David Porter knows all too well about businesses looking for marketing help who have champagne taste on a beer budget. It doesn’t really go well.
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David, welcome to Bad Marketing Sucks. How have you been lately?
Very, very well, thank you. Very well. And it’s Friday after all, so you can’t complain on a Friday.
Not at all. Not at all, so tell us what you do and how you got there?
So my name’s David. I’m the director of a company called Surge Marketing Solutions, and we’re a full service digital marketing agency. What that means is, people come to us with a selection of problems and then we have a full range of solutions there
to help them solve their problems ultimately. So the best way to describe it is we have three silos. We’ve got the creative team, we’ve got a development team, and then we’ve got a marketing team. So it just means that whatever the problem, we
have something in our tool bag to fix that problem, ultimately. And I think, well the reason it’s come about is, I’ve worked in various marketing roles, I’ve sold radio advertising, I’ve sold press, I’ve sold digital. And what I found was lots
of companies out there do a lot of good stuff. Equally, a lot of them do bad stuff, but you would only get…
I know, it’s crazy, isn’t it? You only get the solution that someone can offer. So if you go to someone who specializes in out of home and you say, I need to promote up my company, then they’re going to talk about bus shelters and radio. And if you
talk to somebody who just does Google AdWords, then Google AdWords is going to be the thing you should use. So I wanted to be in a position, digitally speaking, that when someone comes to us, we say, right, where are you now? Where do you want
to be? Now let’s look at everything you’ve got going on and then we’re going to put a solution in place at the right time because you might need a plethora of things, but it might not necessarily be affordable or it might even work. So we’ll start
here, get some success, and then start introducing other things as we need to, ultimately. So that brings us back to that full service solution. What do you need? When do you need it? And in what order?
Very nice. Now, okay, so obviously you referenced your experience, a little bit of corporate gigs.
What have you seen, give us an example of the worst you’ve seen. Something that just makes you cringe and makes you just want to fix it.
So it’s generally to do with people’s websites. And people can be really precious because, oh, I built my own website. Brilliant. Okay, let’s have a look. Yep, I can tell you definitely…
And then people can become really precious around logos. So they’ll come to us and say, right, we want a new website. Brilliant, all the bells and whistles. We’re going to have a slick design, the right use of white space and fully responsive. It’s
going to look brilliant. Well, we want to keep our logo. Okay, but your logo looks like it was done in Word on art, and we’re going to build this shiny website and you’ve just got this thing sat at the top and then it’s, our logo has to be massive.
Why? They’re on the website, nobody cares about your logo. And we often go through the, we show people the progression of Apple and Starbucks. So if you look at the Apple logo that started as Sir Isaac Newton under a tree holding an apple, I mean,
God forbid the person that had to embroider that onto a T-shirt.
And as time’s gone on, that’s just now the Apple sign. And Starbucks is the same. And that was the lady, or the Siren as she’s known, was quite far back in the image and it was all brown, because obviously coffee’s brown, so that graphic designer
was obviously thinking about that one a lot.
And now it’s just a picture of the Siren without the logo, without anything else, and you just know that’s the brand. So it’s trying to help people who’ve got something terrible whilst keeping the core it and go, well, this is the bits that are good,
so let’s extract them and turn that into something better, and then we can do a website that’s going to work for you. So I’d say that happens a lot. And just in terms of being handed something that is a long, far, far away from where it needs
to be, if they’re going to start getting customers.
Yeah. Even the businesses that I’ve run into that have a pretty decent logo, the thing that frustrates me the most is that you will have it in the lowest resolution and they have no, they don’t have any historical, like the source files, where are
they?
And to be able to do anything of quality, not having the source files is so miserable. It’s like, just please, hang onto those.
They don’t understand the file format either. So we’ve had it and they’ve sent it over as just on a Word document. It’s like, not even a JPEG, you’ve got to have some vector files or something stashed somewhere along the line. But yeah, it’s interesting,
but again, I think that’s something to do with lack of experience as well. Ultimately, you don’t know what you don’t know. Our job is to educate.
And really to take the time to have the hard conversations and say, I know you love this and I applaud you for that, but this is really where we need to be guiding you. Those are not easy. I think those are not easy conversations to have.
They’re not. But it’s like, I wouldn’t go to a mechanic and stand over the engine and go, I don’t think you’re doing that right. I think you should do it this way. I’m employing the mechanic, so go fix my car. And I think when you’re employing an
agency, it’s a case of, and don’t get me wrong, it’s an element of trust, but if you’re employing us, you’ve got to trust us. And some of the things we’re going to say are hard truths, but we’re saying it in your best interest because if you’re
here and you want to be here, there’s no magic bullet. It’s going to be a case of fixing lots of things and just keep doing the 1% and eventually you’ll be where you want to be, but then you can’t be precious about things. And if you keep doing
the same thing over and over again, you’re going to get the same results. So try something new.
Yeah. Don’t be afraid to, that’s the key. You know? Afraid to step out.
Good marketing is about failing. And we explained to our team that if you’re not pushing the boundaries and you’re not failing, then you’re not trying something new. So if we’re not trying something new, how are we doing the best for our clients?
And it’s okay to fail because you’ve tried it and you know what not to do on that account next time. So I think constantly, you don’t want to fail all the time, but I think it’s an important lesson in failing because it makes you better as a marketeer,
makes your agency better and the client gets a better result as well.
Yeah, I came across something, maybe a year and a half, two years ago, and it was probably on Twitter, and this has been presented in multiple different places, but somewhere at one time there was a study of quantity over quality. And so you had two
groups. First group, let’s say there’s 10 people in the group in this college course, go take the perfect picture. And then the other group is, go take as many pictures as you possibly can. And the ones that were going after perfection did far
worse than the ones that were iterating and failing and trying new things out.
Trying to get better, right?
Yeah, agreed. It’s the only way. You’ve got to, you learn more from a failure than you do success, so be prepared to fail, it’s okay.
Yeah. All right, so what are your favorite things you’ve been a part of when it comes to trying new things and ultimately having a success out of it?
I think social media, so when I started the agency almost 10 years ago, it wasn’t really a thing. I mean obviously everyone had Facebook, but business pages and things were only really starting out for the last couple of years. So it’s been really
interesting to take something that didn’t exist really and then turn it into something and we’d had no experience. So we took on our first client and it was actually quite a major client, it was a theme park in our area. And looking at what they’ve
done, ultimately they’re just, social media’s a difficult one. If you say too much, you don’t get a result, if you say too little, and we always explain that your wife might complain, she’s complaining all the time to you, but then again you don’t
hear it because she’s complaining all the time. So it’s the same with social media.
If you keep saying it over and over, people don’t hear it. So it’s about that kind of saying the right amount of stuff to the right people. And what we’ve discovered they were posting every day, every day. And if you can’t think of something interesting
to say, then people can’t be bothered reading it either. So taking over that account and pulling it back a bit and explaining that actually less is more, let’s do a little bit less in these areas, but be more targeted. And their average reach
went from 500 people to about 75,000 over the next year, and we were doing less and they couldn’t get their head round it initially. It’s like what you’re saying, we should only do three times a week and we should only have so many things going
on? It’s like, yes, trust us. And engagement went up and tickets, I think ticket sales went up by about 22% in that year alone.
And you got 30% of that, right? 35% of that?
Yeah, I’d have more stacked on the wall if I got 35%. I can only afford the one. We got [inaudible 00:09:06] whether we succeed or not, we got paid the same unfortunately.
That’s going to be another conversation…
Yeah, exactly, how to change that model. Well, on that note, just take note, Blair Enns and David Baker have a brilliant podcast, 2Bobs, and they cover some of that topic. So take note of that and look them up because they’re brilliant.
2Bobs. I will have a look at that.
Yeah, so all right, oh, go ahead.
The only people that generally say, you can have a percentage of this are the people that haven’t quite got a business yet. So it’s like brilliant but we’re taking it from zero to something, whereas the successful businesses [inaudible 00:09:48]
Yeah, no doubt. So, all right. What would you say from that particular case study that you just articulated, where did they get that mentality from, of we’ve got to do volume over quality?
Like anything, it’s lack of understanding. And it goes against everything you would understand. You would think more frequency the better because with radio advertising, it’s all about frequency, it’s all about opportunities.
Top of mind awareness, right.
Yeah. You need to be hitting at least four opportunities to hear in order to make a decision on something. And that goes into like music too. So I think that mentality came in, well, that means you need 25 spots a week and you need to do this. So
I think that mentality has come across a little bit and people just thought, the more we see it, the more people see, the more people see, the better we’ll do. But what they don’t really understand, until we go through the process is that you’re
only talking, maybe, 3 to 5% of people who like your Facebook page are going to see your content. And Facebook’s a funny one because it decides what you do or don’t want to see. So you might have a thousand friends on Facebook and you get to see
lots of pictures of breakfast and dinners and the kids and the dogs and stuff, but you probably only see a hundred to 200 people post.
And that’s cause Facebook said, well, you don’t like, you actually don’t like Jeff, you’re not a big fan of him. You never like his pictures, so we’re going to stop showing it to you. And the same is true with business pages. If people aren’t interacting,
they’re not liking, they’re not sharing, they’re not tagging, they’re not talking about them. Facebook goes, well, you don’t like them. So that overdoing it seems like the right thing to do, but actually it’s counterintuitive and that’s a big
part of the process we generally have to go through is just hold off, step it back a little bit, let’s be more focused in what we do. And that generally works for most clients.
It’s not really any different than just building a relationship with a human being, right?
So if you and I meet at the pub and I text you 10 times before you get home. I’m like, hey man, that was awesome. Let’s go hang out tomorrow. You’re like, this guy’s a creep.
Yeah, are you drunk at this point or not, not crying? Maybe?
Maybe, maybe not. But David’s not going to dig it.
At the end end of that night my head could be on that wall if you’re going to be texting me [inaudible 00:12:08]
That’s right. That’s exactly right. But the businesses do the same thing. Oh hey, you stopped by. I’m going to try to talk to you 20 times before you get home.
They do it with email marketing too. So you’ll find that you’ll buy something brilliant, you’ll get an email and then you go, oh, that might be interesting. And then the next few days you get another email and it just becomes white noise. And then
you just go, no more emails. And social it’s too easy to do. But again, it’s that if you can’t think of something to say, then don’t say it. And it’s social media for a reason. It’s supposed to be building relationships with people, like you said,
and I think people just go too far or they don’t go far enough and they’ll go, so what happened today? We’ll post about it. Well, nothing’s happened for two weeks, so we’ve got nothing to say. So then there’s that middle ground. It’s like the
Goldilocks effect. Not too much, not too little, just right in the middle.
So you would say that social and your traditional advertising are very different in terms of how you reach that customer?
Yeah, I would say so. And I think it’s because it’s more measured. So traditional advertising still has a place, but the stats show that spend on digital is just going up and up and up. And even over the last five years, it probably was about 15%
of marketing budgets and it’s now in the 30, 40% kind of bracket of what people are spending online. And the biggest difference is being quantifiable. So with social, you can say, well, any avenue, whether it’s SEO or Google AdWords. You can say,
this is how many people saw it, which is what most old-fashioned media would say, well, we know we’ve got this many readers, or this many people bought it, right, we might have read it.
Well, we can say, well, this is how many people saw it, this is how many times they saw it, this is what they did about it, and then they actually had a conversion at the end of it. So we can attribute that this is your conversion ratio. And a lot
of that stuff is kind of finger in the air when you’re doing things like maybe press releases or magazine articles or newspaper or traditional print. And it still has a place because it’s really good brand awareness, but quantifiable results,
digital is kind of where it sits much better.
Yeah. Now I remember when digital first started coming out. So we actually both worked at Comcast doing ad sales there, but primarily TV. But when digital started coming out, it was twofold. It’s like, hey, this is cool, but then it became part of
your budget. It’s like, well…
No one really knows about this yet, but it’s come a long way of what you can and can’t do. I will say, oh, good ahead.
Sorry. About, when I started my career, I did it about, I was 18, so about 22 years ago, and that was before Google, and there was a thing called Overture. I don’t know if you remember that? So basically, they were the AdWords management for the main
search engines. So that was your AOL, AltaVista, Ask Jeeves [inaudible 00:15:07]
And that used to set up the bid management across all seven platforms, but again, people weren’t really aware of it. So the cost per clicks were massively really low, but it was brand new. Nobody really knew about it, nobody believed in it, ultimately.
And obviously it’s become a much bigger animal now that people can’t ignore.
Yeah, I think the most impressive ad that I remember, which we’re served so many, remembering what is in and of itself, impressive.
Right. Nobody wants to stand out, that’s the problem.
I think it was for, well, I mean I don’t remember. I think it was for Marriott Hotels, but the top banner had a guy reach down into the 300 by 350 banner and grab an orange. And it was brilliant. I’ve never seen anything like that since.
Wow. I don’t remember that.
Oh, it was awesome. It was really, really good.
Well, I’ve seen, there’s those 3D boards they do now, so it’s kind of like, if you had a corner building, you’d have the screen on both sides of it. So they do them and it’s a whole 3D thing. So there’s actually, like off Back to the Future when they’ve
got that shark coming out at Marty McFly when he first goes in. And it’s that but it’s fully animated and coming out and looking like it’s diving out the screen. It’s insane.
Yeah, I’ve seen some of those. Now, have you seen some of those in person? I’ve only seen them on…
No, no. Only on a screen, unfortunately. One day.
Yeah, all right. We’re going to book a trip and we’re going to go…
If you’re going to book a trip, he wants to go to Vegas.
That is true. That is true.
He’s been several times and he’s had a great time and I think he’s enjoyed the alcohol as much as he has the gambling. So am I correct on that, David?
You’re 100%. As long as you keep the telephone numbers to a minimal Paul, then we’ll be okay.
Yeah, no doubt. No doubt. Absolutely, absolutely. So all right, so what is the number one thing that you would guide somebody? So if somebody just showed up, called you up and said, hey, I need help. Just give me direction. So we’re going from bad
marketing sucks to great marketing. How do we get there for this client?
So first off, I always try and understand the business. So it’s important they understand their business as well. A lot of people can set something up and it’s a passion and don’t necessarily know the acumen side of things or understanding your margins
so how would you actually make profit? Also then, who’s your target audience? Because you can’t sell, some people say everyone’s my customer and it’s not normally the case. And even if you have a really popular product, you’ve still got an area
that certain people will buy it more than others. So I think understanding your products or service, understanding your profit margins, and then understanding who your customer base is. Only then can you start to work out what you should invest
so you can work out to get a return and where you should invest in terms of making sure the right people are seeing your product.
And one of the first things we look at is typically, have you got something that people need or is it something people want? Is it an impulse purchase? Is it a high ticket item, low ticket item? And sometimes people have created something and nobody
knows anything about, well, there’s no point in being found on Google for a product that no one knows about and fixes a problem not many people have. So it’s them working out, well, do we go on Google that basically gets you found when people
are looking for something or do we have to go onto social and say, we’re going to put it in front of people that should be interested, but we don’t know when. And then it’s looking at what might be the solution that combines all of those things.
And then it comes down to, well, what’s the budget?
And we always explain to people that marketing budgets are like gambling in a casino. You put down what you can afford to lose because the worst case scenario for any business is to say, right, I’m going to spend 500 pound a month, 5,000 pound a month,
the figure’s arbitrary, it doesn’t really matter. But if you can’t afford to spend that money without seeing a return in the first one, two or three months, then that doesn’t really create a strong marketing strategy because it’s stressful. You
need that money back. So you need to be able to say, right, there’s going to be a period of loss potentially.
And that means you need to be able to put the money in without seeing that return while it builds up. Because most campaigns can take three to six months to really start building traction because you need data and then you need to make decisions.
So we always kind of say about, right, put a budget aside and what’s your annual budget? Rather than saying, I can maybe afford a grand a month. Well, what can you afford over the 12 months? And then we will look towards breaking even and then
getting a return on it. And if you live hand to mouth, that’s problematic and will cause issues in the business and it’ll cause friction with the agency. And ultimately that relationship will break down and we should all be wanting the same thing.
And it comes down to what you want out the relationship. The client should be getting good service and results and the agency should be getting a fair fee. So if everyone’s profitable, everyone’s happy, and that’s the only way it’s going to work.
Absolutely, makes sense. Now, one more question, do you find that a lot of businesses with a beer budget try to compete with businesses with a champagne budget?
Yeah, I say they want a champagne campaign on a Rola Cola budget.
I like that one. I have to start using that one.
Yeah, it rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?
Yeah, you get that a lot. And I think it’s about just being realistic. So obviously with things like, with any campaign, if you’re going to do platform spend, it’s, look if you’ve spent 500 pounds, you’re going to reach this many people. If you spent
a hundred pounds, you’re going to reach a portion less. If you spent 5,000 pounds, you might reach more. So it’s just about understanding, again, your market and the restrictions of who’s in that market as well. But everybody wants to compete
with the big boys. It’s just a case of doing it in order.
So it might be, let’s not do search engine optimization quite yet because it’s going to be based on your industry might be two years before you start seeing a result. So it’s not really affordable to put that money in for two years and not see a return.
So maybe this other option’s better where we can start getting instant traffic and people who are interested in what you do and then test it and refine it and then improve it over time and then build up to that. But yeah, low budgets and high
demands are a common thing, unfortunately.
Yeah, I think that’s universal and that is unfortunate.
Yeah, that’s worldwide. Yeah, a hundred percent, that’s worldwide. And the other thing is the people that pay the least, expect the most, which is…
they’re the hardest to work with, most of the time. Have you found that to be true as well?
Massively. So our biggest client are our easiest ones to deal with. They just go, all right, our report, looks good. Phone call every week, report every month, sit down, go through it. This is the good. Well we have a slide called the good, the bad,
and the ugly. So it’s like, this is brilliant, this didn’t work quite well and this just failed miserably. Why? What do we do about it next time?
And they’re brilliant. And then the other ones that are spending the smallest amount are like, phone calls constantly, emails constantly, where are we at with this? And it’s like we spend more time communicating with those clients than we do getting
to do the work. So it’s like, if you just get on with it, you’ll find you’ll get results.
But, that’s the nature of people. You’re not going to get away with that.
It is. So do you have, are primarily your client base in the UK or are you spread out?
Yeah, so we have clients all over the UK, which doesn’t sound as impressive when you’re in America because we’re a really, really tiny country. But yeah, we stretch the whole of the UK. All five hours of it. And we’ve got that right out in London,
right up to Scotland. We’ve experienced clients in other countries as well. So we’ve ran campaigns for companies that wanted to target things like Spain, Italy, France, and multiple countries, which is quite interesting cause we got to then think
about changing the language as well, so the adverts could work out, is your laptop set up in English or is it in Italian? And then we were able to test Italian adverts versus English adverts and see which one got better conversions.
Which is cool. But then predominantly it’s mainly looking after clients in the UK.
Very nice. Very cool man. Well thanks so much for joining us today. And I think now what’s just left, we’ve got to figure out when Vegas is happening.
Yeah, we’ll have to get with you on that.
I’ll just let you and Chad go.
Yeah. You won’t let us go alone. I know you. I know how you are. You at the cards…
We could reach out to your listeners of the podcast and if they think it’s a good idea, maybe we could have a GoFundMe and we’ll all [inaudible 00:23:35]
There you go. There you go. Absolutely.
And then somebody can have a percentage of it.
That sounds awesome. I’m all in. All in.
Yeah, we’ll share the wins and none of the losses, obviously.
Awesome. All right man. Well thanks so much.
David, we enjoyed it very much.
Me too. Thank you for inviting me on. It’s been a pleasure.
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