The sheep in the field next door to us had all been just been shorn. And when the sheep get shorn. They make such a racket.
Cause they're cold. They're saying: I'm freezing!
I think because if you see a shorn sheep, it doesn't even look like a sheep anymore. It looks like a generic animal. It could be anything. I'm sure they're just yelling at each other, going, who are you? Which one's my mother, you know? So when I was lying there listening to these sheep shouting at each other, going, who the f*ck are you? It reminded me of this- the test that they did with, I think it was law firm websites. So they took all the branding and names of a bunch of like, homepages of the websites of big law firms, and then asked people who worked in these firms to like basically identify which was which. And they hadn't a clue.
Did they just take the brand off them? Yeah, yeah.
And they were basically, they were all exactly the same. They were completely indistinguishable from each other.
Okay. Oh, we are now down to one bar, so we're playing battery chicken today with our Zoom recorder. Um, welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface with Dave and Julie. Um, I've got a few things on my list.
Got stuff written down.
But yeah, whether it's any good or not, I don't know.
We will find out.
We will find out. Um, and I'll keep my eye on the battery thing as well. Yeah, yeah. Should be fine. It's nice to live dangerously.
Yeah.
I don't think that's the definition of living dangerously. Wondering if the battery's going to run out on the recorder when you're doing a podcast.
Yeah.
If that's dangerous.
That's dangerous as it gets. It's not too bad.
No. That's right.
Um, go on then.
I'll let you kick off.
It's fine. Are you sure? Yeah. Well, talking of kicking off. I just was going to talk about the football for a bit.
Oh. Go on.
It's like it's the World Cup. It always does this like everybody's talking about it. Even people who don't like football are talking. Well, I'm.
Not a football.
Fan.
Generally, but I do like the big tournaments and I do watch football, watch football. Last night it was Germany and Paraguay.
Exactly like what you're doing watching Germany and Paraguay, you know. Would you normally you know.
It's just the World Cup. I don't know something about it. Like the European Cup as well. I watch that, that's about it. What is it? I don't follow football other than that.
Why do people all around the world who don't even particularly like football, get completely sucked in to twenty two young men kicking a ball around a piece of grass? What?
What is it? Well, yeah, because they don't get as excited about the Women's World Cup. If there is one is the one.
There is.
one. There you go. I didn't even know if there was one. Same with the rugby. I mean, that's not really true. I mean, I'm a huge fan of women's golf.
Yeah. But I mean just the scale of the World Cup. What what is it? I mean, it it's a it must be a marketing thing.
Um, yeah, I guess it's I mean, a lot of people like say it. It's sticking two fingers up at, um, at, you know, the powers that be. What's what what, what's the word I'm looking for?
I have no authority about.
Sticking, sticking two fingers up at authority because it's people coming together and broadly speaking, being nice to each other, even with the rivalry is great.
Yeah. It's lovely. Even even at the ends of matches, all the fans are like hugging each other and speaking and everything's being I mean.
It's always like that.
At rugby. Yeah.
Always like that. Rugby more or less. Yeah. Give or take.
But this is just on such a massive scale. Yeah. It is lovely. And I was just trying to work out why.
Did you conclude.
No, no I'm throwing it to the floor. Why is is this such a big thing? Why is everybody obsessed? And what is it about the World Cup and football that that brings people together that way? I don't know, I mean the answers on a postcard listener. I'd love to know because it's it's so random. If you think about it logically, you know, a bunch of blokes kicking a round leather thing around a bit of grass and the entire world is obsessing and happy.
And The Private Eye had a headline, which was like World Cup special kicks ball, something like that. I know it's, you know.
It makes no sense when you think about it.
But seeing things at the top level, I mean, here's here's the thing, I quite like the Olympics because I quite like watching judo and weightlifting and weird stuff that you never get to see at any other time. And seeing it at the elite level is maybe one of the reasons that, you know, you mentioned this morning that, you know, in theory, the thirty two teams that have now progressed are the best teams in the world and and the best players in the world. Um, and seeing any spot at that top level, maybe because it's not, it's an easy spot to understand. It's not like cricket where a lot of people, even though cricket's very simple, a lot of people look at it and think it's really complicated and your husband plays it and you still don't understand it.
I don't care enough to even try and understand it, to be fair. I was like, yeah, right. You got a big number and somebody else got another big number, and then you went and had some sandwiches. I don't know, but but yeah, I suppose everybody has kicked a football around in the garden. There cannot be very many people, male, female, any age and who haven't kicked a, kicked a ball about and tried to get it in between two jumpers. You know, it's it I suppose it is very universal. Yeah. And then you're watching people do it really well.
Yeah, I suppose so. Um the games I've seen um the England game where it was four two. Did they play Croatia? So at least there were six goals scored. I mean, last night's games it was it was one one when it finished. When the ninety minutes. Well, no, last night's game went to extra time and I thought no, I've had enough. That's too late already. Yeah. So I left it at that. And then I checked the score in the morning. The Paraguay Germany game. It went to penalties. One of the other games went to penalties, which is which is cruel.
Netherlands.
There's no other way of doing it. I mean the only the only thing I was thinking last night, um because I think about weird things when it comes to the, you know, sport and stuff. So football, I don't think football pitches are any different in size than they were donkeys years ago.
That are different sizes. There are bigger.
Ones. But generally speaking, you know, Wembley and all the big places, the football pitches. Yeah, yeah. The people playing football, men and women have got fitter.
And faster.
And.
Stronger.
And you just wonder whether all of that strength and capability and skill squished into that little space makes it very difficult to score.
Could be.
Yeah. I mean, in golf, they're about to change the rules or they're going to change the golf balls because. Yeah, because they hit the ball so far. Yeah. The courses can't extend anymore.
That's true. So they have to make it harder.
Driving a golf ball three hundred and eighty yards or something like that. So they're like driving a par four. So they're on the green in one in a par on the par four putting putting for an eagle.
The golf clubs are better. The balls fly further. The technology is advanced. So they almost have to pull the.
Well, yeah. I mean, golf balls did change a long time ago because it used to be that the American golf balls were slightly bigger than the UK golf balls, and they all got standardised.
But now you get like super doo dah golf balls that that have more of this and more of that. And you get if I'm trying to buy Christmas present golf balls, I'm like, I want some golf balls. And then you're faced.
With very different.
With all these different kinds of golf balls. You're like, well, now I don't even know how to buy golf balls.
I play a very specific golf ball.
Exactly. People have. Yeah.
And it's basically whatever I find. And I'm not joking. I mean, I can afford to buy golf.
Balls.
But I love finding golf balls. I never bought a golf ball. I haven't bought a golf ball. I mean, I play golf three, four times a week. And I haven't bought a golf ball for twenty years.
That's brilliant.
Because I just go out and find golf balls and and.
But do you have favorites among the.
Golf balls? I tend to use kind of softish golf.
Balls if you're out looking. Do you go, oh, wow, I found a one of these and like, oh, it's one of them.
Yeah, yeah. Because I find when I find certain types of golf ball, I give them to your husband because he doesn't care. Because he doesn't care. No, no, he's quite happy because they're a harder ball and they go a bit further because I hit the ball further than. So he's quite happy to get a bit more distance on the harder balls and balls I don't play with. I play with with a softer.
Yeah, but you've got more.
Control.
Over them.
Yeah. But um yeah, so there are loads of different types. And in fact, that whole talking about marketing because we're supposed to be. Oh yeah. Um, there's, there's various challenger golf ball brands coming out. Like seed is one of them and they reckon that their golf balls are as good as Titleist Pro V1, which are like the best golf balls where you're like forty, fifty quid, maybe for a, for a dozen.
Or.
Something like that. So I think that's right. Yeah.
It doesn't go to just the land in the nearest river. That's quite a lot of money.
Yeah. That's why it's such a thrill when you find a pro V1. If you speak to any golfer, you know, you hit an okay golf ball in the rough, and then you go looking for it and you find somebody else's pro V1 that they lost. That's like happy.
Days. Yeah, it's like putting a fiver in your pocket.
Yeah, that kind of thing. Yeah. But, um, yeah, so we've kind of wandered away from football, um, moving. But I wondered whether football needs to change because I don't know.
Yeah. Because at this level they're so tight, there doesn't seem to be.
When you look at a game, it doesn't mean anywhere to kick the ball for a bit of space. I mean, they do create space and. But it doesn't.
Seem. It's not very often.
No, it doesn't seem. And it's a bit dull.
To.
Watch and like games going one one after full time and then.
Penalties after.
Extra time and then penalties. And it's like, you know, I don't know, even if it's not my team. And it really is. Um, because England, like Scotland tend to sort of exit these tournaments far too early.
They get a lot further than.
Well, they get maybe get further than Scotland. But um yeah, the penalties, I find myself getting nervous when it's my team watching penalties, but I get nervous watching anybody, anybody.
Because I think for the individual person kicking the ball and the goalie.
You put yourself in the position.
Of them.
Don't you?
You do just like they're putting themselves out there and it's not a team effort anymore. It's like that one guy. He's the one that missed the penalty. It's awful. I cannot bear to watch it.
It's difficult. Yeah, absolutely. Um, so why is the World Cup. Why is the World Cup popular?
Yeah.
No idea. No idea. But it is. And like I said, I certainly enjoy it. But, um, I wouldn't stay in to watch it. But if I'm in and and I know it's on, I'll stick it on.
Yeah. I mean, I'll make the effort to watch Scotland and I'll probably watch the final. Anything in between that I'll kind of like have a look at the score. But I'm not fussed about watching them.
Yeah yeah yeah. Um something I've bumped my gums about before, people using our lead gen form on our website to flog the stuff. Oh, that's so annoying. We've had a flurry of them recently and it, it just kind of irritates. And I suppose in our line of work, and it could be in any line of work where these things come through. And I don't know, I don't know, I'm mentioning it just, just, just to mourn really, because yeah.
I.
Mean, there's no solution to it.
That's a form that's there for an enquiry. It's really rude.
I think it's like if you're filling that, if you know, if we've said if you if your need some need some help with something, you've got a project you want to discuss, whatever, then fill in your details and send it in and it'll go into our CRM and we'll follow it up, etc.. And you just get somebody trying to flog you, you know, cheap services, development, economy or whatever. Yeah, it, it feels to me like, you know, you're getting off on the wrong foot. You know, it could be even if it's something that you might be mildly interested in. The way it comes in just kind of is, is, is irksome. And I, I don't know, I guess it's, you know, any industry, I suppose, um, gets, gets hit with this, but, um.
It's a bit lazy. I mean, if they really want to sell you something, you know, craft a personal email and, you know, get in touch properly, but just like pinging in stuff on people's enquiry forms is, is a very kind of high volume, lazy, semi-automated way of doing.
Because at the heart of a lot of the stuff that that goes on online in terms of lead gen marketing, business development, you know, you want people to either pick the phone up or fill in a form, generally speaking, so that you can then, you know, it goes into CRM and you can do something with it. It's kind of a common thing. And I suppose these, you know, forms are ubiquitous and therefore they're a very easy way. But I would imagine the success rate is pretty low.
I would imagine it's even lower than email.
Um, probably. Yeah. Yeah. I would imagine so because it's.
You're, you're, you're filling in a form that isn't designed for that purpose. So it's a bit, you know, even more of a long shot than, than the guy that rang us up today and wouldn't stop talking.
Oh, that was quite funny.
He literally just kept talking every time you told him you weren't interested, he just kept talking. And none of us were listening by the end, and he was still speaking.
I know very rare that I hang up on people, but I had to hang up on him.
Um, you'd still be in there now.
Going back to forms. Just, you know, as an aside to the GR. Stop filling in our form. Unless you're trying to. Unless you're actually making an enquiry, um, make sure that your forms are working. Um, because I, there's a, there's an office for sale in Aboyne. And just out of curiosity, I thought I'm going to get some details about it and have a look at it and find out about it. Um, not that I particularly want to move offices and I don't think it's very big anyway, but I'm just interested to see, you know, what the price is and what you're actually getting for your money, etc.. So I sent the form to the estate agent and about four or five days later, still nothing really. So I actually went into the office because they've got an office here in Aboyne. I went into the office and said, oh, put a web, you know, an enquiry via your website about this property. Um, anyway, they took some details and then I got an email from, from them, um, today, but it seems to me that their web form isn't working and that is a real killer because that's like the opposite of the people who are filling our forms try to flog us stuff. If there's people are saying like, I'm interested, you know, get in touch. I want to discuss a project. And you don't.
You're not even finding either you're not getting it or you're not doing anything with it either way. I mean, that's just like throwing money away.
So just as a, like a little thing to kind of at least make my, my, um, my, um, morning slightly useful. Yeah. Make sure your web forms are working.
Test them and they can break. So I mean, even if they were working last year, last week, they might not be working. Now if you, if you haven't had any enquiries for a while. First thing to do is test the form. You know, it's like when you used to be like waiting for a boy to phone you and they didn't phone.
I've never waited for a phone.
They didn't phone. You'd be, like, picking up the phone to make sure it was still working. You know, that sort of thing. If you haven't had any enquiries, check, check that your form is still working. I mean, it probably is, and it probably just. You haven't had any enquiries, but if your form's broken, the sooner you find out, the better.
Yeah.
That's right.
And they.
Do sometimes.
If you're doing it properly and it's going straight into a CRM because you're hooking it up with HubSpot or Salesforce or any, any number of different systems that are available, then it generally is way more reliable. But web forms, if it's like just your web server, you know, that's, that's sending them and they can break.
They can break things like.
Spam can get in.
Plugins, do updates that can break things. And just sometimes it all just one of the connections just, just doesn't connect anymore. And then they stop coming through. So also when you're building your website, it is really, really easily done that, um, you forget to test a form and, and it's not working. And we do try and test every form when we put websites live, but it's always worth a double check on that because it's really easy to miss. And then again, you're, you're missing out on things because the, the email address is going is still the test email address or something. And it hasn't been changed to the right one. So, you know, test your palms.
Right. Talk about something interesting because I'm sure that bored people to tears. Um, it was my fault. Sheep. Okay.
This is one of these. I was lying in bed last night and, um, counting sheep. Know, the sheep in the field next door to us had all been just been shorn. And when the sheep get shorn, they make such a racket. They're just.
Cause they're so cold. They say: I'm freezing!
I think because if you see a shorn sheep, it doesn't even look like a sheep anymore. It looks like a generic animal. It could be anything. And I think they're all going like, who are you? Who are you? Which one are you? Ah, I don't know who anyone is anymore. Who are you? And I'm sure they're just yelling at each other, going, who are you? Which one's my mother, you know, where's my child? Who are you? And I'm sure it's that because they just look so weird.
Did they calm down after a while?
Yeah, they were all right. There was. It was all evening. Like when I went to bed. They were still shouting, but by morning they were mostly calm.
Isn't that how they recognise each other? By the by, the different bars?
I don't know. I don't know if they've got. They all look exactly the same, so they've got to find somewhere, I'm sure.
Sound. I'm sure.
That I segue this very.
Okay.
Very neatly or not neatly into a marketing analogy.
So I'm all ears.
So when I was lying there listening to these damn sheep shouting at each other, going, who the f*ck are you? Then I'm like, it reminded me of this. And it reminded me of this, this, um, a test that they did with, I think it was law firm websites. So they, um, they took all the branding and names of a bunch of like, um, homepages of the websites of big law firms and then asked people who worked in these firms to like, I basically identify which was which, and they hadn't a clue.
Based on the soundbites and the, the story or.
Based on the homepage, what it looked like, what it said without.
The brand off them. Okay. Yeah.
And they were basically they were all exactly the same. They were completely indistinguishable from each other. Like the sheep. You see where I'm going with this?
Yeah. Tenuous at best.
Yeah, definitely. So yeah. Um, differentiation. If those sheep were differentiated and had like bigger ears or blue noses, you see, they'd all recognise each other. Um, so if these law firm websites or if anyone's website, if, um, you know, if you're just, if you took the branding and the name of your website and you would absolutely have no idea whose website it was, then you need to sort it. You need to think about what makes you different and have something on there that makes you stand out. And so that, you know, if somebody lands on it, they actually know why you. This is exactly the same as everyone else is.
This, I think, is the bit, the aspect of marketing that Infuses non marketers a lot and especially kind of pragmatic thinkers like maybe engineers, for example. Yeah. Because it's like they believe that if you spell out what you do.
Yeah.
That's fine because that's what people want to know. They want to know that you can do this type of welding and.
Do.
This type of NDT inspection, and you can do this type of pressure testing. Therefore, yeah, you can do this thing for me because that's they're the two, they're the three skills required.
Yeah. Except lots of people can do that thing. And how do you choose? How do you know which one to choose?
Yeah. But could you not argue that you could choose based on track record and longevity? So these guys, these all these people do it. They've been doing it for a hundred years. They've been doing it for fifty years. They've been doing it for twenty years. Okay. So I might fancy the upstart or I might fancy the safe pair of hands. Yeah, they might all be safe. Pairs of hands, I don't know.
But.
They've all got the same certifications.
That's one point of differentiation. That's, you know. Yeah. That makes you that if you think that if you think people are going to choose on longevity, then that's the thing to, to shout about. You know, we've been doing this for one hundred years. If you think people want like innovation, you're like, we've been doing this for five minutes. We're new. Yeah. It's a case of picking the thing that, that you think that is important to people, that you do better than everyone else, or that makes you know.
Or testing to find out what's important, what's the most important to people.
Or ask them.
Split testing and asking, asking people and find trying to establish what makes what's keeping them awake at night. What would make them concerned about giving you appeal?
Yeah.
Or even just reaching out for a conversation. What's gonna what's working against you?
I was working against you. And, you know, if people do get in touch. So, you know what? What was it that made us stand out in the crowd?
Would you not think there's also a fine line between standing out and just looking ridiculous? You know, if you if you do something like, I don't know, pick on accountants, for example. Yeah. So accountants.
Accountants do it very badly because.
Accountants.
Accountants are so obsessed by not sounding like boring accountants that they tend to go the other way.
And, and buy legislation which talks about what they can and can't say because of the financial side of the business and all that kind of stuff. You know, nothing we say is actual advice. It's just an opinion and all that kind of good stuff. Maybe, I don't know, but.
Accountants, I don't think they're as regulated as like some other.
Yeah. Probably not. Well they're not. You can be an accountant with no qualifications. You can just set yourself up as an accountant. If people are daft enough to come and give you money to do their books, then you can do it. Yeah, I think it's one of those odd ones.
Yeah. You can be certified or chartered or you can just.
Oh, just decide you can.
Do it. Add stuff.
Up. Yeah, I can do spreadsheets so I can be an accountant sort of thing. So.
Um.
But, but what my point is, I think in the search for that uniqueness and that message that resonates that story.
Yeah.
You know, you've got to be so careful that you don't, you know, in a few a few podcasts ago, we were talking about somebody who, you know, whatever they'd said made no sense at all. You were none the wiser about what they did.
Oh, yeah.
But they created that soundbite story, whatever you want to call it. Um, to try and differentiate themselves and show that why they were different.
I don't think they had, I think it was just like.
I think they thought they had is what I'm.
Saying. They were trying to cover all the many things that they did in one sentence, which ultimately wasn't possible, which made it just like so generic that, um, it meant nothing in the end. I mean, it doesn't have to be like that one statement doesn't have to be the thing because I mean, you used to call it, you know, the USP, unique selling proposition. But I think that it's really hard to be unique. And I don't think anybody is really unique. And I think that's probably really you go, you could find the one thing that makes you unique and you're like, well, I haven't got anything. So just the one thing that makes you slightly different from your immediate competitors is enough, really. But I don't think, you know, I don't think sort of picking out something that you do differently is going to make you look ridiculous, unless you're picking out something really stupid. Like we all wear green shoes, but if you're just like, yeah, you've been doing it for longer or you do it a different way or something, you've got to find something. And if you, if there's nothing that makes you different, then.
You got to find something. Are there any examples of organisations that are successful and they just haven't bought into any of that. They they're just very good at what they do. And people know they are. So they just, you know, they just say this, we do this and there will be.
But if, um, if people haven't heard of them and they sound exactly the same as, as everyone else, then they're probably not doing themselves many favours because according to reputation already then yeah, great. Then, but then that's just saying, like, we've got this great reputation. You've probably heard of us, you know, and then then that's a thing.
The received wisdom is that, um, um, oh, I've lost the train of thought now. Received wisdom. What were you talking about? You were talking about.
You were saying, um, if you, if they just say we're very good at doing this and so is everybody else, then yeah.
You know, the received wisdom is, is, as you say, you know, you've got to show this, you know, what makes you special, what's what makes you unique. Um, and, and like you rightly say, a lot of businesses are not special and they're not unique, but they're still very good at what they do.
Yeah.
And you know, I don't you think about, you know, um, garages, I couldn't tell you what, um, donut garages, elevator pitches. I couldn't tell you what they say on their website. No idea.
At all.
The reason I used them is because I was recommended to somebody, somebody who used them. I've used them before. They've generally been good and so I've stuck with them. And the reason I use them is that I have no idea what their, you know, mission, vision values or any of that stuff is. I've no idea what story they're telling. Um, I go past the garage and they've got motorhomes for sale that look like they haven't been washed for six months and they've got mold growing.
Well, yeah.
But I'll still take mine there and I'll still take the car there. And you know, I don't, I don't really know.
Why local businesses. I mean, part of their their USP is that they're local. They're near you, you know, didn't garage isn't competing with a garage in Aberdeen or Inverness or Edinburgh or anywhere else. Yeah. They're only competing with garages in the immediate local area. Mhm. Um and you know, some people have to take their car to the main dealer. If you don't have to take your car to the main dealer, you'll tend to choose one that's very close to where you live. So I mean, the USP is that they're close to where you live.
There is there is an element of that, but you have got some choice in this area.
Yeah.
Yeah. I'd be reluctant to not use them.
I use them because they actually call you home. No, but I.
Literally drive past it.
I do it is. It is the nearest and that is part of it. But I have used other garages locally who are probably a bit cheaper, but they don't they don't answer your calls. They don't answer their phones. They they don't call you when your car is ready. They don't give you quotes up front. You know, their communication is shocking. And I just hate that environment of like, kind of having to like call the garage and keep calling, keep calling until somebody bothers to be walking past the phone and pick it up and then put my car in knowing that they're not.
Talking about them.
No, it didn't it good. Their communication is really, really good.
You say that they have my motorhome for three weeks after the demo, and in the end I contacted them and said, is it ready? Oh yeah. Did nobody call you?
Has the person who used to answer the phone left? No, she's.
Still.
Okay. Maybe she was on holiday or something. Might have been if she's on holiday. It doesn't quite go.
As well, because when the car went in, um. I dropped it off Monday night or whatever it was, and she phoned me Tuesday lunchtime to say, that's your car. Really? Yeah. So yeah, you're right.
Yeah. The other one, which is sort of equally close to me, the, um, it's a matter of guesswork. And you usually just have to, like, show up and find out if your car's ready and then it's not ready. And then you remind them and then, yeah, it's. I can't be dealing with that. I just want to put the car in and somebody tells me it's ready and tells me how much I have to pay. I don't want to have to guess if it's ready and guess how much I'm going to have to pay.
So this uniqueness, this could be and I'm going to use another car analogy. It could be something that you do rather than something that you say you could have that that thing that you do, you don't care how it's communicated. And particularly thinking about a manufacturer, car manufacturer, Lexus. So their big thing in Toyota because Lexus are posh Toyotas. Yeah. Toyota and Lexus are basically say if you let us service your car, your ten year warranty or one hundred thousand miles. Yeah. Now they have got a name for it. It's like peace of mind or something. It's not that it's something else, but what they're tapping into is people who they want to pay. Maybe over the odds for a nice car. Cars are accepted as being nice, but the peace of mind of like, well, if they keep servicing it, I don't have to worry about it. It's just going to be six hundred and fifty quid every time it gets serviced, perhaps. Yeah. For ten years. And it'll if it breaks, they'll have to fix it. Yeah.
And it could.
Be.
That they thought, well, what makes us different? Nothing. Okay. Let's invent something that makes us different.
Yeah, well, I think what they did is interesting because they built phenomenally reliable cars, and they must have had a light bulb moment. I thought, wait a minute. Our cars are super reliable. Why don't we just actually give a ten year warranty with the car? As long as we get to service it every year and give it a once over, because we think that might be quite popular with people. And it.
Really is. And it's very little risk to them because they know the cars.
Because the cars.
Are all going to be fine for ten years anyway.
That's right. Exactly. So again, you know, I guess that takes time to build up that kind of thing because if they came on the market now and you'd never heard of them. Um, yeah. And as some of the Korean or whatever they are, I can't remember.
New Chinese cars.
Well, a lot of those cars come out and like, is it Kia? They come out with this seven year warranty or something like that. Yeah. And I think they're doing that for the opposite reason. They're doing it to try and get people to have confidence to buy the cars because they're a brand that people are sort of thing. Are they a bit cheap though? Are they a bit a bit dodgy? So they, they're using a similar thing because what they've all done, excuse me, what they've all done is they've tapped into this cost of ownership, fear that people have you know, it goes back to making people feel safe, doesn't it? You know, the Lexus thing makes you feel safe. Toyota, Lexus makes you feel safe. And I guess the Kia thing makes you feel safe as well. So I guess for businesses.
You've got.
To think about, yeah, how can you de-risk for the buyer? And this, this all comes back to thinking about things from the buyer's perspective. How can you de-risk.
It for the hundred years thing? De-risks it? It's like, okay, these guys are safe. They're not going to go bust anytime soon. You know, they've been going for one hundred years. They must know what they're doing. So I mean, that, that is a, that de-risks it to an extent and things like that.
Yeah. We tap into the fact that we've been around since twenty twenty three or whatever it is, you know, which is, you know, twenty three years. So, you know, we, we tap into that and because we know in our market that the agencies come and go. I mean, with plenty of notable notable exceptions, um, some of whom were kind of rescued. And that's why the only reason they're still around is because they were rescued. But at the same time, you know, there's a lot of.
There's.
A lot of disappeared. A lot of agencies have disappeared even in the space, you know, the relatively small space that we're in up here in the north east of Scotland. Thankfully, you know, we don't rely on the north east of Scotland for all our customers, which is good. Um, yeah.
Okay, so that's my.
Again, kind of went off a few tangents there.
That's my sheep, my sheep story. Yeah. But yeah.
Okay. So.
Um, the rest of it's really boring. If you get anything interesting, it's like boring, boring, switched off.
So that's.
Fine. Boring, techie SEO type stuff.
Unfortunately, the battery hasn't run out yet, so you've got to keep talking.
What have you got? Come on, it's your turn.
Well, I was I've got a few things, but I'll just have another moan at Google. As you know. Big fan of Google ads like like Google ads. You know, we had that issue, um, with the clients, the client thing that we did, um, which was basically people in the states calling it something different. So that's on us, you know, it's on us and them because we worked on it together with.
Them to try.
And.
Try and.
Get, you know, we've fixed it now, but we're running some ads for our own business and particularly aimed at, um, engineering companies and the like. Looking for some help with their digital marketing websites, maybe a web app, whatever it needs to. Whatever it happens to be. And we've. We know we've got a fairly tight range of keywords. Yeah. Because they're not cheap. I mean, they're not hugely expensive. But, you know, you could certainly be paying, you know, twenty quid for a click or something like that. So you want to try and minimise the wasted clicks. And then you look in the search term report from Google and some of the things that we've paid for clicks for. So basically, you know, it's, it's if we think about the website side of things, it was industrial websites, website for engineering companies, websites for tech companies, that kind of thing. Yeah. Some of the things that we, we, you know, like, for example, Cheltenham web design. So that could just be somebody who's got a corner shop that needs to spend three hundred quid on a website types in Cheltenham web design. They show our advert, they click on us, will immediately see, oh, these are not the guys for me. And we've been charged ten quid.
But Google's supposed to understand intent. Yeah. Intense. Somebody typing in Cheltenham web web design is is not looking for us. The intent is completely wrong.
It seems it unless they're so clever that they know that that person had already been searching for engineering, industrial or whatever, something like that. But there was some more. There was Kent Web design, there was Toronto web design, and we are specifically targeting the UK. Um, and then there was Web Design and Development Philippines.
Yeah, that's not even close.
You just kind of get so fed up of Google doing this bullshit, doing this nonsense, no matter how tight your keywords.
Tight.
No matter how tight your negative keywords, you know, you're targeting.
There and it goes, well, we're not spending all the budget. There's, there's cash to be had. Let's just play fast and loose with this budget.
It just feel, you know, and I, you know, there was other examples in the list which I won't bore people with. But you can understand why when we speak to people about paid search, they'll often say tried it, spent a fortune, didn't work, waste of money, didn't didn't like it. Nine times out of ten, it's because it's badly set up. But what this seems to illustrate, unless we're idiots, is like even when you set it up well and you kind of spend some care and attention. Yeah, on the on all aspects of all the bits that can help you waste money, you make sure you don't do any of those and you still get crap like that coming through. It's so.
Annoying. You can you can tie it down really tightly, but if there's spare budget, Google will desperately try and find like, well.
It's and there's no redress. I mean, if you look at something like that in any other line of business, you would think that you would be able to say, wait a minute.
You know, can I have a refund on that? Because that wasn't.
Right. Because that's completely irrelevant. I mean, it'd be interesting if it could be bothered, which I can't. And this is part of the problem to go and say like, you know, we paid for clicks for these terms. Show me how that relates to this, because they would come up with some bullshit reason why they thought it did. Yeah. Well, it's web design. It's like, yeah, but it's somebody looking in Cheltenham for a web design company. And that generally means that they're.
Looking for local.
Much cheaper, you know, just a local web design company to rattle something up for you because I don't know how to use AI.
Yeah.
Anyway.
Yeah, exactly.
Um, okay. Um, that was that, that was just so just like, make sure if you're running paid search, make sure that you're looking at the search terms, report that you're building up your negative keywords and making sure that you're not spending money on clicks that will not convert.
And Google will try and push you to using broad match, which means that it'll use anything that's vaguely similar to the.
Budget in no time.
At all. That's right. But even if you're not using Broad Match, it seems to be like phrase match or exact.
It does seem to have a mind of its own. I mean.
It doesn't really matter.
Yeah, I think yeah, especially when it's niche stuff. When the volume's not huge, it just doesn't learn. So when it, you know, when it doesn't get a chance to learn it, it just kind of. Yeah. Spends money like a drunken sailor.
Pretty much.
Okay. Go on.
Um, there was a new report about, um, where AI overviews are getting their information from.
Go on.
Um, so thirty seven percent of the URLs that the AI overviews are citing came from the top ten organic search results. The rest of them came from further down. Yeah. Um, twenty six percent came from positions twenty to one hundred and thirty seven percent from outside the top one hundred results. Um, quite a lot of them being YouTube. So AI overviews are pretty much not related to your rankings. Um, partly because they're using what they're calling fan out queries. Yeah. So they're like doing a search. The AI overview engine is um, is doing a search. And then it's kind of like asking follow up questions. So I'm looking for information on that. Okay. So if that's the case, tell me about this bit and this bit and this bit. And then they're doing like, okay. And then okay, so now and it's drilling down and drilling down and asking like really specific questions related to the original search. Are you talking about loads of different searches at the same time?
That sounds to me like you're not just talking about Google's AI overviews. You're talking about like Perplexity and Claude and ChatGPT as well, because.
Probably.
The, um.
This report was just about AI overviews, but I imagine I'm pretty sure. Yeah, they're all, they all do the same thing. Yeah. But this is specifically related to, um, it depends.
I mean, for example, I think it's perplexity will always do a live web search. Yeah. I don't know whether Claude will probably do the same, but there are things like if you're on like a, either a cheap or the free version of ChatGPT, it will only search.
It's it's knowledge based knowledge bank.
It'll only search the material it learned on. So the chances are you're going to get out of date information.
Yeah, some of them. Yeah. Don't actually search. So yes, there's a sort of.
I suppose it's the planning out that will will surface stuff that maybe isn't on page one for the core search that somebody.
Did.
But when it fans out then it's got a chance of bringing stuff in. But generally speaking, it's almost like you're asking it a question and then it's just going to Google, you know, kind of and asking the same question, doing the same keyword searches.
And.
Then getting search results.
Then lots of other questions in behind very, very quickly, much faster than you would be able to do all these follow up searches.
Yeah. But it's effectively, I suppose, scraping the results that are on the search engine results page and then turning it into something that looks like a little essay or whatever it is to give you the search results back.
Yeah. Google's own reply was, um, our advanced models identify more supporting web pages, allowing us to display a wider and more diverse set of helpful links associated with the response than with a classic web search. So yeah, it's it's getting much more obscure stuff that, um.
Yeah, doesn't.
Have the volume.
Yeah. Because it wouldn't be being very clever if all it did was grab the top ten results and then condense them into a few paragraphs.
I suppose you can do that. It's drilling down a lot deeper, multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources. Mhm. So yeah, so even if you're not ranking very high for whatever, doesn't mean you're not going to get found. You might if the if it's the answer to a specific question, it'll still find it even if it's not in the top one hundred. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, there's a possibility, but it's still using um, if it's using the search engines and the search engines, you know, even if the information's on page two or page three, it's there because if it's relevant, it's got the, um, eat behind it, the expertise experience, um.
Authority.
Authority and, and um, trustworthiness, that stuff going on as well. Um, which means it's probably got citations, links, you know, so links are still a huge part of the, of the ecosystem. You know, I think there's a danger, not a danger. There's definitely a situation where we've got like the a e or answer engine optimisation, um, merry go round. It feels very much like here we go again, you know. Oh definitely like, like we like we did with SEO. Yeah. It just feels like exactly the same thing. One thing is if you did spend time investing in SEO, you're in a good place for it because like at the, at the, at the start, the foundation of any answer engine optimisation work is solid SEO. So yeah, you know, technically sound content's Good citations to give you authority that give you the authority, etc.. Um, and you know, it does feel a bit like businesses are now going to be expected to invest a lot of time and energy, i.e. money, um, pleasing the, the answer engines the way they did with search engines.
Oh totally.
You know, people are getting weary of it. So it's like even to the point where, you know, the content that you produced that you've already produced is great, but you kind of now need to rejig it and put like the question and the answer right at the start of the article so that AI doesn't have to go wading through the whole thing and, you know, it can grab the answer really quickly. Um, um, I guess people will buy it, you know, we're playing that game to a certain extent, but I think it kind of feels tiresome.
It's more complicated now because you've got to chase the high volume ones so that you kind of get in the, the rankings for the stuff that everyone's looking for in search. But then you've also got to go with a really niche stuff because that's the follow up questions. And if somebody asks that specific question, which you you exactly help with, then you want to be there as well. So you've got to go with the big stuff and the little stuff. And it just made it all even more exhausting than it was in the first place, really.
That's right. Yeah. And most people will be noticing that their traffic is broadly down. Yeah. The clicks is broadly down and they might notice that their impressions aren't. So people are still, you know, they're still appearing. But the AI overview means that, you know, we talked about this last time, about the zero click stuff. Yeah. So, you know, make sure, you know, before you start panicking that you're doing things like checking out to see if your branded search is improving. You know, is your, is your branded search is stronger. It means the, the content that didn't result in a click is raising your profile. So people are then saying, right, let's go and find.
Going looking for you anyway.
Evolutions content helped us. Let's go and now find Red evolution and reach out to them.
Potentially the kind of search which you can, you can actually differentiate in Search Console now between brand and search and Non-branded search. If you can look at your branded search and it's gone up, that's almost certainly to do with something that someone's seen in an overview or a AI engine. They've seen your name mentioned, and then they've gone to find you in a sort of separate effort.
Mhm, mhm. Hubspot's invested heavily in, um, answer engine optimisation. It's got the tools that do the um, um, what do they call it? Do they call it query? Um.
It's a prompt, prompt, prompt analysis stuff.
Yeah, yeah. That's right. So the, you know, basically trying to, I mean, what some people will do is, you know, they do, they're doing work to try and improve how they appear in the answer engines and, and then go in and manually going into ChatGPT and typing the kind of things that their ideal customers will be searching for to see if you know, see if they're actually surfacing, as this seems to be the common parlance for that. But there are tools.
Like HubSpot and stuff like they just do it at a bigger scale and saves you having to do it in all the different engines.
That's right. But again, even that feels like a bit of a racket because, you know, you've got to they charge based on the number of prompts you want to monitor. And those prompts, you know, can often be just subtly different. And it just feels.
They're making up the prompts based on the sort of things you do. They're guessing what people might be asking. So they're not real prompts. They're guesses at prompts. And then you guess at a prompt that you might want to monitor, and then you monitor how often it shows up. So it it gives you a feel for it. But there's no, there's no accuracy in that at all. It's just a, you know, how many times did you show up for this made up prompt this week? And it gives you a feel for whether the engines know what you do or not. But it's not. Yeah, it's not real data like Search Console data is.
No. That's right. Yeah. Um, didn't you say that the search console was going to start showing?
Yeah. There's supposed to be.
Google found it.
Yet. Um I haven't found it yet. Hasn't shown up on any of the ones I've looked at. But I mean it is live in the UK or being rolled out in the UK, but um, presumably for like big volume stuff first because I haven't seen it anywhere, but I hope it does appear soon because I think that'd be really useful.
Mhm. Um, I saw a post by um another agency, um and it was quite good. Quite, you know, it's quite a, quite a good read. They were kind of writing about people using AI badly, as in, you know, like they were basically saying that, you know, if you want something unique in your marketing and your messaging and your storytelling, then you can't rely on AI. You still need the, you know, the lived experience of being a human to appeal to people's emotions because as they put it, you know, AI is never left. It's passport at home when it was going to the airport or, you know, got stuck in a traffic jam or whatever. So it doesn't have the lived experience of people. And you know, what AI is particularly good at is, is like the grunt work. And that's, you know, we've said it, a lot of other people are saying the same thing. Um, but, you know, a post that we put up on our blog, you know, I wrote it a few weeks ago or a couple of weeks ago. Um, and it's, you know, it's where we, where we were, we found that piece of research by Manchester Business School about, you know, AI is not going to replace you people who know how to use AI.
Sort of thing.
Yeah, yeah. And I sometimes think like, you know, I thought it was quite a good piece that the agency had written. But, you know, there's a lot of stuff, I think, where the kind of sentiment in it is, is like a kickback, but it feels more like, um, please don't use AI still hire us sort of thing. It feels a bit like that because I agree that, you know, AI is, you know, just like people, uh, is absolutely capable of producing garbage. And again, very recently might have been last time we were talking about, you know, how some of the content that AI can produce is shocking, as was plenty of the content that actual people.
Oh, I've seen some terrible content written by people. I mean, the bad AI content, to be fair, is probably not as bad as some of the bad human content because SEO agencies, you know, the people that was just churning out that was people that were just churning out garbage to stuffed with keywords. I mean, some of that was awful. And I don't think anything is really content.
I'm talking about people that sat down and, you know, you know, it's sort of reminds me like when you, when you go out and you see some people and you and you just think, what were they thinking, you know, but they stood in front of the mirror and went, nailed it, nailed it. You know what I mean? Before they came out. So there's plenty of people have written content and they think they've nailed it. I mean, there's plenty of content I've written in the past where I've probably been quite pleased with it about it. And I would read it now and think, oh, do you know what I mean? Um, not, not, not quite hitting the mark anymore, but, um, I think this, this whole idea of, of trying to kind of, I'm struggling to find my words. I need AI to help me.
You've forgotten how to string words together.
In their attempt to kind of belittle and, and undermine AI. The kind of missing the point. I think, you know, the emphasis to me should be on use it intelligently and it will definitely help you with your productivity. It'll help you get past the blank page. It'll help you produce, you know, a hundred ideas, two of which might be actually worth you expanding on. Sort of.
Thing, which is similar to brainstorming with real humans, you.
Know. Yeah. Um, in my experience.
Anyway, but, um, you think if you gave it a spreadsheet full of numbers and data and told it to go and analyse it and come back, it wouldn't go too far wrong with that.
But it did.
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
Go on. It's, um. Claude. Jessie. I was like, I gave it a big dump of a spreadsheet out of Search Console and said like, right, go and find ones that are like underperforming that we can update. And it doesn't sound that difficult. You know, it just needs to go and crunch the numbers and all based on fact. It didn't need to make anything up. So it gave me a table and then I was like, okay, can you make that into a spreadsheet so I can then like work with it gave me the spreadsheet. I'm like, that's not the same. So I said, try again. You know, go and actually make a spreadsheet of the original table. It still wasn't the same. So I said like, go and compare the two. Tell me which one's is correct? They said, oh, the first one has lots of things that don't exist. I made them all up. Like what?
How do you get it to do that? I struggle with that. I struggle to get to get it to misbehave that badly. I don't know.
I said, right, okay. In the final spreadsheet, please give me all the URLs of the pages that you think exist so that I can check that they actually exist or not, because I just invented these these titles they're not on. They don't exist. They're not in the data.
Did it say why it had done it?
Clearly it was just pissing me off.
Did you ask it why it had done it?
Like, just explain to me once and for all why you keep doing this. Don't do it again.
No, because I have to say, I mean, using using AI to interrogate Search Console data is one of the things which I'm, I do quite often because it just crunches data very, very quickly.
So it actually was quite slow. And then maybe it got bored. I don't know.
Which. Which model were you using? Were you using opus four point eight?
No, I think I was just using the normal.
I would tend to use opus for that stuff. It just seemed to.
Be.
Needed. Some of the other models, maybe some of the other models are just.
Claude. Claude Jr. Was just like, nah, nah, I think I'll just make stuff up. It just makes it more fun, you know, like a, maybe an intern, like going board. Now I'm just gonna throw some random stuff in there. But honestly, it was just like, why.
That emphasises why it's an assistant. It's an assistant that will do the donkey work for you. You know, you wouldn't trust, um, an intern if you had an intern, you wouldn't trust an intern, you know, empirically and not empirically and emphatically.
Implicitly.
Implicitly. Thank you.
Um, in.
Word wordy day. Um, you wouldn't trust them. Yeah.
You do have to treat it like an intern. You're going to do all.
This article was kind of making in a clumsy way, but it was, it was kind of yeah, it was to me. It was just a bit too clumsy.
The battery, by.
The way, it's still there. Yeah, it's still good.
You don't.
Want.
To give.
It give or take. We've kind of finished. So that's it's actually done it. And we'll make sure we put fresh ones in for next time and not.
Yeah. But yeah I think yeah. Treat AI like an intern that you're given all the work that you don't want to do, but you would check their work because you don't trust them very much.
But I think to a certain extent, people that get stuff out and not taking the time to create the skills or whatever the other AI, AI agents call them to fine tune those skills, to be really clever about how you put together the request in the first place. It's not a criticism of what you did. I'm sure what you did was fine, but I'm more generally. Yeah, do you know what I mean? I think it's it's very easy just to kind of. I can't be bothered writing a whole raft of stuff for it to to, you know, just ask one line, do this sort of thing and then, you know, with hardly any context and and seemingly not much capability by based on your experiences it will produce garbage.
It um, it had done something else earlier in the day or the previous day that had been brilliant. And I was like, yes, you know, what? A bit of a role here. And then it just completely messed me about. So yeah, it's, um, it is bizarre.
Mhm. Okay. Um, I can't think of anything else just now. I believe we're recording again on Thursday. Are we? Because we're trying to get a few in the bank because Lesley's going to be away for a couple of weeks.
I'm not sure we can do. Um. It depends if we've got nothing left to see on on Thursday.
Well, yeah.
I suppose, but do you think anything will happen between now and Thursday?
Not sure. Maybe not.
If not, what do you want me to get a couple in next week?
Yeah yeah yeah. Okay. All right. So, um you've been listening to Digital Marketing From The Coalface and, um, thanks for listening. It means the world to us.
Of course it does. Thank you.