EP392: Mastering Digital Search Marketing Strategies for Client Success

Stacy Jones: Welcome to marketing mistakes and how to avoid them. I’m Stacey Jones and I’m so happy to be here with you all today and I want to give a very warm welcome to Tim Butler. Tim is the founder and CEO of Innovation Visual, a UK digital marketing agency specializing in search marketing. With over two decades of experience in sales, marketing and consulting, Tim is an expert in understanding individual business requirements to deliver the right solutions using online technologies. With experience spanning industries from banking to technology and manufacturing, he’s cultivated a unique perspective. His proficiency in digital marketing has earned his firm recognition from Google, which placed innovation visual among the top 30 digital agencies in the UK. Tim actively helps educate others on his strategies and search optimization and online marketing.

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Stacy Jones: Today, Tim and I are going to be chatting about how to deliver a data driven approach to drive revenue. We’ll learn what works from Tim’s perspective, what should be avoided and how some businesses just miss the mark. Tim, welcome. So happy to have you here today.

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Time Butler: Well, thank you very much Stacey for having me on. It’s wonderful to be here.

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Stacy Jones: Well, I am always delighted to talk with someone across the pond and learn how our world is in fact the same digitally, where everything with marketing is similar with wherever it is based. But can you start off by sharing with us? How did you get started and in creating your agency?

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Time Butler: Well, way back, many moons ago, I had my first digital business back in 98, which was came off the back of me living in the French Alps and that business was selling late availability in ski chalets during the winter seasons. That kind of got me hooked into the digital marketing bit. I always love problem solving and digital marketing seems to be absolutely that sweet spot of enjoyable problem solving and go on a few years and a few different iterations and working at different agencies and an innovation visual basically grew out of me being a digital consultant. And yeah, I took on my first employees the start of 2015, end of 2014, and we’ve been growing ever since and been having a great time solving problems for clients.

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Stacy Jones: Well, that is, I think something all of us are our problem solvers and solution bringers. So when you’re thinking about data digital, like, what are the specific aspects, you know, a brand needs to be aware of today? You know, when you say digital, what does that encompass?

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Time Butler: What in terms of digital marketing or.

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Stacy Jones: The data part, digital marketing and then the data part of what we can pull from that.

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Time Butler: So what I would say is, I think that actually the foundation of digital marketing is the intersection. If you had a Venn diagram and you had human behavior and you had data, digital marketing is that overlap in the middle, because if you don’t understand human behavior, when you don’t understand data, you can never be good at digital marketing. So it falls in that sweet spot of understanding both. And I think that’s what drives so many people to have so much enthusiasm.

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Stacy Jones: For it, because you can actually see something that’s measurable.

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Time Butler: Yeah. And because also you’re thinking about people. So it’s not purely about the technology that we use and the systems and things. It’s actually how do those interact with people and humans and feeling? Because I think often people can get lost in digital marketing to forget that we’re actually about persuading people when it comes to marketing. We’re about changing somebody’s mind. We’re not just about, you know, how many likes or follows or data points. We’re actually about changing people’s minds, persuading them that they like this better than they like that.

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Stacy Jones: So the very basics of true advertising.

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Time Butler: Exactly, exactly. I mean, bring it back to fundamentals. You know, it’s, after all the shiny things are stripped away. We’re here to help sell more products and, as you say, solve people’s problems.

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Stacy Jones: So when you’re starting to work with a new client, how do you determine where they’re at in their health, of their digital marketing, so that you can actually dive in and understand what some of the trends are?

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Time Butler: I think at the starting point, you do have to take some time to understand where they’re at and make analysis of their kind of maturity, if you like. And it’s not just a matter of the age of the business or the scale of the business. It’s about the coordination and the understanding of what they’re doing and how does it all join up. And I think we’re talking about data today, and I think one of the indicators of how good people’s digital maturity is how much of a grasp they actually have on their data and what the data actually means. So they might have lots of data, but if they don’t understand it, they’re probably not that digitally mature. They’re probably floundering a bit and need help with those basic foundation pieces.

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Stacy Jones: And today, like, what do you have to have as a brand? Do you have to have a social platform? Do you have to advertise on Google? Do you have to do all of these different things that are out there?

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Time Butler: No, I would say not. I say, as a brand. As a brand, you have to understand your customers. And to do that at scale, that’s where data and systems come in, because there’s a brand, those things like social media and elements like advertising and Google, they’re just channels. But at the core, you need to understand who your customers are, why they’re buying from you, what frequency may be, but the understanding of what the drivers are, the behavioral elements that you can look at, because it’s that you can own that knowledge and then you can extend it and you can say, okay, now we need more of these similar people. Where’s the best place to find them? Or now we have these people with this need. How else can we help fulfill that need?

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Stacy Jones: And then what do you do after that?

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Time Butler: Well, I suppose it depends on their maturity level, but I think that the starting point frequently is, particularly on the data area, is getting to a single source of truth for their customers. So they may have data from disparate systems, so they might be emailing from Mailchimp, they might have a Shopify store, or they might be a B two B lead business, and therefore they’ve got some information in pipe drive, or they’re doing outreach, whatever. And they’ve got customer data and prospect data scattered across different systems. Really, you need to bring that together as a starting point and have a single source of truth and a single source of understanding of what you’ve got.

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Time Butler: I think once you start bringing that together, then the other important part is tying your marketing decisions at one end to revenue at the other, and actually being able to connect those two things so you can make good decisions.

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Stacy Jones: What’s interesting with digital marketing in general is you’re able to turn a little bit more on a dime than some of the other traditional forms of marketing and advertising in general. Right?

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Time Butler: Yes, I’m completely with you on that. And it’s really good because you can launch a landing page today, and if you get enough data, hit that page, you can assess whether or not you need to change it tomorrow or you’re a b testing it. And by the end of the week, you can make a decision on how your landing pages should look going forward. It can be very agile, but at the same time, I think that can cause some organizations issues in that they sometimes get wrapped up in the doing and they don’t spend enough time thinking. So they’re trying to be agile, but they’re not actually doing things which are effective.

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Stacy Jones: So you either have the cause of concern as a marketer if you are not actually, a b testing, and you’re letting things just dry out into a landscape of a desert and never changing anything. Or you have the overzealous individual who might not actually allow yourself to set it and forget it for long enough to be able to actually see the trends that might emerge.

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Time Butler: Or on the overzealous changer, they run an ab test, and not only did they change the headline and a bit of the body copy, but they changed the imagery and they changed the layout and they changed the form. And it’s like, well, okay, that version’s better, but you haven’t learned why it’s better because of a to z.

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Stacy Jones: They changed it all. Come on.

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Time Butler: Yeah. So then you can’t analyze whether actually you needed it was the headline that made it a win, or whether it was the imagery which made it a win, or whether it was the form change that made it a win. And so people need to sort of have. Have that analytical thinking about, okay, what are we doing to change? And then what the behaviors are of that, but also having sufficient data to measure it. So doing a landing page and saying, actually, on this a b split, one person bought from this landing page and three people bought from this landing page. Well, this page is clearly three times better. Well, that’s really not a big data sample. So, you know, you might have just got lucky.

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Time Butler: You need to be running 100 sales, you know, or maybe more than that, because I come from a background of doing pure economics when I. When I did my degree, and I understand things like statistics and standard deviation, and I don’t think people understand that. You can’t just make decisions without understanding the data implications. So if you haven’t got a big enough data set, you can’t make wild judgments like, that’s three times better.

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Stacy Jones: Well, that’s an interesting career. So economics, ski chalets, and now digital marketing.

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Time Butler: Yeah, yeah. And I haven’t even mentioned the time that I lived in the States and I was mountain bike racing.

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Stacy Jones: Okay, well, that’s getting. That’s very interesting. Where did you go mountain bike racing?

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Time Butler: I was. I was based out of Denver, so I was racing mostly around the rockets, but.

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Stacy Jones: So you also have excellent lung capacity, is what you’re saying?

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Time Butler: Yes, yes. And I have to say, I do love Colorado and the Rockies. It’s really good. And, in fact, above me in my office, I actually have one of the mugs that I won at an event in Colorado when I was racing. So. Yes. But, yeah, I think the background, in more practical terms, I did a lot of work in commercial sales. So a lot of our clients are b, two b. And I actually understand the commerciality because I’ve not been marketing all the way through. Coming from a sales background and a b, two b sales background. And also working in technology as well as in things like brand, I can join things together and help people understand what will actually end up with revenue.

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Time Butler: I was talking to somebody earlier on today and they were talking about, well, the sales people have told us that we need to be pushing this feature, but the technical people have been saying, well we shouldn’t push that because we’re not so strong in the market on that. And I said, well okay, but if your sales guys are good and they say we need to talk about this to get the leads through the door, they’ll do the job of converting that lead into a sale. If that customer doesn’t need that feature quite as strongly as some of the other features that you’ve got, I’m able to have feet in different camps and help our clients in that way move forward and be more effective.

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Stacy Jones: You have a broad view in some very specialized focus areas and you can connect the dots to see where all the data actually lines up.

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Time Butler: Exactly, exactly.

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Stacy Jones: And so what are some of the common mistakes that you see people do? I know you just mentioned they got three sales here and one sale here and that wasn’t enough as far as having enough numbers to be able to look at, understand. And you mentioned, you know, changing the headers and the imagery and everything and reinventing your entire landing page and having a really awesome one, but having no a b testing at all. Yeah, what else?

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Time Butler: I think, I mean, we deal with a lot of mid size and larger companies, some of their mistakes are on a larger scale, if you like. I think at the moment there’s a failure in some organizations to think about personalization and segmentation in an effective way. They’re failing to segment properly over needs and drivers. They’re trying to segment on what makes it right for what product they’re selling or something. They’re trying to box people in. And so maybe it’s the marketing agencies that they’ve used previously. So when we bring them on board as clients and we’re looking at what they’re doing, we’re saying, well hold on, you’re not really segmenting the data in a way that’s helpful to your audience. This is why you’re not getting the results. So you need to think about what’s the problem to be solved.

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Time Butler: So don’t simply segment on size of business, the scale or something like that, and then run your comms based on that. Try and think about your communications based on what the need is that they’re trying to fulfill because they might be different scales. Interesting. I was working with a company based out of Cincinnati, and they’d got this idea of how they wanted to structure their data segmentation. And when we looked at it, were like, actually, you’d better off segmenting based on something like R and D spend than total scale of the business, because this makes more sense to the problems that you’re solving. And it’s really interesting that if you look at that as a problem, if you’re getting your segmentation and then what you’re sending out to those segments, wrong.

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Time Butler: The scale of that being a problem can be quite massive in terms of the revenue that you’re missing out on. But it’s more easily hidden than an obvious thing like, oh, you changed too many things on a landing page. Don’t do that. And that’s silly, but it’s a lot easier to think or to miss, shall we say, incorrect segmentation and just keep barreling on and wondering why your campaigns and your nurture just don’t seem to get the responses and they don’t seem to resonate with your people, with your audience as much as they should.

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Stacy Jones: Well, for anyone listening who’s not really a numbers person, they’re just like, huh, whatever you’re saying. But for all of those listeners who are numbers and who understand that looking at a line of numbers that actually lay out, they tell a story, a really deep story, and you can parse them out and you can get insights that are just unparalleled that you would have no understanding. It’s kind of almost like going to a tarot card reader and you’re like, how do you know that about my brand? But it’s that much reveal that those numbers actually share.

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Time Butler: Yeah, and brilliant. You used the magic word there, Stacey. You talked about finding insights, because that’s what we’re doing the data for. That’s what we’re looking at, the knowledge. We don’t just want reams of reports and graphs and spreadsheets, as you say. We’re looking for those insights, the insight that says this segment wants this, they’re prepared to pay this. And if you say that they’re going to buy from you, this segment will keep buying from you if you keep doing this. It’s insights that drive, again, that human behavior factor. That’s what we’re looking for. And that’s what you have to turn lots of data into. And I think we’re fortunate, as a sort of modern day digital marketeers, we’re very fortunate that the tools we have at our disposal are actually really good at providing those insights for us.

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Stacy Jones: And so where are other ways that companies sometimes are disregarding the insights or they’re making mistakes when they’re looking at the analysis of their metrics?

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Time Butler: I think there’s a failure to join up revenue. So they look at metrics without thinking about the consideration of revenue. So let me give you an example. We ran a campaign for a London city business. Literally, you could see the bank of England across from their offices. They were slap banging in the city, brilliant company. And we ran some LinkedIn campaigns. And there was one LinkedIn campaign, really good conversion rate, good cost per conversion, quite low. And then we had another campaign that we’re running at the same time, not such good conversion rate, so much higher cost per conversion, but still within tolerable things. And they were like, well, no, well, we should just put all the money into campaign a, not campaign b, because it’s giving us all these leads and they’re really low cost. And I was like, well, hold on.

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Time Butler: You guys got a long sales cycle. We just need to just ease back. See, let’s see this through. And what was interesting was campaign a, yes, lots of leads, good costs per lead. But when you then started to join up the revenue, so they went into the actual sales process, they really didnt convert very well. So lower numbers of sales, qualified leads and much lower revenue, whereas the campaign b, the leads that they were driving up, almost all of them converted from marketing qualified leads to sales qualified leads, and then good revenue off the back of that.

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Time Butler: And so it goes to show that if you just look at something like conversion rate or cost per lead and you dont join it to the revenue, you can make a mistake there, because it would have been very easy for the marketing people to go, hey, if our metric is cost per lead, well do a win here, but actually do a worse job for the organization because the revenue doesnt deliver from it. Its the same thing. If youre a consumer business and youre in e commerce, for example, looking purely at cost per acquisition of a customer at a flat rate is missing a trick, because what you need to do is you need to think about what kind of a customer are you attracting, because if campaign a delivers customers cheaply, but you’ve had to discount your product by 25%.

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Time Butler: And these people don’t tend to buy from you again or only buy when there’s a discount yet. Campaign B, the people buy at full price, and maybe they buy a more expensive product or maybe they subscribe and they keep going. Well, it’s actually campaign B, even though they have a higher cost of acquisition. You want these people because you’re making more absolute profit and you’re making more lifetime customer value. And I think that’s the important of joining up marketing decisions with actual revenue attribution.

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Stacy Jones: And that makes a massive difference on the bottom line overall.

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Time Butler: Yeah, huge difference. Huge. I mean, huge difference. And we worked on, you know, we’ve worked with clients where, you know, we’re talking about tens of millions of dollars worth of opportunities coming from, you know, a particular channel, like organic or paid, and, you know, 10% difference one way or another is a significant amount of money at that level. But you can have even bigger swings if you’re getting it wrong. So you really do need to take that time and trouble to join the revenue.

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Stacy Jones: And two questions as a follow up, and this is going to sound very basic, but for some of our listeners, this is actually something that I think would help. When you say someone is a marketing qualified lead versus a sales qualified lead, what’s the line of difference? When does it cross over where you’re like, happily marketing away and now you’re like, you’re thinking that they’re always sales qualified, I’m sure.

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Time Butler: Yeah, I spoke. Sorry, I’m prone to jargon and the other.

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Stacy Jones: No, no, this is normal jargon. It’s just, I know that a lot of people, even with normal jargon, this is very normal jargon. This is, there’s no even like little an acronym here. Like, this is something that people get hung up on.

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Time Butler: Okay, so marketing qualified lead, that would be something like somebody completing a form fill saying, I’d like a demo. Or they’ve been scored up in a platform like HubSpot, and they’ve done certain actions and it’s reached a threshold, and the scoring system says, right, this person has done actions which mean that they’re, so, they’ve got enough intent we should call them and they’re then marketing qualified. So form fill or that kind of scoring is typical. So then marketing, hand that off to sales and sales. First job is to qualify by talking to them and contacting that person. Is this person really likely to buy? So let’s take that form fill. I’d like a demo. The salesperson calls them up and says, hey, stacey, you’ve filled out the I’d like a demo form, would you? This is really great.

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Time Butler: Let me understand a bit more of your situation. And you might say, well, I’m an agency owner, I’ve got x number of people and I turn over this much and that might qualify you to buy their product because you have the need and you have the metric fit in terms of who should work. But if you were to say, oh, I’m a student and I’m just in a research project, so I just really like to see your software because I’m writing a paper on it, you’re not going to ever buy the product. So then you wouldn’t qualify. So it’s that, it’s whether the manual, if you like the manual intervention comes in a lead generation process from that marketing qualified to sales qualified lead. So hopefully MQl and SQl now are clear in people’s minds.

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Stacy Jones: Well, thank you for that. And my other question for you. So, you know, you dropped in organic versus, and when you’re looking at digital, it’s all, is it all the same? Is it different? Is it just metrics and you’re understanding it or, you know, obviously you have more control to a degree on the page, right. You’re controlling your message, you’re designing, but on the organic, and that’s more like your pr, that’s blog traffic that’s coming from your site, that’s your inbound marketing. That’s all of those types of things that are there.

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Time Butler: Yeah.

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Stacy Jones: Are they equally important or is one more.

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Time Butler: They’Re not equally important. But as to which one is superior for a particular person is going to come down to their situation. I would take this back to the basics of marketing. So if you look at the broad brush with organic, and we’ll take organic search engine optimization. So your site’s ranking on Google or Bing and people are visiting your blogs or pages because they’ve found you in a search. If we compare that to that same person does a search, you don’t appear in the normal organic results, those ones, but you pay Google or Microsoft to appear in the results you’re paying to access the audience.

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Time Butler: And the differences, if you like, is on organic, whether that be the SEO or the social media bit you’ve invested time in to create content which is valuable to your audience and you’ve earned, or you’ve created an asset that’s earned their attention. And so you access the audience by creating the asset to earn their attention in paid, whether that’s paid Google or whether that’s paying for your Instagram ad or your Facebook ad, you’re paying to access an audience. So it’s an expense. So you’re spending your money on an expense to access the audience. And on the other side, you’re earning the right to access that audience because marketing is about right message to the right people at the right time.

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Time Butler: So for an individual business owner, you have to decide what’s going to be my blend of what I do and can I earn the right to engage with the audience or do I need to pay to access the audience? The problem with the latter is it’s a short term fix. And if you start driving all your budget into paid media and you become hooked on it as a business because that’s the way you’re getting your leads, that’s the way you’re getting your sales.

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Stacy Jones: Like most people did with Facebook. Right? Like that was what happened with Facebook.

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Time Butler: Yeah. And it’s the same things happening with Instagram now with LinkedIn. I mean, we do a lot of LinkedIn advertising. It, you know, it gets more and more expensive because more and more people are doing it and effectively the bids goes up, the auction goes up. What happens at that point is because the cost per click or however it’s charged because that’s rising, it’s an auction. At some point, unless you change your conversion rates, your metric will make it that it’s not profitable to get access to that customer because of the revenue you get. And then all of a sudden you’ve got no business because it’s costing you too much to get those people in and you can’t afford to do that.

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Time Butler: Whereas if you invest in earning the right for them to want to come and engage with you, I think it’s a much slower build, but you build competitive advantage. Somebody can’t be new to the market and suddenly write 100 blogs, create 100 videos, or do 500 podcasts or whatever it might be that the audience is engaged with and therefore you’re more defensible. But also, people are choosing to engage with your brand. And I think I won’t go too much into it now, but with the changes of the search engine results page, people need to really be thinking about why their brand is going to succeed in the future. In the land of AI, what’s the real, what’s, you know, what’s the real value behind their brand?

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Stacy Jones: How is. I like that description, and I really actually loved your description of earned media as well as earning the right to be there. What do you think is going to happen with AI right now? How do you think that’s going to. That’s such a big question. I know. How do you think that’s going to add another hour? We can talk. What do you think is going to happen in the digital landscape with it? Because, I mean, it’s quite interesting.

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Time Butler: It’s phenomenally transformative. I was at the web summit event in Portugal in Lisbon in November, and you couldn’t escape from people talking about AI and how it’s transforming things. We’ll avoid talking about how AI and generation have. Basically, content’s going to cause terrible social issues and political issues and all of that. Focusing just on the digital marketing aspect of AI.

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Stacy Jones: The good things.

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Time Butler: The good things. Well, it should be the good things because there’s two ways that it’s going to help marketeers. It’s going to make us more efficient because we can do more in the same time. So this means that when we want 50 ideas for blog posts around, I don’t know, orange calculators, chat, GPT can give us 50 ideas in a few seconds, and then we’ve got some blog post ideas where that makes us more efficient. We want an image or we want a video, and we can get AI tools to create that quickly, so we become more efficient. The problem with that, though, is it’s actually going to mean that there’s going to be more content and there’s more noise out there.

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Time Butler: So we actually need to think about not being like I used to say, okay, if you’re good, like back in the day, because I’ve been in the Internet, if you like, since the late nineties, two thousands or whatever, if you were good, it was great because there was hardly anybody there and stuff like that. It got to the point where you had to be great. But now with AI, because there’s going to be so much noise, you’ve got to be exceptional, you’ve got to be really good. So it’s no good just hoping the AI will give you the creativity and it will give you the differentiation. You’ve got to be great behind it. So AI is going to make us more efficient, but it’ll also make us have to work harder.

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Time Butler: But then there’s the other side of AI, which is a performance part, which is AI gives us insights that we can’t compute on our own because it’s the machine learning. And if you think we’ve been using AI and machine learning in digital marketing for years, it’s just been hidden behind the platforms like Google with enhanced cost per click bidding or maximized conversion bidding and things like that. That’s all machine learning tools. It’s just that with the generative AI, creating text, creating images, creating video, we’ve seen it from embryonic kind of use of machine learning to now transformative. But those can then, you know, mean that when we do our A B tests, it can actually. There’ll be programs which will self optimize. So it will run those things and it’ll actually change the headers for us.

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Time Butler: Just like Google Ads will dynamically change the different headers and the different text in there, depending on who it is. It’s going to do the same thing when it comes to landing pages or web pages and things like that. So we should have performance enhancements. So it will be transformational. It’s going to shake up the industry a lot. It’s going to take some jobs out, but make some jobs more important.

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Stacy Jones: Well, I think that you’re a digital detective. That’s my nickname for you. Why not, right? Yeah, but I think that’s with AI, it’s. You’re gonna have to still have a brain and insights fail to make sure that the information that it’s generating, that it’s coming out with and what it’s saying is actually truth because there’s so much distortion there. And you’ll look at something, and I’m not talking about, oh, it pulls something that’s fake off of the Internet. I mean, it can actually, you have one little hiccup with it, you could be one little data set into it that you’re asking it to analyze and you’re giving it an instruction to do x. It’s going to do x to the nth degree, but you may have actually made a mistake and meant to do y.

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Stacy Jones: So there’s going to be a lot of hands on still with people needing to be involved in this technology.

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Time Butler: Yeah, I completely agree. And I think also we have to be mindful not just of AI Mirage, which is where it creates things. So the professor of computer science at Newcastle University here in the UK, he asked chat GPT to give him five undergraduate books for pure mathematics, and it gave him five titles. And the authors of those, Doctor this, professor, that all five of the books were entirely fictitious, but they all sounded believable because chat GPT is a large language model that just strings letters together, which, you know, should make logical sense. It’s not a research tool, it’s not a search engine. And I think people don’t always understand that. So you can have this thing where you’ve got the mirage of AI, but also you’ve got the AI bias as well as, like, mistakes.

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Time Butler: AI really struggles with certain understanding at the moment because it didn’t grow up in the world like we grew up in. So at one point I asked one of the tools, I won’t say which one, to create an image for me of a woman cricketer bowling. So you may or may not know, but cricket is the english civilized version of baseball, obviously. Very civilized. A game can go on for five days.

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Stacy Jones: I mean, you know, because nine innings is not long enough. You guys have taken it like, to the, again, nth degree next level, a.

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Time Butler: Game that lasts five days. So. So my wife plays cricket. So I asked this tool to create an image of a female cricketer bowling. And so the thing what came out of the images were really interesting, a few things. So they, the tool struggle with hands anyway at the best of times. But one of the images, or in fact, I think all of the images had a bowling ball as if you were going ten pin bowling. So rather than cricket bowling, it was ten pin bowling ball.

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Stacy Jones: It looked like a cricket.

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Time Butler: Well, this is the interesting thing. So there was a racial bias in the image because all of the images came out with a south asian looking woman in a feel. Yeah, yeah. Because that’s, you know, that’s what it thought female cricketers should look like. So, you know, we, those things are easy to spot, but we need to make sure that when we’re using things like AI, we’re aware of these things because they’re not going to be always easy to spot. And so, you know, we must be mindful as people, as humans in society, as much as marketeers.

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Stacy Jones: Don’t worry, someone’s going to create a tool overlay for that. That’s a plug in to make sure that just wait and they’ll make a ton of money. Well, how, Tim, can people find you? Can you share where they can go online, where they can reach out to LinkedIn, wherever it may be, and give a shout out to yourself?

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Time Butler: Yeah, I mean, lots of people come and they look for. Look for me on LinkedIn. It’s Timbutler 101. There are a lot of Tim Butlers. If you have a, if you have a Google alert for Tim Butler, you find out that there’s people in the, I think the US Congress or Senate with that name or whatever, and there was a mayor of some town, I think, in Iowa that got done for corruption a few years back that had the same name as me, so often LinkedIn’s not the best place to find a Tim Butler because there are more than one of us. So if you go to innovationvisual.com, that’s innovation visual, all one word.com, you can find everything about innovation visual and me there, we also have a podcast which is digital marketing answered, and you can find that on all the normal platforms.

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Time Butler: And also lots of people watch that on YouTube as well. So yeah, those are the easy ways to find me to reach out. And maybe we can put those in the show notes so people can click on it and get in contact that way.

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Stacy Jones: Absolutely. They will be in the show notes. And then, Tim, if we’re wrapping up, but can you give me like, if you had to give one big piece of advice to our listeners today, what would it be?

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Time Butler: It would be invest the time, money and attention to get your customer data into a better place so that then you can make better decisions, because that’s what it’s there for. And it’s not as hard as you think, but it’s one of those important jobs rather than an urgent job. And it gets put off. But put a note in your diary, create yourself a little internal project. And it’s called getting my data sorted out.

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Stacy Jones: And it’s probably not called find an intern to do this for me.

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Time Butler: Definitely not called find an intern. It’s too important. It’s far too important. Get an agency, drop me an email, we’ll do it for you. It doesn’t cost a fortune. It repays itself so many times over because you’ll make better decisions. You’ll be able to do things like automation. We haven’t even started on things like personalization. All of this runs off good data. So without good data, you can’t hope to do things like personalization, good segmentation, good automation. So, yeah, don’t leave it to the intern, give it to the professionals. If you don’t have time or you don’t have the skill set, and this.

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Stacy Jones: Could be anything from your data. If you’re a large company, you are going to have a ton of data. But if you’re a small to medium size, you may be having data more. So from your HubSpot, from your email platforms, from your even socials, I would assume. And that would be where you’d be calling in website traffic as well.

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Time Butler: Yeah, it’s really about joint. Think of it this way. Think I want to join the impact of my marketing decisions to the revenue that I get. So what do I actually need to analyze in order to join my marketing decisions with revenue. So you don’t need to worry about likes and comments on an Instagram post that’s not relevant. You want to look at what’s that channel actually bringing you in terms of revenue, how do you connect that? Maybe across your analytics platform or maybe using something like HubSpot or Klaviyo? If you’re a lead gen company, is your sales CRM connected to your marketing data set so that you can see people from not knowing you all the way through to being a happy customer?

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Time Butler: That’s what I mean, because you want to make the best marketing decisions and unless you can see the revenue difference, you won’t be able to do that.

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Stacy Jones: Well, Tim, thank you for sharing your brilliance again. Digital detective Tim Butler. Thank you for coming on the show today. I really enjoyed talking to you.

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Time Butler: Oh, Stacey, it’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you very much for having me on. And yeah, I’m very happy to have shared a few of those hopeful nugget useful nuggets of information.

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Stacy Jones: Very I want to dive into our agency’s data right now, I will tell you that. And that’s an area that I like tiptoe in and peer at. And I’m like, do I really want to do this? I’ll save it for another day type of attitude, typically, because it’s a little overwhelming if you don’t really know what you’re doing. I mean, you look at it and you’re like, oh, I totally got it. No, I don’t have it. And most of us don’t have it if we don’t have those inside sites and we haven’t been doing it for years. No matter what type of marketer you are, you need to actually have a different numbers viewpoint on things and it’s a different mindset of being able to see the story behind the numbers.

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Time Butler: Yeah. Yeah. Well, we’ll have to get my Martech team to talk to you after this episode and we’ll get your data sorted out by the time you do the next episode.

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Stacy Jones: I will take you up on that. But to all of our listeners, thank you for tuning into another episode of marketing mistakes and how to avoid them. I look forward to chatting with you this next week. And until then, if you happen to be a marketer who’s interested in the wonderful world of Hollywood and product placement and pop culture and celebrities and fashion and influencers and oh my, who all give you fantastic data results, I will tell you that you can look at digitally too, depending on your campaign reach out. I’m happy to connect you with our team at Hollywood branded. And I look forward to talking to you soon. Have a great one.