How To Spend Your Digital Marketing Budget - Episode 28

Today we're going to talk about what to do with the marketing budget that you've managed to persuade the board to give you. You've got a budget for digital marketing, and you want to make sure you get good value from that budget. Where do you start? What could you possibly be doing with that?

There are a lot of different things pulling you in, a lot of different directions. You've got to spend some of it on content, some of it on paid advertising, some of it on social media. And you do end up in a kind of situation where you sat there thinking, how on earth am I supposed to randomly choose a percentage to give to each thing? Where do I go from here?

I suppose as well, it really depends on your starting point. If you have got a website that was built when God was a boy and it's really awful, it doesn't represent who you really are as a business, then your starting point is pretty obvious, isn't it?

Yeah, you can spend all the money in the world, I guess, on PPC or SEO, but if the kind of product you're steering people back to isn't up to scratch, then you are kind of wasting that money.

I'm back with Alex and we're doing episode I think twenty eight. Believe it or not.

That's quite a lot.

Now, the Digital Marketing From The Coalface podcast. And today Alex and I and probably Julie will chip in because she is here. Julie's got a meeting. All right. So she's got more important things to do than talk to us on the podcast.

She might dip out of her meeting to shout. Yeah.

She hears.

Her saying.

Something she really disagrees with. She might jump in. That's right. Um, so today we're going to talk about what to do with the marketing budget that you've managed to persuade the board to give you. You've got a budget for digital marketing, and you want to make sure you get good value from that budget. Where do you start? What could you possibly be doing with that?

Yeah. And I think I'll just like say it's a, it's something that I personally have to deal with quite a lot, right? When we're doing digital marketing strategy, there are a lot of different things pulling you in, a lot of different directions. You've got to spend some of it on content, some of it on paid advertising, some of it on social media. And you do end up in a kind of situation where you sat there thinking, how on earth am I supposed to randomly choose a percentage to give to each thing? Or, you know, where do I go from here?

I suppose as well, it really depends on your starting point. Yeah. Doesn't it? Because if you have got a website that was built when God was a boy and it doesn't work on mobile phones and you can't update it, and it's really awful. It doesn't represent who you really are as a business. Then your starting point is pretty obvious, isn't it?

It's yeah, definitely build a new website because yeah, you can spend all the money in the world, I guess, on PPC or SEO, but if the kind of product you're steering people back to isn't up to scratch, then you are kind of wasting that money. So yeah, I guess would you say that's the first rule then when you're trying to apportion your budget, make sure that your your website is good enough and if not, invest there.

I think so. I mean, going to the two things you mentioned, you said PPC, pay per click advertising and SEO search engine optimisation. So either of those tactics. So really just rewind a second, start with a strategy, which is what we always say. But you know, the strategy aside, we're not necessarily talking about strategy just now. Let's assume that you've developed a strategy. Um, and there's lots of different things that you've recognised you need to do, including things like search engine optimisation and pay per click. Both of those tactics require there to be something at the end of a click. Yes. And that's usually your website might be a landing page in where pay per clicks concerned, a one page, single purpose.

Mini website.

Mini website. Yeah. So it might be a landing page, but pretty much everything that we're going to do and everything we're going to mention in this, uh, podcast today means that you do have to have a credible web property presence site, call it what you will. Yeah. As a start for ten.

Absolutely. Otherwise you are literally just kind of wasting money. Um, I think that's right.

So I suppose really it depends on the budget. I mean if you've got not a lot of budget, then pretty much getting your website knocked into shape is going to be all you're going to be able to do.

Yeah. And I suppose there'll probably be people listening to this who are thinking, oh, well, you know, I've got a five grand budget for the year. How, how on earth am I supposed to fix my website? To which I guess I would answer, you know, maybe landing pages or a, a better route, maybe.

Go find a really good, really cheap freelancer.

Yeah. Learn to code.

Yeah. Or learn to code. That's what a lot of startups do, isn't it? Yeah. They can't afford to hire coders, so they actually learn to code. Absolutely. Yeah. Um, okay. So let's assume then that we've got a decent web platform we've built ourselves, or we've had built a good website that's got, that's built on a system, a content management system. That means that we can add, edit, delete content. It's a, you know, our website is now a living, breathing thing. It represents our brand. It's built on a really, you know, really good system. Might be WordPress, might be Joomla, might be HubSpot, any of those things and lots of others besides. Okay, so for twenty twenty two, which is obviously just around the corner, what do we want to discuss in terms of, um, tactics to employ places to spend your money, what that might look like in terms of the results you might get from it?

Yeah. And how to kind of work out how to start splitting things down. I mean, I think you pointed out earlier that there are quite a few kind of rules floating around on the internet, right? Like the whole kind of eighty twenty, the you found one. That was what, seventy, twenty ten or something I did. Um, people have these kind of like really prescriptive ways of saying, oh, you should spend your marketing budget like this according to percentages and things like that. I think I don't know about you, but personally, I think it's always better to start at the other end, right? It's like, what results do you want to see.

And when do you need them?

Yeah, right. Because this is a really big thing because a lot of marketing tactics, especially, I guess kind of famously SEO don't really start to pay off for twelve thirteen months, in which case you're into your next year's budget anyway. And it's kind of like, what return have you actually seen for that money? So yeah, how fast do you need results? What kind of results do you want to see? Um, and yeah, then you can.

Let's talk about pay per click advertising. I know we've talked about this before in previous podcasts, but you know, in a bit more depth, this is, this is this is more covering several different ways of spending your marketing budget. So you've, you've, you've got the website in place, you've got a really good website in place. Um, maybe you've even got a tool like HubSpot or Unbounce or something to build really good landing pages. So you can, if you, if your website, if you don't want to send this pay per click paid search to your website, you can send it to a dedicated page if it's a very specific offer. So if we spend some of our budget on pay per click, what what might happen? What's that going to deliver into the business?

You're going to get so instantly what you should see is obviously traffic because you're paying for the traffic. It comes very quickly. There's no real ramp up. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and then I guess also, if you've done a good job of setting up your website and landing pages, you should also see enquiries and or sales depending on, on what you're doing pretty much instantaneously. I mean, there's some gear up, time to pay per click, right? You still have to wait for your quality scores and stuff like that to bed in, but within a week you should start to see results. Rule of description.

first month, very little second month. You've learned some lessons. It's getting better. Third month you kind of got the thing running pretty sweet. You've got decent quality scores. You're not paying too much for your clicks and you're getting the right kind of clicks. Yeah, kind of time scale.

I think that's fair. That's as fast as it gets with with digital marketing, I think. But I mean, you know, you will still, you know, you'll still see some results within the first kind of week or two anyway, right? So it's instant.

So if the business is in a kind of almost.

A distressed situation where it really needs the phone to ring or emails to start coming in with enquiries inside two or three months, then that's one of.

That's the way to.

Do it. Digital marketing spends to consider.

Yeah.

Although potential to deliver enquiries business opportunities quickly doesn't it.

Yeah it does. I think I'm going to caveat that by saying that again though. Like you really do have to make sure you've got a shithole website or landing page to steer people to because, you know, I see a lot of people who are like, the business is going downhill. We don't have time to wait for SEO to kick in. Let's just put one hundred percent of our marketing budget in PPC. And then two months down the line, they're like, nothing's happening and we've wasted all this money. You know, where do I go from here? So yes, but please spend some time making sure your website's good first.

Okay. All right. So in terms of a marketing investment, digital marketing investment for twenty twenty two, um, PPC is definitely worth looking into. It's a, it's a tactic that works extremely well if you put the energy into it, if you learn the lessons, you know, by looking at the, um, what's happening with the click budget, you know, are people buying or signing up for or getting in touch? Are they doing all those things, proactively manage it or get an agency to proactively manage it for you. Don't just set it and forget it and hope for the best. That's a really good place to consider putting some of your digital marketing budget.

Yeah. And I will add, the other thing that's really attractive about PPC, when you're trying to kind of apportion a marketing budget is obviously using things like keyword planner, which is a tool that's built into Google AdWords. You can actually kind of go in and say, okay, so for the keywords that I want to target, let's say there's a hundred of them, how much is it going to cost me per click and how many clicks do I want? And it will help you kind of establish a budget very quickly. You can see if you want one hundred visitors from this search term, it's going to cost you X amount, and then you can use that to kind of build a really robust and simple budget. I guess there's no guesswork involved.

All right. And I think one that marketers, um, think about a lot and possibly misunderstand as well is SEO, search engine optimisation. So that is an area to consider making an investment in. It's an area to spend some of your digital marketing budget.

Yeah, absolutely.

And when would you consider doing that? When when's a good time to, to look at your SEO and allocate some of your budget to that?

Well, I think the first thing, at the risk of setting off our invisible queue, I buzzer I'm gonna say is that generally speaking, SEO takes a long time to pay off, right? So generally speaking, when you're talking about apportioning money to SEO, you're talking about apportioning a percentage of your budget that won't see any returns for at least six months. I think that's fair, right? Unless, unless, unless there are very quick wins to be made. Right. Which is where I'd say it's probably worth talking to some kind of SEO expert, whether that's an agency, a freelancer or a consultant, whatever, because a lot of the time we get clients who come in with a website where we can see really quick wins, especially on like the technical SEO side, where we can just tweak some settings, optimise some stuff, and suddenly they've got visibility that they didn't have before. Yeah. Um, and if you've got the option to kind of apportion some of your marketing budget towards something like that, I think that's a SEO audit.

Yeah. You know, signing up for like we offer it. For example, get your site audited and see where the opportunities might lie. You're I mean, you're right, that SEO, in my view anyway. And in most people's view, an SEO is a longer term endeavor.

Definitely.

But I think it's also very much the case that a lot of sites are missing some really easy, quick wins where SEO is concerned, some basic on page optimisation. There might be some technical roadblocks in there. There's all kinds of things that can that can bite you on the bum. And if you get them fixed, you might get a return on your SEO investment quicker than you think. But you can do a, you know, like an audit first to figure out if somebody comes back and says, look, all of these things are wrong. They're easy to fix, it makes sense to fix them. Then you could still be running your paid search, but in the background, your SEO is starting to kick in at the same time, right?

This is exactly it. You give a little bit of your budget to fixing the here and now issues with SEO, and suddenly you've got kind of a yeah, another stream alongside your paid search. But I think the broader kind of the hard work, if you like, for SEO, the kind of building content ranking for new keywords. That kind of stuff does take a lot longer to pay off. So maybe, I guess when we're advising people on how to apportion budget, we'd we'd often say, you know, maybe give a slightly smaller percentage to SEO if you need quick leads, if you want quick wins.

Yeah. And just, just for clarity, I mean, you mentioned content quite a lot in there. And I think even now, um, it's possible that some people still don't really understand that search engine optimisation has got is mostly about content. Yeah, really mostly about content.

It's really nice to imagine a situation where you could just tweak technical settings and add tags to things, and suddenly you'd rank. But no, the reality is that for most of the traction you're going to get from SEO, it's going to be by writing and publishing content. That, let's be honest, takes time to write, takes time to rank, takes time to attract traffic. So there's no quick win there. There's just, I guess the caveat that if you don't invest in it at all, it'll never start to pay off for you. So you've got to start at some point.

Okay. Um, is it the case that a lot of businesses are still not investing in content? Is that what we're seeing?

I think so. I really do think so. We see so many clients, right. They come to us and they're like, right now we need more visibility and traffic. And it's like, there's no content on your website. So there's nothing really that we can use to kind of push that visibility, right? And we end up in a situation where we're trying to create huge amounts of content from scratch in a short time frame to kind of boost their traction in digital footprint.

Catch.

Up. Yes. Um, and I guess the, the thing I would say to them is if you, you know, if you could go back in time a portion, a bit more of your marketing budget to kind of creating that content early because it really does pay off in the long run.

Yeah. I mean, what is it people say? And I think I've used this before because I know I'm like, but you know, if you want a, a beautiful oak tree in your garden and you want it now, the best time to plant it is twenty years ago. But you can't do that.

So the second best time is now right now.

So it's kind of important, I think, to, as you said earlier, look at the SEO as a long term investment and don't expect necessarily any quick wins, although it can happen, but it really is if you do it right, the gift that keeps giving. And I think that's the thing to remember. Papers. Pay per click. Hugely powerful. Um, you know, and when you turn it off, when you stop paying for the clicks.

It's all gone.

It's all gone.

Absolutely.

You know, some people will try and tell you that it will help your Google rankings. It won't.

I don't think so.

Don't even think about like, oh yeah, we're going to use PPC until Google starts ranking as organically, somehow, somehow automagically.

Magically, my page is going to suddenly appear on page one.

So think of it as a as as almost traditional, better than, but traditional advertising in terms of you turn it off, you might get leads, you turn it, sorry, you turn it on, you might get leads, you turn it off and those leads will stop. The search engine optimisation done right is really is the gift that keeps on giving.

I think it pays dividends for years down the line, doesn't it? I mean, generally speaking, as long as you're kind of continually investing in new content and attracting links, Google will kind of keep pushing your site up and up and up. And yeah, yeah, you should be in a place where realistically, at a certain point, I guess you could maybe stop spending because your site was just generating that much traffic and that many leads.

But I mean, one thing to do if you want some, you know, evidence of this is if you look at, if you take a search term that you would expect people who are looking for what you offer carry out just even if you just, you know, think like, say, for example, you, you sell a particular service. Um, go.

On an example.

I'm not going to.

Use, I'm.

Not going to use, uh, blue widgets anymore. But say, for example, you, you provide, um, tax advice for businesses. Sure. So, you know, you could maybe assume that people would search for business tax advisor. For example, if you carry out that search and then you look at the sites or rather the pages that are in the top of the search results, what are they like? Are they like huge, long pages that are full of all kinds of information and potential downloads and videos and useful information, or is it a page with half a dozen words on it that's ranking. You know, I mean, the chances are for anything competitive, it's.

Going to be.

A long it's going to be a piece of a piece of work. And not only that piece of work, but there'll be other references on that website, what we call in the business a content cluster. Yeah. And you know, just get, get a bit of an idea of what you're going to have to do with your digital marketing budget, where SEO is concerned in order to stand any chance of competing.

And the kind of digital PR link building outreach side as well. Like we were talking about this earlier in the office, weren't we, that there's also kind of you can, you can put a web page that's ranking for a search term you like into a tool like SEMrush or Moz Open Site Explorer or something like that. And look at how many other people are linking to that page and then say to yourself, okay, so if I want to outrank that person, I'm going to need at least this many kind of decent, authoritative backlinks or citations, whatever you want to call them from, you know, kind of other useful, interesting websites. Um, and again, that gives you a kind of rough idea about how much time and effort you need to spend in kind of attracting those links or going out and getting them manually.

Okay. Um, moving on. Um, another area that is worth looking at, um, is email marketing. Na still hugely, hugely popular, but I think, I think we have to in twenty twenty two and beyond, we really have to start thinking about the quality.

Of.

The list. Where are you getting the contact details of the people that you're sending out your emails to?

Did you buy them from a dodgy man, from a dodgy place?

Have you built them up and you know that they are. I mean, I'd rather send a hundred emails out to an engaged audience than ten thousand emails out to a completely unengaged audience, and I know that's stating the obvious, but we all get these utterly pointless emails every single day that we will never be interested in.

Well, we're inundated with them. I'm sure everybody listening to this podcast is inundated with kind of spam emails that, yeah, you know, it's not from a company you've ever worked with before. You know, it's not a website you've ever been on. They're somehow emailing you. You're not, you know, nobody's paying attention to that. So yeah, I guess you're right. You have to do some email marketing because it is still a very effective tool. But I think you're absolutely right in that you need to have a kind of, you know, take a scalpel approach to it rather than a sledgehammer and do it really carefully. Do it really well. Yeah. Um, have an engaged audience. Mhm. Spend some real money on good creative because bad emails just go straight in the trash, don't they? Realistically.

Well that's right, and it's hard to know, you know, how to advise on this because without a good list, then your efforts are likely to be wasted. But it's catch twenty two. I mean, people listening to this are going, well, okay, I just want to send meaningful content to people that actually might be interested in it, but I haven't got a list of people who actually might be interested. I mean, where do I start?

And maybe that's a really good thing that we should be explaining, like, how do you actually build a decent email list? Right? I mean, we build ours by offering. I mean, well, okay, we don't anymore. We used to use gated content on our site, right? To build up an email list. That was how we kind of went about it.

And we spoke about gated content and it's, um, maybe it's not been as useful as it used to be in the last podcast.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. We used to say, you know, download this ebook, this PDF, whatever, give us your email address and then we'll kind of email you useful information.

Even then, how many of them are engaged, worthwhile content?

Well, that's, that's the whole problem with the system, isn't it? So in terms of how to build a decent email list nowadays.

Absolutely.

What do you think that do you think there is an easy, easy answer to that or.

Uh, no, I don't think there is an easy answer to it. I don't even feel well equipped to give an answer to it, if I'm honest. If I'm honest, Absolutely. I'm. I spend more time unsubscribing from email lists that I never subscribed to in the first place than than anything else. I mean, I could probably count on one hand the number of email lists I've subscribed to and I'm, you know, and I've been a subscriber.

Actually.

For quite a long time and I'm genuinely interested. I mean, it really isn't that many yet. We know that the stats tell us that this is still a hugely powerful way to market. I get that.

Yeah. I mean, yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right. Even the ones where I've signed up and I've thought, oh, this is actually going to be interesting. I quite like to read their monthly newsletter. I've ended up being disappointed by the, the quality of the emails and the frequency of them and that kind of thing. So yeah, I think, I guess I would say if you're gonna invest in email marketing now, understand that there is a very high barrier to earning people's attention and that you are going to have to put a lot of effort into doing it.

And are there any thing, any, any, any glimmer of hope we can we can provide like as to a way of building a good list quickly. I mean, we're talking predominantly about B2B or B2C, completely different. Yeah. You could you could make a ridiculous offer on.

Your.

Facebook page and promote the ad, and you could get thousands of signups, you know, really quickly, but we're predominantly with our podcast talking about B2B marketing. And it doesn't seem to me that there is any quick and easy way of building up a quality list in B2B.

I mean, there are some simple things you can do to be fair. Like if you, for example, if you're already investing a lot of money in kind of producing blog content that's really authoritative and interesting and engaging, there's no harm in and certainly a real value to putting like a really engaging CTA at call to action. Before you slap me at the end where we say where you say you slapping in corporal punishment has been banned. Dave, do you know anything?

HR took me in and spoke to me and said, you have to stop hitting this stuff. So that was fair enough.

Um, for now. Um, no, you know, you stick a CTA at the end of your authoritative blog post that you spent a lot of money and time creating and you just say to people, if you want more content like this in your inbox, give us your email address. And there, you know, it's soft. You're not trying to sell the world. You're saying to people, you know, if you've got time and you're interested in what we've got to say, sign up here. So, you know, the only people signing up are engaged. I think that can work. I think also the approach we're starting to take on our site, right, where you're offering something of really tangible value to people in exchange for their email address. So we're saying if you want somebody to spend twenty minutes looking through your site with you, sign up here. And I think, you know, the fact that that's got a clear value. You're not trying to kind of offer the world. You're not trying to say, oh, you know, give us your details so that we can spam you with some miscellaneous marketing copy. You're actually saying this is what we'll do if you give us your details. That helps.

Do you think it's is it fair to say that email lists don't have to be huge to be effective?

You said earlier like a hundred emails. And, you know, it's tempting to say, well, that's nothing that, you know, if you have an open rate of two percent, that's two people that are going to read it. But better that way, I think, to have two engaged people on your website than it is to have thirty people who don't.

I mean, if you've got one hundred people on an email list and you think they're engaged and you get a two percent open rate.

Then, well, yeah, you're wrong. Something's gone wrong. Yeah.

Something's gone wrong. I mean, we had for one of our customers, um, it was a, a newsletter email thing went out and it is, it did only go to it was maybe two hundred people, something like that. But I think it was opened and, and read and clicked on etc. by about one hundred and seventy of them. So, you know, that's an example of when you've got an engaged audience. It's a small list, but they are engaged and you know, it was effective.

Well, I mean, you know, earlier on, Julie mentioned the eighty twenty rule, right? And I think, you know, in email marketing, it's a really good one. Twenty percent of your of a normal person's email list is actually productive and useful. So just spend your time focusing on that small minority. Send them relevant content. Hope to engage them.

Okay, so leading on from email lists quite obviously is marketing automation. So how much should people be investing of their shiny new digital marketing budget in marketing automation?

I think this depends very much on how much kind of internal resource you've got to, to kind of spend on marketing automation, because even things like HubSpot, which make marketing automation very simple and very straightforward, there's still a bit of a learning curve. We still have to spend some time making it work for your audience, setting everything up, building these kind of task lists and queues of emails and that sort of thing. And I think a lot of people think, oh, you know, I'll spend X amount on marketing automation this year without really thinking about who's going to do that work and how you're actually going to turn it into value. So I think, I guess not to avoid the question, but spend some time thinking about, you know, how much time you're realistically gonna spend on it and who's going to do that work.

Okay. And for anybody listening who's kind of not really switched on to what marketing automation might be, I mean, I think Julie would be good to speak about this, but she's abandoned us and gone to a meeting.

More important, but.

Effectively, it's like a process of nurturing without having to sit manually typing emails out. You know, if you set it up correctly, then it's going to look for all intents and purpose, like you're being personally spoken to. We noticed that you were interested in this. Perhaps this might be of use to you.

Yeah, that's the idea, isn't it? You put people on specific queues based on their behaviour. You serve them emails based on the way they act on your site and the things they look at. And it can be very sophisticated. It can be very, very useful. Um, it's just yeah, tough to get to grips with. I think it.

Is. Can you, can you think of any examples where you've been nurtured into a purchase using some marketing automation?

I'm sure it's happened without me even realising.

It's happened without you realising.

It. I mean, the, I guess the most classic example is like, I was buying computer parts a while ago, right? And I spent some time on a website looking at a specific type of computer part. It was power supplies. And then lo and behold, in my email inbox three days later was a list of discounted power supplies from, you know, this website. And I guess that's the the best case, isn't it? It's where people have kind of taken what you're looking at and your preferences and used that to slot you on to a specific.

And I think that's probably a good example that we've all seen is when we've looked at something. I mean, that again, moves slightly towards the creepy end of marketing, which we keep threatening to do to do a show, do a podcast about how creepy some marketing has become. Um, but I mean, broadly speaking, I think it's probably very effective in B2C. It is.

It's definitely harder.

It's harder in B2B, but can, can, can be effective in B2B as well. It's such a long, complicated buying process. Quite often B2B purchases. That's the problem, isn't it?

Well, it's it's both a problem, and I think it is one of the areas where email can really flourish, right? Because I was just thinking there was a client who sells, managed IT services that we work with. And it is a very developed buying process that you're asking somebody to sign into a kind of, you know, multi kind of ten to twenty thousand pounds a year contract where they're going to manage your IT services for you. Nobody's going to rush to buy into that. And what they do is kind of sit people on an email nurture Q if you like. If they show enough interest in the service and then they just kind of slowly nudge them towards a purchase with kind of subsequent emails. But I do think if you're going to do that, you have to be really careful not to annoy people and be offering something of real value in each email because people are very quick to hit unsubscribe.

Okay. Of course, that makes perfect sense. So we have, I think we've touched on, uh, first of all, we touched on your actual website. Is your website fit for purpose? If it isn't, it's definitely worth putting some of your budget into that. And if you haven't got much budget, you might find you put all your budget into that. But at least if you do that, you've got a solid platform.

Absolutely. And then the next year you can kind of go nuts and spend it wherever you like, knowing that you've got I.

Mean, what you don't have to do with websites these days is think of it as a project with a start and an end. I mean, even the web design can be done in a more agile spread over a twelve month period or whatever. There might be some initial work to get a half decent website up and running and excuse me, and then you can continue to grow it, in a way that, you know, um, generates, you know, potentially generates business for you. So we talked about the website, we looked at pay per click and how that can be very effective. Um, and it can work reasonably quickly. Yep. Um, search engine optimisation, usually a longer term investment, but it can deliver some quick wins if there's some howlers in there. If you get an audit done and I would encourage anyone to do that. Email marketing, it's not my strength. So I hope we added some value, uh, on, on the whole subject of whether or not to invest in, into, into email marketing and, um, what the outcome of that might be. And then marketing automation using, you know, some of the usual suspects like HubSpot or paddle or Sharpspring or all of.

These.

Platforms that exist to help with that endeavor.

I'm going to plug a, uh, another service as well, which people should definitely be investing more in. And that is CRO or conversion rate optimisation. Yes. Because as you said yourself, websites are living, breathing things, right? They don't end. You're not finished. It's not done. And what I think a lot of businesses do miss out on is the, the opportunity to kind of take visitors landing on your current site and turn them into leads prospects by working out what your website isn't doing well and improving it. And that is something that I think people should apportion more budget to personally because. Right.

But we did talk about that very recently, quite recently, very recently, in fact, in, in a, in a podcast where it was like, you know, how to get more bang for your buck, bang, bang from the visitor visitors, website visitors that you're already getting. So we won't go into any great detail on that just now. However, I think that is a really good use of marketing spend. If you've got a website that's getting good traffic but not good conversions, for example.

Yeah, absolutely. It's like we were saying at the beginning, you know, make sure that your website is good also, you know, even when you're, you're pretty sure that your website is good and you're happy with it, actually test that and make sure the people that are landing on it are converting. Yeah. Spend some time working out. Why not if they're not one hundred percent.

Yeah. So conversion rate optimisation. It We'll add that as the. I think the fifth.

Yeah.

Of our ways to spend your digital marketing budget. If you were going to pick one of those things, I suppose it's a difficult question because it depends. It depends whether the business has got a decent website or not. But yeah, and you know what? I probably don't disagree with you. Go on.

Well, I'm gonna say CRO and making sure that your website is as good as it possibly can be, because I cannot count the number of times people have come to us with, you know, decent enough traffic and no conversions or leads and said, you know, oh, I need more traffic. And we're like, no, you don't need more traffic. You need to fix the things that are holding your website back.

Unless they're getting completely wrong, the wrong traffic completely.

That's true.

Yeah. They've got an article on their website that talks about something that somebody blogged about randomly and, and it's got a ranking and so they're getting traffic.

Are you thinking of a specific example on our blog, Dave? Uh.

There's plenty of examples on our blog, I think. Yeah. But there was one on a client's website as well where he, he talked about something. I can't remember what it was particularly. But the traffic going to. That would never.

Yeah, it's just the wrong. Yeah.

Just completely the wrong. But but I think I agree. I think if you've got a website that's that's ranking, you're getting traffic, but you're just not getting those enquiries coming in. I think CRO is a no brainer isn't it really for, for some of your twenty twenty two digital marketing spend? Yeah, there's a lot of people probably haven't thought about conversion rate optimisation. They haven't thought about trying to get more from what they've already got.

No. And we talk a lot about quick wins and how to kind of quickly showcase that your digital marketing budget works. And that's a really good way because you're taking traffic, you're already getting and turning it into customers. And there's a real kind of demonstratable value to that that you can, you know, you can say to the rest of the, you know, the management team or whoever it is you're answering to, you know, look, we used X amount of money to turn twenty percent more customers into leads. And that's yeah, it looks nice.

Okay. All right. I think we've, we've probably done that to death. Um, if you have any questions, you can also find us at redevolution.com. Uh, all over the web, Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, all the usual places. If you've got any questions, feel free to ping us at question. If you want to come on the show and talk about some aspect of digital marketing or business growth in general. We've got Bruce coming on the show again later this week.

We have, and maybe potentially someone from HubSpot as.

The first person to make a return visit. And yes, indeed, we've got somebody from HubSpot coming on to talk about HubSpot. Surprisingly, not surprisingly.

Who'd have thought?

Um, yeah, that's right. Who'd have thought so? I think from this, from us just now that that's all. Um, thanks for listening. Please let people know about this podcast. We are getting some great feedback from it and we're keen to make it to continue to for it to continue to be useful, relevant, and even possibly a tiny little bit entertaining.

Yeah. Who knows, who knows?

Okay. Cheers. Bye.

Thanks very much.