Everyone's A F*****g Marketing Expert – Episode 77

I wonder if there are other professions out there where they suffer from the same thing, that it's perceived as a very low barrier to entry. I mean, we've all got degrees and chartered status and all kinds of qualifications to do this stuff that we do. Just do it. But you can just do it. You can like, you can just set up as an accountant if you want. You just say, I'm an accountant, I'll do books. I don't think you've whereas you know, your partner's a doctor. You can't just decide you're a paediatrician and give it a go. And they're nuts. Yeah.

We can't do quite as much damage. Yeah, yeah. Well.

I think it's possible if you do the research to find that there are people who work in the medical profession who are utterly and totally bluffed their way into it. So welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. Now today's podcast was going to be a rant. Rant. It was. It was basically.

Why I'm here to tone it all down.

No no no no. Alex managed to do that already. I mean, my original podcast, uh, working title was Why the Beep? Does everyone think they are marketing or coding or design experts?

Yeah, I could probably join in that quite well.

It was going to be a proper rant of a podcast about the, the bullshit like that that you have to put up with when you're working in this industry. But then quite rightly, Alex said, but it'd be more interesting to do it not as a rant, but as a why. You know less about this stuff than you think, you know, that kind of thing. And it's really just a podcast to, you know, because it's, you know, we're at the coalface, we're working with fantastic clients and doing fantastic work. And we do from time to time get, uh, you know, we have conversations with people who kind of know enough about what we do to be dangerous, as they say.

A little knowledge is a dangerous.

Thing, but they don't. Actually, I don't think it's I don't think it's unreasonable. It's it's it's it's like that conversation, some of the conversations that that made me think about this were, um, we're working on an app project and the customer said like, well, can't you do X, Y, and Z? Surely that can't be hard. Now this particular customer doesn't write code, doesn't know how chords written, doesn't know how software is written, but in their mind, and I see it from their point of view, they're kind of like, but surely that's not hard. And then, you know, our, our famous friend Barry from, from London a number of years ago, who, who looked at a design that Rob had spent a lot of time working on and said, I could have done that on the back of a fag packet in two minutes. So it's that kind of thing. And then obviously, as we move on, it's not just about coding. It's not just about design. It's not just about content. Search engine optimisation, conversion rate optimisation, writing a good story, telling a good story. Messaging, branding. There's so much of what we do seems from the outside looking in that it's not hard. As opposed to if you sit there and say, I am a rocket scientist, or I am a nuclear physicist, or I am a mathematician, people go, oh, that's hard.

Yeah, that must be really hard.

It must be really hard. And so they, they kind of attach, they sort of seem to attach a value to it because they, they don't understand it, whereas they think anyway, whether they do or they don't, they think they understand and get what we do. So I just really wanted to riff around that and like, you're dead right. Alex, when you said like, let's not turn it into a rant, let's try and turn it into a, a bit of an explainer, for example, about what you were talking about. And we're doing some work on our branding page. And Leslie was working on a video and you were saying how much you enjoyed the video and how you thought the video told a good story. I think certainly Dave Marshall said that. So, you know, maybe start with something like branding because people, I think, can identify with this process of creating a brand. Although I think if you want to get right back to basics, I don't think people fully understand what a brand actually is. They think it's a logo on it. Well, clearly not.

So this is it, isn't it? Exactly.

The logo represents your brand.

Yeah. And people will say, oh, I want to rebrand. And then you know, what they'll see from the agency from us is a selection of designs, possible logos, kind of avenues we're going to think about pursuing. And they'll just think, oh, that's some pretty pictures. You know, somebody just dashed them off. You know, the designer probably spent ten minutes on that or whatever. But the reality of the situation is that a lot of the time, an awful lot of work and effort and energy and experience has gone into doing that. And I think, yeah, I think part of the problem is that ultimately what the client is getting is just kind of a very simplistic representation of all the time and effort that went into.

Well, they get the end result, they get the end result. And the end result, if it's good, doesn't reflect, doesn't show you the time and effort, because it's, it's just comes out the other end finished.

So like with logos, this is a really good example, right? Because every time Diana puts a logo in front of somebody, she's thought about, you know, how it will look in various colors, how it'll look at various sizes, whether it'll scale well, whether it'll look good at a glance, whether it kind of invites closer inspection, whether or not it tells a good story about the brand and all of that.

And she's also put the effort into understanding the company's values, what they're all about, who their audience is, what you know. Do they want to look modern? Do they want to look traditional? You know, how how they want to be seen by the outside world? So, and the audience of all that goes into it?

Yeah, the audience one's a really important one as well, because I know Diana spends a lot of time looking at, you know, kind of what competitors in the same space are doing and what people's expectations are around a logo and all of that kind of work. And I think, you know, it's not to say that what we do is kind of like impenetrable kind of black magic or that there's like, you know, tons of secret things that you don't know about. So you should just take our word for it. It's just that a lot of the time, what we produce and what we give to clients is the end result of a lot more work than probably looks like. And then when people look at it and they say, well, that one doesn't really resonate with me. Like I find that really frustrating because I get exactly where people are coming from. You're spending your money to have somebody design a logo for your business, but the logo is not for you.

Oh, that's what I was wanting that bit to come up. It's the whole chairman's wife syndrome, you know. No, you can't have it in red because the chairman's wife's favorite color is yellow, so it has to be yellow. And like, is the chairman's wife the target market? No.

Right.

Well, actually, she doesn't get a say in it.

Right? Yeah. And it's that whole problem where like, I don't know, like, without kind of going in on potential customers who are listening to this, it's one of those things where like, there's a, it's really important when you're making business decisions, which is ultimately what these things are that you're thinking about the success of the business rather than, you know, what you fancy, what you think looks nice, what your mates at the golf club are gonna.

Necessarily about what you like or what your favorite color is. It's totally about the people you are trying to attract to your business and how they will react to it and how it will make them feel. And, and, you know, you've got to get that emotional response as well. It's not, you know, if it doesn't do that, then it's not really doing its job.

Yeah.

I also think people make the mistake and you could argue that's exactly what you two have just done, is that they think the brand is all about a logo and well and visual representations.

It's not.

We're just saying the the logo. The logo is a visual representation of the brand. And Diana has to understand what the brand is all about, what the company is about and who they are and, and how, how they want people to feel. So, you know, it is, it is the, the thing that has to, in one simple drawing, you know, represent all this other stuff.

Yeah. But you do raise a really good point. And that is that an awful lot more work is needed to then kind of go on and build the brand successfully and to make it a thing that people kind of look at, believe in, know about, care about all of that stuff is, I mean, there is a science to it. I'm gonna end up, I'm gonna end up ranting despite telling you not to rant. But I think that's the thing, isn't it? You know, There is a science and a methodology to all this stuff. And, you know, I guess from the top level, looking at it as somebody who's just commissioning someone to do this stuff for you, it's very easy to be like, oh, so what? You know, anyone can make up some brand values. Anyone can make up a mission, value statement, whatever. It then comes down.

To internal processes within the company to make sure that actually, everybody in that company actually understands what, what the company's brand is all about. And they actually behave in that well.

Making sure that, you know, if you're, if you're going to say things like your brand values are like, I don't know, like really caring about your customers and giving people, you know, kind of helping people to make an informed decision or something that that actually carries over onto the content on your website, onto the way that you approach your marketing. It's not just a kind of, oh, right, we've got a pretty picture, end of story.

I mean, it has to go right through to the way like your accounts department behave. And, you know, just every single person in the company should be behaving in a particular way. If, if that's what you're saying to the, the public that that that's how you are.

So my favourite, as you both know, my favourite, um, description of what a brand is, is it's what people say about you and you're not there. Yeah, I think that captures it for me and or Diana. I think she's taking issue with me on that a little bit. But for me, based on what you just said, it's not it's it's about so much more so when we're actually trying to understand a business. So we want to help them either rebrand or it's a brand new business and we want to brand them. It's that kind of conversation which we have that maybe is missed, you know, with the focus on the visual representations, what font we're using and what colors we're using and what the logo looks like. You miss this kind of idea of how do we develop something so that people think about us in the right way? The tone of voice we use is right. The messaging that we use resonates with our audience, that kind of thing.

Yeah. It's a especially kind of like, obviously I write a lot of content, right? So one of my biggest bugbears is with this, it's like people will just say, oh, okay, You know, the piece of content that you've written for us doesn't say what we want it to say about our company, or like, you haven't made us sound good enough or, you know, no thought or attention is paid to the fact that, like you say, the content is supposed to resonate with a specific audience. It's supposed to allay specific fears, it's supposed to talk to specific concerns. And it's just, yeah, it's very easy to just kind of look at this and think, oh, how does this reflect on me? How does this make me feel about my business when that's not really what it's for?

It's not for you?

Indeed, one of the things that, um, that made me think about discussing this was an email, um, that I received. We had some discussions with, with an organisation about really sort of giving their digital presence a kick up the ass. And we kind of said, look, we gave them a sort of a good, better, best kind of approach because they had no idea on budget. So, you know, sometimes when we do that, we say, well, you know, a good budget would be this. And for that we could do X and a better budget would be this. And this is why it would be better and what you would get in. And the best would be this. And for that you would get X, Y, and Z. And one of the things that they said in the in the response was like, well, can we start with good? And then go from there, you know, based on or depending on our judgment, I their judgment. Yeah. You know, I just thought, well, it kind of, I don't know, there's something about it jarred with me because these are people who are hiring us for our expertise to make sure that they give, give the best version, tell the best story, tell the world about the best version of their business, something that we know about, but they're going to judge whether or not something's right or wrong. And you know, I get it, but it jarred with me. And that's what.

If we're being judged, it's not. We need to know what we're being judged on. It's not just judged on their opinion of what it's like. I mean, what are their objectives? What is it they're trying to achieve so we can see if we've actually achieved them. We can't be judged on something that is completely like, you know, not even identified.

Well, this is like the fundamental misunderstanding. And I think what you're saying is what jarred with you here is that, you know, they're saying that, you know, you can look at the good product, the kind of minimum viable website, and you can make a judgment on whether or not it's good or not or good enough. Nobody can do that. I can't do that. You can't do that. Like we would always be led by data. We would say, how is it working? What's happening? How are people engaging with it? But I think it's just the idea that, you know, fundamentally, it's not even just the arrogance of thinking, oh, okay, I'm the one to decide whether or not this is a good website. It's just in misunderstanding and thinking. Anybody can look at a website and say, oh, this is good. That's just it's just so far off where you should be thinking, I think.

I wonder if there are other professions out there where they suffer from the same thing, that it's perceived as a very low barrier to entry. I mean, we've all got degrees and chartered status and all kinds of qualifications to do this stuff that we do.

Just do it.

But you can just do it. You can like you can just set up as an accountant if you want. Just say, I'm an accountant. I'll do your books. I don't think you whereas you know, your partner's a doctor. You can't just decide you're a paediatrician and give it a go. And they're.

Not.

Yeah.

Although I think we can't do quite as much damage.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I don't know.

I think it's possible if you do the research to find that there are people who work in the medical profession.

Absolutely.

Utterly and totally bluffed their way into.

It with.

A degree from the University of Outer Mongolia or something.

Like that.

Um, no offence to any listeners in Outer Mongolia. Um, so.

You know, that's one place that's one of the few places where our podcast hasn't been downloaded from.

Is it really.

Mongolia and Russia?

The only safe to say then we hope they haven't offended anyone.

Yeah, we probably haven't. So if we think about, um, how we can, you know, this, the podcast is to try and help people, um, get more from whoever they're working with, whether it's a freelancer or an agency. And the first piece of very simple advice, which you could maybe discuss is if you're hiring somebody, you go through a process where you figure out that somebody is a good person, a good agency, or a good freelancer to work with. You get to that point. So you start working with them. Are you going to get the best out of them?

Well, I think start by not telling them how to do their jobs. I mean, you know, and you know what's.

A good start?

Yeah. We we obviously work with in-house designers. And I, you know, we know that even if we, you know, we can do it to them, we'll be briefing them on something and start going, well, you could do this. And you just see them rolling their eyes and like, no, they're the designers. They know what they're doing. Stop telling them how to do their jobs because they know a lot more than we do and let them get on with it. You know, they, they bring their creativity and they, they know what the process is. So us trying to start suggesting what the design might look like is totally unhelpful. Um, you know, just, you know, let give people an idea, you know, tell them what you want to achieve. Tell them who it's for, give them all the information about you know, what you want it to do, but let them do their jobs because they've got the expertise. That's why you're hiring them. If you're hiring them and then telling them what to do, you're wasting your money.

Yeah, I think, yeah, I think it's a trust thing, isn't it really? Maybe this is oversimplifying it, but I think it's if you're going to go into an engagement and you're not fully convinced that you trust the people to just get on and do it, you're not going to get anything good out of that engagement, right? It's like if you don't give people the space, they need to prove that they're worthy of trust, you're just going to constantly micromanage them into the ground. And, you know, I can't see that really big companies like Adidas or Nike, when they go into a, you know, a meeting with a marketing agency, try and tell them how to do their job. They just expect that they're, they're the experts and let them get on with it. And that's, yeah, if you don't trust people to get on with it and surprise you and show you that they know what they're doing, then you'll have a bad time.

I think another thing is if, if if they're way off the mark and they get it wrong, then explain to them what they've got wrong so that the relationship can develop so that next time they go, all right, I won't do that again. If you just keep going, well, it's not right. I don't like it. Go away and guess what's wrong with it and do it again. Then you're not going to get a good result because you know the agency isn't going to learn from from, you know, what they've they've done wrong or where they've kind of missed the mark, you know, as, as these things develop, as they create more and more content or designs or whatever it is, they get to know what what is and isn't working for you. And then you get to the stage where they get it, and you can just let them get on with it because they know how you want to operate, but you've got to give them the feedback so they can learn and, and get ingrained in your way of doing things.

Do you think, um, I've forgotten what I was going to say now. I was, I was like waiting for I was waiting, waiting for you to, to pause for breath. And I had this thing I was going to say, and I've now forgotten entirely what it what it was.

To come back.

I may come back to me. Yeah.

Ever like I guess like a slightly different angle. One of the things we constantly talk about on this podcast is, you know, kind of hiring an agency versus hiring your own in-house department, right? If you think about it, if you were going to hire a marketing manager or a chief marketing officer or whatever, you would probably leave them alone. You would probably give them time to get to know the brand and to come back with a few different ideas, and you'd go back and forth with them and you probably wouldn't micromanage them. So why do the same thing to an agency, right? I guess that's my, my kind of main question, maybe.

I mean, some people may have worked with agencies who basically are just full of junior people who kind of need a lot of managing. But I think you have to appreciate when you when you when you're hiring somebody to do a job and you want them to help you out and you want them to advise you, then yeah, let them let them do that, you know? Yeah, give them the feedback that they need to get to that position. And then hopefully, you know, you've, you've then worked together, um, to get to a place where they they can be really, really useful. I mean, I was just writing a case study about a company that we helped earlier this year, and it got to the stage where basically we felt like we were part of their marketing department and they would just bring us up or send us a message going, can you do this? And it wasn't even part of our remit. We're like, yeah, we'll jump on that. And just, you know, it was just a really easy relationship where they totally trusted us and we would just get on and, and do stuff. And we just felt like an extension of their team. And that's when it works best.

Yeah, I think, I think I've kind of remembered what I was going to talk about. And it was something you guys were saying around making sure that we give our customers what they need. And it reminded me of the, you know, the customer doesn't know what they want until you give them what they ask for and they realise it's not what they need eventually and wasting money. So this, this idea that you should be telling people what to do and making them create a website or even a piece of content or a social media post. You know, if you base it on what you want and not on what the market and your ideal customers want, I think that's probably the most grown up way of trying to communicate to people that what we're trying to do as an agency, and what freelancers you work with, for example, might be also trying to do is, is actually they've got the, the, the benefit of looking at the thing from the helicopter outside looking in, looking at the market, looking what's needed and trying to help and guide you to present the best version of yourself and use the right sort of language and the right sort of visual representations, etc..

Quite interesting actually, because we've had an experience recently where we were creating a logo for a brand new company and we were working away on it. And they, they had a very firm idea of what colours they wanted. Yeah. And so we did variations on that colour on, on that colour and lots of sort of different shades and different loads of options. And then Diana, our designer, looked at, I don't think she looked at competitors or she looked at the market and actually said, there's another color here that would actually work much better. And, you know, they, they hadn't asked for it, but she gave them this, this option of another color. They, they stuck to their original idea, but she, she was thinking with their best interests at heart and said, actually, you know, this, this would probably work better. Um, and so she went and developed an option there because she was, she was looking beyond just the, the specific brief and looking at, you know, what, what all the best options would be.

Yeah, that's a classic case of the managing director's wife likes orange. So make it orange or actually green worked a lot better.

The green was ace, wasn't it?

It really.

Was. We did. We did think the.

Green worked.

Better and it worked better than the.

I even saw that color combination. Um, on a on a thing. I won't talk about what it was.

So did I. I was in the States and I saw that color and it worked really, really well.

I saw it on one of the things that they're going to be selling, and it just looked fantastic. It really did. But hey ho, you know, they were kind of stuck on it for, for their own reasons. And it's not it's one of those situations where, yeah, it wasn't like you're, you're making a huge mistake here. It, it does sometimes come down to personal preference. Yeah. Sometimes it's not easy to defend a decision about a piece of content or a brand or a logo or anything. It's just it's just kind of like it's a feeling, isn't it? But that goes back to what I was saying about branding being a feeling. What do people feel about you? How do they talk about you when you're not there?

That's an emotional reaction.

It is. Yeah.

I think this is the way you have to be like slightly cautious, don't you? Because, okay, these things are not they're not measurable. There's no data to tell you. But ultimately what will happen at the end.

Probably arguably there is.

Some.

I'm not aware.

Of it.

I'm pretty sure that like sentiment, brand and sentiment can be measured and sentiment.

And there's also you could probably measure things like people's heart rates and things.

Yeah. But I mean, the point I'm making is, you know, there's there's no way certainly when you're putting like a document together or you're presenting somebody with options for the logo colors, there's no way of saying this blue will perform better than this green. But the problem is where you end up at the end is that lots of these small intangible things, these tiny little micro decisions, end up kind of creating just the wrong brand completely. And I think it's really difficult because ultimately, the best defense against all of what we're saying today is, oh, it's all subjective. You know, there's no science behind it. So it should just be about what I prefer. And that's just not the case, is it really objectively there is.

There is science behind a lot of it, and there is science behind all the colors as well. And um, Deanna always, always looks at the, the science and you know what, what different colors, you know, make people feel so, um, you know, the, there is a degree of science in there. Um, yeah. Uh, as well as the, the sort of, you know, personal preference. But, you know, it's more just a case of your agency. If they're doing a good job. Well, we'll think beyond the brief and go, well, is this the best decision or you know, what about this? This might work better. And quite often a client will go, oh my goodness. Yeah, we never thought of that. You know, and they prefer that option. It comes back to what you were saying about, you know, giving them what they need, not what they want.

Yeah. So where can we go now with this? Have we, how can we add more value or, or is it one of the shortest podcasts ever?

Um, well, I don't know. I guess it's a tricky thing because what we're essentially saying is like, you have to trust us no matter what, right? You have to let us do what we think is best. And if we go massively off piste and come back to you with different logo colors.

Yeah, but I will add communication. Just before you go on, I will add that most agencies, ourselves included, were not deaf to what clients say. We don't just say, look, shut up and let us do our job. We're not saying that. No, no. But equally, we need clients to not say the same back to us. Just do this.

So yeah, so.

If that's the case, just hire somebody who knows how to use Photoshop, stand over their shoulder and direct them.

Yeah, yeah. But I mean, ultimately that's.

Looking at a lot of businesses. That's exactly what they did. Well, this is yeah.

So this is kind of where I would go with it.

Yeah. Like I said, it works best when it is a partnership and the agency gets to know you. And then eventually you trust them enough just to go off and do their thing. And you need to give them very little input.

There is. Yeah, there is. The alternative, I suppose, is to hire a baby intern who can do Photoshop or a bit of coding and sit over their shoulder and say, right, move this here, put that there or on that picture. What you'll lack if you do that. The downside is you don't get the experience of people who know more about this stuff than you do, right? You're probably not a subject matter expert when it comes to web design. When it comes to appealing to a specific target audience, that kind of thing. So you're getting that expertise by working with us. But I guess what I really want to get at and where I think we can add a lot of value is how are people supposed to kind of build that relationship? That is kind of two way reciprocal, that allows them to have input and also allows their agency to kind of do their best work. Yeah.

Because people in a design or creative industry can get things spectacularly.

Wrong, right?

Yeah. We ever remember that program with Laurence Llewelyn-bowen changing?

Oh God. Yeah, it's come back, it's back. Oh my God, it's got worse.

Well, he often, they often did a fantastic job and transformed rooms into something really special. But there were some well documented instances where the people walked in and just burst into tears because what they'd done was awful. Yeah. And I think it was awful. It was plain to see. It was awful. It wasn't just they didn't like it. It was like, that is awful because you.

Can get sucked down a rabbit hole.

So if you're, if you're buying professional services in the creative industries, whether it's for content design, branding or whatever it is, then how do we avoid that situation where you completely trust the design company and they do something, which I'm sure there's some examples recently. Well, there are examples of big brands who've rebranded and then reverted to their original brand.

There's also, um, yeah, Center Parcs. Sometimes.

Oh yeah. The co-op did that. The co-op went all orange and, and completely rebranded didn't they? Yeah. And now they're back with the turquoise and the white co-op. Yeah. Everybody loves a slightly modern version of it I think. And it's fantastic. It's a great brand. But they did go completely.

Yeah. Something new people. Yeah. If they've got heritage and they've got people know who they are and what they believe in and what they stand for, then if you if you go too far off that, people just get confused. Yeah. So maybe there are occasions where you can't, you can't just chuck everything out and.

And yeah.

And, and I think, yeah, I think there's a degree of honesty in being able to go, look, this was a disaster and we're going to go back. And I think I think that the relationship with your agency is really important because if they do miss the mark rather than going, you know, no, it's awful. Right. Well, thank you. You know, use it as a way of learning and moving towards that point where, where they do get you and you're like, explain just, you know, you just have to be honest and explain, you know, why it's off the mark. And maybe the brief was off the mark, you know, maybe the, maybe the brief was wrong and the agency actually fulfilled the brief. And like you say, then when they see what they wanted, it's not at all what they need.

So I mean, the very, you know, some creative people have the vision to see what virtually nobody else can see. And they are right and are proved right. If you think about buildings, there's a lot of buildings. I mean, if you think of the, um the Sydney Opera House. Yeah. Now it was hated. It was, it was, it was, it was. Yeah. It wasn't a liked building. Um, when they tried to build the design that the architect had come up with, they couldn't, They couldn't figure out how to build it. It was it was for a while known as a huge white elephant. Yet now it's one of the most iconic buildings in the world. And if you go to Australia and you go to Sydney, it's going to be right at the top of your list of buildings to go and see.

Yeah, absolutely.

The designer knew that. They knew they were creating something special, iconic, that was going to add enormous value to that city over over the decades that the thing's going to stand there, but it would have been very easy for them to abandon it and go, no, let's not do that. And then there'd be just some some square carbuncle there now. But equally, there are buildings that were wrong, look awful and still look awful and are completely.

Yeah.

You know, nobody likes them. You know.

Sometimes you just. You can't tell that until time's passed. Yeah. Um it's, you know, it's a very difficult call.

What about some of the other things that we do? I mean, is there any anything around like search engine optimisation is an obvious one. Yeah. Because there are sometimes situations where people know enough about search engine optimisation to be a little bit dangerous, and we're being.

Told to chase specific keywords, I think is a really common example of that. Somebody will tell us, oh, I really want to rank number one for that because they've decided that's an important keyword for their business. No real understanding of who's using that keyword, whether there are better options, whether it's really feasible to rank for that keyword.

Whether anyone else. I mean, we've had occasions where where they get hung up on this is what they call the thing, but their customers don't call it that at all. So you could spend all your time trying to get the website to rank for a specific, um, bunch of phrases or words. But that's not the phrases that the customers use when they're looking for it. So it's not going to help you in the slightest. So again, it comes down to understanding who your audience is and looking at the data and finding out what they're actually typing into Google rather than what you think you want them to type into Google when they're looking for you. And that that can be that. That's one of the biggest things I.

Think search engine optimisation, SEO is one of the areas, I think where our industry is primarily at fault. I think the misinformation that's put out there, some of which is willfully, um, uh, adopted, if you like, by, by customers, they want to believe that this company who they're paying ninety nine quid a month for to rather, uh, can get them to number one in Google for a really competitive search term. They want to believe that. So they go along with it. And so I think some people deserve to get ripped off in that respect. But I think there's a lot of misinformation. We had a conversation with a potential customer yesterday, didn't we? And it was a great conversation, good business. We we'd really like to work with them and help them, but they came to us having worked with two other in inverted commas, SEO experts who. I mean, you could look at the site, you could tell straight away that nobody who knew about SEO had actually done anything meaningful on that website. It was dreadful. But they've come to us, you know, and they openly said, you know, we're I can't remember the actual words they use, but basically distrustful of us simply because we do search engine optimisation, you know, and, you know, the way that we had, you know, the the way the conversation went. I like to think that at the end of that conversation, they were left thinking, ah, right. So it's not a black art. This is what we need to do. And it's, you know, they understood him because we use plain English, what we would be doing for them.

But you see there again, you know, without, without going in on a potential customer. And you know, that I will caveat this by saying it's not their fault at all. But there again, they did come to the table with a very specific, this is what we think the problem is, and this is what we think you need to fix. Yeah. And I think that's probably, I don't know, like, I think you're right. There's a lot of misinformation out there. There's also a lot of kind of arrogance in, in assuming that because you've read a quick article about how to do SEO or whatever, that you kind of know what underpins it. And you can say like, oh, this is what you need to do. This is what you need to tackle. Like ultimately you wouldn't go to the doctor and say, you need to give me antibiotics because I've got an ear infection.

I think doctors would probably tell you that's exactly what people.

Do.

Being on Google. I know what's wrong with me. Give me this drug. Yeah, well, yeah, that.

Is exactly.

It. Must be. It must be so frustrating being.

And that is like to a degree, I think that is what we're kind of facing here, isn't it? It's people coming into the the relationship or the engagement and thinking that they're adding value or helping themselves by telling us how to do our job instead of leaving us to kind of help them really.

But yeah, it's like, I mean, that's a good analogy. You go to the doctor and you first of all, you would you want them to actually diagnose you. You want them to look at you find out what's wrong, tell you what's wrong, and then tell you what you're going to fix. Rather than saying, I'm going to fix this. I'm not, I don't actually know what's wrong with you, but I'll just fix, well, fix this thing that I think might be wrong with you.

Because the most logical thing to do when you go to the doctor is to give them the broadest possible spread of information. Every symptom you can think of that is affecting you, that you think might be helpful, so that they have all the information they need to go and diagnose you properly. Yeah. And like, the more you try and kind of lead the doctor and kind of, you know, kind of the information that you're giving them and try and push them down an avenue, the less accurate the diagnosis is. Right. But when it comes to what we do. I guess maybe it's less obvious that that's the case. But like, if you come in and you say, I demand that my logo is orange, and I demand that the logo takes up this much of the homepage, and I demand that I have these elements on the homepage. And oh, by the way, I want you to rank for this keyword. There's so little scope there for us to say, actually, you know, the fundamental kind of opportunities that you're missing are this and you just kind of forced your agency down a really kind of narrow rabbit hole, really, where they're going to only be able to do exactly what you've asked, and then ultimately your results suffer for it.

So do you think it's good advice to people that if they don't get any pushback from the freelancer or agency that they're potentially that they're considering working with, that's a red flag?

Yeah, I think so. I think if.

You at least ask questions, you know, they I don't think they should accept what you're saying as gospel. They should be they should go away and do their own research and ask lots of questions and, you know, figure it out. They should they should be doing that diagnosis. They're doing the X-ray or the MRI scan or whatever, trying to, you know, actually figure out just because you say your arm's broken doesn't mean your arm's broken. We're gonna, you know, we're going to check that out and figure out what's actually wrong with it before we go and go down the wrong thing and, you know, fix it wrong.

It's all a question of where you want to end up. I mean, the broken arm analogy is a fantastic one, isn't it? Because if you went to a doctor and you said, my arm's broken. Put it in a cast and the doctor put it in a cast. And then six months later, your arm was still sore. You know, you can't really get angry at the doctor. You're the one that demanded the wrong treatment. And it's the same thing.

You would want the doctor to go. No, I'm not putting it in a cast until I've X-rayed it. And that that's where the relationship with the agency should be. The agency should say, well, probably it probably is broken, but let's go into the X-ray and make sure so that we can actually give you the right fix for it. And I think that's, that's where it comes in. It's, it's making sure that you're doing the right thing and not just jumping to conclusions.

Yeah. So going back to the why the beep? Does everyone think they are a marketing coding design expert? Um, have we added any value to that?

Um, I think so. Conversation I think. Yeah. I mean, I guess, you know, even if all you take away from this is like go into every engagement with an open mind and don't try and tell people what to do and.

Only engage once you, once you actually trust the person. Yeah. Because if you don't trust them, you're going to keep telling them what to do and not get value, not get to where you want, where you're trying to get to with your business.

And, and be sort of really open and have conversations and communicate so that, you know, everyone actually gets something out of it and you move forward rather than just sort of going round and round in ever decreasing circles.

Yeah. A good opening gambit might be sorry. It's a good opening gambit. Might be, for example, with that potential customer we talked to yesterday, they were quite upfront and said we worked with they didn't want to tell us who it was. I think one of them was based in Aberdeen. One of them was based in Glasgow. They'd worked with two supported SEO experts. I'd like to really understand exactly what those conversations were like, what the people had said what they, what they did and why they did it, so that you can really take it right back to the bare bones and then build the trust by saying, well, yeah, what they said there was right. And what they did was right. What they said here was wrong. This is why it was wrong. This is how we know that what they said is wrong. And here's the data that backs up what we're saying. This is what you should have done. And that way you can use those negative experiences from before to build up the all important trust, not use that negative experience to then piece together some half assed idea of what should be done and then say, right, so we know what we did and we did it. We did this and we should have done this. So you need to do this, this and this for us, if that makes sense. You were going to say something.

I was just going to say that. I think it's one of the well, two things. Firstly, it's one of the most difficult things to do is to tell who you're going to trust in any business relationship, right? It's like ultimate.

Relationship.

It's really like choosing whether or not somebody is worthy of your trust is difficult. But if you're not gonna do that, if you're not going to make the leap and say, okay, I trust this person, you definitely just shouldn't work with them.

I think you've at least got to be prepared to trust them in over time. You know, you've got to go into the relationship saying that, you know, I want to get to the point where I trust you and I'm going to work towards that by communicating openly and giving you all the information.

Yeah. Well, I think as I was gonna say the other thing, we keep coming back to really, and the one thing I will say without being too self-promotional is, you know, although we're ranting, we don't actually have this problem all that often. No. Um, and I think one of the key reasons for that is because we do have a lot of conversations with people. Like we sit down and we explain there's no.

We don't hide stuff. No, we just, we explain what we're doing and we explain why we're doing it, which I think is really important.

And I guess as a tip, that's useful for people who are maybe looking to hire a marketing agency or hire somebody to rebrand their company or whatever is like, one of the things to look for is, is this company willing to sit down around a table and explain what they're doing, have a chat with me about it. And if not that, that's probably somebody to avoid, right?

Mhm. Going back just to finish off going back to design. Um, one of the manifestations of the problems with design, as in everybody thinks that they're a designer, for example, is in invitations to tender. This is now less the case than it used to be, but quite often commonly, in fact, tenders would go out and part of the tender was do the design work and show us what our website will look like if we give you the gig.

Yeah.

And to me. To me. Let me finish, let me finish. To me, that demonstrates how people do not understand what design involves. Yeah. Just simply that because you cannot do that without working very closely with the business. Sorry. Are you going to say.

Absolutely. It's you can't do it without without sitting down and doing discovery, without understanding who the audience is. I mean, okay, some of that will be in the brief, but you need the conversation. You need to dig in and kind of get to know who they are. Yeah.

Plus, it's a massive piece of work.

Yeah. Massive piece of work. And you're doing it on new information, so it'll probably be wrong. Yeah. And then you won't get the gig because the people that know them, that are already working with them and probably know them inside out, well, obviously do much better designs because they know them. So you're not you're not making it a level playing field there at all. And you're, you're asking people to basically spend a lot of time and effort on something that's basically going to fail.

What what other examples are there in the creative industries of, you know, do the work and then I'll tell you whether I'm going to give you the gig.

I mean, architects have to do it. Architects have to enter competitions for yeah.

For big.

Projects, big projects. And they have to do the designs before they know that they're going to get paid for it.

And I think that's wrong.

It is. Yeah. It's terrible.

Mhm. Anything else?

Yeah. One of the first copywriting gigs I ever had was like that. It was you can we will consider employing you to write for our blog. But first you have to show us that you can write for our blog by producing three articles. And it's like, yeah.

And they, they tend to use them as well and you don't get paid for them. That's, that's.

one thing I would say to anybody who, who, who does that is that they will almost definitely get the wrong person. Yeah. Because somebody who's really good.

Isn't going.

Is just going to tell you a foxtrot Oscar. They're not going to do that. They're just going to say, nah. And so the only people that are going to do it are the people who are desperate. We would never. Yeah. Um, design a website in the hope that we might win a piece of work. We would never do that. If you can't look at what we've done. Have conversations with us and feel confident that we're the right guys for you, then we're not the right guys for you. And we wouldn't waste your time and you and you're not going to waste ours.

You don't need that anyway, do you? I mean, let's be honest, you can look at a company's portfolio and you can see, you know, irrespective of whether or not you think, oh, these are the designs for me. I want my website to look like that. You can see at a glance, do they do good work like other designs? Solid. It doesn't look like it's been designed for a market for an audience. And then you don't need them to try and design your website with no real brief and no real idea of what they're doing because it's just yeah, it's just silly.

Yeah. It's not, it's not a good approach at all.

Okay. Um, you've been listening to.

Uh, Digital Marketing From The Coalface.

You have, which can be found at.

Uh, somewhere from.

From the coalface dot com.

Or.

Or revolution dot com or on Spotify, Apple, Google.

Yeah, Deezer, you name it, it's out there.

You'll find it.

If you'd like to come on and talk about any aspect of the creative industries or business development, digital marketing, give us a call, drop us an email. Uh, we haven't got any guests lined up at the moment. I don't think.

We'd like some.

We've had some requests in. And it was, it was clearly just people that wanted to do some self-promotion. That's not going to happen.

We want somebody who's going to give people useful information, educate, be entertaining. We'd love to hear from you.

Yeah. We know. I mean, Bruce Alto, he listens to the podcast. He hasn't been on for a while, has he? He was a pioneer. guest on the podcast. He was our first ever guest. Maybe it's time Bruce came on the podcast again and told us about what's been happening in the last twelve months in his world, in the, in a, in a business development, digital marketing sphere. So if you're listening, Bruce, drop us a line. Maybe you can come on again.

He always likes a wee trip out here. Anyway.

He does. That's right on his uh, what's it called, that one wheel thing. Hoverboard thing. Hoverboard hoverboard. Yeah, I saw that. I saw somebody with one of them on Twitter and they have you. If you haven't seen a one wheel, go and Google it. It's basically like literally one wheel, but it looks like a skateboard and it's only got one wheel look, amazing electric powered things. And this, this, this guy put, uh, like a camping chair on top of it and then just sat on it and then leaned forward a bit and went zooming off.

I could I used to live there used to be a guy that actually drove around on a sofa on the dual carriageway every day. Yeah.

That's brilliant. Anyway.

Single wheels from the.

Single wheels from the coalface. Yeah. Thanks for listening.