A wild ride! Digital Marketing today can seem like a rollercoaster with so much out of your control. Learn to control the controllable.

In this episode of The Chat, we explore the critical shifts in digital marketing and sales with an emphasis on trust, strategy, and adaptability. Join us as we dive into the strategies that some of the world’s fastest-growing companies use to navigate this complex terrain.

Key Topics Covered:

◉ The volatile nature of SEO: Hear how one company saw a 50% drop in traffic after switching SEO agencies, and the lessons learned from that experience.
◉ The rise of mobile research but desktop conversions: Discover why people may browse on their phones but still prefer to complete purchases on desktop—understanding this shift is key to optimizing your digital strategy.
◉ AI and content quality: With the influx of AI-generated content, there’s a growing concern about the decline in quality. Learn why poorly executed AI-driven campaigns can damage your marketing efforts.
◉ The power of live chat: How adding human interaction on your website can increase lead conversion by up to 5-7x. Is it time to reconsider the role of live chat in your sales funnel?
◉ Email marketing challenges: With increased spam filters and competition, what does it take to get your emails seen and acted upon in 2024?

00:00- Terry:

Welcome to “The Chat”, where we take you behind the inbound scenes of some of the world’s fastest growing companies. For the past nine years as Chat Metrics, we’ve had an exclusive inside view of how these industry leaders are revolutionizing inbound marketing and sales across diverse sectors. Each week we bring you conversations with top minds in marketing and sales, sharing insider secrets and strategies that drive inbound success. Join us on “The Chat”, your front row seat to the future of inbound.

00:51- Pal:

Hey, Terry, welcome to “The Chat”,

00:56- Terry:

Yes. Yeah. “The Chat”, Good to see you today. Our first chat, really, the first crack that we’re having in a bit of a podcast, even though we’ve, chat often. That’s right. And today I thought we would, kick off this inaugural, chat, in The Chat. with, a topic that’s pretty close to both of us. and in fact, our, a lot of our clients as well, and that’s digital marketing, for marketers, but the digital marketing in, in, in particular, as, as far as where to start with that topic, what’s your overarching thought of digital marketing and what’s been happening in, in the last couple of years?

01:34- Pal:

See it has changed. I think it has changed on a rapid speed and, a lot of things we could not catch up to be honest, even though we’ve been very active in Digital marketing. The customers, the users of the, this whole, social media thing, or whichever form of media that we use, they’ve also evolved. some have dropped. So it’s it’s never stopping a landscape. And, so what I have seen is that. some platform will bring some greatness to what you’re going to type of marketing and then, they’ve dropped and something else got switched on and, but. what I see today is that once you know that, where your target market is, you, where your target audience lives, it is becoming more and more difficult every single day, uh, to grab attention. So what’s your say?

02:26- Terry:

Yeah, look, I agree. I agree. I think I can reflect, both on our own experience, but also on our clients experience, over the last eight years I’ve watched, clients be super successful with their digital marketing and their website traffic just grows, and then something happens, something changes. And all it’s not always out of their control. Sometimes it’s when they change an agency or an SEO agency, for instance, and they take a different Start, strategic approach.

Um, recent, recently we saw one of our client’s, website traffic drop by nearly 50%, but worse than that, the quality of the traffic actually dropped off to be almost completely spammy type traffic. they had changed SEO agencies. and the SEO agency had taken a completely new tact and hadn’t really continued on any of the prior work, the prior good work, quite frankly, that had been done. And so the double impact on that, on our business, obviously, we’re not getting the, a good conversations through live chat software, but for the clients, it was disastrous because their pipeline, which was effectively their website, dried up nearly overnight. that’s, One example of change that, was in their control.

And you could say probably wasn’t managed as well as it could have been, making sure that, the good work that was done was continued or there was nothing that was lost. but also in terms of the platforms that are out there, everything from how much mobiles are used now compared to desktops, but interestingly, As much as there’s been a massive rise in mobile, first click might be on a mobile, but a large percentage of the actual purchases are still taking place on the desktop. People will do this research on the web, on the mobile, and then flick over to a desktop, whether it’s a laptop, or PC to, to complete the transaction. And we’re seeing this, you’ve got to be prepared for all areas. I think one of the other, one of the other big changes that I’ve seen is this, proliferation of marketers now that are focusing on, I’ll call them marketers, focusing on emails, email outbound.

And so that’s forcing the big email platforms to increase their spam filters. So we, you’re seeing the good market is finding it harder to get into the inbox because the filters are becoming more and more, selective on who they let through. And so there’s so many factors. It’s very difficult to make sure that you’ve got all of your ducks in a row when it comes to make, getting the emails in the inbox. So, and I think for me, probably the only other, not only other area, there’s two other areas, AI, of course, and that warrants a whole nether conversation in itself. but social media. That scene, I’ll call it, is changing. That landscape is changing. You look at the rise of TikTok, how quickly it came. Twitter, now ex changing ownership, and under Elon Musk. and it’s changed, the change in that platform is palpable. You can actually see the difference in the conversations and certainly, in, in, and that’s having an impact on advertisers and who advertises in there.

But I think the other, The other area that is, being affected is, is AI and, or the other area that’s impacting marketing is AI. And, there’s good things and there’s bad things. it can help you do your job a whole lot faster. but I’m seeing a lot more lower quality content starting to hit. Hit the internet in terms of advertising, in terms of emails. I’ve got in my inbox, in my spam box at the moment, I’ve got over 200, spam emails, that have come in the last couple of days. Some of them ended up there, the majority of them ended up there directly. some I actually put in there myself that were quite obvious from being written by AI and terribly written by AI. yeah, that’s been the biggest changes, that I’ve seen. what about SEO? SEO I know is one of the areas that, that you’ve got, good knowledge and a lot of awareness on. have you seen that change much? from my end, you’ve got, you hear about Google changing, the algos all the time and there’s been some recent changes lately. but what do you see on that side?

06:31- Pal:

extreme changes. I think, anybody who knows SEO enough or probably has done it, um, on any scale would, would agree that in the last 10 years or so, it has been changing unexpectedly.one thing that he mentioned in your conversation that, one of your customers lost, they didn’t drop the traffic, but they lost a lot of ideal customers and all that stuff. See, Every website that needs, marketing SEO is something that, they cannot live without obviously some people start off with paid ads It does well and then in the long run they realize that you know should have always done SEO as well if not alone when people switch agencies or you get someone in house to do the job. I have seen that In the whole world of SEO, one thing that is being sold and while you were, talking, I was, picturing all those videos that, big marketers has been sending and showing that, look, my traffic was, 5, 000 and then in 90 days, look, and they show you real graphs, they’ll show you their Google analytics and all that stuff, but no one tells you what’s in that traffic,

And we know that, it’s very easy to research, SEO for any website and tell, if the traffic they’re getting, yes, they’re getting traffic, but the traffic that they’re getting is from the keywords, the money keywords, or is it just, there are a lot of long tail keywords and a lot of keywords left alone, still in low competition, because they don’t bring any value to no one. That’s why they’re in low value. And, They might have a lot of traffic, but they don’t bring anybody anything. So sooner or later, people get rid of those keywords and someone else picks them up just to build traffic. And, when you switch agencies show you the same thing. Probably. I’m just, assuming sometimes that they show you the graph that they’ve done for other customers, look at the traffic from 5,000 to 50,000 and 5,00,000 and all, but what’s in the traffic, you cannot tell. get sold by such, kind of agencies or marketers that I’ll bring you traffic, which is not a huge deal. Uh, the huge deal is to get relevant traffic to go and hunt for really competitive keywords. you know, that’s where the whole, win lies. It’s not in the

08:35- Terry:

Fish where the fish are.

08:37- Pal:

exactly that. So, and that is super competitive these days. once you see something is in high competition, even if through your research, it shows you that it’s in low competition. you want to rank for something like, even digital marketing for marketers. may sound like, a low competition keyword, but it’s not, you you go search for it and then you will realize that, there are hundreds of big companies like HubSpot and, AWS, everyone trying to show for that.

And none of them actually does, this kind of service, but they. Want to get the traffic the same thing, but at least it’s relevant to them somehow like someone doing marketing going to aws I don’t think what will they get? I don’t think what aws will get out of it. HubSpot Yeah, it makes sense But you’ll see you know, all these companies that have got nothing to do with marketing are showing up for marketing again Build traffic. It’s building all that authority with Google and that, see, we are so authoritative. We got the content. People want to come and read us. And then it gives juice, link juice to all the other pages that they’ve got. So we all know about it, but, it’s getting tougher and tougher. And, one thing is backlinks, like all these off page things, they are becoming super competitive. I think the whole game of SEO is, I would, for me, it’s easy, 80 percent backlinks, once you’re done with the rest of the 20%, which is still critical, super critical, if you don’t have the rest 80, The first 20 doesn’t do much these days, so content is still king. I would not say that it’s not, but after that, it is the off page. And if it fails, then content can’t help.

10:14- Terry:

it’s, it’s interesting that you mention, content, the on page, SEO component is one part of content, but for marketing in general, then there’s so many other aspects as well, which is everything from all of the collateral that you build, all of the downloads, the white pages, white page, studies, the messaging that you use in your advertising, and the copy that’s actually on your website itself, information you provide, right through to the emails that you write and send, whether they’re, cold outbound emails or whether they’re. nurturing, prospect emails or whether they’re, keeping existing customers engaged content. That next piece of the whole puzzle of that is content. I think is huge. we’re going through it at the moment, putting, not just this together, we’ve built our own, content, calendar and, and plan really.

and I was shocked at how, large and comprehensive, it actually became, I won’t say complicated. It’s not, if you follow the steps and the process, but we got a bit of a bit of a hack, along the way as well, in terms of, where does it all come from and how does it all fit together, whether it’s a common theme for a month or a week and, where to use that from, we can talk a bit about that, later on, I mentioned email marketing there before.
What’s your experience from the technical side of email, marketing? I could talk about the, the message and, getting replies and booking meetings and all that sort of stuff, but from your, what have you seen change from a technical perspective with, email marketing?

11:48- Pal

Are you talking about deliver ability specifically?

11:51- Terry:

yeah, that and look, we, we, we send, email notifications out of our platform every day, thousands and thousands. And they have to get to where they’ve got to go. And there’s a different understand that’s different to, standard marketing emails. And I know it’s certainly different to the, the cold, outbound emails that we do for outreach, for instance.

how do they differ? What, how do we make sure that the notifications hit the inbox, for instance, versus, the cold outbound ones?

12:15- Pal:

See, what I think is that all this marketing, different channels that we pick, whether it’s email marketing, whether it’s social media, whatever, it’s all driven by how competitive it becomes. So for example, if I’ll take a step back and, we were talking about SEO, uh, back in the day, You stuff your website up with keywords that you want to rank for.

I’m talking about probably 10, 15 years ago. you’ll start to rank because nobody else was doing it. And then when everyone else is doing it, then who is responsible to show that content, let’s say Google or Bing or whatever example you pick. Now it’s their responsibility to weed the rest out and get the best one, in front of you. So it’s becoming challenging for them also that, now what should the pick and they use algorithms to, to, to weed that out so that’s their automation when it comes to, yeah, even with the lose end websites used to have some rankings and then became competitive.

Then it, the demand was that, no stuffing, keywords and all that stuff, and then, okay, you got to have backlinks or are you going to have better backlinks? No, you got to have even better backlinks. Um, When we take this whole concept to email marketing that happened probably in the same manner It became more competitive.

A lot of people started doing emails and all that stuff and So with all these, you know lose an email, for example, your d mark is not set up properly You know, your d cam is not set up properly back in the day. They would let it go like in all these Email hosts they will let it go and then because it wasn’t competitive enough and now it’s becoming more competition They it’s their responsibility to weed out stuff and then you know get the best in They still want to get it in because if they don’t then they’re hosting Stop, we’ll stop working or probably people will stop using it.

14:01- Terry:

They haven’t got a business then, have they? If their emails don’t get in the inbox at all. I

14:06- Pal:

So people will run away from it. So they do want, emails that are for value, um, to get in. but it’s their job now to make sure the best comes first, and. Now we put it into technical perspective is that like I said, all these emails are properly set up that your DKIM is good. Your DMARC is good. And every single checklist is done. And then, you better know the content part that, what should be in the copy, there should not be too many links, not too many images. If there’s an image, like for example, one dramatic change that I’ve seen that, back in the day, you used to get emails, Like cold emails with a full set of format with images and like Links and video links and all that stuff and they would still get in but I’ve not seen any such email At least for the last two or three years in my inbox, and I’ve got a lot of inboxes Um that is cold and get all had all that content in it with all these images and all that stuff It’s not happening.

It’s only plain text emails that are still getting in I get like Probably a hundred cold emails every single day. And I don’t look at even one of them. So I think that’s where I’ve experienced the changes. And, from the, again, the technical point is that, your email has to be perfectly set up. It has to be like you said, the warmup, so now that’s a new thing that, email warmups, and because I’ve never used much emails, I had no idea what like email warmup is. I was like, okay. That didn’t matter in the past. Now it does. So again, these are all parts of more competition and as it becomes more competitive, then I think there’ll be more things added to it.

15:44- Terry:

think, email marketing is another entire topic all of itself. there, there’s so many different components to it and so many different ways of it. Is there, I guess though, is there a difference in your mind between the emails that we send notifications out of our platform, which are non marketing, obviously, they’re, business related emails compared to, the emails that we send out for our cold outbound, with, with different domains. Is there, what’s the main mechanical difference behind them?

16:16- Pal:

you mean for a email provider, like the filters that they have or

16:22- Terry:

so both ends, so for instance, I know that in the, we do, we will use Outlook emails or Gmail emails, and use, use it through an email, sending platform, like smart lead or, or something like that. we don’t send cold through in charge for instance, that’s where we send our marketing emails, but it’s still coming from, our G suite email.

What’s the sending mechanism that we use? It’s, I’ve heard you use the terminology before AWS SES. What’s that tech? Is that what we’re using to send the notifications through out of the back end of the platform?

16:59- Pal:

yeah, I’m in, for the most part. for example, check metrics, the notification that we send it through SES because, that’s, it wasn’t anything specific as a, technical, selection, but I think it was, that’s how we were set up in the past. and it delivers well, and we are not reliant on, any third party provider if they go down or something like that.

So there’s, there was high availability from AWS, which. Was a good decision for us. And then we’ve, hooked it with our own IP address so that, there’s no spamming that can be, done otherwise, if someone exploits our domain, we’ve left something loose. but because it’s hooked with our IP address, as long as we don’t spam it. We won’t be, taken down or blacklisted for that matter, at least for the notification bit. but yeah, I think it, it, it depends what you want to use it for, what you want to deliver it for. and then AWS SES is an amazing tool, compared to other traditional email systems like Outlook, Gmail and all. Um, Yeah, I

17:58- Terry:

It still comes down to the fact, doesn’t it, that if you’re going to be sending bulk emails out for marketing, unless it’s super relevant, then it’s going to be spam. And there’s going to be some percentage of people that will tag it as spam. And you can end up ruining a domain if it’s not, if.

18:17- Pal:

If you’re not doing it properly, exactly.

18:19- Terry:

we’ve, we, we jumped on the bandwagon with, we did our research and understood what we needed to do to protect our main domain and set up, other domains to be, doing the cold outreach out of, and we’ve never had one of those. Tag this spam because the outreach we do is very relevant.

I won’t use the word personalized, but it’s very relevant to the person that it’s going to.
we haven’t been in that situation where we’ve lost any of those, domains and we won’t, I don’t think there’s any value in sending out spam emails, spam type emails. there’s, there’s no response.
You don’t get new clients, you don’t get interested replies. So, Look, like I said, e mails can be, a whole, another conversation. It’s very useful. I think it’s still the cheapest form of advertising or marketing, quite frankly. If you do it right, you get the right messaging, out to the right people, that’s the other thing is making sure that you’re segmented and who you’re sending it to.
I think that’s very important. Remarketing. Tell me about on the advertising side of things, re, remarketing or retargeting, How does that work?

19:20- Pal:

basically when someone hits your website or, any campaign that you’re running through, Facebook ads or Google ads or, Twitter ads or whatever. once they’ve been to your, to, to your page, you, whichever platform they’re using your WordPress site or whatever, um, you want to, Chase them back or probably, represent yourself again. So in all these, websites that, news websites or something like that, you might see some banner, running there, like a head of banner or something like small ads. Um, that’s where the remarketing takes place. So it’s on all those platforms that are either running by AdRoll, you through the cookies that, the visitors has on their website, because they’ve visited you once, it can, there is a chance that you can represent yourself again and again.

if you might have noticed you’re checking a website and then switch to another website and then you see the same website or same product that you just saw, uh, that’s the length of it that, you can not only show the page that the person was on, you can even show the product that they were looking So
that, you know, if you. If it is too important, people are going to buy it or, probably not going to forget it. But sometimes when you are doing all this, shopping that you haven’t planned for, it, it comes handy. And also for brand awareness, it’s a great thing. Um, it’s, in my, Experience remarketing has been the lowest converting of all, and that’s why it’s the cheapest to run. Obviously, um, if it was effective as Google ads or Facebook ads or something, it won’t be that cheap. but I think it’s a great tool for brand awareness. That’s the value that I. You know, fine in it, but yes, it still gets you some conversion sometimes. but that’s totally my experience.

21:02- Terry:

so you mentioned, Google AdWords or, really we’re talking about getting into the realm of, PPC or pay per click advertising. how, what is the cost? Look like these days in terms of PPC that, the cost per ads, how does that, how’s that compared to say, a couple of years ago?

21:20- Pal:

Everything has been competitive. And I think, Google ads is one place where the whole competition is derived or probably, determined that, okay, this is the bids are getting higher and higher, so definitely this is a very competitive keyword. Um, what I’ve seen recently is that. If you’re having an e commerce store and that, you’re running all these shopping ads, um, as a marketer, you can go all the lengths that you can go to perfect your page, your product descriptions and all that stuff, but now it’s the way this whole system is set up that, Google ads, that, sorry, the shopping ads, they’re actually taking all that data directly from your website.

In. Almost real time. Like not exactly, but like on a daily basis, you can see, uh, so there is on Google merchant center, that’s where, you feed all the website data to Google merchant center and whatever is, provided there comes to the Google ads. So it’s it’s not that much in your control.
Like it used to be with traditional ads, Like other ads, for example, if you’re running a, a display ad or, or a text ad or something like that, then you have some chances that, you can change your headers, you can play around with some different messaging, but now you don’t have that option anymore. So it’s basically extremely competitive. Yes, but it’s too much in their control. Then it used to be in the marketer’s control or the website owner’s control. It’s totally in Google’s control. They will. decide who would they want to show first. They would decide who’s got better ratings and all that stuff.
Obviously that’s one big factor, but that’s one place that I’ve seen in ads where the control is totally taken away from you. And I think, won’t be. Shocked if that’s, going to be rolled out to everything else that, you won’t write your own copy, whatever is on your website.

We’ll just feed it at that. So that it’s, it’s more control for the Google.
what about the targeting side of things for new marketers and those people that aren’t experienced in running ads, is what happens if you don’t target? what are the risks? mean, like through Google ads, you mean? Okay. So, Google ads is basically, you know, it’s not a introductory platform. It is for some bit, for example, if you’re trying to look for a CRM software, now, a CRM software that you’re looking for or looking for that bid, and then you’re looking at Google, it’s still, there’s a chance that they’re introducing something new to you, your company might show up, the company that you’re marketing for might show up. but the other thing is that, if you are selling something on Google ads that people are not looking for, then. You need an introductory platform, for example, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, where they are just browsing or they’re just having a good time. And then you show up that, we have made this new AI and this can do this for you, right?

But originally that person was not looking for that AI on Google. they’re probably looking for a CRM, but you’ve built a tool that is better than a CRM, but call it something else using AI. Um, You won’t have much luck in throwing your ads on Google ads. Rather, you want to use a introductory, an ad system. that’s why people go to Facebook so that they can display something. There’s a lot of room to display. You can show a big post video, whatever that you, what you can, um, where Google is wonderful for, A billion things but for such introductions, it’s not the right spot So you need to know as a marketer or even as a business owner That you need to decide that where should you be throwing these ads? it’s not always let the marketing agencies, you know decided for you Um, it’s so easy, probably straightforward to understand.

25:08- Terry:

It’s really interesting, so you can use other platforms almost as an education or teaching to expose people to your new product or new idea and then it’s likely that they’ll go and search for that on Google. To learn more about it if they’re interested or they can click obviously on the ad And so that you but they’re not in google in the first place looking for it because it’s such a new concept So really you need to target again, use that terminology fish where the fish are it’s interesting and I’ll talk about it probably in the the next podcast but dark social is one of these things that we talk about And I’ll probably go into a little bit detail, more detail later on. these days they say that 70 percent of the buyer’s journey, particularly in B2B is done before they even make contact with your business in that first, the very first contact with your business. They’re already 70 percent of the way through the journey. And that’s everywhere from social media sites to communities, to WhatsApp groups, Facebook groups, anywhere where there are people hanging out, Slack groups, where they, Get peer reviews and referrals and feedback, before they reach out to you as an organization and nine out of 10 times they’ve made the short list already, it’ll be two or three.

It could be potentially one before they even reach out. They might’ve made the decision. and sometimes it’s the salesperson that, loses the sale rather than, the competitive, than the customer, putting it elsewhere. Just quickly back, while we’re talking about advertising,
I’ve never found it so frustrating that when I’m looking for something and I see an ad that pops up, I’ll click on that ad and I’m searching for it. I’m interested in it. The reason I’ve clicked on the ad is because I’m interested in it. And then when you get to the landing page, it’s almost like a, click bait.
It’s something else. It’s not exactly relevant to what you’re looking for. I might have been looking for instance, we use CRM. We’ve been talking about that use CRM, but then you find that it’s taking you to a customer, cold outreach platform. It’s not a CRM. It’s something I guess it might be a lot interested because it’s similar.

27:18- Pal:

But for mine, I think that if the landing page had been more tuned to the ad or do ads that align to the product that you’re selling, so that there’s not this, bait and switch type activity, I think that’s more frustrating. And, we’re certainly, we’ve seen it with our existing customers, wherever anything like that’s happened, when people jump in, in the chat.

27:38- Terry:

They’re quite frustrated and usually they will take the time. not usually, but they do often take the time to tell you how frustrated they are in the chat that they’ve ended up somewhere where they didn’t really want to be, and get your advertising right. But I think that’s one of the things that quite, um, important. what in terms of, in terms of say a couple of tips, for marketers in terms of PPC, to increase the conversion rates on the landing pages, what tips would you give marketers to make sure that, after they’ve spent this money, they’ve done their targeting. whether that’s in different platforms or even potentially geo targeting, making sure that they’re getting to their ideal client profile. what’s some tips that you give after they’ve spent all that money and got people to their landing page to actually get that landing page to convert properly.

28:27- Pal:

I used to run a digital agency back in the day. Um, and I’ve, I was very determined to get my clients more conversions. Although most of them were really happy the way it was going. Um, but I was like, always constantly thinking what could be done more? What could be done more? Um, and so I, I applied that on me.
I was like, how easy is it to sell something to me? And I was like, probably the most difficult thing on planet earth. and I realized that, It’s the trust on the website that people are trying to trust you. When they come to your website, they are trying their best to trust you. Are you giving them enough reasons to trust? That’s totally up to you. Normally people don’t even think about that concept. They go, I’ve built a very wonderful website. I’ve spent a lot of money. I’ve hired the best marketing company. Yeah. that’s rare case that all these things, go in one. but let’s say you’ve done all of that. You think you’ve done your part and now you leave it to the customer. Okay. The visitor of your website and go, now it’s your job to make the decision because I’ve done my bit and I’ve done the best. It’s not that for them, they don’t even know if you’re doing any marketing.

They don’t even know if you care for the business or for the customer and all that stuff, but they
the eye of trusting you. They’re trying their best. one factor that I’ve seen that I tried back in the day for just a couple of weeks, I tried that myself was throwing chat on Facebook. Like live share on the website. And I was behind that. And I put two of my team members, part time team members on it. as I saw it was converting very well. So all of a sudden. And I’m not, exaggerating this. I think on day one, the conversions from five leads for a customer went to 35 leads or something like that. Not exactly. I would say, let’s say if it is one lead, then it came to five. So there was easy five, seven times, of lead conversion right away. and after a few days, the customer noticed themselves and they asked me that, what have you done on the website?

they haven’t been to the website and checked it, that there’s a chat on it. But, I was trying to, use it as much as I can. So I can also upsell to my customers, but also there’s something logical to upsell. would understand the value.so I think putting that human piece and making a website actually alive. Is the strongest thing that you can do. Um, I normally, and I think a lot of people will resemble with this. I normally do not show up on website, those who cannot provide 24 seven support. If I’m making a differentiator between one competitor to the other, it’ll be. They’ve got 24 seven chat. For example, AWS, when you go and buy their pro packages, in their hosting, they charge you a hundred, 150 a month or something like that.

But you get pro support. I have had instances where our service crashed and, databases are overloaded and all that stuff. And I’ve had eight hour long meetings with them in one instance where they’ve put the best. Of the best in the world, you know at my disposal probably five or six of those engineers were with me for eight hours until that issue was resolved or Alternative was provided right?

How would I not value that? against a website that says You’re on your own. And, uh, and I
had no idea when, we switched for AWS, that kind of instance is going to happen. And then that’s support is going to come our way. But now we know, and it’s all possible through that, chat platform again, that, then they put into a zoom meeting, a video call where seven people were there. but I think what I’m trying to say is that, that, Putting a human piece into your website is critical these days. And people tried bots in between just to replicate that or, or to fake that. But. It just will never work. I guess as, as good as we can, there can be information part that is being given by an AI, but when there is human required, it’s good if you have one.

32:33- Terry:

think, there’s a whole host of factors that go into make sure that landing pages convert. Obviously, you’ve got to make sure that the content’s right, that it’s resonating, that it’s covering off on the main questions that the customer is asking in their own mind, What’s going to make this better than the alternatives?
Will this solve my problem? Yeah. How will it solve my problem? Is it going to be better than the alternatives? how is it better than the alternatives? how hard is it going to be for me to change? all that information needs to be on a, a typical landing page, how much it costs, obviously.

but you’re right. There will always be questions, that, still remain unanswered by some people, not everybody, but by some people. And in my mind, that’s where, live chat does come into its own. It ends, it can answer those questions for the people that are still sitting on the fence.
And that’s, where the big increase in, in conversion rates are. Interesting. very interesting. I agree. It’s, it’s one of those areas that, conversions. they’re the heart and soul obviously of what you and I do now. but the reality is they should be the heart and soul of any marketer because, you can talk about, brand marketing and brand awareness all you like, but the whole purpose of brand awareness is to get people to buy your product above everybody else’s.

And that conversion and whatever it might mean from you, whether it’s a checkout, of a basket at. An e commerce store, or whether it’s booking a meeting for a demo with a, seven figure software deal, the conversion, the outcome or the objective that, you’ve put all of your investment to get that website to do, really needs to be the primary focus.
We see the psychologies and little tweaking’s of different colored buttons and buttons in different places and different call to actions on the buttons. when the, when, I think it has much less an impact than being able to make sure that people get the information that they need to get to make a decision.

If your product’s right for them and it’s at the right price for them, they’ll buy it. It’s as simple as that. But they won’t know if it’s right. Unless they’ve got the information to make that decision, so yeah, very good. Very good. And while we’re talking about advertising, I wanted to have a, just a very quick chat around social media advertising specifically.
You said, you mentioned Facebook before. While we’re talking about social media and the power of it, I don’t have the exact numbers in front of me, but there’s, something like nearly 5 billion active users on social media, these days, which is up, I think from, 2017, it’s a, it’s an increase of 38 or 40%.
it’s massive jump. When, so obviously we talk about fishing where the fish are and, your customers are on social media. What about, advertising on social media? What are the, some of the considerations we need to give when you’re advertising on social media?

35:22- Pal:

for example, if you’re selling, again, it’s the, the, Well it’s like you said, fish where the fish are, um, if you’re selling something that is more of a appearance based thing, a nice wallet or, a physical product that you need to see and feel, at least imagine about, Facebook works wonderful for it, Instagram, even Tik TOK, all these visual platforms, YouTube, I think YouTube is also a great platform.
it’s also very affordable in most cases,

35:51- Terry:

it’s one of those things where I’ve seen with, for instance, sometimes it can be quite frustrating. In that the policies of the social media platforms can mean that you can’t run ads that you would want to add, can’t use certain words or can’t use pictures, one of our clients, for instance, in, in the aesthetic industry has struggles because, Facebook doesn’t like you using before and after photos.
They’re okay with the after pretty fluffy shots, but they don’t like showing a starting point and a finishing point, in their mind, it’s some type of guarantee that you’re giving. if you’re prepared to give that guarantee with the money back, then, what you guaranteeing the money back, you’re not necessarily guaranteeing the results.
I think, there’s ways around, ways around it, but nonetheless, it’s very frustrating and can take an enormous amount of effort. One One of the biggest risks that I see in social media is if you are too reliant on it.it’s too easy. And I’ve heard and seen too many stories of businesses having their company accounts either hacked, or just banned because they’ve breached, Policies of social media platforms, and then their entire revenue stream that comes from that platform is gone overnight at literally gone.

There’s no getting it back. You can’t go and, reconnect with all of those followers. Somehow that account is banned. It’s banned. It doesn’t appear on Facebook anymore. You can’t, go and engage with it as a different person. and I think that. There are some marketers out there and business owners who are very reliant on social media for their income streams.
one piece of advice I’d like to give is that there is a way around that, and that is by making sure that you are building your email list. Then your contact list, they don’t necessarily have to be customers. They don’t have to be paying customers, but that audience that you have on social media, you should be building, getting people to sign up to your emails, to sign up to a newsletter, to sign up to information and value that you’re sharing so that if something does happen.

You’ve got a second stream, a second way of communicating with that audience. Because if the social media platform, you’re banned or you get hacked, then it’s potentially gone. it happened to my wife last, early last year was her Instagram account. I don’t even know why they hacked it. She hardly ever used it.
but the difficulty, she couldn’t get her account back as many times as she tried. they, the spammers that actually, or the hackers that actually set up two factor authentication on their side. And so every time. Instagram or Facebook gave her account back. They just changed the password and it went straight back to them again.
And then it got into this big loop with Facebook. And she ended up just abandoning it and setting up a new one, and put two factor authentication. But, so there’s a trick. If you haven’t got two factor authentication, get it. There’s a good reason to have it. um, it’s probably the best hedge, I think, is to make the hedge against the risks of social media being too reliant on social media is making sure you’re building that, that email list, out of the

38:54- Pal:

I think,
um, sorry, just to add to that, I, if you think that you actually made me think, this just now, yes, obviously there’s a reliance on other platforms and, social platforms and all that stuff is, Not guaranteed to be in your control. like you mentioned, I’ve seen big YouTubers losing their channels because of some organization made some complaints and stuff like that, all of a night policies change and you got hunted down. Um, what you made me think is that website is the only thing that you have control over. Now that you might be blacklisted for some, whatever reason, to be showing your website on Google ads or, from Google organic. End of the day, it’s just your website that is in your control. That’s a fact and I wish nobody’s website should get blacklisted anyway But I’m just saying that’s a practical fact is it’s only a website that is in your control Unless you’re doing regular things not doing anything dodgy. And apart from that you’ve got reliance everywhere.

39:55- Terry:

Absolutely. Absolutely. So it’s, it’s one of those things that you need, you do need to make sure that you’re complying with all of the platforms requirements, in terms of their policies and procedures. Otherwise you can end up in a hole. Yeah, it’s true. It’s true. Look, I mentioned, dark social, Chris Walker, from Refine Labs talks about dark social and has been for a couple of years now.

Um, I’ve had a chat, which will be live on the channel here with, Monique Olien, about dark social. But she used the term dark funnel because it’s actually, it’s more than just dark social. It’s actually the beginning part of the entire buyer’s journey. So it’s that, you call it a sales funnel or buying funnel, to put it in customer’s terms.

The dark funnel, as I see it, begins. When the, your prospect or potential client realizes or recognizes that they’ve got a problem that they need solved, to put it in, in, more sales terms, it’s, they’ve got a pain and they need to get that pain relieved. And so if you think about, They’ll, the buyer’s journey today looks so different to what it did 10 years ago in the, in, in 10 years ago.
and, I lived in a corporate world with a, responsibility for 150 external reps and 150 internal, support, sales support team. The days of the first port of call being the salesperson to help me research and understand what are the solutions I’ve got here are gone now with the Internet and so many other networks available.

first port of call often is an internal conversation within the organization and then often the next port of call. Is peers and whether that be through some type of network or group or association that they’re part of. Then the third part often is once they’ve gathered all of their information around who are potential providers and who else has had this problem, how they solve that problem, then they’ll go and do their research.
Anonymously, again, it might expand it through further networks that they’ve been referred to, research on the internet through, you and your competitors websites, without even engaging at all. and so the, by the time you get to that point where they have a ready to reach out and actually engage with your company, it’s 70 percent of their buyer’s journey is actually complete.

So one of the questions Monique asked was, how can an organization, can, do you have the budget, or can you afford to own that 70 percent of the buyer’s journey? Cause what is it? You mentioned the word before it’s brand awareness. It’s the advertising you’re doing about making sure that your brand’s out there.
If you think about, From the funnel that I’ve just described, it means that you have to have a presence in your prospects and potential customers, peer groups. You have to be in the potential community groups and communities that they will be in, whether it’s Slack groups or, Reddit, Facebook groups, etc.

What’s that groups that you need to have a presence in all of those. Potentially need to have your own community as an organization that’s is, considered a valuable resource of information as well. and a safe place where people aren’t just going to get, put on a nurture email campaign once they, once they visit.
So trying to actually impact all of those areas, it’s something that’s well beyond advertising. I’ve seen a couple of people do it, quite well. Chili Piper, I think did a very good job of it. they. Partners, their partners manager at the time. I saw him pop up in communities everywhere where the potential customers are.
and, it was not just him, it was a team. So it was like a whole team.so you have to have a fairly decent sized budget to be influencing the early stages before people are even, and there’s interesting things you can do. running, engaging, running competitions that actually engage with potential prospects in places where they are for chili piper or do a couple of really good, smart things on linked in where they run competitions of, they’re all about booking meetings for account executives.

And they. competition I saw was something about vote for your best account executive, and tag, his boss or something along those lines. So it was like the Chili Pepper, Chili Bubble, we’re using that as a way to get their brand recognized because they ran this competition and gave prizes away.
So it was quite good. But I think the challenge for organizations now is the how to actually impact that first 70 percent of the buyer’s journey.
And I think that’s why you talk about, re resolving who your website visitors are. So if you can identify the website visitors that come to your site, that, if they’ve been, if they don’t just bounce, they’re more than, they’re more than 10 seconds.
It’s likely that they are actually there for a valid reason. And they’re coming there because they’re interested in the topic. What if it got them there before then, whether it was a Google search or whether it was a, a Google keyword search, or whether it was an ad or a post or some piece of content that’s got them to your website, there’s some level of interest, you don’t know what stage they’re at, and you don’t know how interested they are.

But being able to know who has actually come to your website with some accuracy gives you the opportunity to do two things. You can, retarget, remarket to them like we mentioned earlier. and that being a fairly low cost, less effective potentially, but if you can target it right down to the people that are there and then identify those people that have visited your website within your ideal client profile.

Then you should be able to get your, remarketing, conversion rates up to making sure that you’re excluding people that don’t fit in your ICP. But the other side of that then is if you can resolve, who’s coming to your website, it gives you an opportunity then to email them, touch them specifically, potentially even call them directly and, have a, conversation, a real conversation.

If they haven’t engaged with the chat, I think people, depending on how people have got their live chat set up, Yes. look, they’re as effective as they’ll ever be. People seem to, a lot of people seem to hate chat bots. Some people are happy to chat with them, but a lot of people seem to hate chat bots.

I think if your website or chat live chat is set up so that there’s a chat bot there, there’s going to be a big portion of people that won’t engage. if your website is set up so that there’s live chat there, but it’s asking for an E your name and an email address before you go talk to a person, then that’s, Our experience is that we’ve seen it cut 96 percent of people that say they want to talk to sales out of that chat, because they don’t want to hand their contact details over there, obviously in that 70 percent of the buyers funnel.

but if you can have live chat there where people can have an anonymous conversation, that’s an opportunity then to put some light on that dark funnel and have conversations with people in an anonymous format. that gives you an opportunity to let them experience your brand and experience your organization and lets you have some influence in terms of, their buyer’s journey, through the way that you interact with them and how much empathy you show and how you care, it’s just really their first brand experience.
So, I think those two components in the dark social that, that are within our control and may not be. Overly burdensome as far as cost is concerned is that live chat component and the resolution component for actually identifying who comes to the website. But dark social is another whole piece. And, and that’s Chris Walker’s now, not talking about that so much and talking much more about, very carefully measuring and monitoring the advertising spend that he’s set.

It’s obviously his new focus for his business, but. there’s no doubt that digital marketing is a challenge. There’s so many different facets to it. something I’ve always been interested in. I wouldn’t call myself necessarily jack of all trades, master of none, but nor am I a particular master of any single component of it, except obviously with the With, things much more website related SEO and, live chat conversions.
But the resolution and advertising component is something that, we’re building into our platform pal, as so it’s something that I’m pretty focused on at the moment as well. We’ve seen some pretty exciting results as far as that’s concerned, but I wouldn’t like to be in any new marketers shoes stepping into a new organization, with, having to decide where they’re going to market, where they’re going to spend, the budget. My only, my only piece of advice would be A, B, T, always be testing and making sure you’re testing and measure everything you do so that you can funnel your, budgeting dollars into where, to where they need to go.

48:37- Pal:

true,

48:40- Terry:

Well, I don’t know if you got anything else you want to add into this conversation

48:44- Pal:

No, I think It’s a great start. It’ll be too much if we go anything beyond this.

48:50- Terry:

So I think that’s just about, that’s about us covered today. there’s rabbit holes that we Go down on nearly every single one of those topics in more detail, but, it was a good conversation. Thanks pal. It’s been good, catching up for our, our first, chat on the chat.

Um, looking forward to say, yeah, it was good. I enjoyed it. Look, looking forward to seeing what the, what the next conversation is going to be about.

49:12- Pal:

Same here.

Have a good one.

49:16- Terry:

Bye for now.