Digital Marketing From The Coalface

• The cringey AI lead magnet test: Julie shares what happened when she tested a tool that promised 30 "tailored" LinkedIn posts, only to receive completely fake case studies and bizarre claims.
• Talking to your data in plain English: Dave and Julie talk about how connecting tools like Windsor.ai to Google Search Console, Google Ads, and GA4 lets you query your marketing data in natural language, bypassing complex PowerBI filters and SQL queries.
• AI watermarks & editorial control: AI watermarking isn't something to fear if you take ownership of your content. You need to make sure to apply human oversight, and refine every word you're sharing.
• Strategy vs. "random acts of marketing": tech businesses need a structured marketing framework so that their teams aren't just creating ad-hoc AI content for the sake of it.

Plus, Julie and Dave swap summer highlights and office drama, featuring Edinburgh Fringe comedy, metal detecting adventures, a new coffee machine, and some spilled milk that no one cried over.

This week on Digital Marketing from the Coalface, Julie and Leslie dig into what actually happens when you hand marketing decisions over to an algorithm, including a few stories that are more entertaining than they probably should be.

When "optimised" budgets go rogue: a campaign built to get women into STEM programmes ended up serving ads mostly to men. Not, as we suspected, because of a biased dataset, but because of the maths. Women drive a higher share of buying decisions, so their clicks cost more, and an AI chasing a strict cost-per-click target will avoid them if it can.

The multilingual blind spot in AI search: if you're running non-English pages, they may be nearly invisible to tools like ChatGPT. One experiment run by Strategy Director Pieter Serraris found it favours English content even when other languages are available on a website. Featuring English versions of a website pages might well lift AI citations by ChatGPT by over 120%, but keeping that content updated is key to avoid negatively impacting your digital footprint.

Getting out of the bots-writing-for-bots loop: generic, over-bulleted LinkedIn posts are everywhere now, as the result of handing your whole brand voice to AI and letting it write in an echo chamber. Julie talks through how to actually train AI on your team's voice, so it speeds things up without smoothing out what makes you sound like you.

AI is a genuinely useful assistant for scaling what you do, it just still needs a strategic brain behind it. The people who will stand out in the midst of all the samey garbage are the ones who know how to blend machine efficiency with genuine, real human connection.

Have a listen!

• The HubSpot AI nuance failure: Dave breaks down a real-world blunder where HubSpot's beta AI tool recommended reaching out to a competitor agency called "Blend" simply because the algorithm read the common noun "blend" in a text snippet. Be aware that AI still drastically struggles with basic context and business logic, so don't put all your trust in its supposed critical 'thinking'.
• Google's crackdown on "AI Slop": Bringing up the recent experiment where 1,000 bulk-generated AI blog posts were completely de-indexed by Google within weeks, Julie and Dave discuss why automated content engines are a fast track to search invisibility and why subject matter expertise remains your best SEO asset.
• Crafting an authentic B2B tone of voice: Avoid copy-pasted corporate speak when marketing to highly niche and technical audiences. You want to align your brand's vocabulary with the direct communication style of the teams you serve.
• How "self-indulgent" forms kill conversions: A single "required field" (like "How did you find us?") at the final stage of checkout can completely halt a transaction. Dave and Julie discuss how to identify and eliminate self-inflicted user experience (UX) friction on your B2B landing pages to keep high-value leads moving forward.
• The "pro bono" enterprise sales strategy: Dave shares how Red Evo recently won a highly competitive, 17-page HubSpot development contract by offering a no-obligation discovery session.
• IP intelligence & perfect sales timing: Do not dismiss IP-tracking software. Julie and Dave share how using a budget-friendly tool like Leadinfo lets you see major prospects browsing specific pages on your site, helping your outbound sales team time your business's outreach perfectly when quiet deals suddenly warm up.

Feel like the internet is constantly telling you your marketing is out of date?

You aren't alone. This week on Digital Marketing from the Coalface, David and Julie are talking about the exhaustion of "marketing FOMO" and how tech and engineering leaders can focus on the foundations instead of chasing the next shiny object.

We get into the classic debate: should you specialise or generalise? Is niching down a massive risk, or is it the absolute best way to land great clients who actually get what you do?

We're also blocking out the SEO noise to talk about what actually matters with meta descriptions right now (spoiler: please stop using them as a sales pitch). Finally, Julie shares a crazy story about how she accidentally coded a custom app using Claude (despite having zero programming experience) and David explains why moving AI out of the chat window and into your actual daily tools will make your life a whole lot easier.

If you're a busy decision-maker who just wants straight-talking marketing insights, this one is for you. Grab a coffee and hit play!

Let's be brutally honest: if we stripped the logo off your manufacturing or engineering website, would your buyers have any idea who you are? Or are you indistinguishable from your competitors? Pragmatic engineers love to believe that simply listing capabilities like "NDT inspection" or "pressure testing" makes them special. It doesn't. In this episode of Digital Marketing From The Coalface, Dave and Julie rip into the boring, copy-paste marketing plaguing the B2B sector. Learn why you need to stop hiding behind your spec sheets and start "derisking" the sale for your buyers by stealing a brilliant psychological safety trick straight from the Lexus playbook. But the controversy doesn't stop at your homepage. We take aim at the search giant itself, asking the million-dollar question: Is Google Ads spending your marketing budget like a drunken sailor? Dave shares a rage-inducing reality check about how Google plays "fast and loose" with your cash, charging for completely irrelevant clicks like "Philippines web design" when you're trying to target UK industrial buyers. If you are tired of blending in and sick of digital ad waste, tune in to fix the leaks and finally give your B2B brand a spine.

Is Google deliberately obscuring its AI search mechanics to protect its 20-year monopoly? In this episode of Digital Marketing From The Coalface, we dive into the smoke and mirrors of the latest Google AI guidelines, which frustratingly claim that nothing has actually changed. We also explore the widening divide between building websites for human journeys versus AI machine crawlers, and try to bridge the gap between marketing strategy and web engineering as we discuss why older, structurally simple websites might perform perfectly fine, while modern JavaScript-heavy, lazy-loading pages can be entirely invisible to AI agents. We also unpack the shift toward headless CMS to resist the heavy load of AI crawlers and deliver lightning-fast web pages, and we contrast human-centric design, which prioritises branding and UI, with agent-centric design that demands clear structure, entities, and metadata. Finally, we cover the topic of deep integration between CRM and Google Ads to track meaningful B2B conversions. The reality of keeping up with AI search is an exhausting marathon, but endurance is key.

Standing out in the age of AI is exhausting, and with the rise of AI agents creating an "ever-decreasing circle" of content and Reddit bots speaking to other bots, we highlight why maintaining a unique brand tone of voice is more important than ever. If you want to avoid producing generic "slop," your distinct branding is your best defence.

That is why you should also tap into the power of plain English messaging. Julie discussed a recent piece of research proving that concrete, specific phrases are significantly more memorable than abstract corporate jargon. We dissect a real-world example of an engineering company claiming to be "leveraging our specialist capability", or whatever that means.

Listen now to discover why you need to rethink your website's homepage, re-evaluate where your customers are searching, and maybe even start using AI for, say, your weekend marathon prep!