How To Avoid Wasting Money Doing Digital Marketing – Episode 66

So if we're going to talk about how not to waste money and when you're doing digital marketing, what is the overarching thing that you can do to avoid to avoid it? The overarching thing.

Um, well, I guess have a strategy, right? I mean, I think that's the, the most integral part of it is like, know exactly what you're setting out to do. Have an overarching plan. Um, and then something that you can measure and say, is this working? Is this not working?

Yeah. So when it comes to digital marketing and getting eyeballs on your website, it's absolutely not how many? Yeah, it's who.

I mean, in some ways would prefer, especially with pay per click, right? Where we're paying for every click. We'd actually prefer to see less traffic, but more relevant traffic. Focus on what actually matters to your business because you don't have very much money. You want to make every penny count.

Challenge what you're being told with. So what? How is that going to move my business forward? Okay, welcome back to Digital Marketing from the coalface. Um, Alex has suggested this, uh, subject this week about how not to waste money with your digital marketing. So it's Alex's idea.

And I take the blame if it all goes wrong.

Yeah, I'm already bored.

But anyway.

Um, well, I'm going fishing today. I'm going fishing on the Dee salmon fishing? I've never tried salmon fishing. I am a keen fisherman, as you know, but I've never tried salmon fishing. And I'm going up, uh, to fish on the Dee.

Going alone, which.

Is, uh. No, I'm going, uh, it's through the club. I'm a member of a club, and I'm going up there. I'm going to be shown how to spear cast. And yeah, I'm going to be quite delayed trying not.

To try not to make a fool.

It's where the royal family fish. Yeah. So there you go.

Catch some salmon.

How lucky am I.

Some royal salmon.

Yeah. Um right. So, um let's crack on because I'm going fishing and I'm gonna have a bacon sandwich before I go. So I haven't really got time for this nonsense, if I'm honest.

Well, you know, that's the thing about digital marketing, isn't it? You just put it on the back burner. Do it later.

Okay, so the last podcast we did, which was a cracker, if you missed it, go and listen to it. It was the one with Bryony from Watertight Marketing, and she was talking about how often with marketing people waste a lot of money and went into a lot of detail about that. And it's kind of her passion to, to talk about that and help people not waste money with marketing. And I think traditionally people have almost accepted that where marketing is concerned, money gets wasted.

Yeah, I think so. There's that view. It's kind of like a black hole, isn't it? Yeah. That's right.

Yeah. I'm not sure which bit of what I do works kind of thing, but digital marketing has made that a bit different. Um, in that you get more of an insight into what is and isn't working. And so in theory, you don't actually, you shouldn't actually be wasting as much money as maybe in the olden days of printing leaflets, throwing them up in the air and seeing where they land.

I don't think you should really be wasting any money, but I mean, yeah, like you say, you can attribute every sale, every lead, every click to a channel, right? With digital marketing, you can see using platforms that are completely free, like analytics or Search console, exactly where people are coming from. So you should, if everything's set up correctly, know exactly what.

But isn't attribution one of the big issues with digital?

With digital?

It kind of is, isn't it?

It's confusing.

Explain to people what we mean by attribution.

So attribution is literally where we're going to say the, the click or the sale came from, right? So if we pay for PPC ads, somebody clicks on the PPC ad, they buy your product.

You pay per click like Google ads. Yes, I know, I know, we used to do this thing where I pull you up for, but I was recently speaking to somebody who's a huge fan of the, uh, of the podcast. Gordon. If you're listening, this is because of you. Uh, and, you know, they like the fact people like the fact that we kind of don't use Acronyms in a glib kind of way. Yeah, I'm not going to be a dick, but I will kind of like you are. But I am a dick. I know, I know, I am a dick, but by PC you mean pay per click. Sorry. Go on. Carry on blabbing on about attribution.

So in. Uh. Thanks, man. Um, in an ideal scenario, you'd know somebody clicked on a pay per click ad. They went to my site, they bought a product. Therefore I can attribute that sale to pay per click. It's obviously way more complicated than that because somebody might come to your pay per click ad leave, find you on Facebook a day later, and then buy your product. And then which do you attribute that to? Right? Is it your pay per click lead that told them about you in the first place? Is it the Facebook ad.

And you only really care when it doesn't work.

Right? And you're getting into the real nitty gritty. The point is, you're still streets ahead of traditional marketing, I think, because at least, you know, you know, X amount of sales happened, X amount of visitors came from here. You can roughly tell what channels are driving the the good stuff really.

Okay, so if we're going to talk about how not to waste money when you're looking at digital marketing, when you're doing digital marketing, what is the overarching thing that you can do to avoid to avoid it? The overarching.

Thing. Um, well, I guess have a strategy, right? I mean, I think that's the, the most integral part of it is like, know exactly what you're setting out to do. Have an overarching plan. Um, and then something that you can measure and say, is this working? Is this not working? Something you can adjust rather than just kind of randomly? Because I think it's fair to say for most of the people that are kind of dabbling with digital marketing, that maybe haven't been doing it for very long, or don't really know how to do it and are on their own with it. There's a temptation often to kind of just try different things. There's lots of shiny things. Lots of people sell you stuff like the idea of pay per click advertising, right? Google will say, oh, if you spend fifty quid with us, we'll get you fifty people on your website and one of them might turn into a customer. So you're like, okay, I'll throw fifty quid over there and maybe I'll try and promote some social media posts, because I've seen Facebook advertising that service to me. Maybe I'll pay a blog writer to write me two blog posts because I know I need a blog and you just kind of like generally kind of like giving little bits of money away all the time. And none of it's really showing a return. And I guess.

Let's get a bit more granular. Let's think about PPC pay per click, Google ads, the you do a search in Google and the bunch of stuff that often appears first on the page with a little word ad. Next to it is a Google ad. People are not paying to be there, but they're paying. If you click their ad, hence it's called pay per click. So let's think about pay per click. How do people waste money on p p c?

So the main and most obvious thing is like so with PPC, you are bidding in like a kind of auction. So you're saying to Google, I want my ad to appear for this search term, and I'm willing to pay up to this much a click. And then they look at all the different people who are putting money into the pot and saying, I want to appear for that search term. And they say, okay, who's who's willing to pay the most money? They go to the top of the list on paper. So one of the ways you can waste money very quickly on pay per click advertising, sir. Yes.

Is it just as simple as is it just as simple as paying the most money to be top of the paid search rankings?

No.

I didn't think it was. I didn't think it was.

Um, yeah. So obviously Google are also evaluating things like how relevant your ad is for the search term, how relevant your landing pages for the search term landing page. Yes. The page that you're directing people to that.

You're just sending them to my website. Is that not right?

No, that's very, very.

Wrong, is it not?

We have episodes on on pay per click advertising, to be fair.

Okay. So as we're going to talk about PPC, you carry on, but let's make sure that we talk about landing pages because that's a really important aspect of PPC, isn't it?

And also just generally how not to throw money away with marketing. But yeah, so anyway, you're entering into this big auction. Um, you're saying I've got this super relevant ad. Well, if you're saying I've got this super relevant ad and this super relevant page and I'm willing to pay this much Google say. Okay, right, fine. But if you're not doing those things and you're just trying to bid money for keywords when you don't really have a relevant ad for it, you don't really have a good landing page to send people to. You're just going to end up spending a lot of money for every click that you get. And very quickly, what you'll find is that people also don't convert when they reach your site and you're just wasting money.

Okay, good. Um, did you talk about landing pages? I got distracted because a lorry went past. You know, I like lorries.

It's really good to know that you pay attention to these podcasts. They're an.

Educational resource. I'm a sucker for a big lorry.

I've never understood the fascination. It's a thing if.

You drive one. And as you know, I do. Maybe that's the amazing vehicles. Yeah. They're fantastic. Sorry. So did you mention landing pages? I generally I genuinely was distracted.

Uh, kind of, I think.

Okay, so when you're doing a PPC ad pay per click ad, you've got to make sure you're bidding on the right keywords that you're getting in front of the right audience, that you're sending them to a place, a page when they click the advert that is super relevant to the advert, right?

I mean. Yeah, exactly. I mean that's exactly it isn't it? If you're buying a blue wooden box and you click an ad that says buy your blue wooden boxes here and you end up on a page that's selling you multi-coloured wooden boxes or orange wooden boxes or bikes, you're gonna think, what the f*ck am I here for?

So what's one of the main things that people do with PPC is they don't think about where they're sending people when they click the advert.

Yeah, exactly.

That's a huge waste of money because just sending them to your website as if to say, it's in there somewhere, go find it. It's not gonna work.

Well, no. Exactly.

They're looking for answers right now. Instant gratification. Click an ad. If I don't see what I expected to see, then I'm off. I've gone.

That's one of the most fundamental rules, isn't it?

A lot of money for clicks. Yes. We were talking this morning about the website audit clicks that we had for a quick thirty quid for one click. Yep. Yeah.

So you better be sure.

If you pay.

thirty quid to get somebody on a page that you know exactly what you're offering them and that it's compelling.

That's right. Exactly. Okay. And anything else we can do before we move on from PPC, because this podcast isn't just about PPC.

No. Yeah. I mean, well, I think you know more broadly as well. The other thing I would say about PPC is like, no, advertise the products that you are actually wanting to sell and make a profit on. Because that's the other thing we see a lot of, right? People want to have a crack at PPC advertising. I do this, I'll advertise on that. Whereas what they actually want to sell people is like a kind of subset of that. Get specific, get granular, give people exactly what they want to see. Don't waste money chasing after the top level terms.

Any negative aspects of PPC you want to talk.

About? Yeah. There's also a thing called negative keywords where you can tell Google that you don't want your ads to appear for specific terms. So a good example of that would be cheap cars. If you're selling cars or if you're a lawyer, but you don't want to do anything to do with immigration law, you might be like legal services, but not immigration legal services.

An example I often give is is relevant to us. So if we bid on, uh, if somebody types in web design company, then I want them to see our advert if they type in cheap web design company. I don't want them to see our adverts or the fact that we have cheap. The word cheap in our negative keyword list means that if that word appears, no matter what else they search, if it's got that word in it, don't show them the advert. Simple, simple concepts. Why don't you just taken your wedding ring off?

Just take it off all the time.

I hope he doesn't listen to this. She'll now know you took your wedding ring off. Uh, right. So, um, that's like I said, it's not all about PPC. Like, make sure you're bidding on the right keywords. Make sure you've got landing pages, you've got negative keywords, probably probably get somebody who knows what they're doing to actually do it for you in the first place, because Google makes it really easy for people to put their credit card in, press a load of buttons and think that they've got an effective PPC campaign running. Trust me, it is not effective. You will waste money if you take that approach.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Okay. Yeah. I was just gonna say, actually, I'm kind of coming to believe, uh, the more kind of stuff that we've been doing with PPC and CRO together in tandem as well that you can't really do conversion rate optimisation.

Which.

Is trying to actively get more conversions out of the people hitting your page. I am starting to believe that you can't really separate the two anymore. You can't just do PPC in a vacuum and say, this is going to work for my business. You have to be thinking about what you're going to make people do once they hit your website and actively kind of investing in your website and improving it all the time as well.

One final thing I would say about PPC is you might not like the idea of paying for clicks. You might not have had a good experience in the past with PPC. You might be one of those people who says, I never click adverts on Google search results, and I don't know anybody who does.

Yeah, well.

Trust me, millions of people do. That's where Google makes most of its money. So it can be a very effective tool. And but it can also be.

It can be very expensive.

Very expensive, and a complete waste of money. Totally. All right. Um, so we've talked about the fact that we should have a strategy first approach. Yep. Um, we've talked about the fact that we and I kind of skipped over that it's a massive subject. And maybe in a future podcast, we'll maybe spend an entire podcast talking about strategy and discovery and really digging in before you actually do any work, any design work, any writing, anything. So. So I am going to just gloss over it for now because we didn't really set out with this one.

I mean, it's a massive subject. It is, to be fair.

It is. Um, interestingly, another podcast I'm involved with, uh, with alerts dot com. If you go to alerts dot com, one of the menu items is podcast. And in that we talk all about strategy. Yeah. Um, it's specifically for not for profits, but strategy strategy. It's, there's some good stuff in there if you're interested in strategy. Little cross plug there.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well done.

Good job. Yeah. Um, right. So moving on. What else can what else are people doing that is draining their marketing budget without actually getting much of a return.

Well, the other thing that I think really stands out for me, just coming back to the whole strategy thing is blogging, right? It's like one of the really common pieces of advice that people hand out is, oh, if you're gonna do digital marketing, you're gonna promote a website, you have to have a blog. So loads of people and it's, you know, it's not their fault at all. Go out and they'll pay a freelance writer or they'll get somebody in house, right? You write one blog post per week, just write a blog post. It can be about anything you like. There's no strategy pinning it together, getting people to write for your website, getting somebody to upload it, find images, publish it. It's expensive, it's not cheap. And if you're not doing it for a reason and there's no kind of strategy underpinning that, it can be an inordinate waste of money. I mean, how many company blogs have we seen where it is just like, you know, yeah, Sally did a fun run. We got a new client and then, you know, some weird kind of like state of the industry type thing. Uh, you know.

Where are you going with that? Okay, so let's dig into that a little bit. Yeah. How do people stop wasting money with their blogging activities and start making the blogs they create effective in driving enquiries, business opportunities, or sales.

So you have to ask yourself what the purpose of the blog is. I think. Don't you really?

If only someone had written a blog called what is the Purpose of a blog? Yeah, Google that. If you Google, what is the purpose of a blog? You might find a blog post by read evolution on page one.

Some philosophical ramblings.

Well, ramblings anyway.

Um, yeah. No, I mean, so the idea obviously of a blog is to kind of drive, actually engage traffic and leads on your website, right? That's the idea. Get eyeballs on your website, people that care about what you're offering, and then you sell them a product or a service. And when you approach blogging from that angle, the next question is, what are you trying to do with each individual blog post? Right? You've got to try and rank them for a specific search term. You've got to know what people are searching for, the questions they're asking about your products and services. And you've got to go away and create content that actually answers those questions.

If you're interested in this whole subject of answering questions, then one of our previous podcasts with Marcus Sheridan, who's the author of the book, They Ask You answer is well worth forty five minutes of your time.

Yeah.

I mean, Marcus is a genius when it comes to storytelling and using blogging, using content to drive business results. And the book's a great read. I like the audiobook version, but the podcast we did with Marcus was fantastic.

Yeah. It is. I mean, I think the point is really, it's not just a vanity project. It's not just about saying something. It's about saying something targeted. It's about answering a genuine question or a genuine need that people have. And it's about writing something that's actually kind of authoritative and useful and interesting, isn't it? At the end of the day?

Yeah. And that's an interesting one in itself, because people often glibly throw out the term write useful, interesting content. Yeah. Don't they. I mean, you know, it's.

Easier said than done.

Yeah. It really is easier said than done. What's interesting, I mean, some of the subject matter that we blog about is Not interesting, other than for a very small group of people who are trying to solve a very specific problem. Well, yeah, geeks, sometimes geeks. But for example, you know, we write content on the subject of, um, irrigation pumping stations for gated communities in Florida.

But I mean, you know, interesting. It doesn't have to be a blanket thing, does it? Like you say, interesting to the people that you're trying to appeal to. Right. Because you should only care about your audience. And that's the other thing about a blog, right? It has to be targeting a specific group of people. And yeah, and you're right, it is glib advice to just say, write something interesting and authoritative. I think the thing to remember about blogging about any subject is that you're not doing it in a vacuum. Go online, look at what other people have written about it and try and one up them. Try and do something better. Try and get more granular. Try and be, you know, more interesting. Don't see it as a right now I have to write an article about green bikes because people search for green bikes. Oh, that's a bad example. Like how to change my bike chain. If you're a bike manufacturing company or whatever you might think. That's a great blog post to do. People Google it. I can get in front of them, but don't just write something for the sake of writing something for that keyword. Go away, look at what other people have done and try and beat it. Really.

By the way, it's the second time you've used the phrase in a vacuum today. Don't do it again.

All right. So are you opposed to vacuums particularly particularly.

I like vacuum cleaners, I do. You should see this Dyson thing I've got at home. It's cost a fortune. But oh, my word, it's a joy to use. Right. Let's just let's just kind of cobble together a very basic checklist for people who want to use blogging effectively because blogging is not free. No, blogs don't create themselves. They have to be researched. They have to be written. You have to find photographs to accompany them. You have to put them on your website. You have to optimise them. You have to cross-link them. You are doing all of that in the hope that when somebody is asking a question and you've got the answer that they find your website. And then there is some sort of call to action, something on the page which makes them do something else, like get in touch with you or, or somehow.

Something.

Engage in a chat session or whatever. So like, let's just assume now that let's assume I'm an idiot. What do you mean? That's going to be easy? Assume I'm an idiot. Just talk me through like I'm, I've just started this business. I, I, I'm in the, I'm doing mountain bike holidays because I live in Royal Deeside. It's a beautiful part of the world. It's a Mecca for mountain bikers. So I'm going to cash in on that trend. And I'm going to start running high end mountain bikers who've got a few, few quid. And let's face it, that's most of them. Have you seen the price of mountain bikes, mountain bikes. Anyway, so I'm going to run. I'm going to run mountain bike holidays. I've started my business. I've built a Wix website and it's actually all right. It's okay. I built it myself and you've looked at it and you've gone. Actually, it's not a bad job for a, for a DIY, but I know that I need content. There's only so much I can write, so I'm going to start blogging. Help.

So the first thing is keywords. I think that's probably the best place to start, right? You've got to go away. You've got to use a tool like SEMrush or Google's own AdWords keyword planner, that kind of thing. You're looking at me like you're gonna jump down my throat. No, no.

Not at all. No, no, no, I have no idea what you're talking about. I'm an idiot. Remember SEMrush? What the. Keywords.

You're an idiot. You can't go into business. It's hopeless.

Plenty of idiots run businesses.

That's true. Um, no. Yeah. You're right. Um, so you've gotta. So keywords are the phrases that people are searching for things that people. I think just.

To pick up on that, I think that I like what you said there, you know, keyword sounds SEO and geeky.

Yeah.

Well, you know, if you go back to the Marcus Sheridan stuff, when people ask, you answer, people are asking questions. When they ask questions, they type words, phrases into the search engines. You need to understand what the words and phrases are that they're typing in.

Luckily for you, there are some third party platforms programs like SEMrush, which is a digital marketing tool, um, or.

SEMrush dot com. You can get a free trial.

Yeah. Um, there's Ahrefs, there's Moz, there's tons of them. There's tons of them.

They don't help themselves, are they? Ahrefs. I mean, we know what that is. You know, we get that. But like Ahrefs, so is the literally the the letter a h r e f s dot com. Ahrefs dot com.

Yeah.

Notice how I said h and not.

A pet peeve of mine to. Uh, mars dot com is another one. Um, and then there's also free ones like, um, Answerthepublic. Right? Where basically these are just programs where, yeah, they're collating data about the questions people are asking online. And you can type in a subject like mountain bikes, and they'll just give you a big old list of all the things people search for around mountain bikes. Some of those keywords, um, you will see very quickly as well. They'll tell you how many people search it every month. Um, and some of those keywords will immediately jump out as you as being obvious subjects for a blog post like how do I book a mountain biking holiday? Or where should I go mountain biking? Or why is Royal Deeside great for mountain biking? And you can create content that targets those keywords. That is designed to rank in Google every time somebody searches for that key phrase. And that is where you have to start. Ultimately, you have to have a big old list of things that people are asking that you can write good content for.

One step backwards. Just one step. I agree with everything you've said, except simply finding the search terms that people are using isn't enough in and of itself, is it? Because one of the things that I would definitely do, again, in the in the spirit of not wasting money, is I would type that into Google and see who's already getting a page one ranking. And if it's like websites that are really, really strong, they've been around forever.

Like mountain biking world.

Yeah. I mean, you know, you have to pick your fights. You have to pick your fights.

You'll see as well on some of the tools we're talking about, like SEMrush or Ahrefs. They'll have like a competition metric that'll tell you how difficult it is to rank for a keyword. And I think generally, you know, they're not always super accurate. But as a rule of thumb, if it's saying this is a really competitive keyword, forget about it. You're just starting out. You don't have time to waste like that. Find the ones where there's nobody else really trying. Yeah. Be smart.

Okay, so we've done our research. We understand we didn't actually talk about the pen portraits by our personas, which is almost a step before that, who are, who are ideal customers, and then move on to the idea of what are they typing into search engines, which then gives you a list of subjects in order to give you an opportunity to write content, assuming that you think you can write content which will get ranked in Google because nobody else is really yessing those search terms.

Yeah, but I think, you know, you're an idiot in this example. Um.

Broadly speaking, I am.

No, I mean, and really, I think that kind of stuff is important. But for a lot of businesses, you can get a good start just by heading on to one of those keyword research tools and seeing what people type. I mean, you know, people aren't searching for mountain bike related keywords unless they've got an interest in mountain biking and they're probably a target audience. But yeah, it may be more complicated depending on what industry you're in.

And then once you've got these subjects, what would you say is the what makes what makes a blog post good? What makes a blog post so good? It's likely to do well in search.

This is the tricky bit, right? Because you don't. That depends very much on what the expectations of your audience are. Maybe mountain bikers only really like reading really short, punchy stuff. Maybe they don't have time, they're too busy mountain biking to.

Or they might like videos.

Maybe like videos, maybe they like podcasts. The point is, yeah, what you want to do then once you've got your list of keywords is head over to Google and see what other people are producing that's working well for that kind of content, right? It's if you find that for where should I go mountain biking, everybody's got these like little listicle posts with a list of ten destinations. That's probably the kind of content people want to see. If the content.

Isn't sorry to interrupt. Isn't buzzsumo isn't that what that does? Doesn't that give you. It's another tool. Buzz, buzz, sumo dot com or whatever. You Google it, you'll find it. It tells you for particular search terms, what type of content tends to do well, whether it's blog posts or videos or listicles or.

Whatever, whatever.

Yeah, listicles. Just tell people what a listicle is.

That's gross. You know, sometimes you see that like they crop up on Facebook all the time, don't they link to them on newspaper websites? It's like ten reasons to X or five things that will surprise you.

Really been done to death.

But it has. Yeah, absolutely. But it does.

Still getting done.

Yeah. Well, for geography stuff, especially where it's like ten places to visit, people just want a quick rapid fire list of things that they'll find. One that interests me and I'll go there kind of thing.

So geography. I did actually get my O-level geography And the thing I remember most is being fascinated by the concept of plate tectonics because it was like clever words. Don't remember much else. Oh, I remember that one. Well, that was that was from geography. Do you remember that?

Did you ever have to do a fieldwork exercise where you counted people in city centers? That was a big chunk of my geography.

That was when you were in prison, wasn't it? That was that was when you were on day release from prison. That wasn't school.

It's like it all blurs together, to be honest with you. Um. Anyway. Well.

No idea. Right. So we're kind of like doing the anatomy of what makes a blog.

Post, right? So, you know, roughly what other people are producing, you know, roughly what you need to go away and produce. And then it is literally a case of go away and produce something better than what's currently ranking.

What else might, uh, hinder, um, mountain biking tours, um, from creating great blog posts, but still not getting good value for money because, you know, the subject we're trying to get to is not waste money.

So to get a blog post up and ranking, you can write the best blog post in the world. But if nobody links to it, you or anybody else cites it as you would cite a scientific article, it will never really get much traction in search. Google specifically ranks sites based on how authoritative it thinks they are. That's what I was.

Driving at, because Dave's Mountain Bike Tours is a brand new website. So what? Hasn't it got.

Any authority at all? Google doesn't think it's valuable because as far as it can see, nobody else on the internet is referring to it. Nobody's talking about it. Nobody's linking to their great content and saying, read this great article. So until you can start getting people to do what is called citing your website as in linking to it from their content, you're probably not going to get a lot of traction. Now, one of the things you can do to get a bit of a head start on this is by linking to your own content, right? So citations are signals of trust, but you can also, if you constantly refer to your own articles and link to them from other pages of your website and that sort of thing, you can get a bit of kind of internal linking going, which sort of helps.

But all of this really makes it clear why we need a strategy. Because if we decide, right, I'm gonna I'm gonna do these mountain bike tours. I've built my own website and I'm gonna write loads of blog posts. Oh, and by the way, um, this business will only work if I start getting bookings in the first month. Is there a flaw in that plan?

I mean, yeah, a little bit because a month is no time at all. So what can we do?

My strategy is flawed. Fix my strategy. Alex, we talked about it at the beginning.

Well, you'll have to lead me there because I forgot. Oh, right. Well, yeah, I mean, well.

You don't have to wait with PPC. I know, I know what you're gonna say that that like, people think that you can basically spin off PPC campaign and immediately start getting clicks. That's not true anymore. I mean, it's highly competitive. It can take two to three months to get an optimised campaign running efficiently. Yeah. Um, but it's.

It's.

Going to be quicker than, than trying to rank blog posts on a site with no authority.

Yes, absolutely.

But the plan is the strategy would be do both.

Yeah.

If you've got the time and you can do it yourself, it's not going to cost you cash. It's only going to cost you your time, which is actually the most precious resource all of us have got. But so I don't want to trivialise it, but getting a bit philosophical, um, you know, um, I think so again, this is why we talk about having a strategy and why businesses fail with digital marketing. But I've tried blogging. Yeah, but your website's got no authority. Nobody cares what you've got to say.

Well, you can see us. Yeah. I mean, this is it, isn't it? You can see a scenario where you do PPC independently. It wouldn't work. You'd do blogging independently. It wouldn't work if you just mashed the two of them together. And like you say, you use the PPC as a kind of stopgap while you're getting some rankings, advertise on the search terms, push people towards your website, and then as soon as your content is ranking or organically, you can stop paying for that. It makes sense, but it's really easy.

If you if you use PPC to get people either to a landing page, probably, and eventually onto your website, and then they see you've got a blog. And by the way, they're really interested in mountain biking. So. So now the read in your blog, and then they go on to Twitter and share your blog, and they go into a mountain bikers forum and share your blog. And suddenly the whole thing starts to kind of work a.

Life of its.

Own and get some momentum.

But this is it. You need all the pieces to be in place at the right time in order for that kind of perfect thing to happen to you. It's it's half luck and half preparation. But when you don't prepare, it's pretty much when you.

Don't prepare, that's when you have this kind of scattergun approach. So like, yeah, I'm trying everything. I'm going, I'm going, I'm doing social media. Okay, let's just look at social media. How can we use that effectively? We probably should have Julie involved in this because she's, she's more into the whole social media thing than either you or I. I think.

Yeah, I think one of the first things I'd say about it though, is it's very easy to not use it effectively, right? One of the biggest things is like people chasing things like likes.

You mean to use it ineffectively?

I do mean to use it ineffectively. If only there had been a word for that. I do have an English degree, I promise with words and stuff on it. It's great. Um, no. Uh. You can. Yeah, you can use it very badly. One of the things that you'll find very quickly is it pushes you to do things like promoting content. Like you'll you'll post something and say, oh, do you want to promote this? Ten thousand more people will see it. And you think, oh, wow, more eyes, more likes, more shares, and you chase these vanity metrics. But again, unless it's part of a bigger overarching strategy where you thought about your messaging and you thought about where you're pushing people and what you're trying to get people to do, there's so many brands nowadays just throwing ten, ten quid, ten quid there on social media.

Just just rewind. Talk to us a little bit. I'm not picking you up on this because it's a phrase. It's fairly self-explanatory, but just talk a little bit about vanity metrics.

Yeah. So metrics that you that make you feel good as an advertiser or a marketer, but that don't actually help owner or a business owner, but don't actually help to move your business forward. So likes and shares on social media are a perfect example. You can say something dead witty on Twitter and you'll see ten thousand people like it and five thousand people share it. But if it's not, you know, it's not actually driving people to your website and making a sale. It's still a waste of your time and energy. It doesn't matter how many Twitter followers you have, if they're not from the right demographic, they're not actually buying mountain bikes off you. It doesn't really matter.

So when it comes to digital marketing and getting eyeballs on your website, it's absolutely not how many? Yeah. It's who?

Yeah. I mean, in some ways we'd prefer, especially with pay per click, right? Where we're paying for every click. We'd actually prefer to see less traffic, but more relevant traffic than to see ten hundred people who are never going to buy a mountain bike. You know, I'd rather have three visitors that are actually going to ten hundred people.

Just isn't than one thousand people.

It's a Friday morning. It's the end of the week.

It's like doing numbers in French. I'm trying to learn to speak French and numbers. That's absolutely hilarious. They are just hilarious.

Well, is it is. There's a weird one in French, isn't there? Where it's like, do they have like sixty ten instead of seventy or something like that? Weird.

Uh, seventy Swiss, isn't it? Yeah. And then when you get to eighty, it's it's caravan for twenties.

Right.

Yeah. Eighties. Yeah. But then when you get to ninety one, that'll be caravan. Isn't it. That's like four twenties and eleven. Makes perfect sense.

Just quickly do some maths.

Yeah. But I mean, I actually, uh, have have a chat with a guy in France on Zoom once a week and we've been, I've been learning about the French political system, which in itself is fascinating. And so there's lots of numbers in there. We talk about voter numbers. We talk about, um, uh, the dates, you know, when like the First Republic, Second or Third Republic, all that sort of thing. And so we've, we've done loads of stuff which involves numbers, and we just both have an absolute scream with it because he's trying to learn English. He's English is a lot better than my French and I'm trying to learn French. And he does struggle a bit with some of the English numbers, but only it's only really the nuance.

I'm not surprised if he used to adding tens and eleven seconds 40s together. And I mean.

I mean, Leslie, you know, one of our team who's who's a French national.

Who.

Produces all of it. Well, she might do. It'd be interesting to see whether she is listening to this bit, but. But Leslie, who is French, um, who produces the podcast, uh, she, uh, she's the first one to sort of like howl when we start talking about the way French do numbers. I don't know how we've got on to French numbers from podcasting.

Vanity metrics.

Vanity metrics. Right. Go. Uh, you've managed to somehow align the word vanity with French accidentally.

Completely. Accidentally.

Dangerous territory.

It's, uh, the two things do seem to kind of go together in my head.

Leslie will have something to say about this.

Um. Yeah. No. So just don't get too tied up chasing things like traffic visits, you know, likes, impressions, that kind of thing. Focus on what actually matters to your business because you don't have very much money. You want to make every penny count. And really, you can get so tied up in chasing that stuff and it doesn't help.

Yeah. I suppose the, the, the thing that a lot of people would benefit from when talking to the people tasked with doing their marketing, whether that's somebody in their own team in-house or an agency is, is always challenge what you're being told with. So what?

Yeah.

And I don't mean that in a nasty way. So like, you're telling me this, so what? Why is that good? What what how is that going to move my business forward?

I really like that, actually. Yeah.

So that's a bit arrogant, but it doesn't have to be arrogant. It's it's meant that, you know, in the in the spirit in which it's meant it's not arrogant. It's just let's make sure that we are doing stuff that can benefit us.

Yeah. I mean, to be fair, in the, in the spirit of doing a podcast about how to not waste money on marketing, the other thing it really does bear saying is like, make sure you're actually measuring conversions, right? Because the amount of companies we work with, the amount of businesses I see that do not measure conversions, they'll measure traffic. Oh, we've got loads of people on the website. Fantastic. End of story. But not actually go away and think how many of those people actually turned into customers? How many of them sent you a form? Yeah, it's integral.

Can be hard, can't it? I mean, if you develop a great website, but predominantly, once people have found you via a blog post or a paid search or whatever, they pick the phone up and it's very easy in the excitement of an enquiry coming in to say, just could you just tell us how you arrived at picking the phone up and speaking to us? Oh yeah. Well, I was, I was speaking to a friend. Great. It's a referral. Or I was on Google and I searched for this and I found your website and I'm now I'm ringing you. Great. Okay, so we now know, even though you didn't fill a form in on the website, this can be attributed to the work that we've been doing on the website.

Yeah, it is very hard to attribute phone calls, though. If there's one thing I could undo, if I if anybody ever gave me a time machine, it would go back and kill the phone early because I wouldn't have this problem. Yeah, absolutely. Alexander Graham Bell just a quick bonk on the head.

Yeah, absolutely.

Wouldn't have this problem, would we? Um, it is really tricky.

Because it probably wouldn't be an internet.

Either.

Because there'd be no wires, no wires all over the place the internet can piggyback onto. Um, okay, so we've talked about all that stuff, PPC and blogging and everything else. Where else? You know, just as for the last bit of the podcast, where else are people potentially wasting money? I've got I've got one in mind, which I'll put forward. Yeah. So if I've got, you know, I'm going back to, you know, Dave's mountain biking tours and I've come along to Red evolution. You're a digital marketing agency and you're in a bind. You're in the heart of Royal Deeside. And that's where my holiday is going to be. Makes sense if I work with you. Um, I've got absolutely total budget of ten thousand quid in order to get my business up and running online and moving forward.

Is this a pitch for Wix again? No.

Not necessarily. Where, where. Um, so I, what I'm thinking is that I should spend that ten grand on my website.

You probably shouldn't.

Oh, right. Okay. Go on. Talk to me about that.

Well, there's this great program called Wix. No, I'm joking because I put us out of business like that. We will eventually. Um. No, I mean, yeah, what you probably shouldn't do is spend an inordinate amount of money on your website until the business is up and running and making good money. There's a lot to be said for paying for a really good website, but it probably comes later in the process, right? It's like, make sure that the idea works. Spend the money on marketing the idea, getting eyes on the page, getting people on the website, and then go away and upgrade your website. Spend ten, twenty, one hundred grand on it, whatever. But at the beginning, it's probably not the most important thing.

So is there. Can we give people an idea of how much of their marketing budget they should spend, or Karen's trying to tip toe out? Go on, open the door and ring the bells. Go on. Do it loud. There you go. There we go. You're going to get the buns for the bacon rolls. Fantastic. Oh, good.

Appreciate that.

Okay. So, um, we're not suggesting that you shouldn't spend sensible money on a website. You should, but if if you are on a limited budget, then it makes more sense to get up and running with a credible, as credible a website as possible with as least money as possible, and then spend the rest of the money on your content on possibly on PPC, uh, possibly on LinkedIn ads or any, you know, actually getting opportunities coming through the door.

I spend at least half of your budget on the marketing, I'd say. And, you know, it goes back to that. One of the things we're a big proponent of here, which is like the whole idea of growth driven design, right? It's like, get the minimum viable product live, get something that works up and then you can spend on it later. You know, a website is not a static thing. You don't pay for it and then think, right, I've paid my ten grand. It's done. Our website is always going to be or it should always be kind of continually improving. So don't try and get it perfect the first time. Just get it up.

If you want to get up and running with a website for and a full, uh, customer relationship management system.

Yeah.

Website, CMS, CRM, all of that stuff. HubSpot dot com. They've now made their CMS free. So you can have a twenty five page website fully hosted, uh, pick a template. It's automatically going to hook up to your customer relationship management so that when people fill forms and it's going into a system so you can track the conversations with customers, etc..

Should we be talking about CRMs? To be fair, in a, in a podcast about how to make the most of your marketing budget and not waste money, spunk, money away. Um, as I said yesterday when pitching this podcast, um.

You, you said Spaf.

Did I say spaf? There we go. We've had two nasty swears now, haven't we?

Yeah. Well you have.

Um, a CRM is a customer relationship management software that helps you manage enquiries. It's probably something that given that the HubSpot one is free, for example, you should probably invest in because I think keeping track.

Of invest in something that's free.

Just set it up, get one. Um, because yeah, like keeping track of your enquiries, knowing when or making sure that you've emailed people when they've enquired that sort of thing. I mean, it's really easy to lose track of, especially when you're busy trying to market your business, run around on social media like do everything, probably go mountain biking, occasionally getting something that kind of brings everything into one place and lets you track things like your leads is probably a good a good shout, I think.

Um, so, um, I'll just kind of briefly go over that, um, at, here at Red evolution, uh, we get enquiries via referrals, emails, phone calls. We get a lot of business because people find us. Yep. They maybe find a blog post or they maybe find a page of content on our website. They fill in a form and tell us who they are and what they're looking for. Sometimes they only tell us who they are, but essentially when they fill a form in, that information goes into our customer relationship management system. From that moment on, all the conversation I have or one of any of us has, but certainly I do a lot of the BD stuff. So the business development stuff. So all the conversations I have take place inside the CRM. So when I'm, um, fishing on the Helford River down in Cornwall in the motorhome and I'm away from the office and somebody goes, oh, that John Smith just phoned from Acme Engineering and, oh, well, what have we, what what's been what's the conversation like? It's all there. You just go into the CRM and the whole conversation that Dave and has had with John Smith is in there. Plus I can then create a deal, which is an opportunity which goes through various stages conversation, provide proposal, discuss, proposal, win business, don't win business. And that deal process is hooked up to the CRM. It's part of the CRM. So straight away you could go into the CRM when I'm not here and see that with John Smith. Um, yeah, we've had ongoing conversations, had a proposal and there's and by the way, here is the proposal that they've had and they're at the decision making stage. And so they've probably got lots of questions. So you're not kind of like having a conversation with John and he's thinking these guys are idiots.

Yeah, that's.

Exactly like they have no idea about where where I am with, you know, we've all had that with customer support, for example, an in depth conversation. And then you get past, yeah, we're gonna have to put you through to to Alan in supplies. Hello, this is Alan. Hi, Alan. Yeah. How can I help you? It's like I've just told your colleague. Oh, well, I have no idea what you just told my colleague. We don't capture that information. You're gonna have to tell me again. It's like, okay, great. Well, CRM stops that. So it's absolutely does what you said, it makes sure that every single enquiry is nurtured and associated with an opportunity or a deal goes through a series of stages. And then either is gets one or doesn't want or isn't one. And, you know, you can do things like, well, you know, out of ten enquiries, we only convert one of them. Something wrong there. We need to fix that. Or, you know, the conversion rate is fantastic. Yep.

Or yeah, like you say, or you find that actually, you know, company wide people are only following up on like every third lead or something. It's just really good intelligence. It's good information, keeps things organised.

Yeah. It's something that a lot of salespeople shy away from because they don't kind of want what they're doing to be visible. Yeah. They don't they don't like the transparency that a CRM brings. But honestly, take it from a company who had a CRM, started using it, then went back to yellow stickies and, uh, oh, wait a minute. It's, I think, I think I remember what this guy was looking for type conversations to a company now who use the CRM religiously. Yeah. Uh, it's fantastic. And so, you know, going back to this idea of don't spend a fortune on your website, you can build a website using a tool like HubSpot where you've got an integrated CRM and it's hosted and everything, and you just pick a template, it's going to look okay, it's not going to look brilliant. There's going to be limitations.

Brilliant.

But if you're up and running, that's better than, well, I spent all the money I had, and we have had conversations with businesses who come to us saying websites not generating any business. We say, right, in order for us to help you, we need a budget of two, three, four, five thousand quid a month. And they're like, well, I've spent all my money on my website.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I think. Do you think I don't know? Without getting too philosophical about it. To me, it feels like an awful lot of people just want to kind of skip the growth phase of a business. Right. It's like you just want to start at the end, have a really good website. Do the marketing have customers? It's like you actually have to get really good at making the most of these small budgets.

There is there is a way of avoiding that. You go and buy an established business. You know, somebody else has done all that groundwork and everything else. And that's why people buy businesses because they don't want to go through the growth, the growth phase. They don't want to have to establish a website and create a build a.

Customer.

Base, build, build an effective PPC campaign. They want to just pick up the reins. And some people are really good at the growth phase and not so good at the, the, the kind of, you know, um, expand phase, you know, the kind of start up phase is where they're at sort of thing. And then they're, you know, they're better off handing it off to somebody else. Yeah. We really are getting off the subject now.

But yeah, I think as a rule, um, just, yeah, just try and be mindful of what you're going to do with all of the leads once you've got them and use a CRM or something.

Okay, I think we'll wind this one up now. I think we've covered quite a lot. If there's anything that's kind of perplexing you about how not to waste money with, uh, with marketing, and it's not covered in either the previous podcast with Briony or this podcast that Alex and I have just done. Then drop us a line. Uh, as always, if you want to come on and speak about something interesting, uh, in a digital marketing business growth context, we'd love to hear from you. You can go to red evolution dot com and fill in a form or faunas. You get the number on the website or go to from the coalface where the podcast lives. You can also get in touch there. Nobody does really on from the coalface. Nobody really uses that site except for maybe, you know, listening to the podcast. If they don't use Spotify or Apple or whatever.

Yeah.

Okay. In the meantime, um, I'm gonna have a bacon roll and then go salmon fishing like most people do on Fridays.

I'm not going to go salmon fishing.

Right. Okay. Um, it's been good. I've enjoyed it. Alex.

Goodbye.