If you're working with an agency and they're recommending a platform, how are you supposed to know whether or not they're doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, because it's the right fit for your business, or because they want to improve their partner status with with whatever vendor they're trying to sell for.
Well, here's an idea. If an agency says, we recommend you use HubSpot, say to them immediately, how much money does that make for your agency? You need to drill in and get the agency to explain why they think it's worth making that investment.
Yeah. Broadly speaking, what you really need out of all of this is a website that you're not afraid of and that you can use.
At the end of the day. If the agency can't persuade you that the technology solution that they're suggesting is the right one for you, if you're just not persuaded, even if it's for a dumb reason, then that's it. It's not for you.
Yeah.
Welcome back to another steaming hot Digital Marketing From The Coalface. In fact, the call I'm talking the coalface. I mean, traditionally, as you probably realise, coalface is were very, very hot. Well, yeah, if you look at ancient pictures, photographs of miners and things, they're usually they're working in the nude or a pair of underpants. Um, Calvin Klein's usually they were partial to Calvin Klein's, I believe. Um, yeah, it's really hot. Um, we've got the door open, so there might be a bit of traffic noise in the background. You know the drill. People who listen to this.
Podcast, to this nonsense.
They know the drill. Yeah. That's right. Um, I really don't know whether this where this subject's going to go today, but we'll give it a try. We're talking about, or rather, I'm making a statement. Beware agencies who are big corp.
Mhm.
I think agencies can be seduced by big tech companies like Google and HubSpot to the point where they blindly recommend products in order to get badges. You know, the sort of we are Acme Gold partners and this kind of stuff. Certainly in digital marketing, that happens a lot. Um, you get kickbacks as well. Like, you know, look, some Google cushions over there on our big red settee in our chill out area. And we got them because we're Google partners under Google tea set or cups.
Anyway, um.
I think it's, um, nothing, I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with this idea that agencies like us become affiliated with, uh, products and companies, etc.. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but I think motivations need to be considered. Yeah, we have certainly secured new business and the client has shown us that, for example, they were on the HubSpot platform, and there was absolutely no reason for them to be on HubSpot platform. They were sold HubSpot and told that, oh, you can't do what you need to do in WordPress, for example. I mean, I'm not a huge fan of WordPress, I've got to say it, but blatantly, that was complete horseshit.
Yeah.
And it was sold. They were, they were sold HubSpot in order to horseshit snot swearing.
Is it not? No. All right.
Um, and it's funny how like with horse shit, if you stand in horse shit, you're like, you're standing dog shit. It's like you are kidding me.
I've genuinely never stood in horse shit.
Yeah. It's kind of. It's not offensive. No, it's just chewed up grass.
Another tangent?
Yeah.
No, I mean, one thing I will say, I think it's probably worth talking about because a lot of the people listening to this won't really understand how this works, right? They might not even know that these technology partners offer kickbacks. And it's worth pointing out that there's a big difference in the kind of level and type of kickback offered. Google, for example, will just send you cushions. Yeah. Pretty pointless really, all things considered. Other companies like HubSpot, there's like a financial incentive for recommending their services and.
It's in perpetuity as well.
Yeah. And, and then for some companies as well, like, like, as you know, I think I've spoken about in the past, I used to work for a company that was very in bed with Magento. Um, and they're, they kind of.
I think I know her.
Yeah. It's, it's out now. It's called Adobe Commerce and nobody's using it anymore.
But I don't know.
Her. Yeah. Well, um, but yeah, no, so they kind of almost demand exclusivity, right? So they want their partner agencies to kind of only recommend their platform. So whenever you're dealing with an agency, I guess it helps to just be aware of the fact that when they're recommending solutions, you know, sometimes it is because they are genuinely the best solution. But there is often a direct financial incentive for getting somebody on a platform like HubSpot or something like that.
You see it most acutely. I think once you start working with, for example, we work with with HubSpot, we're fans of HubSpot. Yeah, like HubSpot, we use it ourselves. We pay for it for our own marketing automation, we use the CRM, but we also we're also HubSpot partners and we get, um, some financial remuneration from selling HubSpot, CMS or HubSpot CRM.
We're not very good HubSpot partners, though.
We're not, we're not because we will always, um, we will never sell a solution to a, to a customer if it's not right for them. We don't, we're not going to ever sell a solution in order to safeguard our HubSpot gold partner status, for example.
Yeah. And I guess that's the problem, isn't it? It's like a lot of the time, companies, web agencies will get in bed with these software companies because the solution's really good, but you end up in a situation where either you're financially dependent on that renumeration, or you just really like having the badge, and then you are doing stuff to kind of maintain that level. And that's, I guess, where it gets dangerous.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, we are guilty of it. For example, we're Google partners and we got an email a few weeks ago saying, oh, your partner, your Google partner status has lapsed lapsed because you haven't done X, Y, and Z. So basically, an hour and a half later, we'd fixed it by doing, you know, taking some of Google's boxes and doing some of the, uh, exams that they need us to do, not exams, tests that they needed product knowledge tests is what they really are. Um, in order to get our badge back. Yeah. And we, we want that badge because we think it gives us credibility. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. Trust me, if you see a Google partner's badge, it doesn't necessarily mean it means that agency is credible because these badges are not necessarily that difficult to get. I think the Google partner badge, you have to have a certain spend with PPC as well.
As having.
As well as having passed.
The tests. And this is largely the problem, right? It's the same with the HubSpot certifications, to be honest. It's the same with all of these industry certifications. Is that when you actually kind of dig a little bit deeper, it doesn't actually take very much knowledge to get them. It just takes you being very kind of wed to the system and selling it very well. And that's the problem, I think, isn't it? It's like to be a Google partner just means that you've sold a certain amount of PPC spend essentially, or are responsible for managing it.
Or inherited a customer who spends ten grand a month on PPC and suddenly.
Actually do anything on their accounts, right?
Yeah, yeah. That's right. Um, so if we just sort of dig in a little bit to the HubSpot one, um, I think it comes to the fore. Most notably, once you're sort of on the inside, you've become a HubSpot partner. Um, you've become a tiered partner, as they call it, and you get a relationship with HubSpot with specific people in HubSpot. And that's when you start to get, it's potentially potentially irritated either. I mean, you know, our connections at HubSpot, we get on, we get on great with them, but they are completely and utterly focused on getting you to sell their product. They don't care beyond that.
No. And you know, they're never kind of, oh, turn that deal down or recommend a different platform because we know that hubspot's not right for them. That's not a phrase that you'll ever hear come out of their mouths. You know, it's just kind of push the product. And that is, yeah, I think potentially problematic because I think there is a lot of pressure. Like certainly I've felt it before. Um, you know, where you think, oh, actually, I can, you know, is it best to push somebody towards that platform or not? I don't know, but there's this slight kind of pressure, this incentive to do it. And that is, I think, something you have to be very aware of.
Mhm. I think there's a danger that this, um, this podcast is going to run out of steam very quickly. Because, all we're really saying is that if you choose to work with an agency based purely on their credentials, as in like they're a HubSpot gold partner, they're a Google partner, and perhaps they are, I don't know. I mean, some other partner, I don't know.
Yeah, I mean, there's plenty of these things around. And like I say, it happens with Magento. It happens with Shopify. It happens with all of these kind of things, you know? But I think there is an angle here that wants exploring more, which is that, you know, if you're working with an agency and they're recommending a platform, how are you supposed to know whether or not they're doing it out of the goodness of their hearts because it's the right fit for your business, or because they want partners to improve their partner status with, with whatever vendor they're trying to sell for.
Well, here's an idea. If a, if an agency says, we recommend you use HubSpot. Say to them immediately, how much money does that make for your agency?
And they will look very shifty and say, it's not about.
The direct question.
Because if they turn around and say, for example, they might sell a. I don't know, for example, if they sell sales starter, for argument's sake, it's about four hundred quid a year. Yeah. You know, the agency is going to make forty or fifty quid. So if you say, you know, we think sales starter is going to be exactly right. Oh well how how much money will you make out of that? Because I know it's on the website. It's four hundred and fifty quid. Well, first of all, the agency might get you a better deal, because once you start working with companies like HubSpot, you realise that you can drive a bargain.
Yeah.
So first of all, the agency might be to help you get a deal. But but say, for example, you're just paying the headline rate and the agency says, well, we'll get forty or fifty quid. That's not going.
To concern you.
No, that's not going to concern you. But if they're trying to sell you one of the higher level packages that HubSpot offer, and it's going to be costing you quite comfortably, could cost you ten thousand quid a year. I think we pay HubSpot about, I'm gonna say about five thousand a year for the software that we use.
From HubSpot for our own.
Stuff. Yeah. So you can comfortably spend ten grand a year with HubSpot.
And that.
Could well be a really good investment. Yeah. Um, but that agency out of that gig is going to make a couple of grand.
Yeah.
So you could then think, okay, so if I'm going to spend ten, you're going to get two of it. So are you definitely doing this?
Because this is. Yeah.
I don't honestly know if I'm you know, if because you you raise a good point. I don't honestly know how you get around that and get to the point where you can provide the completely impartial.
It's that whole.
Yeah, it's that whole trust problem again, isn't it? And I think a lot of people, as soon as they know you're getting a kickback, they're immediately kind of suspicious. And they assume, I mean, you know, just to be clear, there are times when Magento, Pardot, HubSpot, Google ads, you know, these programs that offer these incentives for for agencies to sell them are actually the best possible solution. It's not like, and I will say as well that even the agencies who are pushing these solutions very hard because they want to maintain their tier badges or whatever. Often they can be, you know, utterly convinced and maybe they're even right sometimes that it is actually the best possible solution for you. These bits of software, they're not rubbish. They're very good. Yeah. It's just a case of making sure that it's the right application for you. Right. I think that's the the main point.
Yeah. So you need.
Something?
Yeah. You need to drill in and get the agency to explain why they think it's worth making that investment. And if they're not telling a good story around that, then it's maybe a sign. Not necessarily is the case, but it might be a sign that they are selling. They are trying to sell you the solution simply to get the kickback, because there are, I suppose there's two, two types of agencies. Some agencies have a business model where they are effectively affiliate marketers. They're there to sell software and build up a kind of monthly recurring revenue. Because if you sold a ton of HubSpot.
Well, you just you might get to a, you.
Might get to a point where you have a monthly recurring revenue that's thousands of pounds.
So will you see this?
That's a living. It's not a bad way to earn a living if you're a small one or two person agency.
It's not a bad way of earning a living if you're a big agency. I mean, if you look at some of the HubSpot elite partners, you know, there'll be more HubSpot branding on their websites than there are of their own branding. And they will, you know, all they do is flog HubSpot. Day in, day out. And yeah, they're pretty massive because of it. Yeah. Um, and I think that's fair enough. You know, if you're one hundred percent sure you want HubSpot, go and work with one of those people. Fantastic. But if you're not, you know, those people aren't going to be objective. They're not going to give you the best possible kind of overview. And I think just going back to what you were saying there, you know, at the end of the day, if you go to an agency and you say, well, why are you recommending HubSpot? The other thing you could do, I think it's fair to say, is say, well, you know, how have you evaluated this against other platforms? And if somebody came to us and said, okay, you've recommended HubSpot, but like, why, why HubSpot and not WordPress, we would be perfectly happy and comfortable to run through a list of reasons.
Yeah. But if they said why.
HubSpot and not paddle, we would be like, we don't know paddle.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I'm going to come on to that, that idea of in-house expertise. Um, but I was just going to come back to something you said, you know, you jokingly said that we are rubbish HubSpot.
Partners because.
Simply because we don't blindly try and sell it to people in order to make a couple of quid and get a, you know, a platinum tiered partner badge sort of thing. In fact, we're teetering at the moment on the edge of losing our gold partner badges.
Yeah.
And I couldn't care less.
Yeah. Well, I.
Know that we, I know that we can make HubSpot sing and dance. And if we don't sell it for ages, because none of the customers that we're working with, it's not the right fit for them.
Yeah.
For any of the customers we're working with, rather then I don't mind that. And if we lose our gold partner, so what?
Yeah.
Do you want somebody with a badge, or do you want somebody who can actually help.
You use.
It, use it effectively. But I think that the slow progress that we've made, because we've been using HubSpot now for seven years.
Yeah.
More than seven years. And we only became gold partners last year.
Yeah.
Now, whereas other, you know, there are, there are agencies out there who are gold partners within a few months of starting to use HubSpot and starting to implement HubSpot for people. Um, I think our slow progress was because we genuinely didn't see a fit for it, or we didn't see a justification for the cost of.
It.
With the people that, you know, the people that we were working with. We knew that we could achieve what we needed to achieve for them without using HubSpot. And you can you can achieve everything HubSpot can do. You can achieve it without buying HubSpot. But the integrated nature of it all does make everything a lot slicker. And it's a great platform to work with. So we are not, we haven't come to, um, what is it? What's the opposite of praising Caesar? We haven't come to praise Caesar. We've come to bury him. Um, but you know, the, the, the good that men do is often interred with their bones. Uh, the evil lives on after them. Yeah. I don't know why I'm talking about. We were talking about.
We were Shakespeare.
Yesterday, weren't we? The play within the. What is that? The play within the play I, I, I'm sure it's taming.
I think it is. Yeah. Yeah. I'm pretty sure.
Anyway, um see how highbrow this podcast has become. We're even talking Shakespeare.
You came here for the digital marketing podcast.
Pod podcast.
Will badly.
Quote Shakespeare.
At you while talking about it, right? Yeah, absolutely.
No, I mean, yeah, I think that's the thing, isn't it, with a lot of this stuff, you know, we've been very slow to grow with HubSpot. A lot of agencies out there are very slow to kind of grow with these partner programs, because every time somebody comes to the table, they are actually saying, okay, well, we could recommend HubSpot, but what about X, Y, and Z? And actually, nine times out of ten, somebody internally will say, well, actually, I think, you know, in this case, Joomla would be better. Or in this case, WordPress would be better. And it's, I think that's the that's the problem, isn't it? We, the agencies that kind of don't have the platinum or elite partner badges are doing the kind of hard graft of working out, whether it's the right program, it would be very easy to just be like, right, everybody gets HubSpot website from now on because that makes us more money.
And I don't think there's anything wrong. If an agency decides like from now on, if you know, we only use HubSpot CRM, we only use HubSpot, CMS, marketing automation.
Well, yeah, that's it.
That's what we do. And if you know, and we.
Will recommend it because it's.
Because it's where our expertise and we know we can deliver using that technology. And I think that's fine.
Yeah. But that's still I think that's still slightly different to how a lot of I don't know, I don't want to turn this into a rant, but I think that's still slightly different to a lot of agencies conduct themselves because say, for example, we decided to just embrace HubSpot. People would come to us and say, we want this website, and we would say, we can build it in HubSpot. And if they said, well, is that the best platform? We would say, well, you know, potentially you could go somewhere else and build it in something else. A lot of agencies will tell people, no, no, you can only achieve this in HubSpot. HubSpot is the only platform.
That's where the CRM has to be.
And that's where you have to be really careful, I think.
Because if you think about it, we, we've in the past, we've had to turn down gigs.
Yeah.
Because it was built with, they had a website, they didn't want to rebuild it. And we would never sort of start a project by saying, you need to rebuild your website in a technology that we understand.
Agency classic.
Yeah, yeah.
We would never do that. Um, we might say if you, we'd love to work with you, we think we can really help you, but we haven't got expertise in, let's just say craft. Yeah. I mean, we've dabbled with it, but we've never really got.
Our teeth into it.
And why should we? I mean, you can't be a master of of craft and Joomla and WordPress and Magento.
And yeah.
If I don't say Spotify and all those, you can't you can't be a master of them all. So this sort of brings me back to what you were saying there about the HubSpot situation. Now, so for many years, we'd, we'd, we'd put all our efforts into becoming experts, uh, with the Joomla content management system. Um, and so when people came to us, they invariably got a Joomla website, but they got Joomla website because we knew Joomla could do the.
Job and.
You could make.
It do it, but also because.
That's where our expertise.
Was. Yeah.
So now we've got expertise across Joomla, WordPress, HubSpot. We'd be prepared to work with a customer who'd made a big investment in a platform that we didn't understand and didn't, didn't know about in order to do all the stuff that we can do for them, we would be prepared to make that investment if the right opportunity came along, but we would always be up front and say, you know, we haven't got expertise. And parts of south west England, parts of southern and central England are moved into drought status.
Yeah. There you go.
Breaking news while you're listening.
Yeah, except.
It'll be old.
News now.
It'll be old news now. Yeah, yeah, it'll be pouring down by Monday.
When this.
Goes out because it's lovely. Friday lunchtime early afternoon at the moment. Um, yeah. So I think you're right. It's more complicated isn't it? And I think the thing that we're driving at all the time here is when agencies source their preferences on you because it suits them and not because it's right for you.
But there's another angle there that you've kind of touched on, I guess, which is that, you know, if you really want to work with this agency, because they seem really switched on, they seem like really good guys. They seem to have the right kind of mindset to work with you, but they only have experience in one specific platform. Sometimes that might be a sacrifice that is worth making, right? It's like at the end of the day, an agency is just made up of people. And if you're looking at an agency and saying, okay, these guys are fantastic, but they only want to work with HubSpot, maybe it is worth moving to HubSpot just for that. It's just like you say, the, the problem arises when it's pushed kind of unfairly. And I think it is worth. Yeah, just kind of reiterating that if people are pushing a technology very hard, it's probably worth being a little bit suspicious of that.
One thing I would say, um, as a, as a caveat to all this, if the agency is the right agency for you, um, but they're pushing a technology that you've never heard of. And when you Google it, you find that there's a really small pool of talent with that particular. We had a call a couple of three weeks ago, maybe slightly longer, and the guy was looking for somebody with Django.
Yeah, D g a a n g or Django.
My accent, you know, Django, Django.
I don't know how you'd say it.
Django. I say, I would say a jungle in lots of different accents. Well, you know, like we're going to we need our website. It's built with Django.
So yeah. So I'm.
Sorry. Sorry to any Geordie listeners.
Oh, that was Pakistani.
I wasn't no it wasn't Geordie.
Yeah. Yeah. I'll do my Geordie in a minute. Um yeah I suppose I don't know if.
Yeah.
If you, if an agency is saying look you know we use this and it's and it's a little bit obscure, uh, be careful because if you fall out with the agency like that guy maybe had no, he'd built it himself and now he was looking for an agency to take it over. And I was like, yeah, it's not a technology that we're familiar with.
That's exactly the point.
I'm sorry. We can't.
Help you.
You're gonna get tied into a very small pool of vendors. And if you do fall out with your agency or you decide they're not working your best interests, you're then going to have to either rebuild or find one of the other.
Well, I would say as well.
Is when I got back to him very politely and said, look, you know, and I could have said, yeah, yeah, yeah, we can help you and winged it. And I didn't. I said, look, this isn't technology that I'm familiar with, and I can't even make a recommendation because I don't know any Django developers. Um, he never replied. Yeah, well, yeah, he never replied. I thought, yeah, a bit rude. Yeah. I mean, I'd been very polite. I'd offered him, you know. You know, I'd rather I'd shared with him the fact that I couldn't, we couldn't help instead of winging it and saying we couldn't. Taking his money and I said, you know, well he's.
Just crossed now, isn't.
He? Yeah. So I mean, he's angry at me because of his bad choices.
Um, but yeah, so I guess, yeah, that's the thing, isn't it? If you really want to work with an agency, they're pushing a platform and the platform is really well known and you can probably jump ship later and find somebody else that can work on your Shopify website or Magento website. Yeah, fine. But if they're trying to lock you into something very niche, then yeah, that's a, that's a risk really.
Yeah. There was an interesting, there's an interesting ongoing opportunity with having conversations with an organisation based down in London just now about maybe doing some discovery with them. Um, and it looks like, you know, there's, there's a potential for a good relationship. They are at the moment, uh, all in on HubSpot, they're using HubSpot CRM, they're using HubSpot marketing automation and they are using their site has been built using HubSpot CMS, and they asked me the direct question, does our website have to be in HubSpot CMS? Um, and I told them, no, it doesn't. Now it would have been better for me. I did tell them that HubSpot CMS is a great platform. Um, but based on what I can see and based on what I know about your business and what you're trying to achieve, then absolutely you don't currently, you don't have to be using the HubSpot CMS. Now, if I'd been a different type of agency, I would have said, yeah, if you've already built it, you know, I recommend that you stay in HubSpot CMS because if they come on board with us, that would help our hiring because our tiering would be based on the websites, not only HubSpot, um, solutions that we've sold, but HubSpot solutions that we manage. So if they're paying three hundred and fifty, four hundred quid a month for HubSpot CMS, then that would then fall into our manage and would help us maintain our HubSpot. But I told them that, no, you don't need to. Um, interestingly, while we're talking about, um, talking about that, the HubSpot method of tearing did change, um, because it kind of benefited businesses that purely sold HubSpot and disadvantaged agencies like us who quite often will pick up a company who are already using HubSpot and help them get more value from it. And HubSpot have now recognised that, um, I there's still, I think an emphasis ultimately, they're a software company who are trying to flog software. So they're always going to give preference to their partners that are selling the software as opposed to I, I, I think that's not quite right because if people buy, don't utilise or rather underutilise and then dump HubSpot, then that's churn. That's not good for them. They want people to pay them four hundred quid a month for the CMS for the next twenty five years.
But I think that's at the real root of this whole problem, isn't it? I mean, what we're talking about here is like a very short term approach, like the agency's peddling this software when it's not going to fit. It's the same approach, isn't it? HubSpot, these agencies, everybody's just focused on selling the solution. And once they sold it, they pat themselves on the back and say, we did it. We sold somebody, HubSpot, but it's not. They're not looking three, four, five years down the line. And I think that's something that's probably worth saying, although you might, I don't know, be cross. I might get walloped with a shoe here, but it's not we're not doing the, the whole, we're gonna actually evaluate this and recommend a decent platform because we're saints. We're not doing it out of the kindness of our hearts. We're doing it because we think it makes better business sense. We want you to be happy seven years down the line. We want to still be working with you. And if we recommend a platform that doesn't actually work for your business seven years down the line, you're gonna be like, well, those guys were idiots. Want to go and get a new website with somebody else? It's just about taking that long term approach, really, isn't it? I mean, whenever you're making decisions about a website, a CMS, or even your CRM, the technology that you're using, You know, you want to be making it with a view to the long term, really not the short term. And it might solve problems. Now, it might be fine now, but are you still going to want to be using it a few years down the line?
One thing that people do get confused about, I think, is whether or not Google cares.
About what.
Platform you're using. Um, there was a piece by, uh, I can't remember his name, but he's a, he's a, he's a Google person. Um, and he's currently, you know, he's one of the, the Google, um, mouthpieces, if you like. And he was asked that direct question and said, no, it doesn't matter.
Yeah. And it's an interesting one because I see this recommendation kind of pop up all the time on like SEO forums and stuff where somebody will ask a question about building a website and people are like, well, as long as it's structured like WordPress, as long as it works like WordPress, because that's what Google likes. And it's like, yeah, I don't know where that misconception comes from. But again, if an agency is trying to sell you on a platform on the basis that it's easier to optimise for Google, that Google prefers it than, yeah, that's a big old lie.
Yeah, it really is. Um, and I think, I think you raise a good point that if an agency has a certain, a certain level of expertise with a particular platform and they say that that's fine.
Yeah.
But if they say something like this.
Platform.
Well, we need to move you into the WordPress platform because the platform you're currently in isn't search engine friendly and will never be able to get good results. And we've heard customers saying telling us that agencies have said that to.
Them, the lies that people tell. I mean, there is one massive exception to that, right? Which is like some some cmses are really slow. Um, I'm thinking particularly just.
Tell people what a CMS is. I know I'm not picking you up on it.
Content management system. So it's like the back end of the web of your new website platform.
The tool that you use for putting content in and editing content already in your website.
So in thinking particularly here about platforms like Magento, for example, that are kind of notoriously difficult to optimise, very slow score very badly on the PageSpeed insights tests that we were talking about in the last episode. So like, sometimes there is an argument for saying.
Nice plug for the last episode, by the.
Way.
It was, it was, it was quite good that episode. I enjoyed it, I enjoyed recording it. And I think it, I think it's quite good.
Helpful. Yeah. But yeah, so, you know, I think again, sometimes like there is a kind of an argument to be made for actually this platform doesn't perform very well, but by and large, I don't know, like from a technical perspective, maybe from my own education, you could shed some light on this, but can Google even see what CMS? Yeah. Yeah.
They can. Yeah. Because I think the Search Console will, I think one of the things it will do in there is it'll either used to or still does. It will say you're using an outdated version of Joomla, WordPress, whatever. Yeah. And it sees that it might see it as a ranking factor. It certainly sees it as an issue because if you're using an insecure unsecure.
Yeah. They don't want to send you unsecure.
Insecure would be a content management system that I wasn't really sure I want to be a content management system. I think I might want to be a CRM.
I've got imposter syndrome. Don't we all?
I think, I think if we, um, yeah, I think what I'm trying to say, yes, Google knows. Here's the thing, um, in a, in a, an agency group that I'm part of, um, there is one agency owner in that group in particular who is absolutely convinced that simply moving their website from WordPress to HubSpot skyrocketed their rankings. Another member of that group.
Um, thinks they're talking rubbish.
Thinks thinks that that just can't be. I'm, I'm looking at it thinking, I mean, and to be fair to the guy, he says, look, it could be that our WordPress site had evolved over a long period of time. It had turned into a complete rat's nest. And by rebuilding it in a new content management system. We organise the structure. We cleaned up the URLs. We. We did a bunch of stuff. And maybe that. Because. Interestingly, if you put most HubSpot based sites through core vitals, PageSpeed insights tool, they do abysmally, abysmally. Well, they do abysmally.
Yes.
Full stop.
Yeah. No, definitely. I think I think it's interesting, isn't it? Because the other angle to all of this is the whole kind of confirmation bias thing, right? It's like you've moved your website from WordPress to HubSpot. Suddenly it does really well and you're like, oh, it's the platform. It's the platform. I mean, it could have been any number of things. It could have been a pre-existing issue. It could have just been that, you know, you've paid more attention to the content this time around. Whatever. The point is with a lot of this stuff, when an agency is telling you, you know, this has worked really well for us, that's one thing. When they're saying this is the definitive solution. And we know for a fact that moving your website to HubSpot, that's not they're not really taking a scientific approach. They are trying to sell to you rather than being objective. Because I think the objective conclusion that you draw from that as a digital marketing professional is something changed and it was good for the website. Yeah, I'd be very cautious of saying what had changed.
Well, people do grasp at straws when it comes to trying to improve rankings. And if they think that a particular content management system is going to give them some sort of benefit, then they're all over that. But, you know, they're interested in that and it's, uh, it's almost certainly not the case, but a badly performing website, um, and a badly put together website, a website that has got irrelevant content and poor structure and technically has challenges, no matter what it's built with, will underperform. It will not deliver what that organisation wants, which nine times out of ten is enquiries leads. There's traffic.
There's another angle to that as well, isn't there? Which like I might undo all the hard work we've done trying to seem objective here. I'm not trying to plug HubSpot, but also the other angle to this is that if a content management system is hard to use, and your team are less likely to log in and publish content. That's also a really bad thing. And again, something worth kind of evaluating when you're weighing up different platforms is like, is my team actually gonna find this easy enough to use? Because there are quite a lot of content management systems out there that require quite a lot of knowledge to log in and have often said.
That about Joomla. I mean, we know we know it inside out and we love it. And it's a very structured way of building a website. It's great, but.
I think you have to understand.
Do I get that some people find it confusing? Um, a lot of people like WordPress because it's easy to use or at least it.
It.
Works the way their brain works. I think, I think Joomla works the way a slightly geeky brain works and WordPress works away a non-geeky more creative brain works. And I think that's why WordPress has been favoured by designers who have turned to digital. They find it very easy to to get their head around WordPress. I guys don't like it at all.
No. Well, I think the problem with WordPress is you still need a million and one plugins to make it do anything.
Even those cmses, even HubSpot has got an an ecosystem of plugins and things. But yeah, WordPress it has, I think at the last count, was it ten, fifteen thousand plugins that you could use with it? A lot of people just install plugins and then when they decide they don't need them, they don't uninstall them. And it all becomes quite, quite messy. That's right. Yeah. There's one plugin in particular which is quite popular, and a number of customers, new clients that have come on board with us over the last six to twelve months use it. And that's, um, Elementor.
Yeah.
Now what Elementor is, it's a plugin for WordPress that creates a really nice drag and drop environment so that none corder's non developers, even non creatives can can build web pages that actually look okay. Yeah. There's quite a technical overhead doing it's doing.
A lot of complicated.
Yeah. And basically I think you can probably do this. And if somebody from Elementor wants to come on and tell us that it's the users and not the software that causes this problem, but it's almost like, um, you know, you could buy a car and you could load it with every conceivable extra.
Mhm.
Um, just in case you ever need it. So like you, you know that one time it got hot that one day. Great. I've got air conditioning, but the other three hundred and sixty three days, you never actually used it. Well, I think elemental is a bit like that. Yeah. It puts everything you might ever need and loads that every time you load a page, just in case that particular page use that particular feature. I'm probably oversimplifying it and misrepresenting it, but broadly speaking, it is like any rapid, rapid application development environment that tries to speed things up by not requiring you to really know what you're doing.
Mhm.
Uh, it tends to build solutions that are heavy, cumbersome, clunky, slow, etc. and certainly that particular WordPress plugin, it's not the only one. There's. WP bakery does very similar. It creates a drag and drop environment. But you know, Google it. Other plenty of other people will tell you that it slows websites down. So if you know, if you come to us and you say, well, we've got this website and it's not performing well in terms of speed and can you fix it for us? If it's like built with Elementor, the answer is kind of, well, probably not. Maybe we could probably. Well, we could almost certainly speed it up. Yeah, but whether we can get you scoring really good scores on mobile and desktop, it's probably not the case.
Yeah, definitely. Definitely. So I guess going back to the original question then when what.
Was the original.
Question? When people are shopping around for agencies, how can you kind of tell whether or not they're just shilling or the lack of a big tech company or a genuinely recommending solution, I guess? Yeah, I guess being able to talk at length in detail about the pros and cons of different systems like that is probably one of the big the big ones, I guess. Are there any other questions people should be asking could ask us to.
There's sometimes isn't a straightforward answer. If you if you said to us, if we looked at this, looked at what you were trying to do, and it seemed like, well, you know, you do need a CRM, um, we could use Hubspot's free CRM, which is fantastic. Um, you do need a new website and we've all agreed that it's not us trying to sell you something. We've all agreed that the website is not fit for purpose. It's not delivering leads. It doesn't represent the brand. It doesn't tell the right story. It hasn't.
It just we do have another episode of this very podcast about how to tell whether or not your website is broken or not, don't we?
Yeah, I think we do. It was a while ago because this is episode seventy one or seventy two, and I think, yeah, it was probably forty something. Seventy one. It's probably a relative youngster in the in the bread, in the bread.
We've talked podcast hours of what.
Was I going to say? Bread cast.
No idea. It's a Friday.
It is Friday. It is hot. Um, yeah.
But yeah, no, you're right. There isn't always a straightforward answer. And it's very easy to yeah, I guess be too sceptical and assume that people are trying to sell you things when they're not.
Yeah. I mean, what I'll often say to people is that most it's let's just talk about content management systems, because I think you mentioned them a few times and explained what a content management system is. Most nor all content management systems ultimately squirt HTML back at a web browser. So somebody does a search, they see a link, they click the link that tells says to the server, somebody wants this particular page, it goes off, builds the page and squirts it as HTML over to the web browser, whether it's Safari or Chrome or, I don't know, Firefox, Internet Explorer, version six or whatever it is you're actually currently.
Using, they call it now.
Yeah. Um, and so ultimately, it's not about the end product, the web page. It's about things that you were talking about. It's like, well, what's the expertise in the team? Well, we've got four people in our team who are who've been using WordPress for the last five years. Well, kind of probably makes sense to build it in WordPress, even though it would it would be painful for us because we're not fans, but we've got the technical and creative capability to do that. Um, it's, there's no point trying to re-educate because you don't want to put friction into a system and you that's exactly what you were saying. If there's friction that stops you publishing content on a regular basis and makes you think, oh, you know what? I can't be bothered fighting with that website today, I'm not going to bother. Then that is bad because you want to be able to just in a frictionless way. HubSpot is particularly good in that respect.
Well, it's designed, isn't it? That's the whole point of it is that it's designed for kind of marketers to use so that you can.
Well, here's an example.
Get content up quickly.
I wrote a blog post this week and I concentrated on the content. And then I said to Diana, right, I've finished this blog post. I'm going to get Alex to proof it. But in the meantime, could you go and do a design number on it, which she did and did a wonderful job that I would never have done, even though it's a drag and drop environment, etc. But Diana's Diana can write HTML well, she can write a bit of HTML, but Diana's a designer. Yeah, and she just went into HubSpot and made this page look wonderful. Yeah. Without having to speak to any of the devs or anything else. And, you know, HubSpot is a really nice, it's got some drawbacks, but it's a really nice content management system and it takes away some of the friction. It also because it's a software as a service, as in you don't host it, you don't buy it and download it. It's provided as a service, which is one of the reasons for the cost of it. Um, it means that collaborating on pages and content is also dead easy. Yeah. Now you can argue that it is with WordPress and Joomla and some of the others to a lesser extent probably. Um, so yeah, you know, if I was an agency, I'd be looking at the makeup of the in-house team. If there was an in-house team, um, if it was a company that was saying, look, we just want you to build, look after, manage and run the whole thing. Yeah, we might still use Joomla. We might not recommend HubSpot.
Yeah, definitely. It's interesting, isn't it, I guess. Yeah. Broadly speaking, what you really need out of all of this is a website that you're not afraid of and that you can use. And I guess ultimately, as long as whatever agency you're talking to is pushing a solution that you look at and you think, yeah, I could use that, that's fine. That's all that really matters at the end of the day.
At the end of the day, if the agency can't persuade you that the technology solution that they're suggesting, yeah, is the right one for you if you're just not persuaded, even if it's for a dumb reason, then that's it. It's not for you. Yeah. Um, I think the danger with some of these solutions is people might look at, for example, HubSpot and it's three fifty, four hundred quid a month. And then they look at WordPress and Joomla or open source content management systems, which you can just download and install on your own server. And they are free. No licensing costs. That I think is a potentially dangerous comparison.
Only really draw like, yeah, like from my own knowledge as well. Like a similar thing used to happen with Magento and it was much more expensive than free alternatives like Shopify. Um, but what was happening is that in order to get over that kind of barrier to entry, agencies were trying to tell people, oh, only Magento can do this. Magento is the only thing that can do this. And that's the thing, isn't it? If a technology solution is more expensive than all the competitors, there's probably a reason for it. And that reason may or may not be a good reason for you. It may not be something you care about. Like you were saying before, HubSpot is self-hosted, if that's good for you. And that is like kind of reduces friction and makes it easy, then fantastic pay for it. If not, then maybe not. But when? What I would be very cautious of is when people are saying, oh, this technology is more expensive than all the competitors because it's just better. It's better in every way. That's not going to be true ever.
You need to be a bit more specific.
Yeah.
Okay. Um. We're good. Yeah. We're good. I think we've covered that. If you've got any questions about content management systems, about technology solutions, digital marketing, if you'd like to come on to the show and talk to us about your experiences with digital marketing and some of the things you've done which have helped you grow your business, then we'd be delighted to hear from you. You can get in touch with us. Alex. Where can they get in touch with us?
Um, well, we, as you're fond of saying, we live on revolution dot com. Um, the podcast has its own little website, doesn't it? Which is redevolution.com. Did I get it wrong? Zero marks for Alex, my podcast.
redevolution.com/digital-marketing-from-the-coalface.
Well. Um, I'll be in the naughty corner for the rest of the day.
No you won't. It's Friday. I couldn't care less. Um, okay, thanks for listening and we'll speak to you next time.