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FOMO danger, the joy of print & brains - AMA with Andrew Laws, James Kindred & Sophie Robinson
32 Plays1 year ago
**Co-Hosts:**
- Andrew Laws, Senior SEO Lead and Founder of Yeseo
- James Kindred, Experienced Graphic Designer and Business Owner
**Special Guest:**
- Sophie Robinson, Marketing Agency Owner at Moodi
**Overview:**
Join co-hosts Andrew Laws and James Kindred in this engaging and laughter-filled AMA session on LinkedIn Audio. This episode featuring special guest Sophie Robinson explores the interplay of SEO, marketing, and graphic design, offering listeners a unique blend of expertise, humor, and practical insights.
**Highlights:**
1. **Sophie Robinson’s Marketing Wisdom:**
- Her approach to holistic marketing support and the impact of social media on businesses.
- Tailoring marketing strategies to diverse industries, from charity to retail.
- The real-world results of effective social media engagement and content creation.
2. **Co-Host Insights:**
- Andrew Laws shares his decade-long journey in SEO, emphasising client-friendly strategies and impactful results.
- James Kindred discusses his 20-year experience in graphic design, highlighting the importance of creativity in branding and marketing.
**Key Moments:**
- A lively exchange of ideas and experiences, punctuated with frequent laughter and anecdotes.
- Discussions on the evolving digital marketing landscape and its challenges.
- The importance of SEO and design in building a successful online presence.
**Conclusion:**
The episode concludes with a light-hearted wrap-up, reiterating key takeaways and the value of integrating SEO, marketing, and design strategies.
**Next Episode Teaser:**
Don’t miss our next Wednesday’s AMA, promising more insights, laughter, and expert advice on the world of SEO and digital marketing.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the AMA event
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, you're back with the Untitled SEO Podcast from the SEO. This edition of the podcast is the recording of an AMA and Ask Me Anything that I did with Sophie Robinson and James Kindred on a LinkedIn audio event. We run the AMA events every Wednesday GMT at noon on LinkedIn. For more information email me or just go and have a look on LinkedIn. Thank you for listening.
00:00:26
Speaker
Oh, there was a little tune there. Did you hear it, James? I didn't. Does that mean that your life, please do not swear, act accordingly? Act accordingly? Oh, do we have to act accordingly? No, thanks. Only if anyone's looking. Thanks for anyone who's joined us for this creativity SEO, AI, and whatever else asked me anything. I am your host, Andrew Laws, and I'm here with my fellow host, James Kindred, and I can see our mate, Sophie, has popped up already. Hello, Sophie.
00:00:57
Speaker
Interestingly, the system doesn't actually tell us who's listening. We have been doing this thinking there was just a handful of people and looking at the analytics after was quite surprised to find out there's loads of people who've been tuning in.
Privacy and visibility on LinkedIn
00:01:10
Speaker
So thank you for the shy people. I've decided I'm going to go to somebody else's LinkedIn audio just to see what the workflow is because I'm guessing it's a privacy thing.
00:01:21
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know if it's a visibility and account level or if it's at the event side of things and they're just not showing you everything that's going on just to kind of limit the amount of data that's flying backwards and forwards of who's here and who's not. Sophie, would you like to say hello? Give us a thumbs up or a wave or something if you'd like to say hello.
00:01:45
Speaker
oh excellent she said yes right let me click a few buttons and what should happen I think you might have to press ask to speak or something like that Sophie which I can then approve can you find that button if you hover over your your little icon you should get a little context menu so you can press something there
00:02:13
Speaker
Yeah, there's not a great deal of guidance or what does what on any of the guides for the LinkedIn audio stuff. Nothing. First of all, if you're like, just drop us a message if you've got a question, there's no messaging feature.
00:02:29
Speaker
so it's like oh my god i can't believe no one's coming forward with a question well this is all an experiment and we like to we like to be just beyond the bleeding edge i'm not sure what is beyond the bleeding edge just vacuum i guess infinite space so sophie
00:02:47
Speaker
Well, she's just said, what am I doing here? I'm going to have to type. She said that a separate time, but I have to reply. I think you actually, I don't need to type too. She can hear me. Sophie, I think in the live pop up thing, if you hover your mouse
00:03:03
Speaker
mouse over you should see the context menu so three little dots and if you click on that I think there's something should pop up that says oh you're on your phone I'm afraid I have no idea Sophie oh this is beyond this is over the edge this is we are we are so far out into the vacuum oh she's gone I think this is quite entertaining I'm kind of turned the last AMA into a podcast and I'd listen to this
00:03:30
Speaker
Too confused, man. Welcome to two middle aged blokes, being confused. Imagine she'll pop back up in a minute then. Maybe she's switching to her desktop. So what's been on
Marketing strategies and approaches
00:03:46
Speaker
there? There we go. There's Sophie. There's Sophie. Welcome back, Sophie.
00:03:52
Speaker
Oh, we've got somebody else, we've got Laura as well now. I can't blame her really. Oh no, Laura's back. There we go. No, she's gone. I don't know how this is a weird feature of it kind of.
00:04:09
Speaker
shows you who might be listening and then they disappear again. So what's been on your radar this weekend Andrew in terms of workload and stuff you've found and that sort of thing? I think my biggest learning this week is that it's possible that sometimes you spend a lot of time developing systems for your business
00:04:27
Speaker
Only to find out that somebody else has done it much better and much simpler than you have and you can just You can just pay him a little bit of money so we've been through kind of various CRM's starting off with a Spreadsheet many many years ago and then we use capsule for quite a long time And then we moved everything to notion because we love notion about notion is great I think notion is great because you can kind of it's a good tinkering tool and
00:04:53
Speaker
for people of that persuasion of just wanting to kind of try stuff out, but have a fairly reliable data set to begin with. Yeah, I think we've done it. Can you hear me? We can. Hello, Sophie. How are you? I'm good. How are you? Confused. Yeah, this is really confusing. This is not, this, that was not easy to do, but a few directions.
00:05:19
Speaker
You have to put your hand up like you're in primary school, and then you allow me to speak. Interesting. Sophie, would you like to introduce yourself? Hi, I'm Sophie. There you go. Sophie's a friend on the... I never liked the phrase, but the Suffolk business scene. Fellow digital marketing person. We'll come at these things from a different angle. What would you say your specialism is, Sophie?
00:05:49
Speaker
We're known for social media, but I would say that we're a bit more of a generalist. I'm definitely trying to move that way over versus just doing social media because that's not what my qualifications are in. I've got a marketing degree, not a social media degree. So, you know, I'm much more
00:06:09
Speaker
you know, utilised across a marketing campaign versus just the one thing. This is something that's come up in, James and I have got a mutual client who I won't name, but this has come up just in the last week that
00:06:26
Speaker
If you as a client know what your goals are, but you don't know which tools to use, then finding the right people to speak to is actually quite a challenge. Because if you speak to someone who only does paid ads, they'll go, hey, do you know what? Paid ads is the answer. In SEO, I try not to. I will do feasibility and say, look, I don't think SEO is the way to go here. But yeah, it's just interesting that you obviously as a generalist
00:06:53
Speaker
So what's your starting point? I mean, you don't have to give away your whole process, but how do you get to the the nub of what might be the best strategy for a client? Well, look at the strategy. That's the main thing, you know, like a lot of what was happening and the reason that I got here and I actually made a real point to change how we were working, because a lot of people were coming to us specifically for social media.
00:07:23
Speaker
We would then be, you know, upselling cross-selling or whatever, but there would still not be a full marketing strategy in place. And also then my time wasn't getting paid for because I was, I'm a busy body, can't help myself. So I'd be like giving all this advice away that was either not listened to because you know, it's not necessarily in a document somewhere or it wasn't appreciated because it wasn't like given on a formal basis.
00:07:51
Speaker
And so, whilst there'd be a social media strategy, there wouldn't be an overall marketing strategy. And I would just seal these holes in whatever was going on and point them out. And, you know, more people have really unrealistic expectations on organic social media as well, which is that they're going to generate leads. You know, not really, it's not going to do that. So, you know, without it, you know, working in silo just doesn't work.
00:08:20
Speaker
I think anymore, like you've got to have a comprehensive plan. And so my first question now is, what is your marketing strategy? And if you do not have one, let's do it. And there's so many strategies. There's the brand strategy, the marketing strategy, content strategy, all of those sorts of things. But the main thing is like, what is your marketing strategy? What is your goal and how are we going to do it? Because I can tell you now.
00:08:45
Speaker
whacking some posts up on Instagram is not going to achieve it. So, absolutely. I think it's, you make a really interesting point in that. The door's just not. The marketing strategy and the brand strategy and the, the specific digital strategy all have to work in unison and they, they can't, they don't work quite as well without each other in place. And you can sometimes,
00:09:12
Speaker
perhaps over focus on one specific area, like Sophie was saying, you know, let's do social media, whatever that means, but it's just, it's one place your audience might be, doesn't necessarily mean they definitely are, but if you're focusing too much on that one place, you may be missing a much more receptive, engaged audience, even for an offline marketing strategy and not even bringing kind of considerations for digital into it is,
00:09:40
Speaker
Where do my audience play? Where do they sit? And what entertains them? It doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be social media, just because it's the newest thing doesn't necessarily mean your audience has adopted it. No. And as well, because a lot of business owners of an age, they're not so much, you know, obviously there's a new generation coming through. But social media is synonymous with a young person.
00:10:05
Speaker
You know, there's this, oh, I think I should be on there. Why should you be on there? What makes you think that you should be posting on a specific channel when your audience is hanging out somewhere else? Why would you try and get your mind wrapped around something else that you don't even know if that's the right thing for your business to be on there, but just because everyone else is doing it.
00:10:32
Speaker
And I think the other thing as well is that, you know, have you got a consistent, meaningful thing to talk about on that channel? Because the worst thing you can do is kind of do a bit. You don't see anything happen and then you stop or you get distracted or you pivot into something else or you're not kind of sticking to a plan, a growth plan to see if it works. And it can be too tempting to kind of jump onto a new thing like LinkedIn audio.
00:11:00
Speaker
and see if something's going to work. It's worth investigating, but it's not worth putting all your cards on the table to. It's worth having a separate... What's happening over here? What's this doing? But it shouldn't be part of your marketing strategy to test a few bits and pieces out.
00:11:17
Speaker
I think it's the joy and the opportunity of people who do what we do that we can play. I went through the Stephen Covey process a few weeks ago. Why is it that you're in business? And it kept coming around to play. And I was thinking, this is a really strange thing to try and express to my clients, my potential clients, or the world at large, is that a lot of people in digital marketing
00:11:42
Speaker
We play with stuff. That's why we're doing LinkedIn Audio. I don't want to shatter the illusion that this is a carefully well-thought-out thing because I did schedule it at midnight last night originally and then turned up today wondering why it wasn't working. So, Sophie, I think...
00:11:58
Speaker
kind of what you're saying just joins all the dots together really. It's saying yeah well that's what is out there because the worst thing when people approach anyone in digital is when they come in with a fear of missing out and I always want to say what is it you think you're missing out on? Yeah and ultimately
00:12:20
Speaker
I don't know if you've had the same. I get a lot of conversations and James mentioned offline strategies. I had this conversation of print really expensive. I really like dismissive of certain channels as well because they've tried something but they haven't thought about why they're doing it. So they've decided to get some leaflets printed but they've missed how key messaging they haven't, you know,
00:12:49
Speaker
you call to actions, whatever they've decided to do. Although, you know, they've put mailers in the wrong place. And then of course, print is going to be expensive.
Comparing print and social media marketing
00:13:00
Speaker
If you haven't done it properly, if there's not a strategy behind it, if you don't know what you're trying to get the goal of, you're going to just see the invoice and
00:13:12
Speaker
not the bigger picture I think the other thing as well is that it's very one of the misnomers about print marketing is people still say that it's hard to measure and I disagree I think it because it's still a conversion rate and if you've got the right call to action and the right mechanism whether it's via QR code or a short URL or you know if you're wanting to be a little bit more vague like a hashtag or something like that
00:13:39
Speaker
It's still a measurable result, because if you're if people are coming through that process, you're putting them into a funnel and you can measure the effectiveness of it. Sure, you've got to print perhaps more than one Instagram post and make it a physical thing. But as you say, Sophie, if you if you get the message right and the call to action right, it's a it's still a very, very full powerful way of doing things, if not more, because it's it's underutilized nowadays. And ultimately,
00:14:09
Speaker
print hangs around for so much longer. Like, social media, you can't even guarantee that people are going to be seeing what you've put up, one, down to, you know, the algorithm. And two, it's gone. Within 24 hours it's gone. Like, it's not, you know, and people see so much of it as well. So when you've got this beautiful bit of print that comes through, you know, you don't chuck it away immediately. You know, even like the
00:14:39
Speaker
The Domino's leaflets that come through my front door end up on the stairs for a few days before they go directly into the bin. And so there's a lot of value in the lifetime that it's around. And I had someone say, well, you know, I get print and I just put it, it's still on my dashboard. And what they could do, they could name the business what it was for. And I was like, it's been on your dashboard for three months.
00:15:09
Speaker
Yeah, like, you know, and that moment that you suddenly go I need this, you're gonna be like, oh, there's a leaflet on my dashboard that's been there for three months, or you're gonna be there was a leaflet on my dashboard for three months that I now know about. So it's passive, it's passive as well. Because you can also say leave on the dashboard, leave on the stairs. That there's something I'm doing for
00:15:32
Speaker
for Christmas favors this year for my clients, which are specifically done because it's gonna stick around and be really visible. And offline media doesn't necessarily just have to be print and everything you do, whatever the format, if it's digital or online or offline or whatever, the marketing strategy and the brand strategy has to define what that activity is, not that someone else is doing it.
00:16:00
Speaker
No, and ultimately, you know, it's about efficiency as well, like just save yourself some time by thinking about it. And save yourself some money by really purposefully dedicating that budget to all of the channels that are best for your marketing goals. Not
00:16:21
Speaker
let's see what happens because I think absolutely I think the other thing is within that budget put some money aside for experimentation and and play to a certain extent is
00:16:36
Speaker
you know, what, what are those edge cases? What are those potential missed opportunities that can come around in the next 12 month plan that we've perhaps not thought of this time and use the data that you're gathering to try and kind of inform yourself how to move that thinking forward for the next time you go around on the strategy and stick strategy within that time. Don't kind of disrupt it because something's happening and it looks exciting. Stick to the plan.
00:17:04
Speaker
come back again, learn what you found out, find some space to experiment and then go again. Yeah, which I think can be quite hard for business, business, well, anyone, because it's just a case of trust the process, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. And that's why the three of us are here. Hashtag marketing. So Andrew, have you are you still poorly?
00:17:30
Speaker
I am still poorly. I was about to divulge something on this, which I won't in case we use it as a podcast. But yeah, things got nice for me. That's all right. That's all right. I'm quite happy. I've been really enjoying the fact that you two have just been kind of coming away with it because I'm sitting here head spinning a bit with just thick with cold, but. It's firmly placed on desk. It's quite comfortable. This is the joy of this being audio only that you can't see that I haven't done my hair and I look after sleep.
00:18:02
Speaker
I'm serious as well. Go on there, James, say something smart.
Using Discord for community building
00:18:07
Speaker
Oh, so one thing that I'm tinkering with at the moment, which I've never really got my head around is Discord. And the opportunities are doing stuff around that and creating communities on that. It's never really kind of, I've always just seen it as a slack for gamers.
00:18:27
Speaker
But it's not, it's actually, it's really quite interesting and I think there's an interesting thing that you can do around creating communities on a couple, one which is around AI and the kind of community of developers and creative thinkers for that. And another one is Cole Gray, he's a fantastic designer up in Scotland. He's created one for graphic designers and that covers all sorts of stuff like mental health and events and
00:18:54
Speaker
general kind of weird thinking and memes of cats. But it's quite a nice way to create a community and then you can bring other services into it. So I'm playing around with that and some APIs and some WordPress and some Zapier and just kind of concocting some weird things to try and understand how it can actually work for real world communities in geographies and that sort of thing. And that fits into some of my thinking with the Ipswich Love Project as well.
00:19:23
Speaker
Sophie, do you use Discord or Telegram or any of those community builders? No, I don't. I was on Telegram for a bit, but I think this might have a bit of, you know, James has a ADHD thing where I get really overwhelmed and there's a lot of messages going on. So anything like group based, I get quite stressed about. I have to step back from them all the time. I mean, Discord, I did kind of go into
00:19:48
Speaker
Being a musician, we're always trying to bring musicians together because musicians generally tend to be quite good networkers. But we started a group on Discord and then everyone who was an admin in the group found all the toys in Discord and they got to the stage where each time I went to it, it was like having bags of ball bearings thrown at my head. It was just too much, just too much going. Always pay attention to your notifications on your devices because I've got most of my
00:20:16
Speaker
Notifications for these sorts of things even slack switched off and I just need it like email is like I'll go in and check slack and see if there's anything I need to do but if you leave it open discord in particular, there's a you can have a soundboard on it and load it up with a load of mp3 files and then trigger like horn sounds if a certain thing happens and
00:20:37
Speaker
And it's like, I can imagine that's probably quite appealing to one group of people. But that that would be my day finished. If I was sat there and it was just like, soundboards going off and like, it would just be too much. So I think it's kind of, you know, really, really be specific with your notification settings or switch it all off and have a kind of do not disturb level stuff until you go in and look at it. Same with email and that sort of thing is when my head's ready, I'll go and have a look, I won't
00:21:05
Speaker
I won't let the app tell me what to do. When I mentioned earlier kind of the people in digital marketing or let's just say people doing stuff more like we is doing, we often go and discover things and play with them first, but I think we tend to get burnt out by them first as well. Yeah. So I'm very interested about kind of putting up shields to protect myself from just getting too overwhelmed. And I think when I looked at Discord, it was like, it's too much for me.
00:21:34
Speaker
But it doesn't happen. It's however it's set up. Which communities you choose to join and that sort of thing as well. And I'm very selective with the ones that I go into and make sure that I'm not kind of walking into the big general rooms because I get the same sensation as I get. If I walk into a busy room in the real world, I can't do it. It's too overwhelming.
00:21:55
Speaker
So I think it's having that. But if you can, and this is actually going back to kind of tinkering with things and playing with stuff is that I will look at something for an hour. And if I can't find a way in, I'll walk away, I might come back to it again. But if I can't find that one kind of angle of what would be a use case for something like this, I'd walk away. And I think that's a real challenge to a lot of software and service providers.
00:22:26
Speaker
with the onboarding is that you have to give someone a context for using it that might trigger something in their brain. If you just kind of go, here's your account, go and have some fun. Beyond not knowing how to use it, you can't see a creative or a commercial opportunity to actually having it in your ecosystem.
00:22:48
Speaker
I agree entirely. I was just before you popped on Sophie, James was asking what the big thing in my world this week and it's... I was talking about CRM, so we've gone from, you know, crappy spreadsheet to another terrible idea, then we use Capsule, then we develop things in Notion. And Notion's so broad and can do anything.
00:23:06
Speaker
but this two days ago I started experimenting with HubSpot and I know about HubSpot I think anyone in marketing knows about HubSpot and we know it's very good it's very powerful but I always found it too overwhelming so I never even signed up for an account I'd read about it and go oh that all sounds terrifying but I signed up this week and the way it guides you through is very good I'm obviously only on the free one at the moment but it does they've dealt with that overwhelm in a pretty nice way
00:23:33
Speaker
I particularly like HubSpot to stalk people with their email opening. But what, do you find it weird that I've got, he's one of my freelancers. He opens emails, there's one particular email I sent him on Monday. He sometimes opens it three or four times an hour.
00:23:50
Speaker
And I'm going to ask you, what do you think is going to change? Wow. She's probably said something very valuable in it. I had... Oh, you're so positive, Sophie. I really like that. Yeah. What the hell's Andrew talking about? I had someone speaking of something that had like login detail. I can't remember what it was. How to access something, but from a red flag client that I'd parted ways with.
00:24:19
Speaker
the name in the way that some ex-clients can, like just like that block of anxiety came up. And it happened the other day and I was like, why? You know what I mean?
Anxieties of digital marketing tools
00:24:33
Speaker
I'm laughing in sympathy. It's absolutely sympathy because I know exactly what you mean. And I was like, they're going to email me. I don't want to talk to them ever again. Like, you know, real like dramatic.
00:24:46
Speaker
but all based off the fact that HubSpot had told me that they'd opened an email, but it was all just terrible. I remember now, it was just showing them how to access MailChimp. So, you know, and you're like, oh, so it has its benefits, but yeah, in that moment I was particularly triggered. I had to learn the difficult way that what I create in my own head is a million times more interesting than reality in situations like that, when the reality is always really quite dull,
00:25:17
Speaker
Makes life exciting, but oh my goodness. Yeah, the mind is the biggest weapon against your head. It's the most... I could do way more damage to myself through what I think versus what anyone else could do to me. You can just decide what the hell you like and no one's going to tell you because you also know it's so mental that you're not going to say it out loud.
00:25:47
Speaker
So there's no one to disagree with, which is also really problematic, isn't it? Because then you've just got yourself in complete tears. So, yes, can empathise. I get that entirely, but CBT, I went through it years ago and it was like, wow, really? This is how other people think. That sounds really useful.
00:26:10
Speaker
My wife has ADHD as well and she used to refer to her in a monologue as the Italian bees. It would be kind of like super high speed, buzzy noise that you couldn't quite tell what was going on but it was very passionate and very kind of loud and then she finally got her diagnosis for ADHD and got medication for it and suddenly realised that
00:26:35
Speaker
people not, that's not how the brain's supposed to work. And I get a similar thing, but I choose, I take a different route to deal with it, but it's a very weird thing that, what do you mean you're not thinking all the time? Yeah. Yeah, I said something to someone. It was something like, oh, I think you should do this. It was my best friend about something personal.
00:27:04
Speaker
And she was like, why on earth were you thinking about this? I was like, no, I wasn't thinking it was part of a combination of thoughts that I had in that moment. I was like, so you were probably like one of 17 thoughts. And that's the one. Yeah. I don't know. Oh, while you're here, I should probably tell you. And I'm like, I've only just considered this and that's the only time I thought about it, but I thought about it.
00:27:32
Speaker
I think it's intrinsically linked to creativity. I think that thought process is the joy and the terror of it, really. Yeah, in equal measure. It's great when you want it to be there and sometimes it's not there when you really want it to be there. And then the rest of the time it's, please, please stop. I don't need you right now. Mine goes when someone asks me a question and suddenly I'm just looking at them being like, I don't know what you just said. I have no idea.
00:28:01
Speaker
I mean, Sophie asked, you know, what do you think of this fork? And I'm like, I don't know. I don't have a thought about it. There's no thoughts now because you've put me on the spot about this one thing. Next Thursday, when you least expect it, I will explode with no end of opinions about that fork. My brain is ready.
00:28:24
Speaker
Yeah I mean I could probably actually have a lot to say about forks because like the really inane details of life is where I like to delve down deep but for this for this conversation knowing that you might repurpose it for a podcast I will save you.
Wrap-up and reflections
00:28:40
Speaker
Well I want to know now. Would you repurpose it into a podcast about forks? Yeah maybe. If only one of us owned a company called fork hey. Well yeah.
00:28:50
Speaker
I knew there was a reason I called it that. For this day, right, we've only got a couple of minutes left. This isn't the kind of audio adventure where we have a call to action and it's not the kind of like, rate, listen kind of thing, so I've just taken up 20 seconds of vocalisation that has no goal. James, do you want to pitch in?
00:29:13
Speaker
Yeah, nothing more for me. We'll do the same again next week. We won't catch anyone out by midnight show. So you can enjoy a sandwich rather than trying to get some sleep. And yeah, come back next week and we'll find someone else to chat with or answer some questions and kind of ramble for 29 minutes and 48 seconds.
00:29:37
Speaker
Sophie, I've really enjoyed your company for this. Thank you ever so much for popping up. Is there anything you'd like to, any wisdom you'd like to impart on the world before I press the end button? Not on the world. I mean, just on the audience in audio. I don't have any in this room.
00:29:53
Speaker
I don't think anything I can say is broadcastable. As we've been talking through this, we ought to do an after-hours one. The Ipswich Panto does a rude version. I do something similar with a guy called Dan Callas, which is called the SEO or Die podcast. I don't think that would be fun.
00:30:19
Speaker
Be hostly and press the end button. So thanks for listening everyone and we'll see you next Wednesday at noon.