way of filtering it out, but this was just a thing I was listening to.

But what it comes down to is the AI engines. The reason that they like Reddit is that natural language, is where they seem to thrive because that's where they learn. Like if they listen to this conversation, they would learn something about the way language is structured together in the patterns of speech and what we're talking about relates to B2B you know. We're fundamentally talking about how B2B often misused social media because they don't try and go in there and be helpful and communicative and everything else. They just go in there and broadcast. And it's not a broadcast medium. That's why Reddit is is beening hoovered up by the large language models.

Yes. I guess it's learning from there. But as long as it continues to be human, otherwise they're just learning from other machines. And like you say, the whole thing just becomes completely pointless.

Yeah, absolutely.

Okay, so that was that, um.

I was going to talk very briefly. It was something we were talking about last week. The guys were talking about one of our clients who uses HubSpot but are putting together a project for them. And they're using a different system for emailing for newsletters and the like. Just for mass emails. And they're not going to use HubSpot. And I was lugged into the conversation that the guys were having. I wasn't involved in the conversation. And what it kind of came down to is that they don't want to increase their HubSpot subscription.

Okay.

And so they've got a subscription to a different system. And I just happened to say to one of the guys, "Oh, that system must be really cheap then. Does it compared to HubSpot?". You know, like one hundred thousand sends a month or something for whatever? And the guys were saying, well, no, it isn't actually that cheap. I mean to get the level that they want, they may well have to spend like £300 a month on it or something like that, which is.

So how much are the extra contacts in HubSpot?

I'm not sure. But I think they were kind of broadly against HubSpot because they feel like they're already paying HubSpot an awful lot of money for what they get. And I mean, they've got enterprise CMS.

Yeah okay.

And it's working well for them. But, you know, I think they feel a little bit like they're not sure whether it was the right decision to use it. But this got me thinking. And we were talking about how. And I think this email system does it where it's like they've got a free version and then they've got a version that's £20 a month and then it's £300 a month.

Okay. Big jump.

I just scribbled down like, SaaS companies behaving like drug dealers basically.

Yeah.

You know, like, come and try this thing. Oh, no, no, it's okay. It's free. It's free. Give it a try. Oh, that's quite good. Or do you like that? Yeah. Do you like that? Oh, I'll try this and try that. And you can do a little bit more with. Oh wow. This is really cool. Right. So I definitely want to use this now, but I need to be able to send this email to a thousand. Right. Okay. That's £300 then. Yeah. But it was £15 a month or £20 a month. Now you want £300 a month. It seems to work because loads of them do it.

Yeah. They all do it. And even apps you know, you get your free app and then as soon as you want to do anything actually useful with it, you're like £15.99 a month or whatever.

Yeah, yeah.

It does seem to work, but they hook you and they normally give you a free trial of the full version and then scale it back down to the free version. So you like, they hope that you're going to miss all the features that you had when you first tried it.

Yeah, yeah. But it's, I guess it is working. But when we started selling HubSpot and more importantly, using HubSpot, I remember it was something that we were taken aback by the leap.

Well the starter was £20 a month.

Yeah. And then the very next version.

Is.

£300?

£600.

Oh, is it £600 now? Yeah, I think the CMS is £300 odd, isn't it? Maybe.

Yeah.

If you wanted the starter CMS, it's like two hundred quid a year. And the next level up, the pro level, which gives you more functionality, etc..

More pages.

Yeah. Suddenly it's three hundred and fifty or whatever it is a month.

It's a massive leap.

Yeah. I think it feels like an odd business model. It feels like it shouldn't work, but it seems to.

Yeah, I don't know.

Or maybe it doesn't, I don't know.

I mean, we've got a client who's really struggling with the number of pages. They've added a lot of pages that we didn't expect when we first built the site. And we're, just trying to find ways of keeping it within the starter because there's no way they're jumping up to the next level.

Yeah.

Yeah. And that is an issue.

Mhm. We use Unbounce, but we're actually busy at the moment, probably going to offboard Unbounce becuase.

We offboarded another one off it today.

Good. Because we were looking at. We started out paying it was like one hundred and ninety eight dollars a month or something. And it's now about three hundred and fifty dollars a month because.

We've got lots of domains in there because we're using it for clients. We've got lots of different domains. And if you have more than three domains, they start charging you extra per domain. So we're trying to offload a few, a few domains that we dont need.

Given what we talked about last time, you know, like SaaS companies struggling and MCP servers, meaning that people don't need as many seats because they can just get the data out and do things with it. And you do wonder whether they're going to have to revisit that.

Yeah.

But, you know, if they're revisiting it when they've been, spending money like a drunken sailor thinking we're going to get all of this recurring revenue, and then suddenly the recurring revenue doesn't come because of things happening in the tech market.

Well, yeah.

They're going to struggle to, um.

And there's a.

Rebalance that.

Well there's a lot platforms out there. Maybe it's time for a bit of a shake up and maybe they're not all necessary.

Yeah. The recurring revenue, recurring monthly revenue model is, it's very enticing. It's something that, you know, we'd like a piece of that. I mean, obviously we play that game to a certain extent because we survive, if you like, because of the retained work that we do, the ongoing retained work. But that's slightly different in my opinion, I would say that wouldn't I, than the software licenses.

I think it is different because we're doing work, we're actually creating something every month. We're not just taking money for the thing that we've already provided. We're actually inputting something every single month. And the longer we're working with clients, the better the outcome for them. So I think it is a slightly different. I don't think it's particularly comparable.

No, I agree. I'm always going to agree about that. Yeah. Right. Yeah. What have you got on your list.

We've talked before about um like younger people, Gen Z or whoever are using TikTok and Instagram for searches rather than just Google. They're using YouTube and TikTok and all that. Apparently now under 44 is not just like the really younger ones, but the under 44 bracket is tends to be using at least five different platforms for searching. Whatever I got this from didn't specify which ones, but I think we can safely say Google, YouTube, TikTok, don't know what the other two or three would be.

How specific was the report? Searching for what?

Frankly, I can't remember where I got the information from. I've just written it down. It was some podcast. So, it was probably on the train journey when I kept falling asleep. So I may have missed a bit of this information, but I have written it. I do remember them saying, it's not just the very young, very young sort of segment of the market is using a lot of different platforms to search. It's weaving its way into older brackets. And you know, Google's obviously still the leader, but they're not just using Google. They are using five or more platforms.

I think it would be worth digging into that for future episodes and seeing if we can sort of figure out the kind of searches that people are doing.

I don't know if that maybe includes ChatGPT or AI as well. It probably does, because I can't think how else they'd make that five. Five plus. So I think it would include like AI searches and YouTube, TikTok, Google. But yeah, I have no idea where that data came from.

Okay, so not particularly useful then.

Interesting. But not particularly useful.

File that under "Oh that's interesting".

But I mean it is interesting that it's not just like a really young person thing anymore. Everybody's searching and beginning to search in a different way than they used to. And we will try and figure out what the hell I'm on about for next week.

I mean, the term 'search everywhere' does that only refer to people like us who are trying to get either ourselves or our client clients found, you know, so we have to be everywhere? Or is it just like all of the tools that we use social media tools, forums, websites, Google, Bing, like there's so many different ways of being discovered. It's just you kind of need to be everywhere.

Be everywhere, because everyone is.

Not easy to be everywhere.

That's the problem. You can't be everywhere. You kind of have to pick a few. Unless you've got a massive team, you have to pick a few. You cannot possibly be everywhere. You know, people are using five plus platforms. Maybe like pick three of them and do them well rather than just trying to spread yourself too thin. It's really hard.

At what point are we going to be seeing the majority of traffic that isn't referral traffic, direct traffic. You know, the majority of discovery, search traffic, wherever the people have searched, at what point are we going to see the majority of that not coming from Google?

I don't know. I mean, Google's still massive, but it's got to be changing. I'm always surprised when you see the numbers of like Google still so dominant because, it's really hard to even find the links on Google now because you've got to go so far down. You've got your AI overview and your ads and your snippets and your suggested videos and blah, blah, blah. And then by the time you actually get to the actual links to sites, you've probably given up the ghost. So I.

Do you still use Google because I do. I use Google every day to try and find something.

I do but I am lazy and I use the AI overview first. And then if I'm not sure about the AI overview result, I'll then, because the the links and the overviews are still pretty rubbish, so they usually don't give you what you want. So then I'll scroll down. But yeah, I mean, I still do, but definitely not as much.

Mhm.

Because if you can, if it's just a simple question and the answer is there in the AI overview, you never need to go into it whatever site it is. But if it's something more in depth and you want to kind of read the whole thing, then yes, but definitely using it less.

Okay, but still, use it a lot? Google? I mean, I do, I definitely do despite using social platforms like TikTok and Facebook and various others.

Do you use TikTok to search?

Oh, good question. I was trying to think about that. I generally scroll on TikTok and I find the algorithm kind of feeds me the kind of stuff that I'm wanting to consume on TikTok. I mean, my TikTok algorithm generally feeds me stuff about Claude AI and stuff about golf and stuff about motorbikes. And it kind of knows me quite well. And therefore I generally use it more for recreation, where I just like chilling out and have a bit of a scroll and see what gets thrown at me. I mean, I learn tons from it. Yeah, about golf and about Claude AI and about motorbikes and things, because it's kind of feeding me what I want, and I've certainly searched in TikTok when I'm doing like research for a client, when I'm doing some competitor analysis, I'm trying to say, well what are their competitors doing on Facebook? What are they doing on TikTok? So I go looking for them, or I'll sometimes do generic searches on TikTok to see just what comes up.

But not as a TikTok user.

No, not as a kind of right, I'm going to buy something. Like I was looking for a jacket for running, a waterproof. I've got two or three windproof ones, which are fine, but I was looking for something that's really light for running, waterproof, Google. And it was like, you know, then you just got links to Runner's World, the five best, yada yada, and all that sort of thing. So I never even thought to go and search on YouTube or TikTok or any of those kind of thing. Um, and yeah, I might do now just to see what it throws up. I've actually ordered the jacket from Decathlon. If you bought anything from Decathlon. Yeah, right. So I ordered this jacket on Friday and they said, " Oh, do you want to pay like £9 for next day delivery? Yep. I will do that. I'll pay £9 for next day. Did it arrive? No. No. Has it arrived today?

It's a bank holiday. Nothing will arrive today.

It's just. Yeah. I mean, why did they take the order? Because they used DPD and DPD. Ah. But yeah, it's the first time I bought anything from them.

So I have bought a few times from Decathlon. I thought they'd been pretty good actually.

It's an own brand thing. It's a KIPRUN. This jacket.

The running stuff's good.

Yeah, well, they're one of the reviews said, like, "finally, a lightweight, waterproof jacket that you don't need". Oh, that's a bit of a problem. I ordered a large, but we'll see anyway, if it's too small, I can send it back.

I always tend to size up at Decathlon. Handy hint for anyone listening. Always size up at Decathlon.

God, I wish I'd known that.

We'll see, we'll see.

It should arrive in the next day or so.

So yeah. What TikTok is good for. The only thing I really use, because I'm not a big TikTok user, I'm still an Instagram girl but.

I never really got Instagram. I never really, sorry, I never really became an Instagrammer.

Yeah, you just went straight to TikTok. You kind of bypassed it.

I love it. Because I like video content, but I don't think I joined the dots and realize that Instagram wasn't just pictures, it was mainly video. Well, it didn't used to be.

It was, it was.

Still.

Emerged as an image.

And I think that's maybe why I missed it. I don't know why. Anyway, we kind of wandered off topic.

Yeah. But TikTok, I tell you what it's really good for is finding restaurants. If you're going somewhere and you want, like, restaurant reviews because lots of people, post 'Top five restaurants' in wherever. Okay. And it's really good if you're looking for somewhere to go and eat. So that's the only thing I've really used it for, search-wise, but it's great for that because you do get, like, the food blogger type people and there's lots of food content in there. And it's a good way to get places that people have actually recommended. And you can see pictures and like I ate here and it was great. And okay, so that's really handy. That's my main use of TikTok. Find places to go and eat.

I think it's used more for B2B stuff than people realise. I think it's got a bad reputation. I've spoken to people many times and mentioned TikTok and, oh, you know, TikTok. It's, "We will never be on TikTok" sort of thing. Okay. Fair enough. But you know, that's fine. But your competitors maybe are, so you might want to think about it.

Same as all the other ones. If that's where your customers are, you need to be there. So it's a case of research and speak to people and speak to some of your top customers. Do you use TikTok? And if they do, then you might have to rethink because it's not whether you I mean, it's the same when Facebook started, people were like, "well, I'm not", "I hate Facebook, therefore we're not going to use it". That's not really the way to make your decisions. It's like my favourite colour is pink. Therefore, our logo should be pink. Well, that's also another way to make your decisions. It's like what? You know, what colour do your customers expect you to look like?

I do, I get it that people wear the I'm not on Facebook thing like a badge of honor. Don't they? It's like tedious.

So how'd you find out what's going on then? Yeah. You know, you have to ask.

Someone else on Facebook. And I really like a good comeback, you know, like, "oh, bles. That's a shame. Could you not work out how to use it?

Yeah, like, "we don't have a TV". Like, why the hell not stop being so sanctimonious!

Sanctimonious, that's the word. Yeah.

That's a great word, isn't it?

It's a good word.

Yeah.

Um, but yeah, it is a badge of honor thing, you know, "I'm not on Facebook".

I don't like Facebook anymore. But it's a great way to find out what's going on locally and.

Good way to sell stuff.

Sell stuff.

Find out what's going on.

Find out what's going on locally. Find out if there's if there's a road, a very big tractor, a road closure or an accident and bits like that, it's really handy, even though like to find things like what your friends are doing and things, you can't actually find that anymore because it's so full of all the other crap, but it's necessary just to find out what's happening.

You don't have to live there.

I don't open it that often, maybe once a day, quickly, whereas I'll spend a lot of time on Instagram, but I kind of just like, "oh yeah, I better look on Facebook" because it's like a local paper, just like, what's going on?

With a lot of our customers, like B2B type companies, engineering type companies that we work with, I mean, we'll often say to them like, you know, have a nicely put together Facebook account because you could use it for potentially use it for advertising and recruiting jobs. That sort of thing. So it's knowing, like you say, what the platforms are good for. Definitely, TikTok might be a good way of showing the quirkier side of your business or showing videos of impressive big lumps of engineering that people don't get to see every day that they might just find interesting. And you know, where that might lead, you know? I can hear people saying like, "well, you can't just do something just because". It has to be a reason, there has to be a likelihood that it's going to generate some kind of. But you know, who knows who might see it? Who knows where stuff comes from. It's back to this search everywhere thing.

Yeah, it's what you used to do with like, posters on the sides of buses or in the tube or on London Underground escalators or whatever. They're not going to lead to a direct sale. But you need to be, the people that get thought of, when somebody's wanting that thing. And if they've never heard of you and they don't know what you do, then you're not even in the running.

Mhm. Yeah. And that's something which, I've been doing some work on recently, this trying to understand how to be in the running in the age of the AI engines. We've talked about it on previous podcasts and I've got some stuff that's whizzing around my tiny little brain at the moment on that subject. It's exhausting.

It is exhausting because there's loads of new stuff to learn.

And loads of new stuff to create, to do and places to be, you know, online. Online, that is digitally. Yeah. Anyway anything interesting on your list?

Well, there was another thing. Um.

Oh, good. Let's talk about that.

So there was some research I was reading about this morning, and they kind of proved that concrete phrases are more memorable than the sort of wishy washy abstract y phrases. Okay. So, um.

Give me an example.

Rather than saying "we are the best solution for increased efficiency". Oh yeah. Say "we have software that saves your marketing team three hours a week!". And people are, oh, you're like, oh, that was the ones that saved three hours a week. You're never going to remember the one that said, "we are the solution for increased efficiency". You'd be like what?

I know. And how often do we come across this though?

I know. Well, was that an ex? I sort of started looking for like an example closer to home. And I did find an ex client whose home page on the website says "leveraging our specialist capability for the energy transition".

Okay.

I'll give you five minutes and see if you can remember that.

Yeah, I've forgotten it already. But yeah, it is definitely written by. Well, I would hope not a marketing person. Yeah. Written by the CEO or the accountant or.

I mean, I know what they're trying to do because they do lots of different things and they make different types of equipment for different parts of the energy industry.

Im trying to think who this is.

But if I say anything else, I'll give it away completely. 

But they used to work with us and now they don't work with us. Did we used to do anything on their website and with messaging and everything like that.

I'm not sure if we helped. I'm pretty sure we didn't help with that message.

What did it say again?

"Leveraging our specialist capability for the energy transmission".

Okay. So anyone could Google that and they could find out exactly who it is.

Yeah, that's true. If they care that much.

If they care.

But it doesn't say "what's leveraging our special". It just means doing stuff.

Doing stuff.

Leveraging our special.

To do the thing you would expect us to do and that you will pay us to do. Yeah.

I mean, what they do is they design and manufacture equipment and they can make bespoke equipment for people in that industry. But I mean, "leveraging our specialist capability", they could be accountants, they could be a marketing team, they could be cleaners.

Yeah.

Whatever, they're not saying what the specialist capability is. The specialist capability is actually designing and manufacturing complicated engineering equipment. They could at least say that, even if they can't say what kind of equipment, because they've got lots of it, they could.

It's always been thus.

They design and manufacture clever bits of kit, but "leveraging our specialist capability".

Mhm.

What does that mean?

Well, you kind of know what it means, but it.

Doesn't say anything.

Wanky way of saying it.

It doesn't give you any clue as to what sort of specialist capability they've got.

Yeah.

So yeah, um, try and be a bit more specific because that actually not only does it help people actually figure out what you do. I mean, there's so many of these things, you go on people's websites and you read the entire homepage. You're like, I still have no idea what you do because it's all just leveraging and solutions and blah, blah, blah.

Yeah.

But like actually be specific and people might actually remember what you do and think about you next time. So there's actual research. It's not just, it sounds stupid. There's research to say that people remember it more if you actually add real examples.

Yeah. And that's something that's come up in some of the research I've been doing for us, is that we need to be more specific. We need to sort of have some numbers to back up some of the stuff that we talk about, you know, and that's something that we need to look at and something I'm actively looking at right now, and I'll definitely need your help with it.

Have you gone into the AEO stuff in HubSpot?

I've had a look at it. Yeah.

It does have a ton of recommendations in there.

Yeah. It does. It probably, you know, we recommend that you now work a ninety five hour week and do all this crap, which might or might not work. Is kind of what it boils down to, I suppose, but it's definitely the game to be in. To me, it's like consultants, they're in the game of telling you what to do and then taking some money and then buggering off. And you have to then figure out how to do it. And I think that's where these tools are. They're really good at suggesting. And there's no comeback if it turns out that what they suggested you should do, actually, you didn't need to do it or it didn't actually make any tiny bit of difference to your business. "Oh did it not? Oh, well".

Yeah.

You know, thanks anyway. Thanks for the money. Um, but yeah, I did have a look at it and my first thought was, hmm, do we really need OtterlyAI if we're going to have this, if we're already paying for it because it looks.

But we can't use it for clients who don't have HubSpot.

That's right. We can't. Well, they can buy it. And it's a lot cheaper than Otterly.

Yeah, it was £50 a month.

Is it? I couldn't find a price.

£50. Or is it fifty quid or fifty dollars a month at the moment? I think that's maybe an introductory price because.

It's been in beta. Yeah. I mean Otterly's not expensive really. One hundred and eighty dollars a month or something like that. So we'll stick with it for now. But we do keep getting emails. I need to get emails from them. Yeah. And we need to figure that out as well because obviously they charge for the prompts and yeah. We need to make sure that's clawed back. Yeah. As it were not. C l a u.

Claude. As in claw, not Claude as in Claude. Yeah. Yeah.

But yeah, I think there's a real danger with this stuff that, it's going to finish up just being the bunfight that SEO was for five years. It's just like, uh, tedious.

And I see that you've added little intros at the beginning of one of the, like the latest blog posts and sort of like, here's what it's about.

Yeah, a little. Yeah just to give it a try.

The things it says because I can't be bothered reading the whole thing. So put it up front something. So yeah, that's worth a try. See if that makes any difference. Yeah. But that is one of the big recommendations is um get the information near the top of the post. And if it's in a paragraph, put it near the top of the paragraph.

It's easy to say that, but it's not actually that easy to do. It's not, you can do it with anchor links, you know, anchor links to the FAQ section and anchor links to the sections, which is all I've done. And to see if that, to see if that has any impact, you know, experimenting with it. It actually does feel like it's quite a nice user experience. If you can read sections in abstract. I'm actually, I'm interested in that bit click and just get that bit. Yeah. That's fine. I'll just take me straight to your FAQ or whatever. So yeah, it might just be the way that we do it from now on. Yeah, it makes sense.

It's helpful to humans, which is also a good idea.

Yeah. So it should be the first idea really, anyway.

Um, so you're going to come on to your exciting thing you're going to talk about.

Yeah. Except I'm not going to talk about it. It's really exciting. I'm going to tell you about it obviously when we stop recording, but it's interesting. It's an interesting thing that's come up as part of some research I've been doing and it, I think, it had maybe, sort of occurred to me before, but I wasn't convinced it was really important. Anyway, it turns out it might be something that's really valuable, but rather than talk about it, I'm going to do it, which you will take a while. It's a significant chunk of work. And we'll come back in the months to come, we'll report back as to whether or not we noticed any impact from it.

Okay.

But it's felt good that was the plan. I've written a paper on it and it'll explain it in some detail. And also there's a plan of attack there as well.

Oh how exciting.

So well, you might not think so when you when you see the, the enormous amount of work we're going to have to do, to make it happen. But anyway, yeah, we'll see if it works and we'll report back if it does. Okay. Or maybe if it works really well, we won't report back. We'll just keep it all to ourselves and our clients.

A little secret.

Yeah. That's right.

Yeah. Okay.

So there you go. So that worked. That was my intention to eventually get on to it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And see if it, we'll see what transpires.

Okay. Um.

We kind of run out of time. You've got an awful lot written down for like, you know, anything interesting you actually came up with?

That was an entire podcast that was a complete waste of time. So I'm not going to talk about that. The other thing I think I mentioned it last time, but if everybody's using AI to create stuff and everything's all sounding very much the same, does that mean that your branding and your headlines and your creative stuff is way, way more important suddenly?

Um. Must be. Yeah, I would say so.

If it's the only way to make you different, then your branding surely has to.

But you've got to make sure all of your content, even if you're using AI to help with that content, doesn't lose that tone of voice, that kind of brand. Yeah. Your the language that you use, the tone of voice, the approach that you use, you need to capture that even if you're using the tools, the AI tools to help.

Well, yeah, that's kind of what I mean. It's, um, make it different, to stand out.

So what was the question? Or was it something you read or picked up on a podcast or something? What was it?

It was somebody talking about, you know, if you're using agents and AI is just creating everything and you're sort of there's a danger of losing control of the sort of brand voice and, um, any sort of personality because it all just all start sounding the same. Which made me think, well, then, you know, your branding is much more important and you've got to be really, really clear on who you are, what you look like, what you sound like. And you've got to feed that into everything. Otherwise you are just all going to sound the same. But the people that make the effort are going to stand out.

If you're using AI, you know, a la twenty twenty four, twenty twenty, early twenty twenty five, just to produce slop. I mean, we need ten blog posts, right? That's it. Press a button. It's done. If you're using it in that way, then there's a danger of that. But if you're using it in the, you know, the twenty twenty six way, if you're, if you're actually using skills and you're using multiple filters and things to make sure that you don't lose the tone of voice and you're reading every single word that's produced in order to make sure that you're happy with it. My rule of thumb is if I read it and I'm happy with it and I'm enjoying reading it then if it's in the tone of voice for Red Evo, I can sense I can pick that up. And obviously if it's for client work. Yeah. And it's learned. I've taught it how to write for that particular client. Or what that client responds to, uh, and they say that, you know, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. So when I'm sort of working with clients on content and I'm getting really positive feedback for the content, that kind of to me is, the eating of that pudding. I think that it would be easy to phone it in and not do that and just think, oh, great, I've just produced like ten new blog posts and they're all great. And I'm sure they're great. I didn't bother reading them. I just slapped them on the website.

And they're just gonna be identical to everyone else's.

So is anyone doing that? I guess some people are.

Oh yes, there will be like the SEO rubbish that used to go out there with all the keywords.

We used to put out there. Do you mean?

No, no, I don't think we ever did. Um, but yeah, I think the clarity over who you are, your branding, what makes you different, what your tone of voice is, who you are. I think that becomes way, way more important.

Mhm.

And if you don't stand out, if you're not really clear on what makes you stand out, and if you don't manage to get that across, then you're just going to sound like everyone else. So I think it becomes the only thing that you've got that's different.

Is the way you communicate.

Yeah.

Mhm.

The 'who you are', the brand and the fact that you manage to get that across. And if somebody reads something of yours or sees something of yours, they know it's you and not someone else. I think that has to become more important because it is the only way.

Mhm. Okay. That was short-lived.

I thought you might be quite enthused by that, but.

You know, I am. I am enthused by it. I am, I'm trying to think. I mean, if you're not putting any energy into your marketing, then AI is a godsend. You can just blast out as much drivel and crap as you like, but you can also use this to become way more productive and not lose your tone of voice and not lose who you are as a company, as a brand, as an organisation.

Are the ones that are gonna surely do better in the long run.

Yeah.

Because everyone else is just gonna merge together and sound the same.

Well, this comes down to the paper I shared with the team from Manchester University Business School.

It was a good one.

Yeah, it was a good read, wasn't it? And it was basically saying like, you know, AI is not going to take your job, but somebody who knows how to use AI will. Yeah.

You know, I've seen that said a few times.

There's a lot, I mean, I think Harvard Business School and various others have brought stuff out saying that basic thing. Obviously it's early days to actually establish whether that's true or not, but it is about learning to use it, you know, learning to leverage it in a way that makes you more productive, not in a way that makes you produce more crap.

Yeah, it makes you just the same as everyone else. You still have to stand out. You still have to add the personality.

And because back in the day when I was like, you know, I blog a lot but back in the early days, back in two thousand and seven, two thousand and eight, when I was like a blogging machine, before you even came along Red Evolution. There were times when I got a bit between my teeth and wrote what I thought was really good content, and there was other times when it was just like, I need to write something about X, and there was obviously no AI assistants or anything else. So I would just sit and like, how many words is that? Five hundred and twenty? Right. Keep going, keep going. Nine hundred and eighty, keep going. Nearly there. Nearly fifteen hundred words. Great. That'll more or less do now. So anything else I can put on now is just a bit of extra. You know, those days have gone. I mean, producing the content is no longer the hard bit. Producing the volume of content, I meant to say, is no longer the hard bit. It's making sure that you're producing great content, even if you're using these assistants.

Yeah. The idea, the tone of voice, the adding some original thought in. And, you know, even if I was writing it. Tell me what your point is and what your take on it is and adding examples of like stuff that, that you've said or seen or done so that it's personal nobody else can write that because you're using examples out of your own head.

Yeah.

That's right. I am really done now.

Good. I'm going to be away towards the tail end of this week, and you're away.

For the beginning.

Of next week working remotely. So yeah, it might be.

Friday.

A.

Week, Friday. I'm around.

A week on Friday? We can maybe get Leslie to make sure she's in on that day so we can record a week on Friday.

Yeah, yeah.

Obviously.

Gives us time to think of things. You've got obviously your mammoth walk run thing going on.

Walk run thing this weekend. Yeah, that's what it starts as its official name walk, run thing.

Walk, walk and run over some mountains.

It's not over some mountains really. It's mostly on roads, but it's obviously through the Lake District. So obviously it's through the Lake District. So obviously there's a little bit of up and down involved. Oh er Mrs.. So yeah, looking forward to it.

Yeah, yeah. Tell me, remind me how many miles.

It's forty.

That's quite a lot of miles.

It's a lot of miles. Yeah it is. Yeah.

So even if you were here at the beginning of next week, we wouldn't get any sense out of you anyway.

Um. It depends, it depends if my prep has turned out to be good prep or.

Oh, this is Claude's training plan.

It was, it was a training plan. You know, what I found is in previous years, I've been sat at work thinking, okay, the Keswick to Barrow thing is coming up in, I don't know, three or four weeks time, five weeks time, six weeks time. I really should.

Get out there.

Yeah. And you kind of do it and there's no rhyme. There's no reason, there's no pattern, there's nothing to it. So I was like, wait a minute. So I got Claude to create this thing for me. And, um, yeah, absolutely. Night and day. Now, I'm not saying for one minute that I'm going to like do this walk on Saturday in record time or anything.

But if it makes the training easier.

If.

It makes.

If it makes it. Yeah. I mean, the longest training walk I did was just over twenty six miles. And normally I did run quite a lot of it. But you know, if I've done twenty six miles in just over five hours or whatever, you know, it's a fairly quick pace. You'd think the next day I'd be like, oh God, no, no, no, I was absolutely fine because of the build up, build up, build up. So gradually I'm hoping, I mean, that's twenty six is just what another fourteen and that's the forty. Yeah. And on the day when there's people there.

Yeah it does keep you going. Definitely a bit more.

Yeah. I mean as you know I've done it many times before and I've done it. You know, my quickest time was six hours. So I mean, back in the day, I was like fairly flying along. But last year and two years previous to that had a real issue with not eating and drinking properly. And I just literally collapsed spewing. I mean, it was. Yeah. And all that came out was water because I'd just been guzzling water and I had far too much water. I could hear it sloshing around in my belly. No carbs. Glycogen stores empty.

Yeah.

And you know, I'll tell you how crazy it was. I mean, I actually thought, this is it. I'm gonna have to pack it in after doing it many times. Oh, this is it's got me this year. I'm not gonna be able to finish it. And a bottle of fifty seven pence fizzy Lucozade knockoff type drink from Lidl. And I was right as rain. Yeah, more or less. I mean, the damage had been done. I was absolutely buggered.

But you just need the sugar and the salt. And really.

When you do huge distances, the real issue is you can't be arsed eating. It's a real kind of double edged sword because you're like, I know I should eat this flapjack and like, you're trying to chew it and you're like.

Yeah, it's finding stuff that you can eat easily.

Well, I'll tell you a thing I've found really interesting, but I'm going to tell you anyway.

Um, I'm interested in this sort of thing.

Well, you mush up banana and then put a load of honey in it and you make it. It's almost like it's like it's quite liquid, almost like a smoothie. So I took it in. When I went on the twenty seven mile, I took it in a plastic bag with a little wooden spoon. So literally just like spooned it out. Some of it went in my mouth and it was great because it was.

It's sugar.

Because it's sugar and it's liquid, but it's got solid in it because its got the banana. So compared to trying to eat a flapjack, it probably had the consistency.

Of a gel.

Yes. So what I've done is I bought a five hundred milliliter, one of those collapsible bottles. It's just like, it's just like a bag with a plastic top.

I've got them for running.

Yeah, yeah. So I've got one of them. I'm just going to ram it full of honey and banana.

Just throw it out.

And then just like, literally like toothpaste. Yeah.

Yeah. Just put it in my mouth.

And then at the checkpoints you can get, you know, sweets and bananas and all sorts of. I'll carry some flapjacks in case I'm really desperate and I can manage. But honestly, when I was doing the long ones, the long training runs and trying to eat a flapjack, it just got increasingly hard, really just not good.

Yeah. You've got to find the thing that you can stomach.

But I've also found the high five electrolyte and carbohydrate drink.

Okay. Yeah, I know what you mean. Yeah.

It's lovely. It's really nice. I like that. It's just powder. You mix it up.

Yeah. So you can put that in your water bottle.

Yeah. That's right. And I made it. Made a difference there. And I went for one of the um I've got it upstairs. It's a Yeti but it's got the glug top on it rather than the, you know, the thing you have to suck. You know, the strangest thing when I've done it in the past, one of the things at the end is my mouth's really sore from

Sucking on those things.

Sucking on the water bottle. So this one, you just spin the top off and it's just like an open thing.

You pour it down.

Yeah. And I found that, um, you've been listening to Digital Marketing From The Coalface, and we also talked about some other shit as well. So, um.

Yeah.

Thanks for listening and, uh, yeah, thank you. And, uh, we'll speak post Keswick tomorrow. Yeah, hopefully.

We'll find out when and if all this fueling strategy worked.

Yeah.