Sue Blatchford, the co-founder of PayPerClick Australia, is a results-driven digital marketer who has helped build businesses and drive growth. She is also the author of the book The Digital Marketing Download 20: 1 – 20 Years’ Experience in one day.
While it may feel like we have been discussing digital marketing and digital media forever, it’s only the last two decades. Before digital marketing, it was called online marketing, interactive media and multimedia marketing. In this episode, we try to cover as much as we can on the knowledge she has gained over the past twenty years in digital marketing.
For the rest, you need to go to DigitalMarketingDownload.com.au
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Australian businesses are losing $5.46 billion in marketing wasted budgets, like it’s ludicrous.
Transcription:
Darren:
Hi, I’m Darren Woolley, Founder and CEO of TrinityP3 Marketing Management Consultancy, and welcome to Managing Marketing, a weekly podcast where we discuss the issues and opportunities facing marketing, media, and advertising with industry thought leaders and practitioners.
Now, it feels like we’ve been talking about digital marketing and digital media forever, but in fact, you could argue that it’s only been for the last two decades. Before digital marketing, it was called online marketing, and before that, interactive media, and multimedia. And the practitioners were largely direct marketers with a technology bent.
My guest today is one of those people for whom digital marketing is a passion and a life calling. So much so that she’s published a terrific book titled The Digital Marketing Download 20:1, 20 years experience in 1 Day: A Download of Everything Digital.
Now, I’m not sure how much we can cover in this conversation, but let’s see how we go. Please welcome Sue Blatchford from Pay Per Click Australia, a results-driven digital marketer who’s helped build businesses and drive growth. Welcome, Sue.
Sue:
Thank you so much, lovely to be here.
Darren:
I have to say I was going through this book, and I thought this is an amazing piece of work. What was it that inspired you to capture all that knowledge and be able to put it into a book that you published?
Sue:
Well, it’s funny, the book was driven out of a sense of frustration. So, I started writing it at least four years ago when I realized 16 years into working as a digital marketing specialist that I was saying the same thing again and again and again.
And it didn’t matter if you were a huge corporate client or whether you are a startup or whether you were a small business owner, the issues were the same across all different levels of business, irrespective if they had a large marketing team or they didn’t.
Darren:
It’s interesting, isn’t it? Because people think of digital marketing often as if it’s something totally different from marketing, but it’s actually an important subset, isn’t it? It’s not like the two exist totally separately.
Sue:
They don’t exist separately at all. And in fact, it’s one of the fascinations that I have. And while a lot of agencies will say they’re results-driven, we are really passionate at Pay Per Click about coming back to marketing as a tool for business success as opposed for the sake of marketing, which happens a lot.
So, when we define what we do in digital marketing, it’s all about coming back to achieving a business goal instead of a marketing goal, which sometimes are not aligned, they can be two completely different things.
So, the coming together and the bringing back the focus on core objectives of a business outcome makes marketing so much more successful.
Darren:
Absolutely, well, marketing is a function of business, isn’t it?
Sue:
Apparently.
Darren:
Well, it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. I think the biggest challenge that a lot of businesses have is being able to align and set up marketing so that they can actually close the loop. Because marketers will say, “Well, we’re here to support and help grow the business.”
It’s almost like an apple pie statement, it’s what you’d expect people to say. But the real difficulty is in actually closing that loop. And that’s one of the areas that digital marketing has actually helped move some of the way, if not completely closing it.
Sue:
Well, I totally agree, and digital marketing was one of the most accountable forms of performance. So, you’d pay for traffic or clicks and eyeballs, and then they would come through and they’d interact and you could actually see what they were doing as opposed to many other forms of marketing.
It was very, very accountable and it still is. A lot of people in the streets will say, “Oh, you can’t do it like they used to and there’s privacy concerns,” but in the main, digital marketing is still extremely accountable.
Darren:
Because it does touch on all areas. Let’s talk about what was called the marketing or sales funnel. Digital marketing can operate at every single level.
Sue:
Every level, yeah. And it comes back to that question of what falls under the digital marketing umbrella, which is essentially, everything that can be done online in relation to a business touchpoint.
So, it’s everything from your paid media, your programmatic, your website, your SEO, and also, your social media. Anything that can become through in a digital perspective to us falls under the digital umbrella.
Darren:
That’s a good way of thinking about it, because we’ve seen the rise of the specialist. There’s the specialist social media strategist, the specialist SEO strategist, the specialist … there’s all these specialists which then fragments digital marketing into all of these disciplines, and often, makes it hard then to pull it together to that single-minded objective of delivering sales and growth.
Sue:
It’s a critical issue that today, when you split everything up so finely — and it’s what happens with marketing budgets as well. It’s like going to a birthday party and you get a piece of a big cake, and you got to split it up to all the people, and you’re splitting it up so finely that the birthday person doesn’t even get a piece of cake.
So, what that really means is that a lot of the marketing budget is not being spent on the highest opportunity to convert into a sale, a lead, or a business objective. The budgets are being diluted and spread so thinly and siloed so independently that they are missing that connectivity to create business growth.
Darren:
Well, I’ve got a theory about that. And that is that every person now that works in digital marketing that says they’re a strategist — take the word strategist away and add salesperson, because they all recommend their particular discipline.
I’ve never met a social media strategist who wasn’t telling clients to spend more on social media. I’ve never met an SEO person that’s not asking the client to invest more in developing SEO. They’ve all got their own vested interest, particularly when you’re working with external suppliers in each of those fragmented areas to actually want a bigger slice of your birthday cake.
Sue:
That’s right, and the reality is, even when a CMO has a marketing manager or there’s a marketing team underneath, they’re generally a person who comes in and works in marketing, has their own niche, their own opinion, their own agenda of what they want to work on, and that will naturally claim more of a marketing budget, even if it’s not the highest converting channel that could be leading to a lot more growth.
So, until a business has exhausted their potential of their highest converting channels, that should take up the largest piece of the pie.
Darren:
Because I have a friend who’s a CMO and they were promoted into the U.S. into a traditional e-commerce business which was all about last click attribution and converting at the point of the sales making decision.
Except that they were over time seeing a decreased return on investment. And they made this ludicrous idea but perhaps for the first time ever, they do some more work at the top of the funnel to actually drive more people.
Because if you start relying on things like the Google platform, there’s only a certain number of people that are searching for your term at any time, but you could actually impact doing that at the top. Sure enough, testing a few different creative executions in different media, they saw x10 plus times return on investment by the extra traffic that attracted in there.
Sue:
So, the way that I look at that, Darren, is I call it digital visibility. What is your visibility to a business or a brand digitally when people are A, in market? So, the Googles are very, very important. When you’ve got Google, you’ve got a direct intent, eyeball.
Darren:
Of course, they’re searching for something.
Sue:
They’re searching for something and they go on there and they’re looking specifically for a product and service. And effectively, if you are not showing up either in organic or paid, your shop is shut. It’s shut, you’ve got no digital visibility, you’ve got no chance of getting that business.
The other way that we’re talking about is digital visibility, when like-minded people, there might be … and that could be in a social media, in an audience targeting-
Darren:
A community of like-minded individuals.
Sue:
A community and it could be through content. So, you’re supplying valuable content and people are coming in through that. Not specifically so much for the direct intent, “I’m ready to buy your product or service now.”
Google really needs to be addressed as a major source of potential leads. When you’ve got somebody who’s in market and they’re buying through Google, you’ve got the highest potential to convert someone into a customer. So, I highly value what Google can bring to a brand if it’s done well.
And that’s the story. All of these platforms have a level of complexity and skill and talent that you need to be able to use them and they can very, very easily — you can be throwing your money into the ocean if you don’t do it well. So, it’s really important.
Darren:
It’s important, I guess, to get that balance, isn’t it? To be visible but also to be there when the person’s making that final decision.
Sue:
So, when we work with our clients, a part of what we would do in analysis or a digital performance audit is, I do a digital visibility analysis and comparing them against their competitors and when they’re in market and when they’re not in market, and where the opportunity is for them to get their next 10% whatever growth they’re looking for, and making sure that they’re available when people are ready to buy or they’re in market.
Darren:
Because another one was the big e-comm retailers that only exist online and they’re finding themselves pouring money into search terms for specific products, and whether they should be doing more to actually try and turn their website into the destination.
Because you can imagine, for all the products they sell, ASICS sports shoes, that you have to buy ASICS to get anyone that’s in there, look at. But can you invest to the point that they come to your store first to look for ASICS shoes? Or do you always have to be there because that’s where the consumer is? Do you think it’s possible to turn them around to becoming a destination?
Sue:
Well, a couple of things I will say about that, every industry and every business type has their own landscape that you’re working in. If you’re working in travel, you’re up against large aggregators, if you’re talking about big brands, you’ve got big retailers, so it all depends where you fit into that scale.
So, there’s multiple different things you could do in that scenario. Firstly, using the Google merchant and making sure that you’ve got good shopping campaigns set up so that gives you an opportunity without having to pick lots of search keywords, and you can be visible, which is what you want to do.
But you have to evaluate each landscape specifically and work out where you can actually fit into it. I call it the director slot. You’d get a lot of people who would go, “Oh, we’re not showing on Google for this.” And everybody, the director would then come back to the team and everyone would be going, “Oh …” and having this crisis about it.
And I would say to them, particularly from SEO, you may never rank ever for that term, it’s impossible. There’s so many people who’re digitally competing against you, you will not get there.
Darren:
And I imagine the broader the category, the more difficult it is because there’ll be more players covering lots and lots of terms, which means you end up needing very deep pockets to be able to compete.
Sue:
And this is where the analysis really comes in. So, you work out what’s achievable, so that’s where that digital visibility comes in. Where do I fit? Where can I fit in? What’s on the table for the taking? What’s already taken?
So, I’m a real truth speaker. I tell people you’ll never rank for that organically, like it’s impossible. And you look at some of the things like car insurance, 20 years ago, we could get people ranking on page one for car insurance like that, but now …
Darren:
Helps if you had the URL.
Sue:
Apparently, that’s not supposed to matter so much anymore, but we know that it still does. But essentially, the landscape is different, and it has to be custom evaluated per business, per objective, per competition. And then you work out, okay, here’s the level playing field and where are our opportunities to go forward? Because there’s not a blanket answer to that.
Darren:
As you explained that, you got me thinking about — because everyone’s talking about customer experience. It’s interesting because when it comes to digital marketing, people are inclined to talk about user experience, and then they define it as the website, what happens when you get to the website.
But in many ways, a much of the consumer experience of brands is online. It’s everything from searching to going to websites, downloading apps, transacting — all of this is happening even to the fulfilment. It’s become a significant part of user experience. And I’m thinking particularly of it could be a product like traditional retail, but it’s all the services brands as well, like insurance and Telcos and the like, isn’t it?
Sue:
And it’s a really important factor, and you’re right, all of those things play into whether it’s the UX and the actual interface, and then it’s the customer experience, all the way through to how someone responds to them on a social media post, all of that is customer experience.
Talking back to the digital part, like the actual website, the biggest failures happen when people don’t address their user journey. So, that is, if we’ve gone to the trouble from SEO or Google ads or your social, and you’ve taken people through to your website, they don’t follow their own journey.
A lot of people go, “Well, the campaign didn’t work.” Was it the campaign? Was it the marketing or was it the user journey? Every single step from the creative, to the add, to the landing page, to the checkout, to even the quality of the product, all of those things create the customer experience.
Darren:
And so, there’s data for all that, isn’t it?
Sue:
There’s data for all of that.
Darren:
You actually know how many people get at each of those gates because I always like to use real world metaphors. It’s literally like you got all these people to turn up at the front door of your shop and it was so busy and confusing and the door seemed locked, so they walked away. That’s a big problem.
But to then say that the campaign didn’t work. “Well, we got all the people here, they just didn’t come in.”
Sue:
We’ve also got a saying — for about eight years, we looked after one of the biggest, most iconic venues in Sydney, so without naming names, everyone knows what that is. But we had a saying was — we’d be tasked with selling all these shows, et cetera, et cetera.
And then we’d be, “These ones aren’t going well,” and then we’d be going, “Why aren’t they going well?” And then we’d go, we can’t sell a shit show. You can’t sell something that nobody wants to buy. And even if you sell it once, they’re not coming back again, so it it’s one of those …
Darren:
That’s actually an old advertising saying, “Great advertising will make a great product great. Great advertising will make a bad product fail faster” because more people will know how bad it is.
Sue:
So, as far as the whole customer and digital experience goes, it’s a critical, critical part and it plays into the success of a campaign. And it’s, again, slightly siloed now as we move forward and things become bigger and people become more specialized, and that UX again somehow can become separated from a business objective.
Sometimes people say, “Oh, look at this website, exactly what you said. It’s too messy, I can’t find anything, let’s just strip all the content out and let’s just minimize this, and then let’s create these really generic labels,” and that’s fine. But now, Google has no idea what you’re doing.
I’ve got this thing in the book, which is called The Madonna and the Menu. So, every time I am looking at a new client, I can look at a website straight away and I can tell how easily is Google just digesting this information off this website.
So, being an eighties person, I always go, well, in the Madonna Vogue video clip, she put her hand up like this all the time, and what I would do, and that’s sort of get people …
Darren:
The letterbox.
Sue:
Yeah, the letterbox, get people to block out their logo.
Darren:
Their logo, because that’s always in the top banner.
Sue:
And then block out their main banner, which most sites have and then please, let’s just read out what the navigation says. Sometimes it still sits home, I don’t know why people do that, but it’ll say services or products or shop or about, and contact. Do you know how many websites are so generic?
And when it comes to Google, it can’t tell from the structure of that website, because then think of it, all the URLs are then created off that structure. So, then you’ve got about, then you’ve got our leadership team. Again, we don’t even know who this is or what they’re doing.
So, there’s simple structural things that can be done and that’s not the … SEO’s a very complicated thing, this is just one example, but …
Darren:
But it’s a very visual failure. When you become so generic that you don’t actually say who or what you are or what the promise is.
Sue:
And that’s what often comes out of a lot of UX, unfortunately. So, luckily, I get to consult on many projects where I get to analyze the IA and the structure and having a background back before the dawn of time when I worked on encyclopedias that used to be delivered digitally, I know how to structure information in a way.
And when we look at the menu navigation, to make it easier for the user journey, the first thing has to be the main thing we want to sell. If we are selling stuff, it’s a shop, or it’s a service, or it’s a legion — we’ve got to clearly label what we are doing and be very explicit, not only for Google, but for the person visiting the site.
So, two weeks ago, I went and did exactly the Madonna menu for a new prospective client, and they said, “Oh, but a big agency built this website,” and I said, well …
Darren:
And you said, and …
Sue:
And the designer has come up with this or somebody who doesn’t understand the full picture of digital marketing, which is what we’re talking about. Whenever we’re talking about creative, design, user journey, language, keywords, Google — it is one big picture and we have to consider everything on that wheel to be visible.
Darren:
Because the other thing that this approach does is it also blurs that line between sales and marketing, doesn’t it? Because there is the fulfillment part, the conversion, which is always was traditionally sales. And then there was the top end, the consideration and the awareness, which was marketing, but it actually is the whole both of them all the way through, isn’t it?
Sue:
So, when you look at the traffic that comes to your website, and again, when we’re talking about this, when we’re talking about e-comm, when we’re looking at online sales, that’s one journey. When we’re looking at lead generation, trying to generate an insurance lead or a business services lead, they have different ways that we …
Darren:
Well, they’re different parts, it’s really fun.
Sue:
That’s right, but they’re generally different business types as well. So, with e-comm, we’re trying to get people as quickly as possible to the product with the great information and deal. And let’s go through and get them through the cart quite quickly.
With services and with bigger ticket or more consideration types of products, we need to be more considerate of the whole types of journey, so people who might be in their investor give or research phase versus people who are ready to request a demo of the product or a FinTech product.
So, we’ve got to really, again, coming back to those big business objectives, manage the way that a site is structured and those customer journeys to really fit how we are going to get the highest chance to convert or engage and attract an audience.
Servicers, you might want to get signups to get more information, and educate as you go and e-comm.
Darren:
Or qualify.
Sue:
Qualify, 100%, and then e-comm, we want to get signups so we can build our first party data. Because often, the other beautiful thing about digital marketing, email marketing is one of the highest converting channels that you can have if you are doing it well.
Darren:
Lester Wunderman was right, direct mail has just become electronic.
Sue:
And it is. I have had the beauty over 20 years to look … I call it looking under the hood and looking in the analytics and analyzing the traffic, the sources its come from, and really understanding what is the best performing channel. And if it’s done well, EDMs will be the highest best performing channel.
I’ve got clients that I know every Sunday, every Tuesday, every Thursday, we’re going to have sales peaks, because that’s when the EDMs go out. And that’s what you want, regular, reliable, consistent revenue driving activity always on.
Darren:
So, Sue, I just want to get back to the book, because one of the things that did strike me when I started looking at it and this is the Digital Marketing Download 20:1, that the very first dozen, maybe half dozen topics that you cover is very much from my perspective, marketing 101, and yet it’s the foundations that are often overlooked, that often people rush to execution before they get things like you’ve got here.
What’s the landscape? Know your competition, know who you are, your target audience, the buying cycle. You’re asking all of those fundamental business questions that are very marketing-focused right up front, and I think that’s really important because particularly in digital marketing, and because of the shiny new things of technology … what’s the latest one? Is AI and TikTok and all … that you do have to get those foundations right, don’t you?
Sue:
Well, Darren, if a tree falls in the wood doesn’t make a sound, right? And I say that all the time because unless you got your foundation set up, you’re not tracking, you haven’t got your core objectives, you don’t know where — nobody knows what’s going on, and it’s just a guess. It’s just all a guess.
And the real purpose behind writing the book, was the foundations are not being done, they’re being missed. Everybody’s so busy that the ball’s being dropped, they’re looking too far ahead at something else, and they’ve forgot the foundations which are going to drive the base core revenue of a business, and what role digital plays.
The reality is, if you’re driving most of your business through a website, when I look at the analytics, Google SEO and Google and Meta, they’re the ones in reality, that are driving the majority of sales, a lot of it for many, many, many businesses.
Darren:
Well, when you look at just internet activity, those two, Google and Meta, have a vast amount of traffic. Now, then they’ve created these opportunities for businesses to be able to tap into that in a very selective way.
Sue:
And you can do very well out of both of them, and you really, really can. And I think that a lot of people like to dismiss Meta in many, many ways and I’ve seen it only grow exceptionally in performance over 20 years in results. In results, I’m not talking usage or this, and everybody likes to say, “Oh, I don’t use it, I don’t use Facebook. Facebook’s for — and that’s all fine.”
Darren:
Old people.
Sue:
Old people. I don’t care what they say, the old people have money and a lot of revenue’s being driven. But like anything, you have to know how to use the platforms for your business gain and not be used by the platforms. It’s two very, very different things, the interface is …
Darren:
That’s a good distinction, use the platform, don’t be used by it.
Sue:
And it’s a battle that I have consistently with Google to ensure that they’re constantly bringing out new features, new automation, new AI, new auto applies, and I’m happy to use anything that’s going to make my clients’ campaigns go better. But if it doesn’t, I’m sorry, Google, I won’t be using it.
And it’s very easy to be caught up in what you’re supposed to do because Google actually rewards its partners by the take up of all of the new features that are being rolled out. And sometimes, they’re not for the best, and we have to keep pushing back and keep making sure they’re accountable.
Darren:
I think a lot of marketers are not really clear on that — that Google does have, as part of their business model, that they’re in business to make profits and grow their business. But there are relationships that they create with their partners to actually promote these services.
And I think it then becomes questionable sometimes in the selection of your partner in digital marketing, to find the one that’s actually being rewarded for driving the growth in your business and not actually being more rewarded for pushing services that you don’t necessarily mean.
And I don’t mean that just for Google, I’m talking about all sorts of technology platforms: Salesforce, Adobe, they all have deals with various companies that reward them for selling their services, their technology, their platforms into those clients.
Sue:
And it’s a very, very noisy space; the pushing and the solutions that are coming out now and the techs and the add-ons and everything that you can have — before you know it, where you think you’re saving money in the Cloud, you’re blown out. It’s phenomenal.
Darren:
Well, Scott Brinker, I think he’s hit 9,000 now in his technology map, 9,000 different platforms.
Sue:
It’s crazy. So again, we always come back … I’m platform agnostic, and after 20 years, whatever comes up tomorrow, and I care, I’ll look at it. If we can get business out of it, great. If we can’t, I’m moving on, it’s as simple as that.
And it’s really about choosing the right channel for your business and weighing your budget to the right channel. And that’s what doesn’t happen a lot, the budgets don’t get weighted to the best performing. They get the cake and they’re still cutting it up and everybody’s getting a piece of the pie and nobody’s satisfied because it’s too thin.
And it’s one of the biggest challenges that we get when I can see a best-performing channel and I go, “Why does budget limit these?”
Darren:
So, I’ve seen that as well over the last decade, I use a different metaphor. I call the budget like chicken feed. It’s literally like the chicken grain. And as they get more and more hens to feed, more and more options, they’re spreading the same budget, thinner and thinner.
Do you think it’s possible to really be able to understand performance by channel so that you start backing a smaller number of channels because we’ve seen this just recently. TikTok, they keep reporting how they’re getting so much more of the advertising revenue and that’s coming from other areas. But yeah, we are always going to get new opportunities, aren’t we?
Sue:
We’re always going to get new opportunities. There’s always got to be some marketing budget for testing different things as they come about. But there’s always got to be, you’re always on. You’re reliable, always on. And you’ve got to keep tuning that “always on” engine to maximize its potential because it’s essentially, where the business is coming from and what e-commerce is performing.
The challenge I think CMOs have or some marketing managers, sometimes with all of the different high skill that you need to be in each of these different siloed parts of marketing, they are so reliant on being fed information from their team and they don’t have a very high level of analytical … they don’t even have the visibility.
They’re not going into Google Analytics and analyzing the channels. They’re relying on this up feed of what’s working and what’s not. And sometimes, they don’t get the right spiel, Darren. They’re being sold the newest, brightest, shiniest object and they’re not being sold to continue invest or if we did this a little bit differently here, we could increase this.
We don’t need more traffic, we need a conversion optimization. It’s really about understanding exactly what the business needs as opposed to keep adding onto the bucket of stuff that we are doing. And it gets very messy, very, very messy.
Darren:
So, you’d subscribe to I think it’s the 70/20/10 rule; 70% always on doing business as usual; 10% for testing out new and untested things, and then 20% is to consolidate the things that do work out of that 10%. Because one of the things you need to be able to do is if something does start to work, you don’t just immediately switch the 70% into it. You need to expand, it’s not a bad rule too.
Sue:
It’s a great rule to have and I think it has — what we need in business is surety. So, we need to be assured that we’ve got a really good continual funnel of either leads or sales. Everyone will have their seasonal things, knowing what they are, knowing when to increase your budget, and always being open to growing what your baseline is. You’ve got to look at what your baseline of your business is and not get too distracted, it’s very easy to get distracted.
Darren:
Now, the other thing I wanted to ask you is we live in a world where we want instant gratification. So, when a client comes to you and they say, “Well, we’ve got this website, we’ve been paying money,” do you set a timeline for them to see results?
Because it’s very difficult often to take someone and get immediate improvement. Do you think there is a reasonable amount of time that a business should set to see results? Or do you think it can be virtually instantaneous?
Sue:
It’s hard to answer that question because I believe every business is different. Sometimes I can turn a campaign on and turn it around in a week, and you can do that, but businesses …
Darren:
But there has to be certain circumstances. Either they’re hopelessly underperforming and you’ve just done something right or …
Sue:
Or they’re not visible in market at all and all of a sudden, you’ve turned them on.
Darren:
Over two decades generally, do you find that … because one of the problems I have is that clients will often engage an agency and then it’s like, “Oh, we’re three months down the track and you haven’t doubled my sales.” And it’s like, “No, there’s like a ramping up period here. It takes time to get the base right.”
Sue:
There has to be a commitment to the investment and the relationship, with an agency to try and get through … three months is too short. Nobody wants to work for three months. You got to have enough data to be able to tell the story and know what’s working and what’s not working, and able to tune that engine to get more out of it.
I can’t say one particular time, but let’s be fair, if you are in business, you don’t expect to be out of business in a week, you want to be in business for the next however many years, so you’ve got to commit to a marketing spend.
Darren:
But if you have a client that says “Here’s our objectives and this is what we want to achieve,” you would then be able to have a conversation with them around investment levels, timeline, and that type of thing, and be reasonably willing to be measured against that.
Sue:
Always willing to be measured against it.
Darren:
I think that’s a really important thing because often, these engagements start and then they just sort of wander on and work’s getting done, but no one’s actually saying, “Hang on, have we actually advanced anywhere here?”
Sue:
Darren, in 20 years, I will tell you, if you fail to make an improvement for a client’s bottom line or proof (and that’s with the tracking) — if you can’t prove you’ve made a difference, you will not keep that client. You will not keep that client unless it’s a mate’s rates thing or something else, you will not keep that client.
At Pay Per Click, we do a thing where every single day, we’ve got a dashboard and we can watch our trend every day. And we don’t wait until the end of the campaign to go, “Mm, that didn’t potentially go very well,” that’s the beauty of digital.
You can track it in essentially real time and, “Go, okay, we need to step in and make a change here, we need to step in.” And comes back to you can’t always make the difference for business success. I’ve seen many businesses not make it in 20 years. That’s just standard, that’s life. And it doesn’t always mean it wasn’t a great idea, and it doesn’t always mean they didn’t have a great product and it doesn’t always mean there wasn’t great marketing, things don’t always work out.
Darren:
There’s also an element of luck in all this.
Sue:
100%.
Darren:
We’re both sitting here, been in business for 20 years. They say if you pass three years, you’re in the majority. I keep sitting here every year passes and I go, “Does that mean I’m doing a better job or just the same job over and over again? Is it Groundhog Day?”
Sue:
Sometimes it’s the beauty of being in an agency, you get to work on so many different products and services and meet so many different people. So, it’s always fun and it’s always really vibrant. And I think there’s a lot of things that … when you do get a new client, sometimes you’ve got to work out what’s not working actually to go what needs to be fixed. And that really comes down to doing a very, very detailed audit.
And I find sometimes people are obsessed with a particular thing. We need content marketing, we need all of these blogs, and they invest really heavily in it. And then you discover this is just ghost content, nobody’s even seeing it, nobody’s analyzed how much digital visibility, the content’s being created.
Darren:
It’s become wallpaper on the internet.
Sue:
Well, it’s just the internet’s flooded with content and even social media posts that nobody even sees, they’re not even visible. So, I really encourage businesses to really review how much they spend in creative and dev versus actual marketing as well.
So, development of a new website can’t be so much that you don’t have enough budget left to actually market it, and this happens more often than I’d like to say. People spend too much money in the creative element, which is fantastic, you need to have that.
But oh yeah, we don’t have enough money, we’ve got this tiny amount left and you go, hang on, that’s a really important part to defining in 12 months, what are you going to do. Are you investing in assets? Are you investing in creative or are you investing in marketing? And if you’re doing all three, that mix is critical to the success.
Darren:
Absolutely. Do you find the difference in the size of business makes a difference? Because you started the conversation talking about small startups, medium size and corporates. Because my experience is the bigger the organization, the more fragmented it is. But then at the other end, the smaller the organization, the less resources they often have at their disposal.
Sue:
So, both of those are correct. So, the bigger the organization, the more fragmented they have and the less the departments are talking to each other. So, marketing could be inhibited by decisions from IT, that’s a really big issue, and they’ve got to become friends for there to be success here.
And in the smaller businesses, they don’t have the knowledge or time, and they’re trying to do too much themselves. And there’s no one school like an accountancy where you get a piece of paper and go, “I’m a certified accountant.” People are operating in digital marketing who have done an online course and they’ve looked after their uncles.
Darren:
They’re all Google certified, I see it on their LinkedIn profiles. Oh, and they’re also LinkedIn certified.
Sue:
That’s right, and the issue with that is that you have people with small amounts of knowledge, again, without business experience …
Darren:
That’s always dangerous.
Sue:
Very, very dangerous. I’m very passionate about helping small business owners because I believe they get a raw deal in digital, to be fair. I believe the platforms are very difficult to use, there’s no way that an individual can be an expert at all of these different things. And I feel that there needs to be a better solution for them, which I hope happens in the future.
And they lose a lot of money in that. But I did read that in a year, Australian businesses are losing $5.46 billion in marketing wasted budgets, like it’s ludicrous. And that’s just because we’re not spending with our eyes on the prize and we’re not spending with smart decisions.
Darren:
And look, I have to say, some of that is business owners because I’ve worked with and talked with a lot of colleagues and friends that are in business, and they need to have an appreciation or at least a functional understanding of marketing.
As soon as you hire someone to do your marketing and not actually understand what they’re doing, it largely can become a black hole for your business. They can tell you all sorts of things that are performing, but ultimately, and to your point at the start of this conversation, and when we first met, is the only purpose of marketing has to be to drive growth.
And that’s growth in revenue and more importantly, profit growth. I recently shared a quote on LinkedIn: “The role of sales is to drive volume revenue, but the role of marketing is to drive margin.”
Sue:
Yes.
Darren:
Because we can all sell something for less, we could all sell our services at cost, but that doesn’t make a healthy business. Healthy businesses have to have margin, and that’s the role of marketing.
Sue:
Yes.
Darren:
Then sales is conversion.
Sue:
Yes, and there’s so many different ways in digital to do that, increasing the size of a cart and there’s just so many different ways to increase the profitability and the growth of sales through digital. But there’s obvious gaps in what’s happening now and it comes down to not being focused on the objective, always comes back to that.
Darren:
Sue, this has been a terrific conversation, we’ve actually run out of time. I do want to suggest that people try and get their hands on a copy of your book. So, I imagine they need to go to digitalmarketingdownload.com.au; they can order a copy through there?
Sue:
Yes, and also available on Amazon as well.
Darren:
Fantastic, so I would say for anyone in business that is looking at or currently investing any money in digital marketing, they should absolutely start with this book.
I thought it was a terrific — well, you said it to me once, it was a rant. I didn’t find it a rant at all, I just felt it was like a breath of fresh air, in that you have taken a topic that could be incredibly complex and confusing, and you’ve brought some common sense to it. So, I want to really congratulate you on such a terrific book.
Sue:
Thank you so much, I’ve really enjoyed talking to you, Darren, thank you.
Darren:
I do have a question before you go. And there’s all this controversy, particularly in the media, about the platforms like Google and Meta. And when you listen to the politicians, it’s almost like there’s a belief that they’ve become these evil empires. What do you think?