How To Market Effectively During Financially Interesting Times – Episode 80

Well, if you don't understand what the marketing is doing, then you think, well, we stopped spending money on marketing. Nothing changed. We didn't see anything bad happen except we had more money in our account at the end of the month, which was great.

That's a really good example of that happening. I did some work for a tattoo ink company once. They sold tattoo ink to tattoo studios. Well, yeah, but also a huge business. They basically had this whole thing with PPC where they were spending about ten grand a month on PPC ads. Um, and one day the owner woke up and he was like, cut the PPC budget. And at the end of the first month, he was like, that's the best decision we ever made because I've got ten grand more now. And in six months time, they came back to us and they said, our business is basically on the brink of bankruptcy. Yeah. Um, can you rescue it? Can you help us kind of revive our marketing machine? Yeah, because we turned it off. And in the short term, it looked fantastic. And in the long term it absolutely crippled everything. But because they didn't actually know how many of their leads were coming from the PPC campaign. They thought they'd saved money initially.

Okay, welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. And I've been away from the podcast for quite a while with Covid and various bits and bobs like that. So, uh, I'm delighted to be back, I think, although I've got absolutely no idea what we're going to talk about. But you have Alex, so give us an outline of what we're going to talk about today with you, me and Julie.

Well, we'll see how long it turns before it turns into car analogies. But to start with, we're going to be talking about marketing on a tight budget because everybody knows we're just about to enter into a recession, probably, and budgets are going to be very tight.

I think they've been tight for a little while.

I think people are gonna get worse.

I think people are cautious at the moment. I think uncertainty that leads to people not making decisions and not spending money. So, um, rather than not doing marketing, maybe there are ways of doing marketing, but, but keeping your budget.

Well, how.

Are we.

As, how are we going to make sure that we provide something of value in this podcast without sounding like, please don't stop spending money on marketing because we need you to spend money on marketing because that's how we make money.

I don't think that's fair. Maybe we just say that and leave it at that.

Yeah. That's done. End of podcast. No, I mean, so I think basically the call kind of like idea really for this was at the same time as all this stuff about the recession was going on. Um, HubSpot also released their state of inbound marketing report. Um, and in it, they talk extensively about, you know, different things that people are trying different trends in marketing. One of the key findings of the report is that for B2B businesses, especially, actually the thing that's returning the most value is the stuff that we always bang on about the content marketing, the inbound stuff, the right good stuff, and put it on your website. Focus on making your website a really good and useful resource. Um, and I guess that's it really, because I think ultimately when you hear something like, oh, my marketing budgets getting slashed, my budgets tightening, I've got no money to spend on marketing, all the stuff that you really want to spend on the TikTok videos and the paid advertising and all that stuff has to go out the window. And then it's a question of, well, what can I spend to get a decent return? And that, I think, is something we can talk about at length, isn't it? Maybe.

Yeah. Things, things that don't cost millions but but are still, you know, you're still keeping going. You're still you've still got a presence and you haven't just, like disappeared off the face of the earth. You're still visible. But maybe, you know, just being a little bit more selective with how you spend your marketing budget.

Yeah. Okay. Um, I'm sort of racking my brains to try and think about how we, um, I don't know how we add some value to this because we're basically saying HubSpot, surprise, surprise, sell marketing software have just brought out the state of inbound report. And that says that you should definitely be spending money on inbound marketing, which is effectively content marketing, which involves search engine optimisation and blogs and videos and podcasts. And, you know, you know, content that actually helps to entertain and educate. Business to business type audience. Um, you know, I'll play devil's advocate. I mean, of course, HubSpot are going to say that because they're trying to flog software as we know only too well.

Yeah. But I think they've, they've, they've researched, you know, a lot of marketers and this is, this is what the audience is saying, not what HubSpot is saying. It's not coming from them. It's actually coming from the market. Um, and that's what people are focusing on right now. Um, rather than maybe the sort of glitzier side of marketing.

Okay. So the thing is, if you are a business with an internal in-house resource, whether that's one person or a team of people, we could talk about how to use that resource effectively. But if you're a business who hasn't got that. So you're hiring an agency like us or, you know, or a freelancer or whatever to do some sort of marketing for you then? Well, the only way that you can, you know, if you haven't got an in-house team, the only way you can sort of like cut money, you know, save money is like stop paying the agency or the freelancer. Whereas if you've got an in-house team, you could say, right, in-house team. Stop spending money on adverts. Stop doing all this. We want you to do the actual work and produce whatever it is, content or whatever it is instead. You know, or as a business owner, you could say, well, I need to cut my marketing budget. I'm actually going to get rid of my internal marketing team. You know, there's limited options, it seems.

Yeah, I guess so. I mean, I guess where I was mainly kind of coming from with this was, you know, in the agency example, there are people who are paying us and there are people who are also, you know, alongside paying us to do stuff to their website. They're also paying Google ads a certain amount of money every month for their advertising budget. They're paying us Facebook a certain amount every month for their Facebook ads budget.

There may be taking adverts in like Business press or newsletters. There may be going to expeditions, expeditions, exhibitions, perhaps expeditions, exhibitions and spending a lot on a on a stand because they kind of need to be seen. But it maybe isn't bringing in returns. So there's probably things they can cut that are, you know, less, um, cost effective than their content marketing. I would just say, if you're going to cut anything, it probably should be the last to go because, um, yeah, other other things maybe kind of are the nice to dos and they're visible, but they don't actually bring in so much return.

So how do we change the mindset? Because when things are going well and there is money available, as I've said before in previous podcasts, and we've said before, and it seems to be, you know, pretty much well accepted that marketing departments have to fight for their budgets. Marketing departments are always the first to get their budgets cut. So how do we or rather, do we need to think about how we change people's perception of marketing? I mean, why is it that marketing gets cut first and has to fight for every penny, and now we're actually in a recession? You know, why is it that we're now having to, you know, do this podcast, for example, and talk about how to, you know, why you shouldn't stop marketing and how to get more from your marketing budget. It seems. It seems that marketing always seems to get.

Marketing and training budget to get cut, because there are there are costs without an immediate sort of, um, return. It's, it's slightly longer term and it's slightly harder to market to, to measure. So, you know, like investing in training. Yeah, you're upskilling people, but you don't see the benefit of that maybe for a couple of years you're, you know, some, some marketing particularly like your sort of TV ads or whatever, you know, are, are very much long term brand building. You might see the benefit of them. Over the next few years. But that's a lot of money to spend when you when you need results now.

Yeah, I think see, I think we're actually to blame for this. I think this is partly marketers faults because I.

Oh, no doubt.

I see where you're coming from. But I also think that this is again and again and again this comes down to the whole problem of attribution, doesn't it. It's that we do not as well. Maybe we do, but lots of marketers don't do a very good job of actually saying, I generated that sale. You know, that lead came from our marketing efforts. We can point to the Facebook campaign that somebody saw that made them decide to buy that product. There's so many businesses that we've worked with over the years that just do not do any of that. They don't do proper conversion tracking. They don't look at the enquiries that come through HubSpot or any, any other CRM platform and say, oh, okay, that came from our ads. Therefore, ads generated a sale. It's just, you know, some leads come in, they do some marketing. If when they increase their marketing spend, the number of leads increase, they say, oh, the marketing is working, but there's no actual kind of detailed, granular attribution going on. So when somebody turns around and says, what's the point in marketing? They can't say, well, seventy percent of your leads were generated by one of our marketing campaigns. They just say, oh, we think it works. And then it's not very difficult.

Yeah. Some of the enquiries we've been dealing with, dealing with recently have said more or less that, that we need some help to get some information out of, for example, HubSpot, because we were not really clear where the opportunities in our pipeline have actually originated from.

So source.

Attribution is a problem.

And that's a massive.

If you're doing digital digital ads, any sort of digital work, it's a lot easier to measure than the, the offline stuff, which, which is really, really hard to.

Measure. But, and I guess that's the point really, isn't it? I mean, that's essentially that's what we're saying. It's that you should have a decent handle over what's generating your leads, and you should focus your time and your money and your effort on that. The thing that actually works for most B2B businesses, I think that is going to be the, the softer kind of organic SEO side of things. The creating content and putting it live. But yeah, I mean, whatever it is that's working for you, there will be businesses out there that are generating most of their sales through paid advertising. And it would be stupid to turn that off if that's the case. But there's a there's a wider.

Problem, measurable, you know, but I think part of it, you know, if you're if your budget is tight, you just have to focus in a lot more and be really, really clever about your targeting, you know, with things like, you know, old fashioned direct marketing. It was all about the list. If your list is good, if you're marketing to the right people, then you're, you're going to be more effective. So instead of sort of just this whole scattergun stuff, you know, let's get something out there. Let's take an ad here, let's sponsor a roundabout or whatever things people do, you know, be really, really targeted and, you know, focus on the press.

Stop the press. But I just sent me a Slack message saying, apparently Kwasi Kwarteng is no longer the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Really?

Really know just what we're talking about. Money and recession and everything else. And, you know, and the government, which is clearly in chaos, um, incompetence doesn't even touch the sides.

And, um, the.

Chancellor.

To be in a job, is it how long is that? Just a.

Few.

Weeks. Well.

It just says the BBC understands is what Phil said.

The BBC understands they're not gonna.

He was summoned back from Washington.

Wasn't back from the US.

Come back early you know and he kind of probably you know.

To be honest. Yeah.

Oh well maybe maybe we won't be going into a recession. Maybe we should turn this podcast around into, um, now you've got your marketing budget back. You want to do with it?

I'm pretty sure.

You know what's amazing? I mean, I'm not a huge fan of, well, I'm not a huge fan of the Tories. I'm not a huge fan of Kwasi Kwarteng. He came across as self-assured and like, you know, he was, he was, he was borderline rude when I saw him in, in, uh, being interviewed as if like, you know, I'm not going to answer that question and I and who the hell do you think you are asking me that? So, you know, I'm certainly quite glad that he's not the Chancellor anymore if he isn't. Because although I'm not a party political person, I'm a very political person. And I just I just know I never really warmed to him and certainly he's never.

Got a chance!

Well, his budget was.

Ahaha.

F*cking disaster, wasn't it was ridiculous.

Oh!

That's the first time I've ever sworn on that podcast. But, you know what I mean. It just boiled my piss. It was just ridiculous.

Should we just go off on a different angle?

Well we seem to have. No, I only I only brought it up because he came over a Slack message on my iPad. And we're talking about recession and everything else. And, you know, it just seemed relevant to kind of to bring it up there. But no, let's let's not go.

At what point is it right to sack the person that's messed up your budget?

Yeah, there is a wider point to be made actually about, I think about, um, the, the current government, their plans, the budget and kind of what's happened, which is that ultimately with all of this stuff, a lot of people, the government included, are making decisions based on kind of gut instinct or what they think the truth should be or what they think the economic reality should be.

Use the data.

I think you can probably compare that to an awful lot of the people. You know, there will be people listening to this podcast.

Well done Alex. You've actually managed.

To pull.

It back.

That's my boss. That's what's happening at work too. Because ultimately this is this is what happens, isn't it? Somebody says, oh, marketing's not working. Pull the budget. Marketing's working, give them more budget, but there's no actual work being done.

We need to do tick tock. We need everyone's doing tick tock. We need to do tick tock.

Don't get me started.

Um, you know, things, things like that, you know, they want it to be true. Yeah. I think you're right.

Jumping on bandwagons, leaping to assumptions, deciding what the economic reality is or how valuable your marketing is or what works and what doesn't without actually sitting down and drilling into the data is stupid, but everybody's going to keep doing it.

So okay.

Um, but yeah, data data is the, the marketer's friend when it comes to, to kind of maintaining budgets or, you know, not not getting everything slashed to bits.

Um, otherwise marketing is only seen as a cost.

Yes, exactly. Yeah.

And we're seeing.

We don't know what we're getting. That's it.

Okay. Whereas the sales team are out there, you know, bringing, oh, you know, selling this, that and the next thing and, and somehow they managed to, to stay because, you know, oh, we need more sales. So people think, right, that's the sales department. Actually, if you need more sales, you need your marketing department first.

So if we're not seeing the if we're seeing it only as a cost, we're not really understanding what it's doing. Uh, I had a question written down, which was what happens if you stop marketing? Well, if you don't understand what the marketing is doing, then you think, well, we stop spending money on marketing. Nothing changed. You know, we didn't see all the leads suddenly dry up.

Yeah.

We didn't see anything bad happen, except we had more money in our account at the end of the the end of the month, which was great. So we could hire somebody else to do something else. It's actually important.

I've a really good example of that happening. I did some work for a tattoo ink company once. They sold tattoo ink to tattoo studios. Well, yeah, but also a huge business.

Yes.

In fact, thinking about it, there's only three or four of them in the country. So if they ever listen to this, they'll know exactly what I'm talking about. But yeah, so they basically had this whole thing with PPC where they were spending about ten grand a month on PPC ads. Um, and one day the owner woke up and he was like, cut the PPC budget. And at the end of the first month, he was like, that's the best decision we ever made because I've got ten grand more now. And in six months time, they came back to us and they said, our business is basically on the brink of bankruptcy. Yeah. Can you rescue it? You know, can you help us kind of revive our marketing machine?

Yeah, because.

We turned it off. And in the short term, it looked fantastic. And in the long term it absolutely crippled everything. But because they didn't actually know how many of their leads were coming from the PPC campaign, they thought they'd saved money initially.

Well, you do save money, but after a couple of months, then, you know, you're just you're nowhere to be found. People, you.

Know, potential.

Customers can't find.

You.

So flipping it around in that report. HubSpot is saying that content marketing. Sorry, a little bit of sick.

Just came up when I said that.

I mean, we do content marketing for us. We do it for our customers. You know, I'm being being facetious because, you know, there's a content marketing is, I don't know, I think it's much misunderstood. But with content marketing, it's almost the opposite. You can do content marketing. And six months in, you've spent a lot of time, effort, money, um, and achieved very little.

Yeah.

But because the return can take a while to start.

It can take a while visible.

But you know, yeah, it's interesting though, because when we sat down to do this podcast, I was like all geared up to talk at length about how amazing content marketing is and how it can generate loads of leads. But I'm reminded of something that you did this week to our website, right, which was go on to a load of pages that didn't currently have one and add a CTA. So a dead simple thing that we, you know, because mainly because we.

Tell everyone listening. At least there might be some. If anyone is still listening.

Well well done.

Well done.

Yeah, well, we'll.

Send both of.

You a prize. Yeah.

Um, but like, we're talking about a CTA call to action. Just just talk us through that.

Yeah. So the idea is that you have something, a button, a little pop up box, something that says, you know, now that you've read this, do this thing, right. So you're trying to.

Should offer them something in return.

For.

Clicking that button.

Yeah.

But but it but this is the problem, isn't it? Because loads of people out there doing content marketing where. Yeah, like you say, they'll, they'll spend hours and hours and hours writing these great big, long pieces of very detailed, very in-depth, very good content. But if you don't anywhere in that content, say, okay, now that you've read this, I want you to do this thing next. You don't give somebody a form to fill in. You don't give somebody the opportunity to contact you. Your piece of fantastic content will do absolutely nothing for business. And you're absolutely right. It's the the next step, isn't it? It's thinking the whole process through and thinking, you know, how can I actually make this add value to my business and not just kind of doing it for the sake of it. That is critical.

Yeah, it's seeing it. It's not seeing it as doing it for the sake of it. It's seeing it as part of a process. So like somebody read.

This.

Process out.

What, why? Why did they look for that thing? What were they, what was in their mind when they actually, um, kind of found it? And then okay, now they've read that, have you moved them further down something? So what do they need to do next? And it's thinking of it as a process, not as a one piece of content in its own right. You have to think of it as a, as a campaign and a process so that you see it as part of the bigger picture.

And this stuff is like doubly critical when you're on a tight budget. Somebody saying, prove to me that this is working. If you don't do that stuff, you don't have your nice CTAs, you don't have kind of good lead into other pages. You're not kind of sending people to other bits of your website that they'll be interested in. You are going to find it very difficult to, at the end of the month, justify what you've done.

Okay, so here's a takeaway, um, for people in the marketing department, um, to take to the C-suite, find, do some research, use your Google Search Console or SEMrush or something like that, and find a search term that you can see has got good search volume. And by that we mean it's used by a lot of people. So take that search term. And that search term obviously needs to be relevant to your business. It's the sort of search term that if people used there, you would want them to find your organisation.

Yes.

So not like cheapest whatever unless you happen to be doing.

That's right.

The cheapest thing, you.

Know.

Take that information and show it to the C-suite. If you like the CFO, the CEO or whoever and say, right, lots of people type these words into Google looking to buy this service, which by the way, we provide. And they don't find us, they find all these people because these people are doing X, Y, and Z.

I think that's a very compelling argument.

It's a very compelling argument. I mean, the C-suite might turn around and say, yeah, yeah, that's fine, but we can do something else to get those people or. No, actually, we don't need those people. In which case you think, well, probably the person in marketing shouldn't be in marketing if they don't understand that.

But then thinking about it, is there any easier way of I mean, when we use Search Console to find low hanging fruit, as in keywords that are easy and quick to rank for that, maybe there isn't a lot of competition around that sort of thing. Like there is nothing quicker than ranking for those keywords. If you know what you're doing is there, it's it's quite quick. It's not massively expensive. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's.

A.

Fantastic piece of advice.

It's a very cost effective way of, you know, just getting more people to know about you and to see what you do and try and then move them towards a sale.

Yeah.

It's not as expensive as other things you could spend your marketing budget on.

I don't think so. I, I, I'm really genuinely struggling to think of anything cheaper or more cost effective than going away and creating a piece of content for a really kind of specific search term that, you know, you can rank for within three or four weeks.

And if we rank for a search term. What happens next?

Well.

Well, if you rank.

Reasonably.

Into what you were saying about people.

Yeah. People who are looking for whatever you're selling or doing are going to come to your website and they're going to look at the page you've created, and then you have an opportunity to capture their information and market to them later, or sell them a product or get them to get in touch with you. A million and one things.

Okay, so let's just break down and try and get something of value out of this podcast. Let's try and break down the process because we started off talking about Alex. Did you started off talking about HubSpot State of Inbound Report, and that was basically saying that content marketing is still by a huge margin, the most cost effective way of finding new customers in the B2B space. Is that fair to say? Is that is that captured it? Right? So let's just do a very, very simple walk through of what that looks like for people who don't understand content. We've kind of touched on it a little bit. And in, in a, in a, in a blatant attempt to pad this bollocks out.

Let's, let's go.

Through, let's go.

Through who.

Didn't decide on.

The, the topic for the podcast? No, I.

Didn't object to talking about this. I guess I'm, it's taking me a while to get to a point where we're talking about something in a way that we're.

Yeah.

Actionable. We're all about giving people something to actually action and do. So let's just, um, let's just talk about that, you know, in the broadest sense, like give people a checklist of like, do this, do this, do this, do this, and this will happen.

Yeah, definitely.

When it comes to content marketing, yeah.

An analogy.

Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, not even just.

Step by step explanation.

Of.

How to, how to.

Do how.

To. So you mentioned, you mentioned a few things, uh, and we used a few acronyms. So let's, let's start with the, the Google search console. So the Google Search Console is a place where you can find search terms that people are using to find your website. This will sound like double Dutch, but they're not finding your website. So for example, they're typing something into Google and the Search console will say you're appearing in a search result, but you're appearing so far down the search results that nobody's clicking through to your website. But you can see that people are typing that into Google, and you can see how many times they are. So that's a great place to find search terms, keywords, if you want to call them keywords that people are typing into, search engines that you could potentially rank for.

It's actual data from your own website and Google Search Console is free.

Um, in terms of actually finding keywords that are worth going after. Do we, do you have any kind of advice on that? Because that's something that I think people do struggle with a lot.

Yeah.

Okay. So I think there's two ways you could look at this. You could put the keyword into a tool like SEMrush, S e m I u s h dot com, SEMrush dot com. Get a free trial. You can put the keywords into SEMrush, and it will tell you whether a keyword has got commercial intent or informational intent. What are people? What are the people typing in? What what's.

Their.

End game? What are they trying to achieve? And that's one way of doing it. You could actually put to work all the time and energy you've spent studying and becoming a, you know, a sentient, intelligent human being and think, right, if people type this in, are they looking for information or are they looking to buy shit?

It makes me deeply uncomfortable when you imply that you can mark it with just common sense.

No. Um, so.

You can apply some common sense. You can brainstorm this with a team.

Which.

Then tells you what sort of content people would want to, um, consume if they type that into Google.

Right.

So, but the other one of the other things that a tool like SEMrush will do for you is if you say, you know, collect, collect ten, twenty search terms that you think are potential candidates for doing some content marketing. Um, it will also tell you how difficult it might be to rank for some of those search terms. So, you know, in that sense, it's important that you almost grid the search terms so that you don't say, right, well, everyone, loads of people are typing this into into Google. We're going to write some content and rank number one for that. And then only to find out six months later that you were competing with Amazon and the BBC and.

The BBC or whatever.

You were never going to get in front of people writing content, using that search phrase, or trying to rank for that search phrase. So it's almost like, you know, in, in a real world sense, pick your fights. And that's.

Where.

You know, sometimes, you know, if you've got the expertise in house, you can use tools like SEMrush. Um, but, um, I mean, even even a simple thing, like if you put that a search term into SEMrush and it tells you that if you want to buy traffic using paid search, that every click is going to cost you fifty quid. It's kind of a very good indication that that's a competitive term that you're going to struggle to rank for. Not always but usually. And again agencies revolution. That's us. You know we can certainly help with that as can many other, you know, really good, um, digital agencies help you understand that. But if you, you know, if you're trying to keep costs down and you're trying to do it in-house. So now we've got a bunch of keywords that we think have got commercial intent.

And we've graded them based.

And we've graded them based on how easy or hard it's going to be to rank for them. Um, so again, now we've got to think, right, well, is our website isn't that strong? Doesn't have a lot of authority. We've spoken about that before. So think of authority as rank ability. How easy is it for your website to appear in a search result for a search term? Um, and again, SEMrush will give you an authority score, which is a fairly good indication. So there's again, it's not really as, and I think this is where people miss out. They don't do this. They don't, first of all, figure out how hard is it going to be to rank for this. And not only that, it's like, how hard is, you know, how hard are the tools telling us it's going to be a rank for this, and how credible are we in a search engine optimisation sense?

Will our site be faster or slower than that sort of average difficulty?

You could find a search term that's like, you know, SEMrush is saying it's easy to rank for this, but that's a bit random because if your website has got zero authority or it's got like authority of eight, then for you, it still might not be easy to rank for. Potentially, potentially. I mean, it's not hard and fast.

It depends. It's, it's, it's using all the data and common sense and a knowledge of your potential customers and a knowledge of your business and putting that all together and getting something actually sensible out the other end of it.

Well, yeah, and I think actually, in a way, this talks to the next bit of the process, right? So if you've got a really bad website with poor authority and you know, you're gonna have to work a little bit harder, what you then need to do is go away and look at who is currently ranking in the top four or five positions for that search term. And ask yourself, what do I have to do to beat them? Because this is, I think, the other bit that people really miss, right? It's like, okay, I've got the search term. I know I can rank for it, so I'll go and write some content. And it's what you actually need to do is go and look at what is currently ranking and how you're going to beat it. You know, if everybody else has written five hundred words and you know, you now need to go away and produce something longer, fine. If everyone else has got a video, then you need to go and think about filming a video, right? I mean, that's yeah.

It's what? Yeah. What is Google expecting when it when somebody types that in what, what does it think is the right thing to show them. Yeah. So you've got to make sure that you're yeah, you're, you're giving them the answers that, that are anticipated.

And so we can, we can, we can have an educated guess at figuring that out by looking at the, the search results, the existing search results that we hope to be to be part of in, in the next few months.

Yeah. What else is out there? Um, so there's no use if, you know, if everyone else is doing something amazing and you could just like, well, I've done something, it's not going to be good enough. But if everyone else has done something really quite rubbish, then it's again going to be much easier.

Yeah. Personally, I think this is why most people's content marketing just doesn't work because they read something that says, oh, you need to write a fifteen hundred word article to rank on Google, and they get a search term and they think, right, I'm going to rank for this search term. They write their fifteen hundred word article and they're like, oh, it doesn't show up. And if you go and look at the search term, you know, everyone's written four thousand words or everybody's got video content or it's all Q and A's.

It's all the top ten sites, all have authority. That's sixty, seventy or something ridiculous. Yeah. And just, just on that, I mean, if you look, if you put your site into SEMrush and it tells you that your authority is twenty, that's twenty out of one hundred, you might think, oh, crikey, you know, we've got no chance. That's not strictly true.

Because there are barely any websites with kind of seventy to ninety domain authority.

You are talking your BBQ's and your like your publishers will have the really high ones. But yeah, on average.

I mean, for example, I was doing some, I did a video earlier on and I used share myoffice dot com as the example for the video. And I was, I was blown away by the value of the key words that share my office ranks for I can share. My office has only got an authority score of about twenty or less. Possibly. I mean, it's not a high authority, um, uh, domain. Yet it ranks for some key words. I mean, some of the keywords it ranks number one for would cost one hundred and seventy pounds a click.

Oh my goodness. That's massive.

It is. Yeah.

So there you go. There's the value of having great content as opposed to paying for that stuff. You know if you wanted to pay for each click, you could be paying hundreds. Whereas, you know, you rank organically, you all, you're the only cost is the cost of actually creating that content.

And I suspect.

Doing the research and stuff.

I suspect when HubSpot say things like inbound marketing is the most valuable thing you can do, this is probably what they're talking about, right? Because if you actually get this stuff ranking and you get the traffic coming through and it costs you nothing except the production costs of the initial content versus somebody who's got to pay one hundred and seventy quid a click for some. I mean, B2B keywords especially are really expensive. Yeah, they get really expensive really quickly.

So yeah. One thing I would say is I think we've made this mistake, and I think lots of people make this mistake that they think of content marketing as finding, doing the research, you know, like we just talked. We find the keywords, we establish that, yeah, you know, we can probably achieve a ranking for that. And then, you know, you bang out some content. Yeah. The people who get the most value out of content marketing are the ones who spend time producing content that is just next level. Yeah, yeah. I'm not going.

To.

Say useful educational, entertaining. I'm not going to just, you know, use all the usual tropes, be funny. Yeah, exactly. You know, it's a genuinely powerful, well researched, well written, well recorded. If it's a video or a podcast and well illustrated, you know, there's effort gone into it. You're not just gonna bang out a blog post, even if you bang out four thousand words and it's just auto magically gonna, gonna, gonna work for you as a business. Because even if it attracts traffic, if you don't put energy into it and produce something that deserves to rank and deserves to convert.

That's the thing. Yeah.

Then don't be surprised when it doesn't.

Yeah, I will bang the drum until the day I die. Like people get so hung up in the tactic. I'm going to write content that they completely miss the bit where real humans are going to read that content. So it better be really f*cking persuasive. It better spell out exactly why you should be buying that product or service or whatever.

Like, yeah, don't just chuck it out on Fiverr and you pay somebody whose grasp of English is maybe not that good to churn, churn out a number of words on a topic or, or, you know, run, run it through an AI tool and just kind of come up with some words that actually happen to mention your keyword a few times. That is very different from providing something that people are actually going to find helpful and relevant.

It's akin to spending thousands of pounds, hiring out a billboard, and then just putting up a blank poster with your logo on it. Do you know what I mean?

It's something that just doesn't make sense and has a typo in it.

You know, the time and the effort has to go into the creative really. And also the next steps like we're talking about before. You know, think a little bit about what you want people to do once they've read this information, make it easy for them. I mean, there's a rule in web design, and I think it applies to marketing too, that keep it simple. Don't make people.

Don't make me think.

Because as soon as you're asking somebody to jump through hoops or go away and look for the next step, you've lost them. People don't have time. They don't have the energy. They don't care enough. So make it really simple.

Interestingly, we were talking in the office today. We saw an advert for somebody who I won't mention, but the advert said, we do this and this and this and this and this and this. Like, no, no no no no no, just do one thing. Tell me one thing. You just lose people unless it's it's very simple, right? I'm telling you this one thing. And then next I want you to do this other thing. That's it, that's it. Like, keep it simple. Don't confuse people. Don't make them think. Just lead them through to the thing that that makes most sense. Don't, don't try and do a million things with each piece of content. Do one thing.

In our space, in the you know, we're in a very competitive space in the digital agency space. There are some notable, um, players in our space who produce content and dominate the search rankings and have grown multi-million pound businesses on the back of it. But they will spend fifteen, twenty thousand quid producing a piece of content. Yeah. They'll get, you know, a team of people researching it. Good team of writers writing it, designers illustrating it, potentially video people writing a, you know, accompanying videos and you know, they put real effort.

Into.

It and they create something which will potentially generate enquiries, generate business for them for years.

Yeah, absolutely.

That's the thing about content marketing, which is. I think it can be overstated, but I think the I think the reason that the inbound report, state of inbound report, and if you just Google HubSpot state of inbound, you'll find it and then you can sign up for it. And then HubSpot will pester the hell to buy to buy the software once you do it. But yeah, I mean, the whole, um, um, inbound will be banging on about content, but it, it will be, um, about, you know, the quality and the fact that it can deliver for years to come, which is.

Also the downside because then, you know, you say, well, we'll stop spending money and you can keep getting, you can keep getting traffic for a long time afterwards. So it's not the pain doesn't doesn't show straight away. If you sort of switch off the machine, um, it will eventually, but it doesn't show immediately. So um, it, it's kind of hard to go. Well, look, you cut the marketing budget And this is what happened, because it's got that longevity and it keeps working. But, you know, if you don't keep doing it, there will be a point in the future where suddenly it stopped working. And it won't be immediately obvious. Why? Because it's a very gradual thing.

Yeah. Well, I mean, the premise of this podcast was, you know, how to kind of save money, how to market on a tight budget as we go into a recession. And you just dropped a kind of fifteen to twenty grand figure there, which will have made some people shit themselves. Yeah. Um, does content marketing have to be that expensive then? I mean, are we saying that for a B2B business, if you want to really make it stick and produce something that's going to last for years to come, it has to be absolutely eye wateringly expensive like that. Or can you do this stuff on a budget?

You can do it on a budget if you've got good people. Yeah. Um, things cost what they are.

If you've got, if you.

Well that's what we were talking about. Yeah. I mean, you know, if you've got an inside, if you've got an in-house team and you've got a good team of people. Um, we had Marcus Sheridan on our podcast quite a while ago now for talking about his philosophy. They ask you answer. His business was about to go bust. And so he started content marketing and he then created a, you know, world beating business on the back of the content marketing and has now created a, an agency on the back of figuring out content marketing. So it, you know, it can deliver. Absolutely. But do you know what I mean? It could just be that, you know, you get one or two examples like Marcus Sheridan with the, the, you know, with his, his story. When it comes to content marketing, for most of us, it's a lot harder.

Yeah.

He was fortunate in some respects that he figured it out when it wasn't really a thing. So nobody, you.

Know, nobody else was doing.

It. Yeah. The chances are now as you embark on your content marketing, uh, endeavors, um, that you're gonna.

Be going up against.

Other people. It can be. It can be what feels like a relentless and thankless thing to be doing, producing all this content. And I get why the board level, the C-suite are kind of maybe not entirely sold on it, but I'll go back to like present them with the data. You know, the thing itself speaks, the data tells you that people are doing this thing called searching online, whether it's in TikTok, YouTube, or Google, they are doing it.

They're searching and they're finding somebody. And wouldn't you rather they found you?

That's right.

Absolutely.

Yeah. I don't know whether we've added any value to this conversation, have we?

Uh, yeah. Well.

Looking at, you know, this is something you can do. You can do yourself, you can use the resource you've got in-house, you can use an agency. It doesn't cost an absolute fortune compared to sort of advertising or paying for things that are going to cost you one hundred pounds per click. So, you know, yes, it's more cost effective than the other things. And if you're very, very focused, you're not throwing money at advertising. You know, the fifty percent of my advertising budgets wasted, but I don't know which which half sort of thing that that analogy, um, you're not wasting it because you're only reaching people who are searching for the thing that you do. So it's a lot more targeted and you're not, you're not throwing money away at reaching people who are never, ever going to buy anything from you. You're only reaching people who are already in the point where they're looking for that thing. So inevitably you're, you're honing in on the right people. So you're, you're using your budget more effectively by doing that.

Yeah. Um. There is always a possibility with content marketing that your content educates people and then they go and buy whatever it is they were going to buy off somebody else.

Yeah.

And that's partly to do with your CTAs or the fact partly to do with maybe you're not capturing their email address or whatever. So they're using your resource and then they're, they're going somewhere else. So you're not, you're not grabbing them. You're not you're not keeping in touch with them.

I get that. I also think that what you what is, you know, more important than any of that is your own brand and your own story. I mean, a CTA. Yeah. And of course, there should be a call to action and trying, trying to get people to click a CTA, fill in a form and have a conversation with you. But it's not just about CTA.

No. And they may not be ready at that point. Like you say, they may still be researching.

It's about, you know, you it's, it's about the brand. It just it doesn't matter. You know, how nice the CTA is or what stage they're at. If they find your website and they read your content, but on balance, they look at your business and think, these are not the kind of people I want to do business with. They're just, I just, they're not giving me a nice warm, fuzzy feeling. I'm not, I'm not buying into this brand at all then. So, you know, I guess what I'm touching on is it's all very well thinking about the mechanics of getting people looking at your website, which is content marketing, SEO, keyword research and all that. But going back to there's a great podcast that's on the BBN mixtape. Uh, an ex-boss of mine, Cliff Collier, talks about the value of brand and the value of brand has been lost in the noise and tools and toys of digital marketing. There's a danger that content marketing is one of these toys that people think is, it's all about just getting eyeballs on your website. Well, all right, if you get if you strike gold and you get a thousand visits a week to a particular page on your website because you managed to secure a fantastic ranking, the chances are the law of averages is that's going to generate some business for you. Yeah. But if your brand and everything that sits behind it is fantastic as well. You'll see a conversion rate go from ten percent to forty percent.

I mean, this is the thing, isn't it? I mean, this is the difference between having a shop that's, you know, painted white and all the trainers are just bunged on the floor. And, you know, when you walk into Superdry or something. What we're basically saying is make sure that when you've spent all that effort and time getting somebody to come into your shop, make sure it's really f*cking nice in there. Like make sure that people see it and think, right, this is where I want to buy from. And that's what a website should be doing.

Yeah, that's almost like getting your house in order first though, isn't it?

Absolutely. Decisions are emotional. Even B to B decisions. They're not logical decisions. People people make make decisions based on sort of irrational factors. It's like, yeah, I like they wouldn't even be able to tell you why they bought from one site and not another site. It just yeah, it just made them feel good. It made them feel comfortable. It made them feel safe. There was something there that was like, yeah, I can relate to this brand. I they get me. Yeah. And yeah. And I think that's really, really important. And that's, you know, that's your marketing budget. Your marketing budget does that. If you if you lose your marketing budget and, you know, just do the bare minimum, you're going to lose that.

Yeah, maybe we've come at this backwards. Maybe the real answer to how to market in a downturn is to spend that time actually making sure your website is as good as it possibly can be, and your brand is telling the right story before you worry about where you're going to get people from.

I've been thinking about that, uh, you know, with, with respect to our own brand. I, I, I, I think we're okay. I think we could do better. I look at, I look at us sometimes and I think we've got mixed messaging. I think we've got a potential to confuse people. Um, and I think, you know, it's something that I want to spend a bit of time and energy on ourselves.

Yeah, absolutely. We were speaking about the other day, weren't we?

Yeah. It's a tricky thing, isn't it? Because it's really hard sometimes to look objectively at what you're saying on your website and say, is this is this telling the right story?

That's the fact that we we're not our customers. We don't know how they feel when they look at us.

Well, all I can say is like, if you look at the enquiries that we've been that we've that have come in over the last week.

Mhm.

We're obviously doing something right. I mean, one of the enquiries is, you know, it's a it's a great enquiry from a business who are in the financial services sector, the sector. They're based in the centre of London. They're in a they're in a luxury.

They're in a luxury market. Yeah.

And they absolutely, you know, they've reached out to us and now they've engaged with us and it's fantastic. So I'm not saying that we're getting it horribly wrong, but I think I'd like to revisit it. And I'm I say that, you know, most people should be revisiting this stuff.

Yeah. I mean, that's exactly it isn't it? Like there's, there's this whole thing where like, you're getting some positives. So you think, okay, this is fine. The question is, especially at the moment when your budgets being squeezed and blah, blah, blah, you know, could it be better? Could you do a little bit to tweak the messaging? Could you have a little bit of a rebrand and suddenly you're getting fifty percent, one hundred percent more conversions, and then suddenly every dollar that you're spending on marketing is going twice as far. So yeah.

Yeah, things change. Um, I think I'm going to manage to squeeze in some car stuff. Um.

Oh no no no, we nearly made an it.

It's not an analogy. But if you look at the way the car market has changed, um bear with, I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but, you know, right now I can sell my car for the same price, more or less that I paid for it two, two years ago. Was it two? Was it twenty twenty? I got it, yeah. Two years or just over two years ago. That that is crazy.

Yes.

You know, it's, it's.

A.

Used car, but it's, you know, you.

Know, two years older and it's got more miles on.

You always lose money on cars, but there are now, you know, motorway dot com. We buy any car dot com. We buy absolutely any car dot com.

Please send us your card.

We'll buy your car even if it's knackered dot com. You know, they're all out there. They're all competing. You know they they are. You know, that market has changed beyond all recognition, where suddenly we're in the driving seat. So I don't know. I guess what I'm saying is that don't laugh.

You'll encourage.

No, that was I just like that we were in the driving seat when you're talking about cars.

So what I'm I guess what I'm saying is that, you know, things change a lot. Look at your brand and look at your ideal customers as you do this content marketing to try and get people on your website and make sure you're getting the messaging lined up. Everything that you're saying is going to give those people that visit your site as a result of the content marketing, you know, the feeling that you want them to have, you.

Know, it's the feeling. It's not just the fact, it's the feeling. And you can't sort of separate the two.

Because content marketing is about getting more eyeballs on your website. But it isn't just a numbers game.

Well, no, and this is the problem, I think, with a lot of people's approach to content marketing, right? Especially if you're outsourcing it to an agency and you say, do some content marketing for me, and they'll come back and say, oh, we got three thousand people on your website last month just through the content we published, and that's fine. But if they don't turn tend to customers, it's completely pointless.

That's right.

Yeah. Which is about, you know, choosing carefully, you know, choosing.

Make sure that you're.

Writing about.

Capable of converting as well because yeah, I think that's the, that's the ultimate problem, isn't.

It?

Getting the right people. And then once you've got them making sure that, that you make the most of having them there.

Yeah.

Okay. Well, that's enough of that drivel.

Um.

Uh, yeah, I mean, well done. If you stay to the end of this one, if you'd like to come on the podcast, um, and talk about some aspect of please, for Christ's sake, come on the podcast and talk to us, um, about any aspect of digital marketing, um, or just talk about your pet rabbit. I'm not really bothered. Just come on the podcast, please.

No carpet for that. We've got enough of.

That.

Carpet will be quite good fun. Be quite good to get Craig on Craig Finn he'd be, he'd be a good guest on the podcast. He's an interesting guy. Um, in the meantime, um, stick in through this, um, recession. Hopefully by the time we come back and speak to you again. We'll know who our new Chancellor of the Exchequer is. We might have a new Prime Minister by then. I heard about.

This.

Highly likely.

Well, I heard about. What was it? They were talking on the radio this morning about Rishi Sunak and Penny Mordaunt.

Yes, apparently.

Yeah. Taking away, taking over from Truss and Kwarteng.

Well, halfway there, we're halfway there.

Our American listeners, which are a significant portion of our listener base, will now be like, what are they even talking about? What is any of this?

Yeah, well, we did mention Washington, and Kwasi Kwarteng was summoned back from Washington. And it sounds like he's been he's been sacked in order to steady the markets. Um, yeah, let's not go down politics again right at the end of a podcast. Um, enjoy your weekend guys. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm looking forward to my weekend.

No golf.

Yeah. Golf. But I might go fishing on Sunday actually.

It's gonna be very windy. The fish like wind.

They're underwater.

No, let's just stop. Let's just stop.