Digital Marketing From the Coalface, Episode 8

An idea that came to Julie and I this morning would be great to do a podcast about what it's like to start working with a digital marketing agency. We do have a process when we start to work with the customer, and that process really starts before they've decided they want to take us on as an agency and before any money starts changing hands, because as we've said in previous podcasts, it's all about making sure that there's good chemistry and there's a real belief that we can help them.

Yeah. That's right. It's really important by doing sort of two hours or even three hours with a client and just finding out as much as possible, and often just letting them speak and having a conversation, you learn an awful lot.

And I guess to anybody listening to this who is kind of thinking to themselves, well, you know, how are you? How are you meant to tell if a discovery session is going well? Or how are you meant to tell if the marketing agency you're interviewing is really engaged? It's that, you know, do they seem really excited to tell you about all the cool things they're going to do? Because if not, I think that is a little bit of a red flag, I guess, isn't it?

So, um, in the next, uh, Digital Marketing From The Coalface podcast, an idea that came to Julie and I this morning because we were, we were working on, um, some work for a client. We were looking at big picture, we were looking at strategy, following a chat with them, which we tend to call onboarding or discovery. And we thought it'd be great to do a podcast about what it's like to start working with a digital marketing agency and the kind of questions they're going to ask and what they're going to do. And that whole process, we thought we would, uh, do a podcast for that. So this is the first time that Julie has joined us, uh, Alex and I on the podcast. So Julie, tell everybody what you do.

Okay. I'm Julie. I have been in the room while they've been podcasting. I've been interrupting and waving and making rude signs at them, but I was interrupting. Um, I haven't actually had the privilege of joining in with you guys yet, so I'm just waiting for the amount of abuse I'm going to get. But yes, I'm Julie, I kind of look after marketing. I've been doing marketing for about one hundred years.

Yeah, Julie's been really modest. She's actually a chartered marketer. She's she's the creme de la creme of marketing. So, um, she's been a little bit modest there.

Um, so when I say buzzwordy things, I get pulled up all the time. What's a chartered marketer?

Right. You asked a chartered chartered marketer is basically like any other profession where you keep, you have to keep your knowledge up to date. You have to do continuing professional development or CPD, which is basically learning stuff about your specialist subject on an ongoing basis to make sure that your information, your your knowledge is still up to date and you still know what you're talking about. Um, I was actually one of the very first chartered marketers in the UK, and I got to go to Royal Festival Hall for.

About Julie's age than anything else.

Shut up. Alex wasn't that long ago. I mean, well, it was a while, probably before you were born, but still. Yeah, it was relatively recent in my.

Application on a Sinclair Zx81, let's just put it that.

Way. I did have a Sinclair Spectrum at home. I learned to code on a spectrum, so they.

Had the Zx81. I was from a poor family.

Oh. Oh. And we weren't supposed to be talking about me.

Sorry, Alex. Say again?

I was just saying this didn't take long to devolve, did it? Into name.

Calling. Yeah. I thought we were supposed to be talking about me.

Yeah. Yeah. Enough about you.

Yeah.

Yeah. Um. Okay. So what what it occurred to us this morning is we were doing some work, so we're not going to talk about a specific client. We're not going to kind of like, you know, give, give, give away information about a specific client. But we, we do have a process when we start to work with a customer. And that process really starts before there's even, um, a sort of agreement before we've even agreed to, um, take them on as a client before they've decided they want to take us on as an agency and before any money starts changing hands, because as we've said in previous podcasts, it's all about making sure that there's good chemistry and there's a real belief that we can help them.

Yeah. That's right. And we and we usually say that to people, don't we? We've got an agenda. But don't be surprised if it wanders all over the place.

Yeah. And the, you know, the, the best sessions are the ones where they get very excited and start really opening up to us and telling us a lot about their business and a lot about the issues they're having.

You think so? I actually think the best sessions are where we sit quietly watching the clients disagree with each other about what they actually do and what's important and everything else. And that does happen a lot.

It does. It does happen. But it's also important because it means they're figuring out their way forward, their strategy. Where they want to be. And and, you know, obviously it's big decisions they're making working with us and moving their business forward. And they're not necessarily all going to agree on what direction that's taking. And it can be really interesting as long as they don't actually start hitting each other or anything. Um it's fine.

Yeah. Okay. So I mean.

In.

A way. Go on, go on. Alex. What?

I was just gonna say, I think in a way, it would be more frightening if people did kind of pop up with a kind of fully formed idea of exactly what they wanted from us, wouldn't it? You know, somebody came to the table and yeah, they do in agreement.

They do kind of come into us often saying, right, this is what we want to do. But by the end of the session, usually it's evolved, which is where we come in because we're there to actually guide them with, you know, what we know and what we're used to doing. And just because they think they want to do X, Y, Z doesn't actually mean they need to do X, Y, Z. It could be that, you know, that's, that's further down the line. And they need to do something else first. Or there's actually a, a better way in our opinion of of going about what they want to achieve. And that's why it's really important to speak to them, because you have to find out not just what they want to do, but take a step back and what do you want to achieve? What's the end goal of this? What's the aim? And the aim isn't to do SEO. The aim is to get more enquiries. And that one of the ways of going about that is doing SEO. So you kind of have to take them back a couple of levels.

Usually you do. Yeah. And if we get a situation where there's a customer who or a potential customer, I should say, who knows exactly what they want, and they're just looking for a transactional relationship, like do X, Y, and Z. Then we know straight away that we're not the right people to help them because that doesn't excite us. What excites us is solving problems. And that's something you said in one of the earlier podcasts, Alex, wasn't it?

Yeah. Although I think it's quite interesting, this whole idea because I guess like, from my perspective, prior to working with you guys, a lot of my experience of digital marketing was very transactional, right? So you'd pitch a client, we'll do your SEO for you for X amount per month, and this is what we'll drive. and you'd kind of forecast potential results and you'd go in with these kind of almost concrete plans. And I think it's quite interesting that, you know, you guys have taken always taken. I think I'm right in saying the complete opposite approach, which is to let it kind of grow organically, right. And to find your way to where the, where the client wants to be rather than telling them what they need.

Yeah. I mean, quite, quite amusingly to some people, you know, the proposals that we send to people sometimes basically say, we're not sure what the problems are. We don't really know what the solutions will be clearly, because we don't know what the problems are, and we don't really have a clue what we're going to do for you. We have to figure all that out first before we can actually give you a meaningful proposal, you know? So we start by trying to unpick the situation that the client's in, and we call that discovery. And generally, as Julie said, that last two or three hours. And it's an opportunity for us to ask lots and lots of questions. And hopefully those questions stimulate the clients to just start talking. And we take copious amounts of notes. We sometimes record those sessions and we're really trying to build a big picture, aren't we?

Yeah. And it's going back to maybe something we were talking about just before we came on this podcast is why we don't really like answering tenders. You know.

Them.

You know, request for price or whatever it is. Um, because they very much lay down. We want you to do this, this, this and this, and we want a price for it. And our approach would always be, well, is this, this, this, and this the right thing? Or would it be this, that, that and someone else and to, to be for the client to come in with a very fixed idea of what they want doesn't really sit well with us because, you know, we need to figure out if that is the right thing. If it's, if it's not the right thing, then basically it doesn't matter how much it costs. They're just throwing that money down the drain.

Yeah. That's right. So the discovery session is really important. It's an information gather. It's also an opportunity for the client to ask us lots of questions as well. If they want to, they can they can ask us, you know, some they can ask us about the kind of work that we do. They can ask us about, you know, customers we've worked with and results we've achieved for those customers, they can ask us very specific questions about search marketing or paid search or content marketing or social media video, anything they want to know about.

They often come out of these sessions saying, oh my goodness, I've learned loads. So, you know, even if they don't work with us, in the end, they've got something out of it. You know, they haven't just wasted two hours of their lives. They've um, they've probably learned something or other. And um, to be fair, we usually really enjoy the sessions anyway.

Yeah. That's right. So, um, I mean, Alex, you've done some of those sessions with us, haven't you already? You know, you've been with us what, since April, you know, April this year, I think something like that. And you've already sat in and contributed to some of these discovery sessions. I mean, how did that sort of feel? Um, compared to previous you mentioned something just a couple of minutes ago about it not always being the way it's been done and you thought it was quite refreshing. Anything in particular putting you right on?

Yeah, something that it reminds me of a few weeks ago, we were in a discovery session with a client and they asked how something worked. It was pay per click or PPC.

Yeah that's right. I remember that, yeah.

Yeah. Um, and at the time, it was one of those things where, you know, because I watched you go into quite a lot of detail about how it all worked, right? And you were kind of walking them through the platform and showing them all the kind of cost per click and how you work out how much you're going to pay for a click and that kind of thing. And it's quite interesting because I think most agencies, certainly most agencies I've worked with previously, like to keep a huge amount of distance between the client and the technology, right? It's like, you don't need to see how this works. You just need to trust that we can do it. Yeah. Um, and I guess there's a slight kind of, I don't know, I guess the first time I saw you do it, I thought like, oh God, you know, they do. You know what I mean? Are you giving too much away? Does it make it seem too simple? Does it devalue what we're kind of asking them to pay for? But I think ultimately it's the best way to do these things right is to be fully transparent and to kind of bring people up to your level so they understand what it is you're doing. And yeah, yeah.

I think so. I mean, certainly in our values, isn't it, to be transparent, it's how we operate. I don't think you can really do the work that we do for, for customers behind some sort of, um, you know, cloak. I don't think you can do it behind a cloak or a smoke screen. You know, I think I don't necessarily agree or I don't necessarily think we go too far with that. Maybe we do sometimes. I mean, I get maybe they get too excited and start going into too much detail, but I can usually see when people start glazing over and I know that's time to stop.

When they start snoring. You've gone into too much detail.

Yeah. That's right. But I, I generally that the feedback I've had has been like, as Julie said a minute ago, it's like they are, you know, they actually enjoy understanding it. And we're very capable of, of explaining things in ways that people understand, you know, we're not into trying to sound clever by making what, you know, making things sound complex, if that, if people go away confused from a discovery session, um, you know, they might go away with their head spinning because a lot happens in that session. But if they go away confused, we've, we've failed. We've completely failed.

Yeah.

We should go away energised and excited.

Shouldn't that is the advantage of that. I don't actually speak technical speak and I don't understand it. So I have to explain it in words of one syllable so that I understand it. Which means that the client understands it as well.

Yeah, absolutely. Alex, you were going to say something.

Well, I just think it's it's one of those things, isn't it? Like the thing that comes across is excitement. And I guess to anybody listening to this who is kind of thinking to themselves, well, you know, how are you? How are you meant to tell if a discovery session is going well? Or how are you meant to tell if the marketing agency or interviewing is really engaged? It's that, you know, do they seem really excited to tell you about all the cool things they're going to do? Do they seem genuinely engaged with the platforms are going to be using and your website, and do they have lots to say about it? Because if not, I think that is a little bit of a red flag, I guess, isn't it?

Definitely is. And, you know, the purpose of this podcast is not just to say, hey, this is how we do things. And we're unique in our view, the way that we do things is how all good agencies do things. So whether it's whether it's us you've engaged with or anybody else, you know, this is explaining what to expect. And if the experience isn't like this, then as you say, there is, it would be a red flag, I think.

So if people are just kind of going through the motions almost like, yeah, yeah, we do this and we do this. And they seem maybe kind of a bit blasé about it or a bit bored with the whole idea, then, you know, that is worrying. Whereas we tend to go the other extreme and get a little bit overexcited from time to time.

Well, it's not formulaic, is it? I think that's the thing that I always come back to. You can't just do digital marketing for somebody where you kind of say, oh, we're going to spend X amount of hours this month doing SEO and you know, you don't need to know about that. We'll just go away and do SEO to your website. It just doesn't work like that. You have to be engaged with them.

You know, because I mean, like most good agencies, we take a strategy first approach. And, you know, the strategy dictates dictates all the tactics you're going to employ, you know, like, you know, blogging and content and search marketing and all the rest of it. But yeah, it, if you're jumping straight into conversations about tactics, you know, search, marketing, blogging, etc., they're the tactics. If you're jumping straight in, then certainly that's a red flag. I mean, it just it just doesn't work. If you don't get a really deep understanding of the business, the people, what they're trying to achieve, etc.. I mean, even if they don't really know what they're trying to achieve. I mean, let's face it, you know, we're first and foremost a business growth agency, as are most digital marketing agencies. So when businesses are starting out on that journey where they want to grow, they sometimes don't have all the answers. They don't really know what's possible, what could be achieved, you know, like, well, yeah, we'd love to sell to like people in America, but we realise that's not possible. Well, actually it might be possible. And so a light switch goes on, a light bulb goes on. And, um, and, and just by that initial conversation, they start to recognise what the opportunities and possibilities might be.

It's interesting though, isn't it? Because, you know, it just goes back to what you were saying earlier about strategy first, right? You have to start with what they hope to achieve a really kind of top level, fundamental kind of basis. Do you think that ready though, as always, like, is that something you've learned over time, or is that always how you've kind of approached those discovery sessions?

I honestly think it's how we've always done it. And I actually think we've lost in the past. We've lost a lot of work. You know, when we years and years ago, when we were more of a web design agency and we did lots of web stuff and a lot more web stuff than we did now, whereas now we have more of a mix of stuff. We still do websites, obviously. Um, but we would start asking lots of questions and you know, to keep it simple. Um, oh, I don't know why you're asking all these questions. We just need a website. We found somebody else to do it, you know? Well, great. Good luck. You know, it's, it's always been an inquisitive mind, like, well, why do you need the website? What's it got? You know, what does success look like? Does success look like a pretty website that everybody goes, oh, your website's lovely and that's it. Well, it's that's never a successful website in my view. That's just, that's just a given that you get a great looking website. It's what does it do? What value does it add to the business?

I mean, I've always started with the question, you know, who's your audience? Who are you trying to speak to? Because if you don't know that you, you, you can't possibly get it right. You're just doing stuff if you don't know who it's for. Um, it, it comes down to that. And I mean, you know, that's my marketing background, but, you know, you're just sort of trained to say, okay, who are your potential customers? Who are you aiming at? And if you don't know that, then you're not taking a strategic approach and you're, you're probably wasting your money.

Right? So to circle back on this podcast subject, which is we're talking about what to expect when you start to engage with a digital marketing agency. What we're saying is there should be, there might be an initial call, half an hour where you might want to ask questions about budgets because, you know, if you're thinking like, well, we want to engage a digital marketing agency and we've got a budget of two hundred and fifty quid a month, it's best to have that conversation early because, you know, our response to that would be, we, we can't help you with that kind of budget. So you want to have a sort of qualifying conversation. And, you know, you can always get an indication of the kind of investment that's required based on the, you know, the agency's previous engagements and stuff. So, you know, fair enough. You might have a half, half hour initial discovery chat. But then, you know, what we're really talking about is you think that there's a good synergy. You think that the agency might be able to help you, so you move to the next stage for us, which is discovery. And that's a massive information gathering exercise. And I think I think we've probably covered that off. Do you think?

Yeah. And I think one thing to look out for would be if the agency spends that two hours giving you a fancy PowerPoint presentation about themselves, that's not a discovery session. That's a sales.

Pitch, aren't they?

Yeah. That's right. It's, uh, it's, uh. Sorry, Alex, I think I talked over you there. Go ahead. Say what you said.

I was just going to say that PowerPoint presentations are a subject of their own, aren't they? Agencies that spend hours preparing slide decks just to kind of show off to clients.

I've never seen a client go, ooh, yippee! That's the half hour presentation about you coming up. It's it's not I mean, I've been on the client side and and you don't want it. Yes. You want to know a little bit about the agency, but you do not want the PowerPoint presentation. Um, you want to talk about yourself? Everyone wants to talk about themselves and you want to talk about your problems because that's what the agency is there for to solve your problems, not to, you know, talk about themselves at all.

That's right. I mean, I mean, certainly by the time you get to a discovery session, you know, the statement of capability, you know, can the agency handle the work that you want them to do? Have they done it before? Um, you know, have they got a track record? Can you speak to some of their customers, all of that stuff? I'm kind of taking as a given. Yeah.

I mean, it should be on their website. You should you know, the clients have found you probably by looking at your website and decided who to shortlist based on their website. So you're, if there's something in your PowerPoint presentation that isn't on your website, it probably should be on your website. So I think you're wasting your time.

Yep. Okay, so there's this, this discovery, basically an information gather and a bit of Q and A and making sure everybody's comfortable. And then, you know, what we do then is we take that all that information away. And then a group of us within the agency will probably take a little bit of time out because the discovery sessions are full on.

They're really tiring.

Yeah, we we usually will just leave it a day or so just for the information to sort of percolate and whizz around in your brain.

That bit where you're out walking the dog and you go, oh, about that. And things start just sort of knitting together and taking shape in your brain. And I think it's really important to have that little bit of space where it does just all kind of percolate in your head and, and start like making little connections between things and making sense.

Yeah. And then, you know, the hard work starts at our end, which is, you know, raking through the information and trying to figure out exactly what success looks.

Like trying to read our writing first.

Well, trying to read your writing anyway.

Well, that was today. Yeah.

It's quite amusing some of that. So we're actually then at a point where we have all the information we need in order to paint the big picture, really. I mean, it's a, it's a, what we're trying to do is, is, is outline a strategy and and outline a position where you are now, where you want to get to how we're going to get from here to be what the market looks like and all that kind of good stuff, so that we can then go back to the client with hopefully a one pager, which is saying, you know, current position, etc., and the kind of work that we plan on doing.

Yeah. It's a summary of kind of where, how we understand where they want to be and, you know, yeah, and where they are now and kind of where the gap is and like, yeah, the answer is right. You need to do these, these general things to, to get from A to B.

And even at this stage, we're not really talking about tactics. I mean, we will, we will say, for example, that, you know, there's, there's clearly a gap, uh, where we need to create a ton of content because we've looked at your competitors, we've looked at the market and, you know, we need to build a body of evidence that we're credible in whatever area of business the client's in, you know, so, so we will make mention of stuff. But at this stage, what we're really trying to do is, is, is, is peel everything back. So, you know, we're not going to mention the client we were working on today. But for example, it was pretty clear that their brand was was all over the place. They had they had several different names. They had several different websites.

It was just very, very confusing.

It was very confusing.

For the end user. Yeah, probably for them as well. But you know, we try and see it from the end user's point of view and say, well, you know, it's really difficult to understand which bit of the business does what and what this means. Um, and how it all fits together and, and possibly do they even need to know how it fits together? Or do they just need to know the bit that's of interest to them? So it's trying to figure all that stuff out.

That's right. So we're looking at, um, we're looking at all of the current, if you like collateral assets that they've got. Yeah. You know, we're looking at their, their current website where, and at this point as well, we're not quite ready to start digging into search console data. We're just making a note that we want to go and look at historical data and see how the current website's performing and where there might be some golden nuggets in there, some really good information in there that's going to help us going forward.

Yeah. But that's more of sort of informing the the detailed plan. Once, once they say, yeah, we agree with this strategy. Let's go forward. Then we, we would use that data and, and really get the detail into the plan. But at this stage, we kind of don't need that level of detail. We just need to see the kind of general map, which direction we're going.

Yeah. That's right. So, um, what we're doing is we've, you know, with this particular client, we, you know, we through a discussion with them, we figured out what they told us that they weren't absolutely wedded to the current brand. So that was up for grabs. And it was pretty obvious that what they needed was to consolidate their, their, their, the different names that they're using, etc..

Yeah, lots of names and none of it really gelling.

Yeah. That's right. So, so we did that. I mean, we, we put that down as um, something for discussion, the whole kind of branding thing. And we then looked at, we spent quite a lot of time, you know, based on the information we'd gathered, looking at and trying to find in this case, because it was quite difficult trying to find their competitors. Yeah, I'd say so. Competitor analysis is a really big part of the early stage work. You know what, what is the customer up against based on what we know they want to achieve.

And often they'll say our competitors are, you know, this company and this company. But looking at the if we're looking from a website point of view, we look online and go actually as far as Google or as far as the online world is concerned, your competitors aren't those people. There may be somebody slightly different. So that's quite a difficult thing to communicate sometimes to clients.

I think so, yeah. Who they think are and who are their competitors are often different. Different things, that's for sure. Yeah. Alex, you were going to say something there.

It's something we hear a lot, isn't it? You know, people kind of say, oh, these are the these are the people we consider competitors. And we'll go to them and we'll say, well, these are the people who are kind of consistently outranking you in search. These are the people who are kind of taking your audience and they'll say, oh, no, we don't consider them competitors. I think that's a really interesting thing to try and negotiate, isn't it?

Yeah it is. I've certainly heard clients plenty of times. You know, when I say, well, what about this company? And they're like, oh, I've never heard of them. And it's like, well, they're hoovering up a lot of the attention that we that we need. We want you to hoover up. We want you to get instead. And actually, they've never heard of them. And why should they? I mean, you know, they don't do competitive analysis. I mean, not in the way we do it anyway. So, you know, that's part of the value that an agency brings, isn't it?

Well, it's an interesting point that you raise there though. So this is like something I kind of, I guess I'd like to ask, and I guess I am playing devil's advocate a little bit here because I think I know how you're going to answer. But in all of this, we're asking a lot of our clients, right? Like a lot, we're asking them to engage with kind of new ideas about what their marketplace is, what their competitors are, what their brand is, what they're doing online. A lot of people certainly, I guess from my experience as a freelancer, especially, a lot of people want to pay a marketing agency so that they don't have to think about any of that stuff, right? It's, it's, you know, I'm going to pay like you would a doctor. I'm going to pay you so you can go away and worry and stress about all this stuff. And I can just kind of get on with my life. Um, do you think that those are the kind of people that you, you then say that, you know, we're not a great fit for maybe they don't actually need digital marketing or that it's not going to be successful for them unless they're willing to engage. Do you think that level of engagement is one hundred percent necessary?

Well, I've certainly got a view on that. I don't know if you have as well. Julie.

Well, I think you know that that doctor analogy, we do love an analogy in this office, but, um, the doctor analogy. Yeah. You can go to the doctor, say, look, I've got a sore leg. Go away and tell me what what pills to take. Or you can go, I've got a sore leg. And the doctor goes, okay, you know, have you fallen over recently? Um, you know, where's it sore. Which bit's sore? Is it your muscles. Is it a bruise? Have you broken your.

Has it been.

So. Yeah. All these questions.

Really like an analogy.

We do. And we particularly love that doctor analogy.

I quite like that one as well because you know it's what day is it. Tuesday. On Saturday, I did a sponsored walk down in the Lake District for forty miles and my legs are still quite sore.

Well, there you go. And I did. I did a leg workout this morning, so mine are also sore. So the the staircase in the office has experienced a few kind of ooh ah ooh today.

Okay, so, um, my view on, on that question and I'm just, you know, just, just thinking out loud as I, as I get to it is that we do want, we do love working with customers who value what we do and, and give us not free rein, but, but actually let us do what we do best and we explain what we're doing, why we're doing it, etc., not just kind of black box, like, leave us alone. We're not, we're not that kind of agency. And I don't think most good agencies are. So we do like people to give us free rein, but it's up to a point. But we want people to be engaged, you know, because to do our job properly, we need an engaged client who will respond, give us answers to questions, give us access to subject matter experts. Let us record conversations so that we can use that for creating content, etc..

Send us loads of really nice images and videos of projects they've worked on. We can't do that. It's always much better to have a picture of something they've actually done than just go and like, get one off the internet of of something that isn't quite right. You know, if they are really involved and they want to provide us with content and have ideas and, you know, are prepared to give us their point of view, then, you know, it works better if they're, you know, as a team working as a partnership. That's when it always, always works best. If we're all working fairly seamlessly as a, as an entire team.

Okay, so two answers there. What were you thinking?

I, I, you know my view already. Yeah. No, absolutely. It's just not worth kind of, I guess if you're looking to employ somebody to do your marketing for you and you think it's going to require no input from you whatsoever, you're very wrong. Right? It's only going to be successful if you're engaged, if you're involved. I think what's particularly interesting is, you know, originally we were talking about what people should expect when they hire a marketing agency, and we were talking a bit about kind of red flags, I guess a green flag then, if you like, would be if the agency is asking you to, to provide a lot of that information, right? To get stuck in and to tell them about your team and send you loads of photos of your past projects and, and tell you that's something that you think.

Sorry, you actually put out there. I should explain that Alex is actually recording along. Julie and I are sat next to each other and Alex is recording. Uh, we're test driving a system called Zencaster, which so far has been good, but you did cut out right at the end there. Alex.

Fantastic.

I'm sure you said all the interesting.

Things.

And I didn't press the, the, the big red button that I've got, which is to, you know, stop Alex talking. But the.

Ejector button. That's right. Yeah. That's great. Actually, we could stop him at any point if we don't like.

We could literally just turn him off and carry on without him. Yeah, absolutely. Maybe we should. Oh. Bless him.

Um, he looks a bit upset.

Now, Where did we get to? Where did we get to? Cause we were trying to put together this big picture. And, you know, based on the on the discovery, we're doing competitor analysis. We're we're really now starting to dig into the gap, if you like. Um, between, you know, our customer, our new, our new potential new customer and the market they're in and the competitors they're up against.

Yeah. And just say, you know, and then we, this, then we, we spend some time and then we show them like, this is the direction of travel. We think you should be taking to get from A to B. So, you know, that's, that's what we do before we even sort of discuss starting work. That's all the, the preliminaries, if you like.

Yeah. That's right. So we have now, you know, with this particular client, we've established that their branding is we need to we need to redo the brand. We need to, we need to start thinking about the brand from, from, from the start, uh, we've looked at their competitors and we understand who their main competitors are and we understand how strong their competitors are online, how great their websites are or otherwise, and and how those competitors have achieved what they've achieved.

And how that compares to the potential client's website or their presence overall.

Exactly. Yeah. And it's fair to say with this particular customer, they've got one or two main competitors, even globally because they're very specialised market that they're in. But like the gap between where they are, you know, a website with what, twelve pages and their competitors who've got multilingual websites with, with thousands of pages.

Of great content. Massive, massive gap.

That's right.

But having said that, they're actually very strong because what they do is very niche and they're very specialist and the competitors maybe aren't quite so specialist. So they, they do have a, a possible kind of way in there.

Yeah. I mean, like, like a, a lot of customers that we work with, they're a really well kept secret. They've been around for a long time. They've got a great business. They've got, they've, you know, they've, they've word of mouth their business into the position it's in now and really just want to take it to the next stage and tap into the opportunities available online.

Correct. Yeah.

Okay. So I'm looking at the, the list that we were going through when we were doing it. Have you got the list there? Yeah. You know, we looked at domains and branding and that kind of thing. Then we were looking at.

Looking at their websites because at the moment they've got four websites. Um, and it's, it's, as we said before, it's confusing. Um, and we don't necessarily necessarily think that that is the best approach. Um, part a lot of companies do this, they organise websites and things like that in the way their company structured rather than the way their customers are arranged. And so I think they've gone about gone about it in that way and they've arranged it because of historically the way the business is built up into different business units. And customers don't think like that.

So what we're saying is we're looking at all of their their current collateral assets, websites, etc., and trying to figure out if it makes sense to their ideal customer. Yeah. And in this case, as you've clearly said, it didn't. It doesn't rather.

Um, so we're, we're looking at possibly arranging the websites in such a way that they, they appeal to different customer groups rather than, you know, from a business approach. So a customer first approach. Yeah. Um, so that's what we're suggesting. And then beyond that, the next thing we're suggesting is, you know, the, the ongoing work to not only get a website and an online presence up and running, but then to develop it, to grow it in an agile sort of way so that we're, um, using the data, looking at the data, looking at what's working, looking at where again, where the gaps are and seeing what we need to do next. And we, you know, we don't plan too far ahead because we use the data and we use the data all the time to see what the priorities are.

Yeah. And that brings us on to like, one of the things that we'll look at is, is, is there a, is there an element of we really need to fill a gap quickly. And I don't, I don't I don't mean a distress purchase. I don't mean like we've got no work. We've got, you know, twenty five people stood twiddling their thumbs and we need something to happen tomorrow because that really is, is a problem that digital marketing can, can solve necessarily, certainly with, you know, in the B2B market that we're in. But, um, what we're trying to understand at this stage is do we need to just take a steady approach? Um, you know, as budgets allow and, and look at, you know, a twelve to twenty four month growth period, which is quite often the case. Or do we also, is there also something we need to do shorter term, like, you know, and, you know, in, in this particular case, and I don't want this to be all about that particular customer, but, you know, we recognise that that there might be some short term gains, some quick wins as well.

Yeah. And that's quite often the case because it's, uh, more of a long term project to if, if they have a website that really isn't doing anything for them at the moment and their online presence is, is quite a long way from being complete or being competitive. Then you do have to do something else just to, to kind of keep things ticking over while that sort of starts to, to gain traction.

Yeah. I mean, I'm just thinking about another customer who actually is a customer. We've gone through this whole process with them and they are a client. And we're currently working on redeveloping their web presence, which does include some rebranding as well. Yes, I was quite similar.

I think we're thinking of the same people.

I think so, and, and with with those guys, we are doing some, some paid search, uh, some landing pages, which we've spoken about before, which are kind of one page websites for with a very specific purpose in mind. And we are, you know, within what a week or so, we're actually getting them some decent enquiries. They look like decent enquiries.

Yeah. I mean.

We're progressing them.

For the one we're speaking about. We actually did some LinkedIn advertising which was very, very targeted at very specific group of people, a very specific part of the world. And, um, it only took a few days for an enquiry. That seems to be pretty decent.

Yeah. That's right. But, but, but the important thing is by doing the The discovery and figuring a few things out and then working on the strategy. You know, it became obvious that there might be some quick wins and some opportunities. And I'll let Alex speak to this point when we do this paid search work, whether it's using Google Ads or LinkedIn or anything else. It's kind of it can have a double benefit because it can be, you know, the client can see something quite quickly, something happening, both, both a visual landing pages and in terms of enquiries. Um, but, um, there's also some side benefits, if you like, of doing some of this work early on. I mean, Alex, I mean, do you want to sort of speak around the data that we can get from doing some of this, um, quick sort of paid search type work?

Yeah. Right. So this, this kind of, um, you know, how much I love a good test and a good experiment. Um, and I think one of the things that's really interesting about doing something like for the client in question that we're talking about, you know, kind of putting some landing pages up while we're in the background, busy kind of building them a new website, right? Is it lets you kind of test out these ideas really early before you've committed to kind of finishing a website, you can see do these pages work, do the kind of ideas we're thinking of resonate. And when we sat down in that initial discovery session and said, this is your target audience and this is what we think they want to see. Were we right or not? And I think it's fair to say a lot of the time, we're not one hundred percent right the first time. Um, and that's the great thing about it because it gives you time to kind of readjust, retune, think, you know, we've learned this lesson, this didn't work. This did work. People loved it. When we put a video on the page, they hated it when it was just pictures, simple stuff like that. And you can take that forward. And when you're kind of doing those bigger projects, you're then going to it with a kind of body of evidence and you're not just kind of guessing.

Yeah. I mean, what I like about what you just said is, is it speaks to this idea that unlike maybe, um, many, many, many years ago when Julie first started in marketing.

Oh, that was a long time ago.

There might have been a thing, maybe a twelve month plan or something like that.

Oh yeah. Totally. You'd have a twelve month plan and it you would, you would write it, you would type it out, you would print it out. You would put it in a corner, you would ignore, you would ignore it. Then you come back to it twelve months later and go, oh, that's what we were supposed to be doing.

So inadvertently, a lawyer had the twelve month plan. You weren't necessarily following it, which is kind of like what we're seeing now, where, you know, most decent agencies will not talk to you about, oh, yes, we'll put together a twelve month plan of attack. It's it's kind of like almost thirty to sixty day maximum, you know, because it's all about iteration. It's all about seeing what's happening. It's all about doing more of the good stuff, less of the bad stuff. And as Alex said, you know, some of the stuff we do works. Some of it doesn't work.

Yeah. And that's a brilliant thing about sort of digital stuff. You know, when I was like originally started out in marketing, you were printing a brochure and you printed thousands of these things and you kind of had to use them because it cost you a fortune. They were sitting taking up space in your office and, you know, you just had to kind of live with them. So if they weren't right, you were kind of stuck anyway because you'd used all your budget on them. Whereas this way, you know, you can you can change something little. You can like, say, put a video on the page or change the pictures or change the headline or, you know, try a slightly different approach without really spending very much more money. And you could be a lot more flexible, a lot, a lot more reactive to what the market wants and what's changing out there.

So the purpose of this podcast was to talk about what to expect. If you if you're working with a digital marketing agency, and if you're working with a good agency, you should expect, um, the, you know, the direction of travel to change, you know, I'm not going to use the word pivot. Definitely not going to say pivot.

You wouldn't like it.

I'm not, I didn't did I say it? Okay. So you've got to be, you know, expect them to, to be changing direction.

To be pivoting, to.

Be changing direction. And, and for that to be part of the experience of working with the agency. Because what they're doing is they're looking at what's happening, measuring using all kinds of weird and wonderful tools. And we'll talk about tools in some other podcasts.

I think I'd be really worried if the agency just followed the plan blindly and said, well, this is the plan. This is what we said we're going to do, so we're going to do it. I think that would be really, really disturbing because you can never get it quite right.

Speaking from experience, I think it is fair to say that there are some clients who definitely have that expectation, right? When you tell them, we tried this and it didn't work, so we're not doing it anymore, they're like, oh, but you said it would work. You know, this was the plan. This was what you were going to do. And I think we have to have those conversations quite a lot, don't we? Really, where we kind of explain to people that, you know, the plan as set out was always kind of subject to change.

Is that just a polite way of saying we get it wrong all the time?

No, I think that's what people think, for sure.

The thing is that that marketers always had potential to get it wrong. It's just that now we know if we're getting it wrong and we can sort it much, much faster. But you know, your marketing is not a science. It's partly science. It's partly not science. So, um, you're dealing with human beings who are unpredictable. So yes, you can try and predict what they're going to do, but they won't necessarily do it. And so, you know, you've got the ability to see if they've done what you think they're going to do or not. Then you've got the ability to change. But you can never predict human beings properly.

It's good that you talk about predict there because what we're doing is we're moving through the what the, you know, the process that the agency or, you know, most agencies, decent agencies go through, you know, the intelligence gathering, discovery, then going away and working on strategy and then thinking a little bit about the tactics they're going to employ to deliver the strategy. And we've spoken loosely about some of those pay per click, etc.. And then there's the like, you know, what we think will happen part, you know, so when you're going, when you're going back to customers before they're saying, great, let's start working together, you know, before agreeing the budget or anything else, you know, you've got to have some idea about, we've spoken in the past about guarantees and how like, oh, yeah, we'll get you to number one in Google, yada, yada. You know, that's kind of not what, what grown up agencies do. I mean, grown up agencies should be able to guarantee to move the dial and improve things and make a difference. And that's part of the process of whether you're going to work with the agency or not.

Well, yeah. What's the point otherwise?

Yeah. And the thing is, it's like a sense check, isn't it? So, you know, we've looked at everything and this is our expectation of what's going to happen over the next twelve months, eighteen months or whatever it is. And at that point, you go back to the customer and have a conversation. And it's a great sort of, um, it's great for like, you know, the balances, the checks. Well, yeah, this all makes sense to us. And what you've said about what we're going to achieve makes sense to us as well. And we're all then pushing in the same direction.

Yeah. And, and at that point, you agree kind of how you're going to measure if it's working or not. So.

Well that's right. Yeah. I mean, what metrics might be.

Yeah. You know what the outcomes are supposed to be. Therefore you know what you're supposed to be measuring.

Yeah. That's right. That's right.

It's interesting. It might be because we're in a kind of read evo echo chamber here, and we're all kind of singing from the same, the same hymn sheet. But, you know, when you put it in those terms, it seems really bizarre that, you know, there are agencies out there who do kind of say, yes, I know that you need SEO. And yes, I know that you need this much SEO a month because really, you know, we're not prophets, are we? We're not here to kind of tell the future. We can't realistically, we can't say what will or won't work. Or we can say is that we will keep trying things until we find the thing that does work. And then, yeah.

I mean, I would, I would maybe take issue like it's not quite as desperate as that sounds. I mean, that sounds a little bit stark, like you have no clue at all. We'll just keep trying things.

We have a pretty good idea what's gonna work.

Sandwich board will walk up and down the high street with a sandwich board. Let's try that. Uh, I'm only being facetious, Alex. You know I am. But, I mean, we are applying, like, our experience. We know what's worked before. We we've kind of know that the techniques that should be employed and what should happen as a result of them. I mean, you know, it's a very noisy, crowded marketplace. We know that, for example, working on search engine optimisation is going to be is going to be difficult because it's a noisy marketplace with lots of competitors. Whereas, you know, the customer we were we were working for this morning, the client we were working for this morning, they're in a, in a global market where there aren't many people who do what they do.

And so it's very different.

Yeah, I think I think we can get good organic search traction for them really quickly. And that's and it's that, you know, applying that experience and expertise and, and setting realistic expectations. And I think, you know, that means if it's indeed the other way around, you know, being able to have that kind of difficult conversation that like, well, we're going to do this, but it's going to be tricky because you are, you're playing catch up. You know, you can't, you know that, you know that your digital presence isn't great. That's why you're talking to us and maybe other agencies and, you know, you recognise that, you know, you should therefore recognise that you're somewhat playing catch up. And they're not easy conversations to have, but you've got to have them now. Yeah.

You know, yeah. And yeah, you just have to make them recognise it. You know, it's not instant results. It's a long, hard slog and you know, we can get them there, but it's going to take work. Yeah. Um, and, and the thing about sort of, you know, yeah, we could get it wrong. It's more down to we know rough, you know, we know the big things that need to be done. It's more the detail that you tweak, you know, the headlines, the pictures, the, the specific tactics, um, that you use or the, the detail within those tactics that you tweak. But the, the general ideas are, you know, we, we know what sort of things need to be done.

Mhm. That's right. Yeah. Okay. I mean, based on what we were working on today, I mean, is there anything else from your show notes from the, from the session we did this morning for that particular customer that we haven't covered?

No. That's it. That that's everything. Um, that's the next thing is to, you know, send the document back to the client and say, look, you know, here's, here's where you are and here's where you want to be. This is how we think you're going to get there in general terms. And, um, you know, let's have another chat and, and work out what the next steps are.

Yeah. Including, uh, discussions around budget.

Yeah.

Yeah. That's right. Having already had maybe some early conversations around budget to see that this kind of broad alignment.

Yeah, they know roughly sort of the, the sort of ballparks that we're operating in, but it's now a, you know, how much do they need to spend and how much are they able to spend to, to, to do the things that we've laid out in this document?

That's right. And usually, usually it's about, um, the speed with which you can achieve what you now know needs to be achieved is dictated by the budget. Yeah. You know, that's why there are some agencies and we've spoken about this before that do accelerator programs where they just chuck a, a load of people for a six to eight week period at a project and almost use like a twelve month marketing budget in, in less than two months. Yeah. But, but really move the dial quickly. That's an option for some businesses, businesses that have that have got, you know, they've got the money to do it and, but just haven't established a good digital presence sometimes choose that option.

Yeah. If they're just ready to sort of take a big leap and, and they realise that they, they have to use the P word, they have to pivot. Okay.

So so that's a klaxon.

We need.

A pivot. Yeah.

It's another I have another slightly leading question, I guess about budgets though. So like as a, as a baby marketer, um, when you are going to clients, you're often I'm right in saying, giving them a range, right? You're not saying this is how much you need to pay to achieve your goals.

Well, we genuinely, genuinely don't know because we genuinely don't know what needs to be done. And indeed, just before you say anything, I mean, what what will often say to people at the end of this process, the whole kind of gathering of information, looking at a strategy is, you know, we say to people, in our opinion, whoever you get to do the work, whether you actually decide after this that you don't want to work with us, you want to work with another agency. This is the work that needs to be done. Um, and you know, my view is if you, if you did this exercise with two really good agencies, the chances are there would be nothing between what you're saying, what we were saying rather, and what the other agency was saying, you know, the work required is the work required. You know you're reasonably fit. You want to run a marathon in six months time. There's plenty of, you know, websites that will tell you exactly what you need to do. You know, by week ten, you should be doing this three weeks before you should do a twenty mile run. Then you should taper off. And it's like, you know, if anybody says, nah, just, just go for a two mile jog, you know, the week before and you should be fine, you know, you know, talking nonsense.

Yeah.

Are you speaking from hard won experience, Dave? Did you not do any training for your walking marathon?

Yeah.

It's that's right though it's there is a, an amount of work to be done and you know, you can't get around that. There's, there's not a quick fix to, to developing a sort of robust online presence.

Well, actually what you just said and sorry, Alex, I will bring you back with your leading question in a second. What you just said, you know, there's an amount of work to be done. And what we're really saying is in answer to the big question is, what's it like working with an agency? Working with a good agency means they will spend time with you figuring out what needs to be done.

Yeah.

You know, however painful, however much work it turns out, needs to be done, that's their primary aim is to is to make sure that there's that there's terms of reference that everyone can relate to. Everybody understands the current position and where we want to get to.

They're not going to guess and they're not going to come up with ridiculous quick fixes.

That's right. Yeah.

They're going to listen.

Yeah. Got you. Alex, can you even remember your leading question?

In a way, you've kind of preempted the kind of point I was slowly meandering towards.

No you're not.

But yeah, what I was going to say is, um, ultimately, I guess with budget, what we're really saying a lot of the time is, you know, X amount of work needs to be done and the budget simply determines how fast or how slowly that work gets done. Right. Which is why they often go back to people with a range. Yeah, we're.

We're pretty much all agreed on that, I think. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, like, like in anything, I mean, if you're in the market for a new car, we do like a good analogy. So you walk into the Volkswagen garage and you sit down with the salesman and saleswoman salesperson. Um, you know, they're gonna really want to establish quite quickly either what your monthly budget is or how much cash you've got, aren't they? You know, and that will help them determine whether they're showing you an ID three and ID four or, um, nope, a Volkswagen. Yep. You know, that's going to make determine it. And so you know, the budgets, you know, if I go into the VW garage and say I need a car that will carry a family of five, it will tow a caravan and it will get me out of trouble if I'm off road. Well, that narrows it right down. And whether you like it or not, you're going to have to buy whatever it is, a Tiguan, you know, and the Tiguan is forty grand or fifty grand or whatever it is. You know, there's no way around it. That's the car you need.

Yeah. You're not going to get that for five grand, you know.

That's right. Yeah. Although I do know a bloke. Speak to me after the podcast.

Excellent.

Dave's exhaustive knowledge of Volkswagens on display here.

Well, I've got two of them. So yeah, I do quite.

Like.

I do quite like.

I've got one.

Oh yes. You have as well. If that were a bit of a VW agency, Dave's got.

I've got a VW.

Golf. Yeah. That's right. Alex you've got a mini.

And we I think we're digressing. I think.

We are.

Perhaps it's time probably.

Because.

Up a little bit.

I think.

We've covered it all haven't.

We. Yeah. So if you're still listening well done. Thanks for listening. If you want to send us any questions about this subject or any other suggestions. Yeah. Volkswagens, if you want to suggest something that you'd like us to talk about in one of the future podcasts, we'd love to hear from you.

Um, on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, even leaving comments.

In the podcast.

Thingy. Phone us, write us a letter, whatever.

Write a letter to attach a letter to a carrier.

Seal the letter box.

I like letters, send us a card, bunch of flowers, anything you like.

Yeah.

Okay, great.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.