Nathan Wrigley: [00:00:00] Welcome to the WP Builds podcast, bringing you the latest news from the WordPress community. Welcome your host, David Waumsley. Nathan Wrigley.
Hello there, and welcome to the WP Builds podcast. This is episode number 164 entitled the how and where of marketing. It was published on Thursday the 30th of January, 2020 my name is Nathan Wrigley and I'll be joined in a few moments by David Waumsley so that we can have our chat, the title of which I've just told you.
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This is achieved through mentorship, events, training and counseling. Please help enable WP and uUP by visiting WP and uUP.org. Okay. Let's get stuck into today's podcast, which as I said, is entitled the how and where of marketing. One thing to say, just before this, David had a fairly slow patchy internet connection on this particular episode, so I do apologize in advance.
I've tried to clean it up a bit, but there's not a lot I can do. It just sort of drops out and fizzles at various points. But what is today's topic about? Well, it's another. Another episode in the exploration of Briony Thomas's watertight marketing book. I think this is about the 10th or the ninth one that we've done so far.
You can read all about the other episodes. There's links in the show notes to all of the other ones, just so that you can keep abreast of, you might want to do them in order, but you don't necessarily have to, and it's all about where and how should we place our marketing. We start by talking about the multitude of ways that I try to promote the WP Builds podcast, and it wasn't really until I.
Put to this episode out that I, I forget how many there were. It's extraordinary and I don't even cover a thousandth of what would be possible. And then we go on to talk about other ways that we might position ourselves and what those messages might look like, different platforms that we might use and how we might use them.
Very interesting discussion and I hope that you enjoy it.
David Waumsley: [00:03:57] Today's discussion is called the how and where of marketing. And again, we are following Ellen from a book, which is called watertight marketing by Brandy Thomas, where she identifies 13 leaks, where businesses can lose potential customers or clients.
And we've been working through an imaginary funnel, which is upside down. And we've been starting with the leaks, which are closest to being customers. So we started with a number, which were really when . Customers are evaluating our services. So they were about forgotten customers, poor onboarding, not having a brand that, customers can identify with, overlay with not having a gateway, a trial or a product, to our offering.
No critical approval, not being aware of, of third party objections that might be out there. Having. No proof of what we do. Well, clients or customers are critically assessing us. And now we've moved onto the whole area of awareness. So we're on the home stretch now. And the last one we talked about information overload, partly about doing sort of content marketing, useful chunks of helpful content for people.
Now we're getting into what we're, I think most people think of as marketing, the kind of how awares and who and how we're going to. Get our message out there to people. So we're combining for this episode, actually two of her leaks, which is how and where. So, gosh, we talked for a long time, didn't we need them? We started this.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:05:25] Every time David and I do an episode, we spend a little bit of time chatting before, and usually that tends to round out about an hour, doesn't it? Whereas today we did about three. We've chatted almost three hours, David, in order to get ready for this episode, and yet we still don't have a clue, in what order it's going to come. So let's just take it in the order of the, the document that we discussed. Shall we.
David Waumsley: [00:05:50] Yes. Well, we could just get to the meat of this. I'm in it. She's really identifying the leak of not knowing the format of we're going to use to reach our potential audience, and then the wear is really about how we get that message out everywhere we possibly can. Really, that's the upshot of what these two are about, but yeah, we'll go through our document because she highlights some good points.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:06:14] Yeah. Okay. That sounds good. The, the first thing that you've written down is all about kind of multiple formats. so the different ways that we can do it is, should we start there?
What kinds of different things do we know about? I suppose stretching right back to the sort of things that would have been around in the, in the pre internet age as well. Yeah.
David Waumsley: [00:06:35] Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's interesting cause this book isn't it. Is he going back six years from when we're recording there?
So 2014 and she's still, if you like, talking about the fact that people should be getting up to date with a lot of the digital stuff, but also reminding those that people still love the traditional methods. So there was a good point she made, which I thought was interesting about larger companies that some employees will still present to their senior staff.
Briefing documents on something they will need to know. Mm. Mm. And that could, that could possibly be relevant if we don't touch print at all. We could be missing out on quite a lot. Really.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:07:19] Yeah. I was listening to a podcast completely unrelated to WordPress the other day, and a very, it was very technical.
Cool podcast. So it is all about the internet and so on. And yet one of the contributors to that, despite the fact that they're heavily into technology, they said, I far rather consume my, my news, and indeed kind of just general reading, via paper methods. So it's, it's a daily newspaper that he buys. He still likes to buy magazines, even though, you know, all of that content could be consumed on an iPad or a mobile phone largely these days. and you know, he still likes to buy a book as opposed to reading it on something like a Kindle. So my feeling is that that audience though is dwindling. He was the only one on the panel. There was four of them on the panel, and not only with the other guests, sort of saying, no, well, that's not how we consume things.
We don't buy newspapers. Everything is on an electronic device. But also, I think they found it kind of. sort of slightly parochial and quirky that he had that opinion. So I, I, I think that too, I think it is on the decline. My children don't really consume anything, in four months that are not electronic.
You know, I can't remember the last time any of them came home from the shop with a magazine in their hand. and if there is a newspaper lying around because one of our family members still. Buys the newspaper every single day. They never pick it up. They're not interested in it. It doesn't have that same kind of pull on them.
David Waumsley: [00:08:47] Yeah. Do you think that the balance though is shifting since this book can? Because I mean, at the end of the day, all I ever do is to try and get clients to start thinking about how digital can do so much more for them. So most of the ones that I know about, they will know about the, the trade publications that they'll publish in without thinking.
They probably won't measure these kinds of things and expos that they need to go to, to promote their. Product or whatever, and I'm spending all, I have been all the time I've been doing this saying, Oh, you can measure everything online, and everything's online and you can be everywhere, which you talked about online.
I'm just wondering now with the high ticket. service or product that we're talking about where somebody has to make a lot of decisions. Do you think it's going the other way now where we need to start thinking a lot more about how we could be a little bit different?
Nathan Wrigley: [00:09:41] Yeah, possibly. and I think, I suppose it depends on the budget in the project. So your example of. Like a trade magazine. So let's say for example, I don't know, you're building a website for some kind of a insurance company or something like that. My, my bet is that there probably is a trade magazine. I never kind of figured out how these things ever got started. Anyway, there's actually a, a comedy show on the BBC, which if you're living in the UK, you've probably seen, and each week they take.
a publication, some kind of industry specific publication. So it might be knitting weekly or freight, I don't know, sort of industrial freight monthly or whatever. And they, they mock it because it's so ridiculous that a publication like this exists. But I suppose if you're in that industry. You.
You would very well know if that exists, but it's not the kind of thing I could introduce them to. I suppose I would have to ask the question, look, are there any print things out there that you, that you consume in your industry that I ought to know about? I'm not going to be able to have that conversation in the other direction, but I, for one, certainly wouldn't be advising any of the clients that I have contact with, to be looking into putting adverts into newspapers or magazines. Not only because I have no idea what the reach of those things would be. but also I've never really done that. I've never really worked with prints or anything, so I would be staring everybody towards digital. But like I say, if they know of some compelling reason to step outside and go back to print or whatever, whatever it might be, then yeah, why not?
David Waumsley: [00:11:15] Yeah. No, I just think, well, people use them in cliche ways, but I just think you know that it's going to get that point where, I think we were talking about this before we'd greeting cards, you know, I think they've died, you know, because everybody just says. You know, happy birthday on the internet, through the groups and on whatever does.
That's what we come to expect. So when you actually receive a physical card, I mean, I know it's very much a British thing and perhaps a a U S thing to do greeting cards, but cause we used to be in that business, it was quite interesting to see who was left, still wanting to buy very tasteful cards and have them hand delivered still you know, it was kind of people who very much. I wanted to stand out and show that they valued somebody. So I just sometimes think, you know, not, not mass, I'm not talking about, you know, shoving leaflets into your Sunday newspapers or whatever, or just shoving stuff about pizzas through people's doors. I'm just talking about, you know, the Pat apps.
We may even need to think more about. Print again
Nathan Wrigley: [00:12:17] It is interesting though. You use the example of, you weren't talking about print, print media being shoved through the door and the the, the demonstration that you had was a, a pizza one. Actually. You know what? If I was building a website for a pizza company.
I think I would be telling them. Right, so presumably you're going to produce like 10,000 leaflets and pay somebody to walk around the streets and push them through the door, because that is, that is literally the way that I operate. When I want to get a pizza, I go to the drawer. Which is full of leaflets from, you know, all the, all the, the kebab joints and the pizza restaurants in town.
And I don't know if that's unique to me or maybe that still carries on in different parts of the world, but that is how I do it. I don't go on the internet for that. So that's quite quirky in a sense. But for everything else I do. But if I'm ordering a takeaway, I go for the physical, actual menu that somebody put.
Through my door. And so if you didn't put a leaflet of that kind through my door, I will not be calling you. So that's really on its head, but I can't think of a single other way where that holds true. Everything else I would say in my life is, is through some sort of Google search.
David Waumsley: [00:13:32] Ah, so the key thing really is local you go, because it's quicker to get a leaflet for your local place that you're going to go and buy your pizza from. That's really it. So you can, you could cut down a load of time.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:13:43] And also, so this raises another quirky thing. The purchasing decision is a communal affair, and so the, the menu hits the table.
And they're, they're quite big. They're kind of like, they usually, by the time you've unfolded them all and got all the flaps, then everything out there kind of like a three in size, you know, so they're like, I don't know, 30 centimeters high and about 50 centimeters across and all the people gather round and go through the list and point and we share like what if, what if you have that?
And I have a bit and you finish off of that and all that. Anyway, so the point is. It's a communal thing, but nothing else has that same delivery mechanism, if you know what I mean. We don't pour over things in that way for for anything else. So I think that is a bit quirky.
David Waumsley: [00:14:30] Okay. But if we applied that logic then to sell in a website to someone, do you think that could be something, but delivering some kind of magazine to people who might be interested in having a new site that that can be passed around through different, you know, directors and whoever's.
Relevant. They could actually browse through that. Yeah. Do you think it might work?
Nathan Wrigley: [00:14:52] Yes. I think there could be mileage in it. I suppose the only problem is knowing who's hand to put it in. Obviously with the pizza analogy, literally every body within a certain geographical radius is a potential customer, so just spraying them all out there seems like a good idea.
So long as they don't hit the bin and they hit the drawer, we call it the drawer of chaos. if they hit the drawer of chaos, there's a chance that it's going to be pulled out and I'm going to buy something from you. But you know, if you're approaching a company, I guess there's some mileage to it, but it feels like the scales, the balance of the scales have sort of tipped in favor of, it's a bit of a waste of time, to, to try and create something for a particular company.
The truth is, I don't really know, but it feels to me like. Print is probably less and less meaningful, in just about every single, line of business. I th I think that's my gut reaction.
David Waumsley: [00:15:47] Yeah. But if I'm convincing myself the other way now, cause I was talking, we were talking earlier, and it's not really in the book, that face to face, it know, but talking about how people like to consume their information.
So we're talking about the how. And I do think when it comes to. A huge chunk of people that need a website is that they just too busy to get online. So getting in front of their faces, as a lot of people do really well. People like yell.com or Hybu. I think the cold in the U S maybe in the UK as well.
They do that, don't they? They literally have sales force that go out there and they go and. Contact businesses in their workplace. So if you were combining the two, you know, because I, I'm, it actually works, I mean, it worked on my brother. He went with them because he knows he needs a website and it's. The case with, I think a huge chunk of the clients that I will get is that I know that they need to have something done, but they never get round to telling me.
But if somebody was in front of them, if I was in front of them, they'd probably commit to something. I'd get them to the next stage. But I find it really difficult through email. But I also think. What about the magazine might actually work if you were sending it out to businesses with a call because you would save them the bother of having to go on the internet and search for web designers that you might want for what you pass a terrible search. You know? Have you ever tried to do that? Try and find out if you wanted to find a website. What a nightmare. Yeah. So many options.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:17:18] Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. I suppose just coming at it from a different angle, it feels like the, the modus operandi for gaining this kind of information has shifted juring our lifetime to the point where.
In the past, it was incumbent upon the advertisers to tell you they existed before you needed them. And the only way really to do that is to, is to use, something like a paper based advertising. So let's say it goes into a newspaper, it goes on a billboard, it goes on a leaflet, which comes through your door.
So. the point where you suddenly need a new kitchen table, you kind of know, and if you didn't know, we had this book in the UK called the yellow pages, which was a great big yellow book. It was about three inches thick, that they would leave on your doorstep. And it, it was basically Google for your local area.
And the point being that all of that stuff was compiled before you needed it. So it was there accessible. Whereas now. I don't need any of that stuff compiled before I need it. I need it when I need it. So I use Google at Hale to go and find what I need at the point I need it. So let's say, you know. I want to buy a kitchen table.
I am not going to go through the yellow pages to look up carpenters or furniture shops. I'm going to go straight to Google for that because I like the way it's presented. I like the fact that it's interactive. I like the fact that immediately from that search, I can click on something and go directly to their promotional materials, AKA website.
whereas if I'm using . Paper-based materials. Well, there's a finite amount that you can fit on a page anyway. if I'm using the yellow pages, well darn it. Tried to click on the yellow pages and I'm telling you, David, it doesn't lead you anywhere. You just saw finger. So I think that's changed a little bit from the information coming, being printed before time, which I might need to nothing being printed, but at least when I click on the links, I can get what I need at the point that I need it.
David Waumsley: [00:19:27] Yeah. You know what if I, I guess, and I thought about this before, but never done anything about it, cause I'm, you know, traveling around the world, but I'm with a thought, one of the best. Here's my problem. The thing is, it's fine when you know what you, you. You need, yes, you're going to search for it.
Because you already know a lot of the time you're trying to promote something that they don't know they need yet. And sometimes that is a website. Yes. You know that their website isn't doing the job that it needs to, so you've got to get before them. So I do think one side of the kind of physical promotion would be in person presentations.
If you, if you could address kind of these business organization networking. Places. I'm sure a lot of people do that. I'm sure that would really help to educate people about their businesses as a slot there, but it might tell people who didn't know that they needed a new website.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:20:18] Yeah. I have a friend and a friend of our extended family who has an incredible networker. That is to say that I think pretty much every he, he's into cars, he buys and sells cars, which I think would be quite difficult if you simply were, you know, you had a garage and a forecourt and you would wait for people to drive past, but his technique and it fits his personality type superbly is too.
It's just go to these networking events and simply explain what he does, where he is. And so essentially, he is, an advert. He's a walking advert during that time. I, on the other hand, I'm awful in those situations. I really don't feel comfortable in them. So I ended up making a mess of it and looking like an idiot.
So, you know, whatever, damaging my business rather than promoting my business. But I think that for the right personality type, those networking events can be great, but they just don't suit me at all.
David Waumsley: [00:21:13] Yeah. And the time's up. And I think they are, you have to have local customers for that to work. But it does have an advantage, doesn't it?
It over the digital. So I'm in the digital equivalent of doing the kind of, the kind of presentation thing, you, it wouldn't work in the same way. So you could put on, like, we do videos and podcasts and we could even have kind of, online conferences as well, but people need. To search for that thing to founders.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:21:42] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point, I think.
David Waumsley: [00:21:44] I think that's the thing, isn't it? Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:21:46] I wonder if, I wonder if search will even be the sort of, the way that we do things in the future, because, you know, you go back, I don't know, 20 years. Prior to Google and clearly that that wasn't a way of doing anything.
It was either word of mouth or looking in these publications, things like yellow pages or you know, some kind of business directory. And then the internet came along and we'd developed this search metaphor and now everybody searches for everything if they don't know something. But always mindful that history shows that what we've got right now is not what we're going to end up with.
I just wonder if search in the end will be replaced by some other technology. You know, it feels like voice search and things like that are just sort of starting to gain a little bit of traction. So the idea that we go through search engine pages may or may not be the way it's done in the future.
David Waumsley: [00:22:34] Yeah. Did you, there was a comment by Jim Galleano on the last discussion that we had where he was talking about, I think his example was a plumber, and about how he was saying that there were some, some local trades people who were interviewed effectively on solving kind of problems, and that's used as adverts.
So I just thought this is almost a bit. Isn't this in this to advertise for people, you know how difficult it is with local chase people, for them to give you something like copy on a website to be able to sort of promote what it is they do. But if you ask them a bunch of questions about the problems that they solve in their job, they can talk for hours and give you really valuable information.
So I think that's what he was talking about and I just thought, wow, that was quite interesting that, you know, there's room in local ADA. You know, to, to sell kind of local services and I love the format. I love the idea that you could get that kind of information out of a client. I thought, well even if not, I'm going to do that a little bit more for websites and just going to say, going to ask you a bunch of questions you answer and I'll use that fun copy.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:23:38] That would just be text copy on the website or would you literally be recording their audio and putting that up? I'll possibly with like an attached YouTube video of them saying it to the camera.
David Waumsley: [00:23:48] Wouldn't it be great if you could get clients to do that. But I just thought it was ingenious. I just thought that was a really good point from Jim. I've not heard that cause like you, I don't listen to kind of local radio, but now people are doing that.
I think, well it's engaging because again, it's content marketing, isn't it? It's kind of advertising and content marketing. I think that's his point kind of combined together. Yeah. In a format we're not used to, but
Nathan Wrigley: [00:24:10] yeah, I mean, so we're sort of touching and skirting around the fact that there's, well, everything that we've said so far seems to have dwelled upon the fact that there's now types of content, which feel a little bit, obsolescence, you know, print and so on.
Certainly from everything, excuse me, that I've been saying that's going to the direction of travel, but of course, this, it doesn't just stop there because the online content, there's so many different formats to that, and we've just touched upon it so. For example, it might be that you want to consume a text based content.
You want to read it, or in the case of this podcast, you've got the choice to read it because it gets translated or listen to it. Or perhaps you prefer to watch videos or you might want to interact on Facebook, or you might want to go through Twitter or Pinterest might be your thing. The point I'm trying to make.
Badly, I think is that there's millions of different formats that you could, well, millions is an exaggeration. There's multiple different formats. and knowing which one your customer is most likely to hit upon is difficult. And so the, it feels like the mantra in, in more recent times anyway is just be everywhere all at once. But that of course leads to different problems of oversaturation.
David Waumsley: [00:25:26] Yeah, absolutely. I'm aware. I'm very sensitive to that because we feel like some people are just, they're too much ourselves.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:25:35] Oh, sweet. Oh, here too. Around
David Waumsley: [00:25:39] Too much. But yeah, it's. I'm not, I just wonder if that's a, I've seen some people, I don't know if this is really truthful, but just some people that I know or used to follow, you see them cutting down a little bit.
And they were the people who used to have that mantra online of be everywhere, and they were, they had everything on automation, so it felt. In the early days when they used to follow them and didn't understand how they did it. It did feel like they literally must spent all day long, literally, you know, talking to people on various channels, but they seem to have disappeared a lot. So I wonder if there was another trend. Going against that.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:26:14] Yeah. Kind of like reacting against it. I wonder if those people though had a very large amount of success at the beginning because they were some of the first people to bring that idea and they were on the internet in a time when internet celebrity was.
Just for a handful of people. Whereas now the, the capability, well, here's a perfect example, me doing this podcast, the technological barrier to doing that is, is almost zero now. So maybe it's just that everything's got a bit water down. And so, you know, perhaps they were used to being slightly more famous, should we say, and it just isn't paying off in the same way that it, that it did in the past.
I'll give you a, I'll give you an example of like the, the, the technical capability. So just, just using this podcast and an example of possible oversaturation, which I hadn't really occurred to me until we were chatting before this, that I may very well be enormously guilty of. So you and I record this episode.
I turn it into a podcast, and I. I publish it on the WordPress website. I write a post about that, and then all sorts of little automations come into play, and you'll all know these tools. I don't need to name them, but I have a tool which scrapes the RSS feed every X number of minutes, and it detects that, Oh look, there's a new podcast episode on the RSS feed.
It then posts the excerpt from the post out to a Twitter. To Facebook takes the, it takes the featured image along for the ride as well. It will go to Pinterest and LinkedIn and all of these other things. Meanwhile, another service that I've, that I've got is, is scraping the audio and turning the audio from just audio into a video with like a little way you form and a picture of the album, sorry, the featured image and so on, and then it pushes that out to YouTube and, and it could push it to.
So LinkedIn as well cause they now do videos in that way as well. And then I've got another app which will be listening for that RSS feed, which will then let me post it. Not today, not right now, but far into the future. It will sort of in the way I've got it set up, it will, it will post that information.
Six months from now, or a year from now. Just as a little reminder, look, we had this guest on the podcast and so on, and so, Oh, and I forgot. And an email gets produced, which goes out to the list with all of the same stuff. So right there. I've probably, I'm guessing I've probably done 10 things, but I only did one.
Which was to interact with WordPress. Every other thing I didn't do. And so the conversation that we had suddenly made me feel a bit creepy, like, Oh, I'm totally overdoing it, but then I dunno, am I, because if you're only on Twitter, then Twitter is the place that I need to be letting you know that we've produced another podcast episode.
If you're only on LinkedIn. Over there. Yeah. My fear is that you're on all of those things and you just think, Oh, good grief. He's at it again, look, he's post the same thing in 14 different places. What an idiot. And yeah, in that sense, I am. I'm just playing the game.
David Waumsley: [00:29:29] I mean this, I mean, the book certainly is encouraging that, you know, don't be, she's really says, don't be afraid of being in multiple places.
And also there's the kind of awareness, you know, thing in her book, she's talking about three times. You get exposed to something to kind of recognize it. So even if you are in three different places and then they, you're everywhere, it kind of helps. But I don't know, there is this other side of me that makes me wonder, because we've always had that.
This issue, I haven't. We were digital marketing because we can do things so easily. It's the quality and quantity sort of argument and quantity seems to wall out. So yeah. Well, there's no way of necessarily measuring this is that there's no way of knowing. So say you get this turned into a video goes on YouTube.
YouTube appears to be doing quite well, even though you're doing absolutely no work, but is it just stealing the people who would see the listen to the podcast on iTunes or something else? We don't know. No, it's nowhere measured.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:30:32] No, no. Yeah, you're right. And that, that is sort of slightly, the fear that I have is that I'm just overdoing it and it's just going in.
But it wasn't a fear that I had until we started talking about it, and then I suddenly realized what was going on because most of these places, I don't know. Frequent all that off. Now I'm not really on Twitter. you know, I inspect the YouTube channel periodically, and certainly I reply to every comment that comes in, but I'm, I'm kinda like not, not curating it.
And so you, the, what you were saying about the quality over the quantity. well, I'd like to think that the podcast was of a decent quality, but then hitting like 50 different media channels suddenly does make it feel as if it's a bit of overkill. Anyway, sorry. We've gone down a sort of podcast blind alley, which wasn't the intention.
David Waumsley: [00:31:21] Well, no, but I think it's still a good point, but . It's not the quality of the content where it's been delivered, but perhaps there's an expectation on certain platforms where you deliver it. So the where you post stuff, I'm conscious of this as well cause I do my videos and I post them to Twitter, which I never go in or bother to reply to any body out there. Right. And no. Anything's happening. it's so rude, isn't it? To do that? So I do, I have a right to be there.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:31:48] It's the same as interesting point. Yeah. In other words, if you, if you put something on Twitter, do you need to be curating that and replying to things? From my point of view, because the, Because of the amount of comments that I've got is so unbelievably manageable.
It's no big deal. And I can reply to them on Twitter. My sort of way of coping with that kind of stuff is, is just log into Twitter once every couple of days and, you know, hit the notifications bottom and YouTube send me, you know, emails to say, you've got a comment so I can cope with that. But if you are a big brand and you are posting this content out, yeah, I wonder
Can't possibly keep up with it cause you're getting a thousand comments for everything that you put out. I don't know. I don't know what the answer to that is. Presumably. yeah, you've got to draw the line somewhere. I don't think it's impolite not to reply to everybody, but maybe if you push, put content out but never interact with it ever again, that might be a bit weird.
David Waumsley: [00:32:43] Do you know I'm having the same issue. I'm looking into some of these SEO for something that's going to be released as a website, and the conclusion I keep coming to because of just things that Google do leads me to say they were just thinking they're going to have a, this is it. Facebook is all going to do alongside the website.
That's really all they're going to be active. Now I'm looking at the potential searches and I notice that. Yup. What features on the search for their product is YouTube videos and lots of impact. There's lots of image searching, so I feel that I have to say to them, you need to get on YouTube. You need to get on Pinterest,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:33:21] right.
David Waumsley: [00:33:22] Places which were, which for my boost, they are so . In some ways. It's not even just about the format, whether it reaches, but the kind of indirect reasons to be everywhere.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:33:32] Yeah. Oh, that's interesting though, that you drew those conclusions. So how did you go about doing that? You, you were just sort of carrying out some kind of keyword analysis where you just looking at keywords in their sector and op came a whole whole ton of stuff in the organic search results pages, which was Pinterest and YouTube and videos and so on and so forth.
David Waumsley: [00:33:53] Yeah. Well it wasn't in the, in the regular SERPs. I mean large. You can see, I mean, Google's slowly turning into, online America, isn't it? It's kind of, you know, it's becoming its own thing. You, you have to do multiple clicks to get to a website these days, cause it likes to show its own sort of. It's got its own for the things that we were looking at. It presented a whole gallery of images somewhere coming through the UC authority sites.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:34:19] Right.
David Waumsley: [00:34:19] So Pinterest was one of those Wikipedia. Sometimes it would be some of the competition, but that was it really. I mean. A kind of third of the display on the top was all images for this particular search. And then after that came the YouTube videos.
So you just thought, well, you're trying to get into the regular listings. Actually, you needed to address the fact that, you know, Google for this particular type of search wanted to present all this kind of media.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:34:46] Yeah. It's interesting that because with the search results pages, just regular text based SERPs, it's really easy to see.
what, what's in return. But when you get images mixed with video mixed with the regular SERPs, it's difficult to know where that would be positioned, you know, because the images, certainly on the searches I've been doing lately, the images kind of aligned themselves across the top. Is that the same in the way that you're doing?
And so, I don't know. Where the video would slot into, you know, if it was forced to be put in the same search results as the text, I'm not sure where it would be like, would it be okay? The, the most popular video returned here is would only be 50th in the search results pages. Then you might have a different approach to that.
You might say, well, actually, look, nobody's really searching for video, but because YouTube. a Google property is being pushed heavily by Google. and maybe they've decided that somebody like you or I like to look at images, because that's a history that we have. Then maybe, maybe those images sort of w we inflate them in our own mind.
But I hadn't really carried out that kind of research, so I've not really taken that to heart. But if I was, let's go back to your example of, well, Jim Galliano's example of a plumber. Hmm if I searched for my local plumber and I noticed that there was a rival who was doing really good how to videos, I definitely be suggesting that not only because I think it would be good for their business, but also I just think it's, it's a nice new, novel, interesting thing that they can then put on their website to show authority.
David Waumsley: [00:36:26] Hmm. Yeah, I think definitely Google's changing, isn't it? I mean, that was it. You've got plain text entries from still for most of the searches that I do, that's what it is. But for certain searches, actually software, again, when we're looking for software, in fact, I often see, you know, the videos that you've done, Nathan appear in as the first thing that I see. So it says, take a look at this before you go and look at the text links below.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:36:50] Wow. That's weird. Yeah. I,
David Waumsley: [00:36:54] I do think Google's changed in there. So with, that's going to have an impact, I think, on, on this kind of medium that we're going to need to use to sort of appear even in SERPs.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:37:04] Yeah. It's interesting. We've got, so you've got Google. Like keyword research as your kind of weapon of choice. And that's led you to think that, Hey, we need to be listed in a search results. B, we need to be on YouTube. See, Pinterest might be a good idea. And under the list, I suppose could go on. w if we took ourselves outside of using Google, I suppose we'd have to be asking the client a lot about this.
They wouldn't, we, we'd have to, we would have to be asking those questions. Is there. you know, how have you come across somebody in your industry who's sending you, print publications? Is there somebody in your industry who is emailing you with online video tutorials? Is there some, is there something that we don't know about that your industry?
Yeah. Has in it that that we could help you with. And it might be that we could turn that into a digital thing. We might be able to smooth the way that you, you know, we might be able to integrate that into your WordPress website. So in my case, let's say that somebody decided, Oh, what a good idea it would be to put a podcast together.
Well, I'd be, I'd be in. I'd be in heaven with that client because I've been there, done that. I know how to do podcasts, and I would be able to carry that out really effectively. That would be a great add on service that I could provide. I haven't had a single client yet, is that right? No, I haven't, you know, wants a podcast.
But that would be, you know, a superpower thing. And, and the same would be true in all sorts of other ways. You know, if they wanted print media, while I know somebody who could take, take that off my hands immediately, but you've got to ask those questions.
David Waumsley: [00:38:35] Yeah. The books and talks a little bit about where people are being, where people are looking. And it's asking to do that research to ask us to try and find out where, their potential clients or customers will be asking questions about the business and be there. I mean, that's, it's slightly different, isn't it? For w what we were talking about, where we're being everywhere by. Publish in this content outline with, you know, with WP Builds going on to YouTube because you're not active in those forum.
There's not much there. What she's talking about it in the book a lot of the times she's, I think a lot of time thinking about trying to be wherever anybody's asking questions, which are related to your industry, you know, what am I be asking? So they might go to ask about a plumber, whether they're going to go, I don't know. There's lots of different places. Aren't there lots of different forums where you might ask those questions and be there.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:39:29] I suppose one of the things that we, one of the things that we had in our show notes was the idea of kind of like running some kind of study, to track how their buyers, so let's do a real world example, like a tile shop or something you, it would be great if they could have at their disposal a ton of data about how those.
How their customers typically walk through the front door or pick up the phone to them, you know? and it's not something that I've got myself involved in, but I've been on the receiving end of that, you know, a thousand times asked at the end of a phone call with my bank, would you mind if we just redirected you for two minutes?
A questionnaire about, about the, the way that that was dealt with all or emails that I've received after the fact, but that, that, that data is supremely useful in my case. I've not really asked clients to gather that kind of stuff. Oh or, and I've only really asked for it once or twice, twice when I was really out out of the loop and I didn't really know how to put the website together.
But having that stuff would be really useful. And having that as a service that you provide, you know, we, we will, we will conduct the survey for you so that your website is better and you've got a better understanding about your business. We'll, we'll create the questionnaire and so on. That could be, that could be a useful little add on service.
David Waumsley: [00:40:46] Yeah. Certainly amongst the clients that I know of who let me know this information or we are getting insight that I'm really surprised how few, but then I guess I shouldn't be, cause I don't, they don't know or don't ask people or don't know where their, their customers are come from in the first place.
How they first learned about them. So, you know, it would be interesting to do it ourselves. I think it's fairly easy in your case, you have a good insight. To where you also come from?
Nathan Wrigley: [00:41:12] Yeah. I mean it's because my business is mostly local. It's pretty easy and, and often it'll be somebody that's been referred through some other person.
So that connection was easy to understand. But as I suppose as your business grows geographically and you have less, less of an understanding of where these people are or how they got there, that carrying out that kind of stuff is interesting. The only, the only downside I think is that, that that. I think gathering that information could be quite a demoralizing thing.
And what I mean by that is I don't know how willing people are to spend two minutes filling out your survey. Certainly when I wander through my local town center, there's always a little phalanx of people and they're usually wearing some kind of like, yeah. Bright bib and they've got a clipboard and they want to, they want to ask your opinion on everything.
It might be politics or it might be bathrooms, and this is, this is that happening in the real world. but, and I'm really reluctant to speak to them. I just can't get into the swing of, of talking to a stranger about some, something that I wasn't thinking about five seconds ago, but I suppose asking this information from clients who've already been through your process. You know that you've, you've, you've built a website, it was successful, they're happy, why not? Why not ask them at the end? It works for our business, but I don't know how it would work for the tile shop example. I gave him a moment ago.
David Waumsley: [00:42:34] Yeah. I know. I wouldn't have enough clients really to get anything from it really. It's that, that's the thing. So we need to do research, but I just wonder about, you know, how we might kind of, it's one of those difficult things if I'm trying to encourage people to get more into digital marketing and get into all of these things. So. Be aware of things that you do for WP Builds.
This whole kind of repurpose in and sending things out at free, where most of the clients I know wouldn't kind of know the, that actually happens, but then now we'd always have this difficulty of knowing. How much time to encourage them to put in all money to get me to do it. I should encourage them to do in terms of trying to get the returns. And that's one of the difficult things, isn't that with this?
Nathan Wrigley: [00:43:21] Yeah. It was interesting. I was chatting to a client while I was probably about six months ago now, and they, they were hoping to embark on a sort of blogging spree that they'd kind of got the inspiration that they wanted to blog in their industry and write articles that might get them some, some.
Well, clients, patients is more the right word cause it's kind of like a, a practice where she, she does massage and things like that. and she, she was talking and we were talking and, and I didn't even talk about the whole re-purposing of the content. She just said, Oh, of course. And then I'll, I'll, I'll post it on my Twitter channel and then that opened up the conversation.
Oh, interestingly, you know, all of that stuff can be automated and shoot really, you can post it. So just completely unaware. That it was even possible. And yet I, I was so oblivious to the fact that this was important because to me it was second nature that you could achieve this. Right. Really easily. Set it and forget it.
Style that, the, I didn't even mention it because to her it was a complete revelation. Really. I don't have to do that. Really. The emails can be able to make it really, and, I don't know whether she. Took off on that or not. She certainly took the names of the, the, the plugins and the services that I'd use, but whether she did anything with it, I don't know.
David Waumsley: [00:44:36] Yeah. Well, this is exactly the same thing I was talking about when I was doing the keyword research. It's the same thing when I'm introducing the fact that perhaps they need to be, and I had to throw in, I don't know how this is going to go. You know where they're going to come on board with this, but they really were thinking they were just going to do the one social media, because I'm sure.
They were thinking about the time that's going to take for them to do it. You know, introducing the idea that you can set some of these on just to automate those and have that build up your general domain authority. That's really quite difficult to get over to somebody that you can do all that, but it is about us knowing those tools.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:45:15] Yeah, that's true. Yeah, yeah. returning for a minute to the survey idea or polling your customers or audience or whatever it might be. I suppose we have kind of entered a period where a lot of that stuff can be automated as well. And what I mean by that is, you know. If you can, if you're able to and have understood, or would, you know, you've implemented in the past things like a Facebook pixel or you've run some kind of targeting and, and you've looked at that data.
I suppose it doesn't need to be a, it doesn't need to be as hard work as it once was. I'm no expert at this, but obviously, you know, I have an understanding of what's possible with Facebook and Facebook audiences and. You know, you could, I, for example, could quite easily target all the links on the WP Builds websites and then should I, in the future launch a product or something like that, I would then have all of your emails.
And so my message, hopefully at that point would be highly targeted and I wouldn't be spraying things, posting things through doors, wasting money on printer versus wasting money on generic adverts. I should be able to target the people that I want. Again. not something that I've already doubled in too much.
Whenever that need has arisen, I've handed it over to somebody again in my local area who I know is very capable at doing that and really enjoys doing it. but increasingly you've, you've got the option of really not wasting time trying to get to everybody all at once. You can, you can go to exactly where they are and give them the content. Well, let's hope is of interest to them at the time that they are ready to consume it.
David Waumsley: [00:46:53] Yes. Across all their multiple platforms.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:46:56] Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. That ice five times a day. It's that does, I wonder about that though. I mean, I dabble a little bit, like I said, in Twitter, a tiny bit, maybe like twice a week and a tiny, tiny bit in LinkedIn.
Maybe once a month. But a lot in Facebook multiple times a day. So for me, being hit up with adverts in Facebook is going to be the way to go. But I suppose only time would tell you would have to target these, these, advertisements or promotional things that you wanted to put out. I suppose you'd have to push them to all the different platforms.
You know, your Google ads, your Facebook ads, your LinkedIn ads, and just see. What? What happens over a period of time, you know, after, after six months, not only did we not get any clicks on LinkedIn, but there were no even not even any impressions. Well, all right, and nobody's on LinkedIn and YouTube. Totally different story. Thousand impressions and 58 clicks. Great. That's where we're going to go.
David Waumsley: [00:47:55] Yeah. Do you know, always failed this always kind of, one new market into one new social media. That is the one that everybody's ignoring and you should be into that cause that's giving great results. that always seems to, there's always
That though I'm always suspicious because it's never kind of aiming at anybody in particular. I think clients that I know do their best to try and understand the social media platforms that they think what they're doing is going to be most relevant to, and then you always hear. It taunted the opposite rally.
So what's the, I've even forgotten the name of it. This is how joyful I am, but there's, what's the one that you only use on the mobile app? That's all photos.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:48:38] Oh, there's this pinch. Well, let's just. Pinterest is all photos, but there's a desktop app for that. There's, I don't know. I do know, but I don't know.
It's also gone from my head, but I, I take your point. The, my kids who are, you know, they, they're young, but they're old enough to have technology. They, they, not only do they not use Facebook, they are, that they're adamant that nobody else uses it. You know, I had these conversations before, you know, so does anybody have a Facebook account?
And they're like, you know, duh Facebook. Nobody uses Facebook, you know, that kind of thing. But, and yet to me, that's clearly what everybody uses. Email, duh. Nobody uses email. My, my children's Snapchat and Snapchat, there you go. Yeah. My children massively interact with Snapchat. They never use email to the point where I do mean never.
It might as well be removed from the phone. They never use Facebook. It's not on the phone. They don't want to put it on the phone. They never ask me, should we put, can we put Facebook on? Because nobody's using it. So yeah, this is a real problem. I mean, this is this other new one going around. At the moment, it's probably not that new, but I keep hearing stories about this platform called tick tock.
Which I think is a, a video platform, but I don't know. I think he's out of China, but it's taking the world by storm. Well, it's not taking my world by storm. It's taken all the cool new kids by storm, and presumably people who write tech blogs and things like that have to look at it all. But you're right, the, the, the next platform is just around the corner. Oh boy. You've opened a can of worms there.
David Waumsley: [00:50:20] Instagram is the one that I was really thinking. I'll tell everybody who got in that should be when put in the a, the time into it and I just, yeah, I don't get it.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:50:28] Well, it's interesting as well. So check out, check out how lazy I am, the the tool that I use to push content. So I produce a podcast. It creates a Twitter. A Facebook, whatever, all of these things. It can also produce an Instagram one, but because Instagram is just an image, you're not allowed to do the text, so you have to say, I would have to set up a separate one for Instagram, and it's like, ah, I just can't be bothered. That's just can't be bothered. Like I can't see anybody looking at a picture that I would produce about WordPress. About a podcast. I can't see a connection there. Oh, look, a photo from the WP Builds podcast. I must go and listen to the podcast or read that. I just can't see the connection. But if it was like a photo of, I don't know.
Daniel Radcliffe. Jumping off a bridge. Well, all right. That's interesting. Like, so I just, and you know, if you're producing cakes, your job is to make cakes. That would be great. Instagram all the way, but not for me.
David Waumsley: [00:51:35] Yeah. Yeah. Instagram does seem to be the one that seems to be getting pushed a lot. Or at least that's what I keep reading.
But who knows? We're just down one stream, aren't we? Or each of us, we're on our own particular journey cause everybody's done their digital marketing correctly.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:51:49] Right. And I guess having the metrics and learning from these platforms where your audience are is the, is is the, the sort of goal, you know, to learn that everybody's on Instagram.
So. Bloomin' well use Instagram. is, is the, is the message, you know, boy, he, we've talked for 50 minutes already.
David Waumsley: [00:52:11] Okay. Well, we definitely better go. We're done and dusted, aren't we?
Nathan Wrigley: [00:52:13] Yeah, I think so. I mean, we add a lot more to say, to be honest, but, I don't think, I don't think we possibly can. Let's leave it there.
Shall we? Right. That's it. I hope you enjoyed the episode this week. Always interesting chatting to David Waumsley. We've got a few more episodes in this watertight marketing series, as I said, by brownie Thomas, and after that we'll be changing the format a little bit and we might be doing some more.
Debating type content, so we take a different position each week and sort of fight his out too. We'll see. See if that comes about or not. I hope that you enjoyed that subject. Anyway, don't forget that we'll be having another podcast this time next week. Book market. It's Thursday. The best way to. Do. All of this, of course, is to subscribe to us on your favorite podcast player.
Do that at wpbuilds.com forward slash subscribe, and you'll see a whole bunch of platforms. You can just click the link and get subscribed and we'll be back on Monday for a news episode, and of course we'll have the live weekly WordPress news in the Facebook group or at wpbuilds.com forward slash live. So I hope that we'll see you at some point.
If not, maybe here next week I'm going to fade into some very cheesy music and say bye bye for now.
