Telling Stories In A Digital Marketing Context – Episode 55

Words matter. Stories matter. We like stories. We are well established. We all know this. And that kind of led on to thinking, well, yeah. So in a digital marketing context, stories are content.

There's this perception around content, especially that you need it to make a search engine happy, to make your pages rank to get seen on Google. But that it fundamentally doesn't really matter what you say on the page. I think a lot of business owners, a lot of marketing people are guilty of the same thing. You know, they're chasing metrics. They want their views and their visits and their page one rankings, but they forget fundamentally that the reason they're doing this is to attract people to their website and that what people are actually going to do on their website is read what they've written. I mean, like you say, people love stories. The last time you bought something from a website, I put good money on the fact that it's because somebody told you a good story on that web page that convinced you that that company was a good company to buy from. The product was something you wanted a lot of time and work and effort goes into doing that.

Right. Here we go again.

Again.

Yeah. Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. Um, back to just me, Dave and Alex for this one.

It's been a while since we just did one together, hasn't it?

Yeah, the last one was a group of us and we've had a lot of great guests on. I'd highly recommend, if you haven't already, to check out some of the fantastic guests that have been on the show recently, some just some great information and some good conversations going on. Um, I listened, no, I didn't, I watched a documentary or a documentary at the weekend.

You did?

I did. It was about meatloaf. Oh yeah. It was actually recorded, I think in twenty fourteen, something like that. But obviously he died recently. So the BBC brought it back onto the iPlayer and it was kind of front of house. And I think actually the radio presenter Iain Dale talk radio LBC had mentioned it in a tweet and I thought, oh, that sounds interesting. So like Saturday afternoon pouring down.

And why not watch a documentary about meatloaf?

It was later on Saturday afternoon, I think, anyway. So yeah, I just thought, you know what? Why not watch this documentary? So I stuck it on and it was fab. I'd recommend it if anyone hasn't seen it. It was it was really interesting. Um, and the good thing is about it was fundamentally about the album Bat Out of Hell. Yeah. You know, but the thing about hell, it's an album I've, over the years I've loved it. Then I've kind of gone off it and I've loved it. But one of the things about Bat Out of Hell is, is all the songs tell a story.

I see where you're going with this. I was I was sat there like, mm, we're gonna get to a point eventually. Yeah. No they do. That's true.

So they tell they tell interesting stories. I mean, if you, you know, if you think of the lyrics like, um, you know, ain't no doubt about it. We were doubly blessed because we were barely seventeen and we were barely dressed. And you're like, okay, tell me the rest of that story. I'm interested in that. And, um, you know, I want you and I need you. But there ain't no way I'm ever going to love you because. But don't be sad. Cause two out of three ain't bad. Oh, yeah. Tell me more about that. I'm interested in that. So, you know, they tell great stories. A lot of songs do. I mean, I'm a huge Pink Floyd fan and I guess sort of in a weird Roger waters way, they do tell rambling stories one way or another, but songs tell great stories, and we as humans love stories. And for anyone who hasn't heard the podcast we did with Bob Keeler, which was fantastic, master storyteller, and it was an hour and a half of.

Him telling a story.

Storytelling and information and advice and one thing and another, it was it's it's actually probably the most downloaded of the podcasts so far. I think it's really good. Well worth checking out. Um, so I watched it and, you know, you became again, very much aware of the stories that were being told and decided, well, you know, that's probably one of the main reasons that it's, it's such a great album. It's just all of those fantastic stories. I mean, you know, the songs, other albums you listen to and you remember the songs and they're catchy and you can almost sing the lyrics, but you're not really thinking of them as stories. So to humans, words matter, stories matter. We like stories we well established. We all know this. We all know about people who you know, it goes back to before we could write stuff down, we would sit around fires, no doubt, and tell stories and so on. And that kind of led on to thinking, well, yeah. So in a digital marketing context, stories are content. And I think there's a danger actually, that this podcast might get a little bit ranty because there's a few things that we want to talk about.

We don't rant, we don't.

Well, I do, I, I, I'm pretty ranty sometimes I think we could get ranty. Um, because a few things have been happening over the last week or so. I mean, this is, you know, Digital Marketing From The Coalface. So quite often we're inspired by things that are going on at the coalface. And one of the things that we that happened recently is we were talking to somebody two or three days ago or something like that about a digital marketing project. Alex, wake up about digital marketing project. And the guy said, you know, I thought, you know, hats off for feeling empowered to say this. But the guy said, oh, so you're telling me it's going to be like two grand for writing a couple of blog posts? That seems a bit steep. Yeah. You know, and you know, to my credit, I didn't hang up. I didn't, I didn't, I didn't end the Zoom call.

Potentially should have done in hindsight.

A little bit. Because the thing is, content is really important and good content is really hard to produce. Yeah. And I, the only time people really get that is when maybe we're talking about working with somebody and they're looking at budget and they say, well, how about if we do the content and you guys just, you know, sprinkle some fairy dust on it?

Yeah.

And you're like, yeah, okay, that could work. And that will, you know, mean that we can do more with less of a budget because you're going to do some of the grind. And invariably we don't get the content. It doesn't arrive. They find it too hard. Or when it does arrive, it's not usable. Not usable. Yeah, yeah, I've killed it. I've done this thing and they send you like three hundred words of nonsense, you know.

Some buzzwords, some cliches.

So, I mean, you're a wordsmith professionally. You're a wordsmith.

That's a lot of pressure. Yeah. No, I mean, yeah, like one hundred percent like going into this. This is like one of my biggest pet hates, right? It's like there's this perception around content, especially that you need it to make a search engine happy to make your pages rank to get seen on Google, but that it fundamentally doesn't really matter what you say on the page. I think a lot of business owners, a lot of marketing people are guilty of the same thing. You know, they're chasing metrics. They want their views and their visits and their page one rankings. But they forget fundamentally that the reason they're doing this is to attract people to their website and that what people are actually going to do on their website is read what they've written. So, you know, they're just kind of phoning it in. They're writing some words. Any words will do. You know, they pay a tenner for somebody to, to write it. They find someone on Upwork or whatever. And then they're surprised when, you know, kind of inevitably, either the site drops off the rankings after Google figures out that their content is kind of a bit rubbish, really, or people get to their website and don't really kind of stick around because it's boring and it's rubbish. I mean, like you say, people love stories. The last time you bought something from a website, I would put good money on the fact and you'll probably tell me that you didn't and you bought it on a whim or whatever. But I would put good money on the fact that it's because somebody told you a good story on that web page that convinced you that that company was a good company to buy from. The product was something you wanted a lot of time and work and effort goes into doing that.

Yeah. One of the you know, it's a few months ago now, but this, this, this little Zoom h6 handy recorder that we're recording on just now. You know, I can't remember where I heard about it. So I did some research and then I finished up on, I think it was Anderton's website. Um, great music website. In fact, I know over the years I've bought a very expensive set of electronic drums and I bought them off anderton's as well. But I remember reading, I think on the web page that they'd put up and they were telling, they, they told a good story about, you know, what it was, how it worked, what you could use it for. And it wasn't just like the usual manufacturer's blurb. It was they'd taken the time to write a story, maybe somewhat of a story. So yeah, I absolutely agree. I mean, there's two aspects to it, isn't there? I mean, sometimes great content is enough to get a ranking. And once people hit your web page as a result of that great content, they might not actually read the content, they might skim read the content, they might just get an impression, a feeling that you guys, you know that you know what you're talking about. And then click a button, click a call to action and fill in a form and say, can I have a conversation? Although you're probably right, I think most of the time when you're interested in something and you're genuinely trying to solve a problem and you don't want to waste your time, you will take some time to read the content that's there.

Yeah, I mean, I think we know, you know, when we sit and, you know, we use tools like Hotjar and things like that to monitor what people do when they hit some of our clients websites. Right? Hotjar is literally just monitoring software. You drop some code into Google Tag Manager script or whatever, and then you can watch people move around your website. Generally speaking, I would say when we put it on clients websites, the pages we see people pause, ponder, look around, read other pages where they are telling a good story, right? And the pages where people just kind of flip past, uh, you know, the pages where they've kind of phoned it in a little bit or there isn't much content.

You've said phoned it in twice now. It is a great, it's a great saying. It kind of it does.

It does all the work for you, doesn't it?

Yeah, I like it.

Um, but yeah, I mean.

To be honest, if I could just say this podcast, he's just phoning it in.

Right off some people. These mics are quite heavy. Um. No, you. Sorry, I've lost track. Yeah. So there's this perception or truism, I guess in in internet marketing that really frustrates me, which is that people don't read content. I think it's truer to say that people don't read shit content, and that a lot of users on the web have been trained by years of reading shit content that people haven't really put any effort or time into, that they now just kind of skim read everything because it's generally not worth their time. But if you want to stand out and you want to make people stick on your page and spend some time thinking about what you're offering, you actually have to invest time and effort into writing good content.

Well, to that point, um, many, many times we've been having, I've had conversations with either clients or potential clients and oh yeah, we're going to revamp our website. We need some help with that. And what we're going to do is we're going to get rid of all this content, we're going to get it and we're going to just it's, there's too much content on our website. We're going to get rid of it. And, you know, then obviously you need to gently talk them down and help them realise. But, you know, you can also get into, there are different ways of approaching this. You might need a lot of content in order to get the search engine success that you want. But there are ways of presenting content. If you take, for example, an academic paper, sure, you know, the first thing you're going to see is an abstract. You're going to get get the sort of this is the essence. This is what we're talking about. If you want the detail, read the whole thing. But here's the abstract. And if you want, you could go then to the conclusion summary, whatever it is at the end, whatever they called it. Yeah. So, you know, content, you know, you don't have to assume that people are going to work their way through an entire long form piece of content. They're going to pick out the bits that they need, which is why it's important to break it into bite sized chunks, lift out the important parts. And again, that goes on to the way that content is presented is also really important because how many times have we seen customers who've got yeah, we've already got a blog, we've been blogging. It doesn't seem to be doing much for us. And then you go to the blog and the, you know, the unformatted text unformatted like sprawling across the page and people are just faced with a sea of words. And it's really, they're making it really hard. But sorry, we digress. We're still getting we're still on the subject of content being important.

Well, I think you're making a good point though, right? Because I think there's this temptation in certainly in like the circles we move in, certainly with the businesses we work with to kind of commoditise the idea of content. It's just just words on a page. If you have X number of them, Google will like you and they'll rank you. If you have Y number of words on the page, then you know, people will be convinced by what you're saying. But fundamentally, content is not just words on a page, is it? On the web? You have to be aware of how you're presenting it, whether it's digestible. I mean, you know, to be fair, some fantastically successful websites don't have any written content. They'll just have a video where somebody explains something. It's not to say, you know, you have to write six thousand words about your favorite service or, you know, the product line you want to push or whatever. It's just find a way of telling the story that's going to convince people to buy on your web page in a way that they're actually going to sit up and take notice of. Yeah.

Okay. So again, from the coalface, second example to this subject to this, this point around the requirement, the need, if you like, for quality content. So, you know, without naming the innocent, um, being what we like to think is a really good agency, um, we get speculative CVS people send us CVS say, hey, I'm looking for work, etc. so we had a CV in from a person this week and I skim read it and said to the guy said to, to you and, uh, and I think Julie and possibly Caron. as well. Looks like it might be worth a look. Let's go and go and take a closer look at it. And you all did, and you did and you know, this person, this person who shall remain nameless, um, had taken a lot of time to produce a covering letter and a CV, which I think the first paragraph on the CV or the covering letter was just like typos and grammatical errors and just all, and the irony was they were contacting us because they were interested in working in content marketing. You know, I experienced I've got this, I've done that. And it's, it's really difficult, isn't it? And so I think one of youse had gone to this person and said, um, send us some examples of the work that you've done. And they did.

Yep. And that was also not good. It was.

It really wasn't great. And I wonder if there is this kind of it's good enough. Yeah. Kind of. I don't not so much. Excuse me, not so much attitude, but there's this idea of content being good enough for the web.

I think so. I think so. I think actually, like I might get a bit ranty here, so you might have to hike me back at some point or edit me out. But yeah, so there's this whole problem, I think where like, you know, the idea of content writing as a discipline has become this thing that you can kind of offer or do. And it is just put words on a page, make sure there's some keywords in there, but just fundamentally like write a body of content. And I see, you know, agencies offer this as a service to clients. I see people buying into the idea that they just need this content writing. Um, and I see sometimes when I'm looking around on the web, you'll see websites where it's really obvious that somebody's gone and found like an SEO agency for five hundred quid a month and they've paid some content writer that, you know, is charging ten pounds an article to write hundreds of blog posts for their website. And it's just awful. It's instantly recognisable. You know, anybody listening to this will know it, because at some point you'll have looked on a website and you'll have thought, oh, this doesn't sound like something that, you know, it doesn't sound like these people know what they're talking about at all. It doesn't sound like they've ever actually done this before. And it's because fundamentally, most of these companies are finding content writers whose only experience is in writing content for the web to just kind of like bash out some words about something that's not actually useful, is it? It's not good at all.

It isn't. No. And this person, and I'm being very specifically not being talking about talking about gender. This person, um, had worked with other agencies in Aberdeen and the examples that were sent by this person were live on customers websites and not great. And you think, well, that person had written it, someone else had approved it. The client had probably not looked at it based on what we said, but what we saw. Um, and that's not to say that I know this sounds really ranty and really critical, but we're trying to get the point across that this stuff matters.

I think it's really important for anybody that's like working in marketing. That's like starting to get into digital marketing to understand the quality of this stuff really matters. It's what's gonna stick at the end of the day in people's minds. And it's really easy to get trapped into this whole thing of like, I don't like reading content on the web. So my customers don't like reading content on the web. I just have to put something up there. And then people will just pick up the phone and they'll ring me and it won't matter. It won't matter if I've kind of written something that sounds a bit off or, you know, if my product descriptions are full of typos or if I'm like, I think is even more fundamental than that, isn't it? It's like you're just not even bothering to think about why somebody should get in touch with you. You're not trying to entice people. And, you know, I think there's a huge overlap between people that take that approach to content marketing and the people we talk to who say things like, oh, our website just doesn't really work for us. We don't need a website. All our business is word of mouth. It's like, of course it is, you know, because fundamentally you've already screwed the pooch proverbially.

Mhm. That's right.

There goes our clean rating for this podcast.

And none of it came out of my mouth. I hear, um, I something that you are. Somebody in the office from the coalface said today, I think it was a. Yesterday was that Google is somehow clamping down on content that is created using some of the AI tools that are out there. Now. We've experimented with the AI because it's our job to experiment with technology, and we concluded that the content that the AI tools produced was not great. However, I've seen people on Twitter talking about, yeah, I'm killing it in search. I'm getting loads of traffic. I've got six hundred pages on my website. I didn't write a single word. The entire thing was produced using artificial intelligence. Yes, but question number one. Um, anyone listening has got the answer. How is how is Google figuring out that this content was written using AI?

Well, to be fair, what Google have actually said is that writing content with AI and publishing it on the web is a violation of their webmaster guidelines. So what they're saying is that. what they're saying is you're not allowed to do it, and they'll take a dim view if they catch you doing it. But they're not saying like, we've got super sophisticated methods to catch you doing it, but.

They probably.

Have. Yeah. I mean, yeah, it's, it's Google.

You know, where they might have learned some of that stuff because in days of yore, when private blog networks were a big thing and they probably are in the the right circles still a thing. A private blog network was a network of blogs, all on different domains, all different websites effectively, and you could buy access to them. So you could dump content in with links back to your website to help your website rank better. Because as we've discussed previously, you know, links to your website from, well, from credible resources help your website to rank better. Now, in the early days of that stuff, the content was was actual gibberish. Yep. It was, it was literally machine produced, not AI produced. It was machine produced gibberish. And it would literally be door, wall, keyboard, floor, rain, snow, um, by holiday insurance, which was a link to the holiday insurance website. And then it would continue snooker table, uh, dessert gravy. And it was just a random set of words.

Trained those machines on your content writing.

Thank you. You're probably right though. But the thing was that the machines weren't right, weren't writing content. They were just randomly chucking words together. But they were putting you would preselect or pre-set what the link text needed to be. And as long as you had two thousand words of gibberish, as long as the link text was by holiday insurance, which linked to the website, it worked. Now, I mean, did Google do something? Did it learn when it was doing that? Because the AI stuff isn't gibberish. I mean, it's rubbish, a lot of it. But it isn't gibberish.

Well, it's not, but it's not. What it's doing isn't too far away from that though, is it? Because this this whole thing. So a lot of these AI platforms are powered by something called GPT three, which is essentially a very complicated algorithm that reads all the pages on the internet or all the pages that you feed it, and then it works out which words often appear next to each other, and then it just reproduces those patterns. So to be fair, like, you know, I'm sure you can rank websites on Google with it. I'm sure that the people that you're seeing on Twitter saying, you know, they're killing it in search, they're not lying. But I think that's fundamentally because Google's quite unsophisticated still at picking up on like what is or isn't good copy.

If you want to find out how unsophisticated Google is, right? Really long search queries and ask it things that are very detailed. Yeah, that's, I do that quite a lot. And the stuff you get back is appalling.

Nonsense.

Absolute nonsense.

But this is the thing. And you know, I'm sure you can trick Google into ranking this content, but fundamentally, this content is never good. And I don't think it would be particularly difficult to work out, or maybe even to train your own AI to spot content that's been written well.

I think there'll be people listening to this, and feel free to contact us who would challenge you to and say, right, there's two pieces of content. Tell me. Tell me which you think was written by a person and which was written by AI. But that would depend who wrote it as well. Because if our friend who who contacted us about about a potential writing job had written it, then yeah, you'd probably pick the AI one.

Uh, the other sneaky thing about a lot of these AI tools, though, because I was reading an article recently in a newspaper that purported to be written by AI. Um, and I was reading it and I was like, fucking hell, this is sophisticated. This is serious stuff. Like, I can't tell. And then I got to the end and it was like written by an AI and then edited by a human. And it's like, there we go. It's like, you know, of course the machine spits out words, and then somebody spends three hours combing through them and making some semblance of sense out of it. But like.

See, I would never do that. Because one of the hardest tasks for me is taking a piece of content. No, no, I enjoy reading my own work because it's fantastic. No, I hate if I'm given the task, and obviously I'd have to give myself the task unless somebody demanded it was me that did it. But if somebody gives me a piece of content that's like, well, I've written this, but it's not quite right, and it needs to be about another five hundred words and it needs to expand a bit. I find that really hard. I'm more inclined to say, you know what, I'll just I'll just start with a blank piece of paper. I'll read that and then I'll write it again because I cannot really struggle.

I get the frustration though, because like, to be fair, I think we're quite unusual because we both of us write for a living or like, you know, at least occasionally spend a lot of our time writing. Um, I think for a lot of people, that blank piece of paper is really intimidating. So I can see where people have been drawn into this trap. You know, it sounds really great, doesn't it? AI software that writes your content for you. Like you don't have to sit there and stare at a blank screen and try and conjure some words up. Like, that's quite a tempting offer. It's just a shame that it's absolute rubbish in real life.

So what have Google actually said? Just recap. They've said that if you use AI to produce content, it's in breach of their.

Yes, they.

Have their guidelines, terms of terms.

So they have their webmaster guidelines. And that's the like basically, they will penalise a website for violating them. And most of the webmaster guidelines are things like you won't deliberately build links you won't do like spammy or underhand things. Um, and now it is like you won't use automated software to make your content for you, which I guess makes sense, right? Because Google's job is to kind of maintain quality. It wants to see websites that are well written, authoritative, interesting, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And if the kind of trend for AI copywriting takes over, they're going to be swamped with web pages that rank in search but deliver an absolutely appalling customer service. So I can see it.

Yeah. And most of this, you know, the reason that AI is getting traction and people who've created artificial intelligence that will write supposedly good content is it's being done because, because writing content is hard.

Yeah, it's really bloody difficult, isn't it? Let's be honest.

So, you know, this takes us back to the, the, um, the person we were speaking to who said, you know, oh, two grand a month to, to produce a couple of blog posts. That's quite steep. It's like, well, yeah, if you think a blog post is something that you bang out in an hour and it's like five hundred words long and there's no thought going into it, but it's got the right keywords in it, so who cares then? Yeah, absolutely. A couple grand.

A month is a rip off for that.

But yeah. Well, I need to say, I mean, the only other thing was nobody at any point had said to this guy, we charge two grand a month to write two blog posts. He kind of just picked that.

Out.

Of thin air because because he was, he was, he was being a bit a bit awkward, to be honest.

Yeah, I mean, no, I mean, that's the thing. I mean, we, we charge a reasonable amount of money for writing, but I think it's reflective of the amount of research, the amount of effort, the amount of time we spend going over things and making sure that it is, you know, kind of convincing, compelling, interesting. Um, I just yeah, I don't think you can really skimp on that kind of thing. And it just goes back to that story you're telling at the beginning about meatloaf, right? It's that whole idea that like an album that has no filler in it whatsoever goes down in history as a really remarkable album. Like, this is seriously good stuff. There's not one single bad song on it. Albums that are full of filler. Well, nobody really remembers them, right? They'll remember the hit singles, but by and large, nobody really cares about the rest of it. And that's. I think you can just apply that straight to the web, can't you? If you want a website that is ultimately forgettable, by all means, phone it in.

But yeah, that's three times.

That's yeah, we'll see how many I can cram in.

Yeah. And I suppose as well, the irony, if that's the right word or irony, if you're American, is I've just alienated our American audience. Now, the irony of, of.

We like Americans for the.

Record, you know, it's the podcast is getting downloaded more in America than it is in the UK.

Some of our favourite clients are Americans. Quick, get it back, get them back.

Yeah, we we work well with American clients, broadly speaking, because British audiences are so much better than American audiences.

That is the perception, isn't.

It's the truth. Yeah, it's definitely the truth anyway. Um, what was I talking about? Yeah. Talking about the irony of Writing not being appreciated. This isn't new. No it's not new. Writers over the years have had a bum deal.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, write you I need I need a thousand words on this. I need it by tomorrow. And you'll. And this is what you'll get paid. I don't know if you ever listened to Ed Reardon's week on radio four. It was basically a sitcom cleverer than that. Sitcom always makes something sound a bit rubbish, but it was way better than a sitcom. It was. It was a it was a sort of situational comedy. Ed Reardon's a writer. He's never got any money. He likes a drink. His best friend's his cat. But, you know, his agent said, oh, I've got you a gig. You need to write this thing. And it was the money was always awful. You never knew when the next money was coming in. And, you know, it's kind of like it's why would that be? I mean, you know, on the one hand, words are so important to us humans. We love stories. We, we devour words. We, we, you know, books, audio books, you name it. Yet the people who produce that, with the exception being, you know, the JK Rowling's and the and the Stephen Kings of this world, the David Baldacci, who write great literature, they write great books anyway, that people love. And, you know, they, you know, there's a lot of people making okay, living. There's a lot of there's some people making amazingly good living. And there's a lot of people who are spend their entire life writing and never getting.

Almost.

A thankless task.

It is. Yeah.

And is that why in a digital marketing context, customers kind of don't value writing, despite the fact that it's hard. We've agreed it's hard and it is hard. And any any customer that's ever said we'll do the writing ninety nine times out of one hundred. They can't do it. Well, ninety nine times out of a hundred, they don't produce anything. They eventually come back and say, well, could you do the content for us? We can't write it.

Yeah.

That's right. And which we like. Give us some bullet points. You're the subject matter expert. Give us the important stuff. We'll do. The writing.

Part of it, I think, is to do with the fact that good writing is kind of invisible, right? It's like when you when you read like a really compelling advert or when you see like a really compelling advert on a billboard, you don't think, wow, that's a really good copy. You think, oh, that's a really cool product. Unless you're like the innocent smoothie people who like are famous for their like weird, quirky writing or whatever. Most of the time the talent is in making sure that your writing is not actually taking center stage. Right. And it's the same like you're talking about literature, right? Most good writers are the writers that know how to get out of their own way. Nobody says JK Rowling is like a master of prose, or that what she writes is really compelling, interesting use of the English language. They just say it's a really good story because your writing is fundamentally not noticeable anymore. And I think that's the key really. It's like you're doing something that is fundamentally meant to be invisible. You're letting the story do the work for you. Um, and I just think, yeah, a lot of people take that to mean that the writing is kind of irrelevant or that anybody can do it. And I think part of the problem as well is that everybody learns to write at school. I have heard so many people say, oh, well, anyone can write, can't they? It's like, technically, yes, anyone can play football, but not to a professional standard.

Yeah. I mean, there are some great tools out there to help you write. They can be infuriating to work with. I'm a huge fan of Grammarly.

Grammarly is good.

Yeah, but it can be infuriating to write with because it constantly is telling you how bad you are. Yeah, it actually, it actually doesn't. It actually encourages you. But you write in a way because, you know, you set like who the audience is, what their understanding is, what the tone is, what you're trying to achieve. And then it's AI tools. So this is again, AI assisting in the writing process. Um, and it's coming back, you know, it's favorite is like, oh, you've written that in the passive voice.

Is it supposed to say, yeah, that's.

Yeah, that's its favorite, you know, but generally speaking, it's good. It can be infuriating because you put together, you know, depending on how you've set the parameters, like it won't tolerate overly long sentences, for example, it's like, you know, you need to break that up. That's people will not your audience that you've told me this is for will not be able to understand and read that. Yeah. And I think broadly speaking, Grammarly is well respected. It is a good tool, but it doesn't write it for you. But it does give you some fantastic guidance. And maybe that's the part that AI plays.

Well, yeah, I was just about to say, like we've always said that we want to keep this podcast kind of open and informative to a large audience, to anybody listening to this that cannot afford to go away and pay an agency to write their content to anybody who has sat there struggling and thinking, okay, well, you know, I really want to write good content then, but how on earth do I do that? Tools like Grammarly are like the first step in that. It's not going to be perfect.

What's the other one? Is it Hemingway? Yeah. Is that free Hemingway?

I think so. I might be wrong.

There might be a version of Grammarly that's free. I know I buy.

A browser add ons free as well, isn't it? For Grammarly, I think.

Is it okay? It used to be all right. Maybe it is. Yeah, I don't know.

But either way you will find plenty of kind of writing assist tools out there that are really helpful and useful. That's a really good way to start. Um, and yeah, I think it's a really good shout if you can't afford to pay professional writers, but generally speaking, content is worth investing money in. I think real money.

Yeah. And, and you won't get good content if you don't know, that's for sure. Okay. Is there nothing else you want to talk about related to content? Have we done it?

I think that's pretty much everything.

Did we get really ranty? We got a bit ranty, didn't we, in this one.

It's one of those things that deserves to be ranted about occasionally, though, isn't it? Because people spend so much money on, like, the look and feel of their website and the quality of the images on their website? Pardon me, but they don't spend any money or time on the content. Oh, it doesn't matter. Get some words up there. Mhm. It really does matter.

It does. It definitely matters. Okay. So if you've got anything that you've heard in this podcast and you are interested in coming on and talking about it, that's fine. Or if it's just digital marketing business growth related, then we'd love to hear from you. And we have got, we've got, we continue to have some great guests booked in to come on. And, um, I think we'll, yeah, we've got two or three this, this month already that we're, that we've got recording dates put in for which is which I'm looking forward to those. Yeah. There's one on I think email marketing, the one on conversion rate optimisation and user experience. Yeah. Me too, me too.

Although the email marketing one will be good too, right? Because that's an area where we're probably less kind of.

Interested.

But yeah. Interested.

Yeah, maybe that's right.

Knowledgeable.

I'd say so. Um, if you've got any questions, if you want to come on, you can go to redevolution.com. You'll find forms on just about every web page and phone numbers. Give us a ring, fill in a form, send us an email, or you can go to redevolution.com/digital-marketing-from-the-coalface, which is the home of Digital Marketing From The Coalface podcast. And in the meantime, um, this is Dave and Alex signing off on this. What will probably go out as a, a supplemental kind of little mini podcast, ranty thing.

On a rainy Thursday afternoon. Is it? It's raining. Yeah. Oh, it was a second ago.

It was raining. That's right. Yeah. Okay, bye for now.