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Revolutionizing Growth: Mastering SEO and Marketing Strategies with Jeff Beale
30 Plays1 year ago
Welcome to another insightful episode of the Untitled SEO Podcast, where your host, Andrew Laws, engages with leading minds in the world of SEO and marketing. This episode features an engaging and thought-provoking conversation with Jeff Beale, also known as Mr. Marketology.
Key Discussion Points:
- The Art of Networking in Marketing: Jeff and Andrew delve into the importance of building genuine relationships in the marketing world, beyond the stiffness of formal conferences and talks.
- Jeff Beale’s Origin Story: Discover Jeff’s journey from his time in the Air Force to becoming an expert in web development, SEO, and marketing strategy. It’s a story of evolution and adaptation in a rapidly changing digital landscape.
- The Misconceptions of Social Media and SEO: Jeff addresses common misconceptions about social media’s role in business growth and the nuances of effective SEO strategies.
- The Role of AI in Modern Marketing: A forward-looking discussion on how AI is transforming the way we approach content creation, SEO, and data analysis.
- Strategic Approach to Marketing: Jeff emphasizes the need for a well-thought-out marketing strategy, highlighting the importance of understanding your audience and aligning your offerings to their needs.
- Debunking Digital Marketing Myths: From the overemphasis on social media to misunderstanding Google's algorithms, Jeff provides clarity and practical insights.
- Jeff Beale’s Book Discussion: Learn about Jeff’s book, which focuses on breaking down silos in corporations and effectively automating marketing processes.
- Parting Thoughts: Jeff leaves listeners with a powerful message: the key to business success lies not in chasing revenue but in developing a solid strategy and building strong relationships.
Find Jeff on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffbeale/
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Transcript
Introduction to Untitled SEO Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello, and you're back with the Untitled SEO podcast. I'm your host from Yesio. My name's Andrew Laws. And in this season of the Untitled SEO podcast, we are doing what we call LAN. And LAN is live action networking. I've been working in marketing for over 25 years now, and I've always been bothered that people in marketing don't spend a lot of time just hanging out with each other. We might go to conferences and give talks and be very official and very kind of stiff.
00:00:31
Speaker
and proper, as it were, but we don't ever just have a good chinwax. So in this season, I'm finding interesting people to speak to and getting to know them live during the recording.
Guest Introduction: Jeff Bill, Mr. Marketology
00:00:42
Speaker
And I am very honored to have a guest with me today. Honored guest, would you like to introduce yourself? Yes, Andrew. My name is Jeff Bill. I'm known as Mr. Marketology, and it's an honor to be on the show. I'm glad to
00:00:54
Speaker
to have the chance to meet you and network. Like you said, not too many times that you just get out and get to just chop it up with somebody and just talk business and not talk business in a sense. It's always the relationships I find that even with in-person networking, the people who I talk to about generally things that aren't connected to marketing or aren't connected to work, they tend to be the people in the long run that I end up actually working with.
00:01:23
Speaker
I think I don't, just for listeners, whereabouts in the world are you, Jeff? I'm in Atlanta, Georgia. So the place where everybody talks about, unfortunately, our football team, a lot of times. But yeah, it's Atlanta.
Networking: Building Relationships vs. Aggressive Pitching
00:01:41
Speaker
That's where I'm at.
00:01:42
Speaker
So I'm in the UK and at networking meetings here, in-person ones, which we're sort of just about back to now, we're about doing that again, tend to find that some people who come in very heavy with the heavy cell and they've got their stack of cards, their business cards and they're trying to pitch to everybody. Those people never do well. I agree. I agree. Actually, I had a client I told that.
00:02:06
Speaker
I was telling him with his campaign to build relationships with verticals that speak to his audience. And so I'm saying, look, just build relationships. He's like, yeah, I'll tell them about my sale. They don't want to know about your sale. Well, tell them the benefits I can. They don't want to be your salesperson. That is not the goal. The goal is just to meet them, just to talk with them, find common interests.
00:02:30
Speaker
things of that nature and as business that is in your line of work comes up, you'll come top of mind. They'll say, oh yeah, I know a guy that does that. And it's a good referral sale versus here's my business cards, like you say, here's my offers, here's my sales, go out and sell for me. Nobody wants to be your salesperson. We don't like being our own salesperson. That's a lovely way of putting it actually. The way I explain it to some people is
00:02:59
Speaker
You know, old fashioned newspaper sellers who stood on street corners and basically shouted about the fact that had newspapers out of newspapers or shouting the headlines or whatever. If you go into a networking or any sort of marketing environment and you just lead with the sale or the pitch, you're just shouting at people. You're just that guy that people are crossing the street to avoid. Whereas something that I think is quite, quite fun. Everyone I work with, they all get a copy of the Dale Carnegie book.
00:03:30
Speaker
you know, how to win friends and influence people. And I encourage my team, if they go to networking, to try not to say anything about themselves at all. For at least the first or second time, you know, the first and second time they go to a new meeting. Tell people your name, and you know, there's a bit where you stand up and they say, you say, Hi, I'm Andrew Laws, and I'm grey-haired SEO wizard at Yesio. That bit's cool, you can do that. But after that, don't say a word about yourself.
00:03:58
Speaker
Yeah. And for one thing, the interesting thing about it, Andrew, is if you are about your business, which most of us are, the passion comes out in your conversation anyway, you don't have to say, this is what I do. Because if it's what you do all day, it's going to come up in the conversation just organically. And you'll start talking, let's let's talk SEO, you'll start talking about. So you're in Atlanta, I can start saying, hey, about the Falcons, and then I can start talking about
00:04:27
Speaker
you can google them online um one of the things i've noticed with google is they've changed things and this is how the algorithm works and people's like what what are you talking about oh i'm sorry i do seo oh you do seo but see it wasn't forced it wasn't hi i'm jeff i do seo it was more like this is how you can find a certain thing you're looking for but the algorithms change so this is how you should search for now you're you're positioning yourself as
00:04:52
Speaker
You're an expert because this is what you live. This is what you do, who you are, versus this is my title, and this is what I've done for however long. Absolutely. So Jeff, let's get into your origin story. How did you find yourself where
Jeff Bill's Journey from Air Force to Marketing
00:05:09
Speaker
you are? How did you get into marketing? That is a beautiful question, and it's interesting. I got in it because I have a big mouth, as you can see. I talk a lot.
00:05:20
Speaker
So I was in the Air Force and I was an ammo, career killer. That is not a career you want to be in. I'm literally handling the ammo. Ammo, I was the guy that brought the missiles and bombs to the plane and worked on the missiles and bombs. Was not a career path that I chose. It was funny how it happened.
00:05:42
Speaker
When I enrolled in the Air Force, the recruiter said, do you want to work with planes? I was like, oh, yes. I'm thinking flying. That's what I'm thinking. College. Nothing close to being a pilot. So I end up not knowing enough. Let him put me in an MOS. And the MOS he put me in was in ammo.
00:06:04
Speaker
And so once you're in a MOS, the only way to get out of the MOS is to transfer to another MOS that has availability. Oh, it's pretty much your job description, your job. So only way you get to another job or career is you have to transfer into something that has availability, and then they usually have somebody that'll switch with you in a sense.
00:06:33
Speaker
Well, nobody wanted to go to ammo, so I was stuck. And it was interesting. So while I'm in ammo,
00:06:43
Speaker
I was like, this is not what I want to do. So I start taking up in school computers, you know, network administration and so forth and so on. So I started getting really good at computers. Now I did this on my off time because on my regular time, I was on the flight line. So I was in a truck with missiles on the trailer, sitting looking at an airplane all day. That was my job. And so as I got better at it, I started to notice that our website,
00:07:12
Speaker
was a symposium that we were doing was horrible. And I was like, this website sucks. And so they said, well, if you can do better, then do better. So the challenge was put. So I started doing the website, got into web development.
00:07:26
Speaker
So after that, then I said, well, nobody can find you. Now this was when Google, this was in mid 90s, early 90s. So this was, Google wasn't even really a thing. It was, it was Yahoo. It was, you know, um, so yeah, like this sucks. So they say, well, if you know better, do better. So I ended up getting this now, mind you, Andrew, I'm not getting paid extra for this work.
00:07:49
Speaker
getting tasked to work because I opened my big mouth. So as I started to learn it and I got out the military, I ended up getting hired by an agency that wanted to sell to the military. So they wanted to sell to it. They figured since I was getting out of it, the relationships were there. So got into that, started doing websites, and that's where my career started, with websites.
00:08:10
Speaker
But as I started doing websites, I started noticing people had these beautiful websites. Really, back then, they weren't that beautiful. But they had these websites, but nobody could find them. So they weren't really worth anything.
Multi-Channel Marketing and Automation
00:08:24
Speaker
So that's when I started to get into SEO, end up moving here to Atlanta, got with an agency, 360ive, awesome agency, taught me a lot, started to learn SEO more, SEM.
00:08:39
Speaker
So both sides of the fence. And then from there, when in-house started working with companies, in-house worked my way as an executive, director of marketing, things of that nature. So as I started to look at SEO, of course, SEO isn't enough. I mean, they might not find you. So I started to dip and dab into paid search, into social media. And then I started falling in love with marketing automation.
00:09:08
Speaker
And so that's where the Mr. Marketology came into play. I started to look at it's not one channel that's going to sustain your business.
00:09:20
Speaker
It's a connection of channels that work together in your common goal. And so that's when I started to look at automation, look at strategy. The tools may change, the trends may change, but the principles are the same. So I started looking at more of, let me help you with your strategy, build out your strategy. And let me show you how you can automate it because a lot of people don't have the desire or time
00:09:44
Speaker
to do it all every day themselves. And make it easy. Let the machines work. Now AI is definitely letting the machines work. So let the machines work, automate it, got into that. And that's where I'm at today. I mean, it's kind of more of it started with me opening my big mouth and telling people that their babies were ugly. So that's how it started.
00:10:09
Speaker
It's such a, I'm not completely dissimilar story. In fact, I started building websites opposite an American Air Force base. Here in Suffolk, there was a very large base called Bentwaters and another one called Woodbridge. This is back, you know, I'm old enough to remember Cold War and I'm guessing we might be roughly a similar age here. But my boss at the time had
00:10:36
Speaker
He'd worked several jobs in the Air Force and then when the base shut, it was naturally his service was up so he left and hired me and we built computers and websites and stuff. Same thing though, just going. There was this really odd vibe at the time that if you had a website that somehow it would be a build it and they will come thing. People used to plan.
00:10:59
Speaker
Because not everyone had websites in the 90s. People would say, why should you work with us? We've got a website. And I remember thinking, what? That doesn't make, that doesn't make any sense. It just means someone can use notepad and those rudimentary HTML. And I'm interested in, in talking to you about, about the business automations. I think it's still misunderstood, but I think a lot of people still mistake doing marketing things for actually having a strategy.
00:11:28
Speaker
And you've kind of read up on some of the things that you say and a bit of your background. And that's one thing I've seen you say that I'm paraphrasing, but it's one thing I've seen you say that I really like. So you say actually on your LinkedIn bio, you don't have a revenue problem, you have a strategy problem. Can you unpack that for us please, Jeff?
Strategy Issues vs. Revenue Problems in Business
00:11:50
Speaker
It's true. Most companies don't have a revenue problem. They have a strategy problem.
00:11:56
Speaker
They, first of all, they don't want to do the hard work. And I felt fallen guilty to that too. I mean, it is hard work. The hard work is understanding, first of all, who your audience is and what their needs are, then understanding who you are and how you benefit those needs. Then from there, you craft your marketing. Everybody comes to it. This is what I offer. I offer cookies. I have the best cookies. My cookies are the most natural cookies. You should buy my cookies.
00:12:24
Speaker
Nobody cares about your cookies. So it's one of those things where you understand your audience and you understand their needs first. And then you understand how you benefit those needs. And now you can put yourself in a unique position of why you are the best choice for whatever you offer.
00:12:39
Speaker
Then you start with your marketing message and your offer. And then you start with your website, your funnel. All the other marketing stuff comes after that. But the hard part is most people just come out and say, this is what I have. Let me Google and find the average price. Let me price myself accordingly. And let me go out here and, like you say, shout. Let me shout and be the loudest shout in the room. And hopefully somebody will do business with me.
00:13:05
Speaker
But really when it comes to long-term scaling, you know, lifetime of a customer, it's usually not what you're offering that they're buying. I tell people all the time, people do not eat at McDonald's because the food's good. The food's sorry. Everybody knows the food's sorry.
00:13:23
Speaker
But it's the convenience. It's the location. It's a lot of other things that McDonald's sell you that you buy. People don't even realize McDonald's, one of the marketing genius that McDonald's does and Disney does the same thing.
00:13:40
Speaker
They get ingrained into you as a child that it's a reward to be a part of whatever they're doing. It's a reward. So psychologically, it's rewarding yourself to go to Disney. It's rewarding yourself to go to McDonald's. Has nothing to do with what they're offering. It's the feeling of I'm rewarding myself. I deserve this.
00:14:02
Speaker
I tell people all the time, they don't sell you what you think they're selling you. So once you understand that, you start building the strategy. Now, what I also tell people when it comes to the revenue problem, stop looking at the what's not working and trying to fix that and look at what's working and replicate that.
00:14:22
Speaker
People spend so much time trying to figure out, well, this isn't working. We need to fix it versus saying, Oh, I get the majority of my clients or customers through referrals. And most of those referrals come to, you know, meeting people out and about.
00:14:38
Speaker
And I don't even talk business like you say, and they refer me business. Well, if that's what's working, stop spending all this money on these clever ads with clever messaging that when you ask at the end of the day, which a lot of people don't, you know, a lot of smaller business don't track larger business. They do the numbers is data driven decisions that they make. It's like, okay, so I'm on Instagram.
00:15:02
Speaker
I'm posting every day, two, three times a day. How many sales did you get from Instagram? None, but I need to keep selling on Instagram. You're not selling on Instagram. You're just wasting time on Instagram. So, how are you making business? Well, I make business whenever I go to the golf course and I talk to somebody and they refer me to this big client. Well, how much is that client worth? Well, that client's worth $20,000. Well, you need to go golfing more.
00:15:33
Speaker
You enjoy it and you get good business from it. And that's what I tell people. You haven't built out the strategy because you haven't even thought about a strategy. You're thinking more about, I need to be on this because it's a trend. Because all of my competitors, what they don't even realize, a lot of these industry benchmarks may not even be apples to apples with you and your business. You may be looking at a report and that report is reporting on, let's say,
00:16:04
Speaker
a larger agency. And you're looking at, they're saying, this is what you should be doing to grow your agency. But you're dealing with an agency that's actually got seed funding and rounds of funding. It's a different animal because here's the thing. If they've got used to lose money, they've got research and development money. They can try a whole lot of different things, see what works, what doesn't work, but they have enough money to sustain it. And they're not going to tell you about the ones that don't work.
00:16:32
Speaker
Exactly. And they don't tell you about all the other combinations that make that work. See what I'm saying? Think about this. Elon Musk sells Teslas. Custom made. People wait almost a year for their car to be developed. And he sells them at six figures a pop in most cases. But you can't go out and say, I'm gonna sell you a car. Give me a hundred thousand dollars upfront. I'll build you the car and get it to you a year from now.
00:17:00
Speaker
see he has that funding where he can he can do that he has the funding to do a lot of press releases a lot of media appearances he has the fun he has so much other stuff going on that people want to be in a tesla because of a lot of other factors and you and there are a card
00:17:21
Speaker
manufacturer and you're saying well I'm gonna sell my car for a lot and you're gonna wait and no you're not Elon Musk so realize where you are realize who your market may be and then serve that market and that's where the strategies come in that's where you sit down and you
00:17:37
Speaker
you plan and you plan and you plan and then you say, this is what's going to work. And then also you got to track, measure and make data driven decisions. And nowadays with AI, that is so much easier because you can just pump a lot of that information into the learning machines and they'll spit back what predictive results you should have. So you're talking authority and data. Yes. Yes.
00:18:05
Speaker
The two things very much go hand in hand. One of the things I like about AI is just crunching a lot of data and getting far quicker conclusions and opinions. Yeah, and that's what the challenges are.
00:18:23
Speaker
A lot of people don't look at that. Even for myself, I looked at myself and I said, well, how's my business going? And then how am I generating my business?
Effective Marketing Strategies vs. Trends
00:18:33
Speaker
And I was falling guilty of that. I was like, oh, I need to be on social. I need to do this now. But the majority of my clients didn't come from that. And so I said, well, I'm spending all this time doing this.
00:18:46
Speaker
instead of doing what's working. What's working, if I spent time doing that, then I wouldn't have to, you know, I may do the other stuff just to be in the public eye, just to be, you know, grab attention like Gary V say. But that's more of if it works great, if it doesn't, it was a good test.
00:19:08
Speaker
But sticking my, I guess you would say, line in the sand on the things that I know that work. Now, if you are just starting out in business, it's hard to do that. Because you don't know what works because nothing worked yet. But most companies, after you've been in business a year or two, just take a year's worth of data, start looking at it, see what works, and then you set aside a little bit of money for research and development. Because this is the other thing. Things don't work forever.
00:19:36
Speaker
I remember back web design. Let's go back Andrew's web design days. Remember back when you were telling people they needed a website and they said, well, I need a website. I've been doing this business for 20 years. I've never had a website. And those businesses now struggle or if they're still in business because they don't have a website and everybody has a website. And now it's like, well, I need a website. Well, it's the same thing. We've come back around to that with AI.
00:20:03
Speaker
I don't need AI. Why I need AI? The robots aren't going to control my business. Well, let's put it like this. Whether you let it happen or not, AI is here. It's going to stay. Yeah. So you might as well go ahead and embrace it and then see how you can tie it into your strategy. And I'm not saying let it run your business. I'm saying see where it complements what you're doing and then just integrate it.
00:20:30
Speaker
I think it's the classic labour saving device. So American marketing in the 1930s to 40s around what we call white goods in the UK, so washing machines, refrigerators and whatever, it was all based on telling housewives, I guess, if you have this washing machine, you no longer have to spend all this time washing things.
00:20:53
Speaker
And I doubt anyone back then went, that's it. I'm not having machines run my house. It's the same thing with AI. I mean, these days I walk through my house and.
00:21:04
Speaker
These little sensor lights light up as I go along and it means I can go to the loo in the middle of the night without falling down the stairs, which is an advantage. It's a big leap forward. I don't fully understand the fear that people have over AI yet because it's just another tool, in my opinion.
AI's Role in Modern Marketing
00:21:21
Speaker
I don't know who's hyped it to the point to make it look like a threat.
00:21:27
Speaker
Now, people look at sci-fi movies and they think that that's what it's going to be. Well, if we start letting this happen and we're going to have the Terminator, we're going to have this and that, and they're going to, Skynet's going to come and control all of us and we're going to not have jobs and so forth and so on. The thing is, the funny part is we'll still have jobs, just our jobs will change a little bit.
00:21:50
Speaker
instead of you being the graphic designer that has to physically go into Photoshop and design this graphic, now you have to be the graphic design expert to know what to put in as a prompt and let AI go ahead and do it. The skill is still filtering the output. I've just realized, Jeff, this might blow your mind, it might not, but in the room just out there is somebody I used to be in a band with in 1994, 1995.
00:22:20
Speaker
And he lived the other side of town from me and he didn't have a telephone. His parents didn't have a telephone. So to book a band practice or organize a gig, we used to write letters to each other. So writing on a piece of paper, putting a stamp on it, walking it to the post box.
00:22:35
Speaker
It would then be like 24 hours to get, it would probably go into London, go to the sorting office and then come back out to where we are in Ipswich. You can read it. And even if he wrote a reply letter straight away, there was like a three, four day delay, communication. And yet the fact that I can now send him an SMS message, I take for granted. And what I really want to see is what in five or maybe 10 years time
00:23:01
Speaker
we're looking back on and go, oh my goodness, can you believe we used to have to do that manually? And that used to take like half a day. And that would just be something that we now take for granted. Exactly. And a lot of us are already doing that. Think about how long it takes you and your team to research your audience to say this is going to be the new offer.
00:23:26
Speaker
It usually takes months of meetings after meetings after meetings and meetings to talk about meetings to do that. Now you can just put in a prompt, say, hey, based on this, based on this information, based on our historical data, tell us what our ideal customer looks like. And it will literally not only give you your ideal customer, it'll give you your avatar as well.
00:23:48
Speaker
And you can say, oh, this is exactly who I need to target. And then whenever you get off track, you can go back and look at it. This is exactly what I need to target. And the beautiful thing is, as it ties into your data, it's not guessing.
Debunking AI Myths in SEO
00:24:03
Speaker
It's not seeing a benchmark. So let me give you an example of a benchmark hack trick, in a sense. We'll talk SEO, because this is what we talk SEO.
00:24:16
Speaker
Everybody says, well, don't use AI because it's not going to rank well in Google, and it's going to kill your SEO, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. OK. Google got barred Gemini. Google's heavily invested in AI. Do you not think that Google is not going to leverage AI? And here's the thing. Most people don't know a lot about SEO, so they're looking at the surface level, the title tags, and so forth.
00:24:42
Speaker
Well, basically there are over 240 different factors. Some of the factors are how much content you have on your site. Some of the factors are how long people stay on your site. Some of the factors are how deep do they go into your site, how relevant your content is to the search result. These are factors that weigh way more than you have in an alt tag.
00:25:06
Speaker
way more, right? So if you have AI and you can spit out a piece of content every single day and you can make long form content, which long form content is things over 500 words, right? So long form content and people like it because it's relevant and they read it and they stay on your site and they keep coming back to your site. You're going to be rewarded for that. Google is going to rank you for that.
00:25:33
Speaker
See, people are like, Google's gonna say, oh, well, it's written by AI. Well, Google literally, what you don't understand is using AI to look at your stuff. So why would they not let you use AI? What really interests me is that people get, well, if you go to chat GBT, even if it's 4.5, and you just say, write me a thousand word article on mugs or cups. Okay, well, I put that, I put it on my website and Google ignored it. Like, well, of course they did. You wouldn't go to a copywriter.
00:26:01
Speaker
say right give me a thousand word on mugs you go to a copywriter and say i need a thousand words and this is what we want to get across and this is our target audience and this is the sort of language we like to use this is the tone of our business this is this is the point in the article which we want people to have that like penny drop moment this is what you try putting all of those things.
00:26:21
Speaker
into a prompt. You're not going to get garbage out. It's just not going to happen. You don't even look at the other factors. Did you even index that article? You put it on your site. You never indexed it. You never told Google it existed. You waited for Google to find it. And the way Google finds it is you have to index it or a link that Google finds links to that particular piece of content. The funny part is if you didn't do any link building,
00:26:49
Speaker
You're not going to be family. Sorry. Hold on. Alexa stop. Google stop. Sorry. You have to do now say Alexa stop. No Google stop. No Siri stop. Oh, sorry. Exactly. Exactly. Because they're always listening. Everyone quiet.
00:27:08
Speaker
And that's the other thing that we don't talk about. They are always listening. If you have these smart devices, you have these phones, they're always listening and they're always serving you up content based on what you are interested in.
00:27:24
Speaker
How many of you have talked about a certain thing and all of a sudden your social feeds are showing that thing that you talked about or your search results are sure and you're like, wow, why am I getting these ads about this? I was just talking about that. It's not magic. They're always listening. So if you know that when you're building your strategy out,
00:27:42
Speaker
you can start putting trigger words into your content that makes you relevant for what people are talking about. And then all of a sudden you start showing up. But it's like going back to what you said, it's about knowing what your strategy is going to be. And it's not just a tool or a trend and say, oh, well, I'm just going to do this little trend and I'm going to automatically be found, automatically be loved and automatically grow my business. And it just it sounds good.
00:28:11
Speaker
Now, that's why we hire good copywriters and good PR, good media people to paint the picture of that because it sounds good. But that's not how it works. It's not. One of my things that I talk about when I do public speaking, I speak to groups. One of my little bells that I ring is that marketing hasn't changed in 200 years.
00:28:37
Speaker
I've got myself and the copywriter I work with, we've kind of got this like two person book club where we'll find the oldest marketing books we can and then share notes. And one of my favorite ones was written just after the First World War. There's things in there that just have not changed. It's so fundamental. Learn your audience, learn what motivates them, learn how to serve them. That's...
00:29:01
Speaker
We do it with different tools now, but I love that you're talking about Instagram because I think social has been missold by the people who own social really madly because you're just hollering into a void. Pretty much always you are in a cave shouting to yourself most of the time.
00:29:25
Speaker
Yes. And they've got everybody buying into the myth, but we don't really realize what social really is selling. Social's currency is attention, like Gary Vee would say. It's attention, and they're really selling you dopamine.
Social Media: Selling Attention Over Sales?
00:29:39
Speaker
They're selling you that dopamine that keeps you scrolling. I remember one time I looked at the end of the week, I looked and my phone said, this is what your activities have been. I spent 14 hours on TikTok.
00:29:50
Speaker
14 hours. I've got a teenage daughter and I don't think she's ever spent that long on TikTok. And I would love to tell you, Andrew, that it was business-related, but it was not. Catch. It wasn't. It was just scrolling, looking at people's stories and entertainment. And that's what they're selling. If you knew what was behind the curtain,
00:30:15
Speaker
then you could understand it. People think, well, Google search results is just because they want to serve you. No, they're selling ads. And in order for them to sell ads at the price they're selling ads at, they have to be the authority source for content.
00:30:32
Speaker
And so people come there, and since they go there, they say, well, because we can identify the audience that comes here, down to the least little thing, and we can get you in front of that, it's going to cost you this. So that's their business model. But if you don't know that, you're thinking it's just by happenstance and love. Social media, they're selling you the dream. You don't know how many arguments, Andrew, I get into.
00:30:59
Speaker
with people that say, well, this influencer has a private jet and a Lamborghini. And I'm like, no, they don't. Yes, they do. And I'm like, I know they don't because I helped with the campaign and we rented all of that and I'm telling you that they don't. And they're like, no, you can't, how can you tell me when I have the invoice, I can tell you that they don't. And so it's funny because social sells us this imagery
00:31:26
Speaker
and we buy into it and so businesses that was more on a personal level but business wise the business looks at social and they compare themselves to these companies and they compare themselves to these influencers and they believe the height to.
00:31:42
Speaker
We need to be doing this because Amazon's doing it, but you don't know Amazon's model. Amazon has a lot of other moving parts to make that work. You can't do two-day shipping if it's you and five other people in your whole business. Jeff, did you have the saying growing up that like, I don't know if it's just a British thing, but if you're caught here, if you're caught doing something stupid with your friends, you say, oh, but my friend was doing it.
00:32:09
Speaker
Parents say well if your friend jumped off a cliff, would you do that? Yeah, so I think I think that's social media
00:32:18
Speaker
Yeah. What reason is there that you would do that? Here's the funny part. The ones that jump off the bridge usually have a parachute or a bungee cord, but you jump off with nothing because everybody else is jumping off. So I'm going to jump off too. And then once you get in the air, you see, wait a minute, he didn't tell me about the parachute.
00:32:40
Speaker
God, that's such a good analogy. I really like that. That's tidy. I really like that, Jeff. Yeah. Yeah. And that's what a lot of businesses, even I've been with some fortune sized companies and they're like, we need to do this because this other company is doing it. It's like.
00:32:55
Speaker
Why? I mean, you don't, you know, because that other company isn't even in your industry. They're not even apples to apples, but you're looking at, they're in the news a lot. They're getting props because of this and that. No, understand your lane, stay in your lane, and your audience come to you for your uniqueness. They don't come to you because you're like that other company, because if that's the case, they'll just go to the other company.
00:33:22
Speaker
I like your message, Geoff, and unfortunately we are slightly over time, but you're in your flow and I'm enjoying talking to you. So I wanted to talk about your book. I don't want this conversation to end because I'm fascinated by anyone who's written a book. So tell us about your book, Geoff.
Geoff's Book: Breaking Silos in Corporations
00:33:41
Speaker
Well, that book was written basically because of silos. I noticed a lot of, especially in corporations, a lot of businesses, everybody came to the meeting and they pretty much would say, well, hey, social media is doing well, or hey, SEO is doing well, or hey, you know, my department's doing well, but they weren't looking at the overall goal of the company.
00:34:06
Speaker
And so the book is basically talking about how can you get with your team.
00:34:13
Speaker
and y'all work together and understand the common goal. And then how can you automate a lot of it? How can you take a lot of it off your plate? A lot of us, especially when it comes to nine to fives, and I'm not going to just say nine to fives, I'm going to say business owners too, as in business, we do a lot of busy work just to say we're doing work. And at the end of the day, it doesn't move the needle. And so being able to see that, you know, as a leader,
00:34:39
Speaker
being able to look at your team and say, you know, that's nice. We got a hundred followers, a thousand followers, a million followers, great. Let's look at our bottom line. Did we make any money? No. Well, it didn't matter then. Or if it did matter, how did it matter? Because everything isn't always the end goal of revenue.
00:35:01
Speaker
But how does it contribute to the revenue? If it didn't contribute to the revenue and we just got a bunch of people, Les Brown said it best. I can set myself on fire and get a million people to watch me burn. Because honestly, they will watch you fail. Doesn't mean they want you to succeed in business. So understanding that, and that's really what the book was. Look.
00:35:22
Speaker
Let's take a strip it all back. Let's work together to the common goal versus coming to the meetings and saying, well, my department did well. We don't care what everyone else did. And then all of you are sitting on the curb because the business went bankrupt. I'm so on board with that.
00:35:43
Speaker
I kind of would like businesses to get to the stage where they don't hire someone for social. These things should just be mechanical. They're just mechanical things. It's like, I haven't been asked for a while, but sometimes the phone will ring on someone and say, can you come and teach us how to use Twitter? And I say, why are you using Twitter? Mechanical stuff of, right, put your text in that box, press that button. Well done. You've tweeted. That's irrelevant. Mechanical things change. They're dull.
00:36:12
Speaker
going to buy a new car. Well, how do the push rods in this car work compared to my previous car? Who cares? Exactly. And you know the funny part about that is a lot of your social media team doesn't even talk to your copywriters. That's why many of them. It should be a machine that should be the whole car. Exactly. It's like, how do you write for social but your copywriters are writing for your website and your blog and they're writing something totally different and you got your PR team, they're writing something totally different. You don't have a company voice.
00:36:40
Speaker
Because nobody's talking to each other. You know, they all just doing it the way they want to do it. And you are so on point with that because a lot of times we get lost. I remember one time I was talking with a client and I was trying to develop a strategy. And then I said, well, I can give you a list of a million people. You can buy lists. OK, we all know in marketing buying lists.
00:37:09
Speaker
Yeah, you just pretty much rolling the dice. I mean, I'm not gonna say you throwing your money away, because sometimes they work, sometimes they don't, but it's probably not the best thing for you to do. But when it came to buying a list, that client literally within 10 minutes paid that invoice. When I started talking about building a strategy, they still haven't done that yet.
00:37:35
Speaker
I think we are on the bleeding edge here, Jeff. I really value people who actually put these things into words, into books, because books have a sort of gravity that I still don't think is quite matched by other platforms.
00:37:51
Speaker
Oh yeah. Just want to celebrate you kind of putting that message out there because it's so important and every time you mentioned earlier about old people saying Google would move the goal post and they don't, they just get better at snipping out junk. This whole thing of it, it's not the mechanics, it's not the delivery, it's the strategy.
00:38:13
Speaker
so when i did a linkedin live today i don't know if you played with that linkedin all year i like linkedin live yeah and one of those earlier and we're saying that when schema code first became a thing so you know for for listeners
00:38:27
Speaker
If you type for hotel information or whatever and Google gives you that information on its result page, you don't have to go through. I had clients throwing their arms up and go, that's it. It's rubbish. They're just stealing our content. I was like, no, no, no, we need to be there. You need to be there. And what I'm really looking forward to in the next year.
00:38:44
Speaker
is the Google AI results. So when you type it in, the little AI box is going to actually give you the answer. What that's going to do, it's going to force everybody in SEO and therefore everybody in digital marketing and more importantly, business drivers, marketers to up their game, get better. I love any development that makes us get better at serving humans, not algorithms.
00:39:09
Speaker
You're right. And I would give you a year or two before that comes into play because Copilot already does that. U.com already does that. And if you don't think that Google is about to release it, you know, the big boys, they don't really come up with new ideas. They just find people with great ideas and they either figure out how they can duplicate it or mimic it or just buy it. Yeah.
00:39:34
Speaker
you know flat out. So it's here. I mean they're trying it with Bard. They're trying it but Bard's not there just yet. But yeah as you can see with like if you go to Edge, do Microsoft Edge or go to Bing, when you come up with your search results right beside the nail on the right rail is the AI version giving you another piece of content.
00:39:59
Speaker
I love this. I love that it feels like the Bing fight back because like you, I started. We used to optimize with these rules for Altavista, these ones for Hotpot, these ones for Arsenal News. And it's become very homogenous and I don't think that's necessarily a positive thing. So I am going to have to wrap up, I'm afraid, Geoff. Give me a parting thought. If someone's listened to the whole of this conversation, which has been really interesting, if you wanted them to remember one thing, what would it be?
Core of Successful Marketing: Strategy and Relationships
00:40:27
Speaker
I think the best one is you don't have a revenue problem. You have a strategy problem. I mean, focus on your strategy. Go back to the principles of marketing. Look at who you serve. Like I love what you said, you know, who you serve, how you serve them, how do you benefit them? And then at the end of the day, it is about building relationships.
00:40:50
Speaker
Anything in business is about building relationships. Let's get away from all the magic that we have in marketing and start getting back to just building strong relationships and helping serve people that need what we have. And I think that's really what it comes down to.
00:41:08
Speaker
That's an absolutely great message, Geoff. All right, listeners, I'm going to ask you to check the show notes because there's going to be links to find Geoff on LinkedIn and any other interesting links of Geoff's that I can find. And I just want to say thank you for listening. Please like, subscribe, and do all that stuff because it does really, really help. So anyway, Geoff, I'm going to say goodbye. Would you like to say goodbye?
00:41:28
Speaker
Oh, yes. Thank you so much for having me on, Andrew. This was fun. It was great. Anything I can do to help you and your listeners, just let me know. I really appreciate the opportunity to be on with you today.