Episode 416: Simon Gould of Sydney Digital Marketing
In this episode, Fiona chats with Simon, founder of Sydney Digital Marketing, about his journey from coin-operated internet kiosks to establishing a leading digital marketing agency. Simon also shares valuable insights on maintaining lead quality. Tune in!
You'll Learn How To:
Simon's early career
The creation of the world's first coin-operated internet
Expansion of the internet kiosk
Evolution of digital marketing
The role of AI and emerging technologies in digital marketing.
The competitive landscape of digital marketing agencies.
Key metrics for measuring digital marketing success
Importance of continual learning and adapting to changing technologies.
Importance of staff stability and low turnover rates in agencies
Evaluating agency performance
The importance of quality leads versus quantity
The impact of consistent content creation
The role of digital marketing
Challenges and strategies in conveying the value of digital marketing to clients
The importance of choosing marketing platforms
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The most successful businesses and campaigns that we've run. The founder knows their numbers, knows their reports, and knows where to find those numbers. I'm in awe of how well some of these people are, and that's why they've been successful. They just know their numbers. If you're looking to improve your online presence, all founders need to be able to understand, even at a basic level, what's going on with their website. What's a bounce rate? What does it mean? If we have an 80% bounce rate, what does it mean? People are only spending six seconds on our website. Why aren't they buying? All of those things you need to be able to take into account so you, as the founder or business owner or marketing manager, can come to make the decisions as to what to do next, what to do to improve things.
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Welcome to episode 416 of the My Daily Business podcast. Today is an interview with a small business owner, and if you are somebody who is challenged, curious, excited or anxious about digital marketing, which is most small business owners can fall into one of those emotions or maybe all of them on any given day, then you're going to want to stick around and listen to today's guest who is an expert in that area. Before we get stuck in, I want to remind people that if you're interested in Group Coaching, it does kick off in August, or September this year. If you're interested in it, get on the waitlist because if you're on the waitlist, you get all these extra perks that you don't get. If you just apply later in the year, you can get on the waitlist by going to mydailybusiness.com/groupcoaching. Also, before we jump into this, I want to acknowledge where I'm coming from and acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of these lands, which are the Wurrung and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. I pay more respects to the elders past and present and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded. Let's get into a small business interview.
It's my pleasure to bring you an interview I did a little while ago now with Simon Gould from Sydney Digital Marketing. Simon has been in the digital marketing space for decades and probably even maybe longer than some people who are reading this podcast. And it's fascinating to me because Simon is in his fifties. I'm in my forties. Both of us grew up without the internet. I would say we both went through high school without the internet, so the internet became commonplace and into people's homes in Australia, where I'm from, around 1997 or 1998 some people got it earlier, but 1997 was the year that I finished high school. I started university as a 17-year-old. I remember just playing around with the internet in the libraries at school. We also had it at my parent's house, and we were one of the first out of my friends to get the internet all hooked up at home.
I remember my good friend Vy and I would send each other these three-page emails to each other. It was like an essay, and we were so excited, and we just had no idea though, that the internet would become what it has become and that people could shop and do all the things. Your whole life can be on the internet. You could just live in an apartment and never talk to anyone and just live the rest of your life, which would be very sad, but you could do all of that on the internet. But as a business owner, because there is so much opportunity with digital marketing and all the different tentacles of that, and that it's always changing, always evolving, it can be hard to feel like a, you understand what it is. Also if you choose to go for an agency, who do you choose and how do you know if they're any good?
How do you know that they're not going to just rip you off? Also, how do you get the most out of working with them? Is it walking through reports? Should you be checking in with them all the time? What is a good agency versus just somebody that's going to take your money? I talked to Simon about this because he has been in this space for so long, but we also talked about how he and his team have had to continually be innovating because there is so much competition. Also, how does he deal with having so much competition? Because everyone with a phone these days can be a digital marketer and call themselves that.
Also competing with people who have grown up with digital marketing and having a phone and videoing themselves all the time. He talks about his own experience of figurehead profiling and understanding what adds to an agency leader. He has to be out there and he has to be showing his face and creating videos and creating content. What does that all look like? It's something he loves doing now, but he talks about what it was like when he first started and he is so real, honest and open in this conversation. Here is my interview with the wonderful Simon Gould from Sydney Digital Marketing.
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Welcome to the podcast, Simon. How are you feeling right now?
Thanks, Fiona. Lovely to be here. Happy Monday. I'm feeling good. Had a bit of a stretch at yoga for an hour, which I try and keep on my Mondays just to start the week off with something a little less onerous than work, but I don't always get there, so I'm feeling very good.
Good on you. I love that Monday Yoga. Is that something you just do yourself or do you go out to a class?
No, I go to Power living in Manley. I've been going there for quite a while. They've got a great studio there and great teachers, and it's just my place to get away from the craziness of business and life.
Yes. What a lovely way to start the week, because we were just talking before we hit record. You've been in this space for a long time. You have been in the online space for a long time. Tell us about how you started, like what young Simon wanted to do when he got out of school, and then tell us about this coin-operated internet kiosk that you came to work on.
Absolutely. Young Simon was in Sydney in the late eighties. Young Simon was just all about getting out night clubbing and doing the nightclub scene, Jameson Street stranded, all the fun things we did back then. I didn't have a clear career path at that time. And then I fell into carphones, now known as mobile phones, evolution if you like, or industry working with some friends who had started off a business, some carphones. I did that for about two or three years. I went travelling around the world, came back, and started a couple of other businesses that were based around marketing and based around demand generation, I guess, getting people into getting local customers into local businesses. I had been running that for a few years and had an incident with my car and there weren't very many of these cars around.
It's quite a unique car. I smashed the window. A friend of mine said to me, we should have a look on the internet. This is 1996. To see if we could find a spare part. I said, what is this internet thing? We got on the internet and we looked around for this spare part from my car and we couldn't find it. We had a few beers and we just said, wouldn't it be great if you could put this into pubs or clubs or start as pubs as a vending machine for the internet so people could put a dollar in and go onto the internet? We did it. We went and found a software developer that could make a coin mechanism, and talk to a computer. It'd never been done before, where you could buy computer time.
We designed a nice, what at the time fancy-ish box for it to go into where it would be safe in pubs and outdoor environments, or not outdoor, but unsupervised environments. We launched it as the world's first coin-operated internet kiosk at that time, even Telstra's Big Pond product hadn't launched yet, so they were very late to market. We dropped it into a few clubs and bars and their backpacker hostels became very popular because backpackers wanted to get on their Hotmail. Hotmail was the killer app that we didn't even have to invent. I was always fascinated with how people were using the machine, and how they were interfacing with it. We developed a gooey, if you like on the front page, what we'd logged people into. Fast forward, was it 1996 to 2004?
I was working on that for about eight years. We rolled out a few hundred kiosks around Australia. We had Telstra come to us as a partner. They wanted to sponsor them. And then we started putting them into Westfield and getting promotional teams to hand out those CD ROM starter kits. We did some work with the Australian site, which I think was their weekend tech insert. We started talking about what we'd found on the internet from the public. And then I took it to the UK and then started it there from scratch with my partner at the time. And we had our first son there in Brighton as well. That was unexpected. New business, new country. Starting a family. It was pretty stressful.
But it was exciting. It was all before no smartphones, no mobile internet. You could start to get your emails on the move around maybe 2001. We owned this public internet access for a number of years. It was a very challenging business because computers in a public environment running on Windows. Even Windows 95 or Windows NT back in the day. It required a lot of running around rebooting machines, refunding, pound coins, and dollar coins. But just gave me a real thirst for this thing we now call the World Wide Web or the Internet. That's still everywhere.
It is. It's everywhere. And it's funny because I lived in London when in 2001 and I used to spend the very small amount of money that I made at an advertising agency. I used to spend it on internet cafes. That's where most of my money went.
It would've been easy cafes probably stalls and his easy internet cafes.
Yes, kind of like the orange thing. I'd ride the bus into town and I'd go to the internet cafe and it was like, it was amazing. I could talk to all my friends and people now are grown up, there might be people reading this who were born in 2001. You're just like, you had it, you have it so easy because back in the day it was, you looked at every minute that you were on because you were charged for it.
That's right. Sports scores, Hotmail, we did a fantastic deal with Wimbledon. We had like 15 kiosks at Wimbledon for about three or four years at the championships each year. We did a deal with Virgin as well. We put some into the mega stores there. It was fun. It’s a lot of work. I wish I knew where things were headed and it is probably hindsight of a wonderful thing. But it was a lot of fun, but a lot of work at the same time.
I can imagine. Then in 2012, only a few years later, you started Sydney Digital Marketing. And we feel like we've had the internet around forever, but no one used the internet when I was at uni, even though it was there. You had your Hotmail address and that might be what you checked. But that was it. 2012 is just after like when Instagram, I know it came out in 2010, but it became popular in 2012. And then you had smartphones that came out in 2007 but became popular in 2010. You started this digital marketing agency very close to when it had just launched in what we think of digital marketing today. Tell us about what it was like when you started what businesses you were working with, and also that education piece around, I'm assuming a lot of businesses would have no clue what digital marketing means. A lot of people don't know what it means now, let alone 14 years ago.
I was a bit of a crossroads and I'd gone and got a job. I've only ever worked with friends or for myself. I went and got a job in corporate and then that contract ended and I was at a bit of a crossroads. A good friend's wife said, you should take all of your knowledge about online marketing, email marketing, SEO and AdWords predominantly, which is what it was at the time. Facebook was just monetizing at that time. You should take that and you should go around the northern beaches and sit down with all the moms or girls and ladies that are setting up their shops, their Facebook shops, and selling their candles or rugs or jewellery and things and help them get online and show them how to do it.
I started the business off, it was going to be called I Mums. It kicked off there and I'd registered the name Sydney Digital Marketing, and I wasn't sure whether it should be Sydney Online Marketing, which vernacular it was going to be Sydney Digital Marketing, or Sydney Online Marketing. I went with digital and had a bit of a hunch. We picked up a couple of good clients and then we picked up, BMW Sydney, which was just through an introduction. At that time, they had a very minimal social media presence and they wanted to improve that. We took them from like a hundred followers on Facebook or something to about 15,000 over, over the years working with them, built their Instagram. We did the very first Facebook Live from a car dealership in a car, and we launched the BMW M2 live on Facebook Live. That was fun. But look, it was very transactional back then. It was the company that said, we need more business, we need more sales, we need more leads. We could build campaigns. When I say we I brought a couple of people on by this stage and we would build outward campaigns. It was very transactional and it was a lot easier back then because it wasn't so noisy. The online space now
is so saturated.
We'll talk about that a little bit later, but where we've ended up now, but for the first probably five or six years, we were just very transactional. We had great service, a great team, and a lot of testing and learning. Sometimes we would knock it outta the park. Other times, I'm sure other people listening can sympathize or concur that sometimes you just don't get any traction with campaigns. We learnt a lot and we're lucky enough that my GM now, Ben, who's been with us for 10 years, has instilled a real kaizen approach within the business. Continual improvement, continual learning, that continual stretch for excellence. But back in the day, in the first five years or so, it was very tricky. As I said, it was more transactional. There wasn't as much strategy and brand work and thinking that we put into it now.
That brings me perfectly to my next question, which was, they say internet years are like dog years, that one internet year is worth 10 real years or pre-internet years or something like that. I was listening to, Steven Bartlett from the Diary of a CEO. I just went to see him and I didn't know what to expect. It was way better than I thought it would be, but he was talking about some data scientists that he saw that said, if you're in your forties now, which is me, by the time you're in your sixties, what took a year now will take 30 days in 20 years. It'll be so quick. If you're an 11-year-old, which my son is, by the time you are 40, what's taking a year today in technology will be done in seven days.
I'm like, “Wow.” When we look at things like AI and everything else, you have had this business going for 14 years, which is massive. Congratulations. But what has that time? And you alluded to some of them just then, what has that taught you about how to adapt to changing technologies? Because even Facebook, as so many of my clients now don't use it, I mean, they use it for ads, but they're not, they don't have a presence on Facebook anymore. Things are changing all the time. What have you learned being in this space over the last 14 years?
The current approach, I guess we're always testing and learning. The beauty of digital is as everybody understands, it's not like the old days of print where you have to lay up and go to the print shop and design and all of those components that required you to get into a newspaper. Very much a test-and-learn approach. We test as much as we can. The tricky thing with small business is budget. And that always is a challenge for us. I'm the eternal optimist and I always say, “We'll make it work.” But sadly, if any of our clients are reading, we do our best. We do our absolute best. But sometimes when you don't have enough budget, you don't have enough creativity, and you don't have a real point of difference.
I think that the key thing now, is we sit down with a client that comes to us and says, “We want to run campaigns.” I'm like, who's your audience? Tell us about your business. Who's the competition? What are they doing? What's your USP? Have you got personas? How are you talking to those personas? The tone of voice, all of those things that, as I said, five years ago, it was transactional. You'd write an ad, you'd get a response, and you convert a percentage, two to 3% coming through a website. There's a lot more biased psychology going into the work. And that's great for ready businesses that have the appetite and the understanding of that. But there's a lot of education that we have to do. When somebody comes to us, can you look after my SEOs?
We're like, “Yes.” And then we ask them all those questions. There are a lot of people who are good at what they do with their business. They come up with a great idea and they can sell it. But then how do they go to market with that idea and cut through the noise and that there are some brilliant marketers out there? There's some brilliant creative. Being put out there that's getting that cut through. I love this stuff. I was there at the mobile phone revolution. I was there for the internet revolution. I was there for the digital marketing revolution, and I'm just super excited for AI. To answer your question, how do we stay across it? Just being passionate about the space, loving the new shiny thing. My team can attest to that in terms of staying focused.
But that's why I've got a team. I've got some great people who do brilliant service and excellent execution. I've just got to be out there just constantly looking and reading things and trying things and finding those new platforms or apps that, that we might be able to use that and everything we suggest to our clients, we try on ourselves first. I think that's a, a little bit of a point of difference so we can put our hand on our heart and say, we did this worked well, or we did this for another client and it worked well.
With that, and I know this is similar to what I've just asked you, but with the agency, you mentioned that you've got a team and everything else, and you've got extensive knowledge and experience in this space, plus any of our age proof would have connections and networks. No doubt. And when you mentioned before the printing, I used to work in magazines, so I feel like I've got a lot of connections from the magazine world and I used to do the social column for the age newspaper before social media was a thing. A lot of people, we all come up together in a way. But even with that, and even with these huge clients that you've had, like the likes of BMW, you must face constant competition in digital marketing because it's huge.
Everyone with a phone thinks that they're a digital marketer or that they have the knowledge to become a digital marketer. And particularly when you've got people who maybe have just grown their social media platform, that's it. One time they've done it, that they can go out and be like, look at me and I'm going to teach you my ways and come to my agency. How do you, whether the competition, I guess that comes up and I've worked in marketing for 23 years at agencies and big places like Amazon and Audible and all of that. I sometimes still think, these people are coming up out of everywhere. How do you deal with that as a digital agency?
It’s a hugely competitive space. Not only dealing with agencies now and digital marketing gurus, but you've got influencers out there, influencer agencies. It's a very noisy space. There are some good players out there. I think, as you said in the notes there are some cowboys out there. Let's be honest. There are a lot of people out there that will just sign you up, take your money, and they're working off a volume business. They might have thousands of clients. I was speaking with somebody just the other week, and they were telling me about an agency where the account manager looks after 80 accounts.
By design, we've stayed small. We charge more of a premium price, but not massively out of the out of the ballpark of the industry. But we are quite choosy, we've become quite choosy with who we work with, only from the point of view that we want to make sure that it works. The, that we align, our values align not all business is good business. I've found, but it's taken me 30 years to 35 years probably to work that out. But sometimes you've just got to say no to the wrong business. And talking to business owners, small meeting business owners, we know there's on costs, there's cash flow, there's financial pressures, there's growth pressures that you need to address within a business.
You've got to keep the doors open. But not all business is good business. In terms of competition, there are a million businesses out there for us. We're not looking over the fence going, what are they doing? We look around and, at the end of the day, we're all reselling the same platforms. We're all reselling ads on Facebook, we're all reselling ads or meta Instagram, LinkedIn, Google, SEO, Google AdWords, all of those things. How do we set ourselves apart? And from our perspective, it's making sure that we focus heavily on our brand. We want to have a strong brand out in the marketplace. We also want to make sure that we're only dealing with our strengths as in lead generation. We don't do anything in e-commerce. It's a whole other beast to maintain e-commerce campaigns.
We just try to stick to what we're best at. We've seen some agencies come and go, over the years. But like I said we just stick to our backyard and there are hundreds and hundreds of businesses out there that would be a perfect fit for us. We're nowhere near market saturation if you like. It has got more competitive over the years in terms of other agencies being out there. One of the things that I do as well is, is build my brand at the front of the agency. Being out there doing videos on LinkedIn consistently, regularly, and consistently, I've been doing videos for the business on Facebook and Instagram for many, many years. We switched that to LinkedIn to focus on LinkedIn. Because that's where the money audience is. That's where we want to build our profile B2B business. That's probably a little bit of a point of difference for us is me being out there and being the face of the business.
If you were talking to somebody now in a small business who has no idea where to start, or maybe they worked with an agency in the past or they're starting something different, what key metrics would you suggest that they focus on to measure their digital marketing efforts? Like how can they track them?
The key to a successful campaign is for you to understand your audience and how to speak to that audience, where they hang out online. Once you've nailed that, the things that we track as a business are basic things like cost per click. Because most people have a finite budget and you want to get as many clicks. Out of your budget as possible. I've always looked at CPM as in cost per thousand impressions because it's one thing to get people to take action, but we're also building a brand here. At the same time, we also want to create some front-of-mind, top-of-mind brand awareness. The lower your cost per thousand or CPM is on these platforms, Facebook, and LinkedIn, they all are measured in the ads managers. The more people you're going to be able to reach, click-through ratio.
How many times has my ad been shown and how many times has somebody clicked on it? Obviously the higher the click-through ratio, the better the engagement. the higher the performing ad, but ultimately it's about lead sales and inquiries. What's the conversion rate like from, say, if you're a B2B business or even a B2C business, but you're sending people off the platforms to your website, you want to make it clear and you want to make the needed, whether that's downloading something, filling out a form, picking up the phone, you want to make that as easy as possible. That will increase your conversion rate, which is the amount of people who have come to the website versus the amount of people who have taken an action or made an inquiry, which then sends a signal back to Google or back to Facebook or LinkedIn.
They're all connected. They want to see that the traffic that they're sending off their platform is landing on your homepage or your landing page and taking action. And therefore they put two and two together and they say, this ad is talking about some service. When we send people from this ad to that website, they like that service because they're taking a conversion action. We are going to show that ad more because it keeps people, it'll keep the advertiser paying us more money because it's a successful campaign and it's popular with our viewers, readers members, whatever conversion rate is probably the most critical because you can have the highest CTRs and the lowest cost per clicks, but if they're not converting when they get to the website, then it's pretty much all a waste of time.
I often say that to people when I'm talking about CR like conversion rate optimization, that it's like sending 10,000 people to a shop and then nobody does anything in the shop. What's the point?
Exactly. Other things are like time on the page how long people are spending and looking at things quarter on quarter. Look into your GA4 or whatever analytics tool that you use and see how are we progressing quarter on quarter. You just get a much broader view. And then you can also look at that quarter and say, how did we perform in that quarter last year or the year before? Because some things are seasonal, some things are macro, everybody's presses out there talking, there's still a recession coming, but is there you talk to people out on the streets and cost of living's gone up. But I'm digressing now. But anyway, back to knowing your numbers and the most successful businesses and campaigns that we've run.
The founder knows their numbers knows their reports and knows where to find those numbers. I'm in awe of how well some of these people are, and that's why they've been successful. They just know their numbers. If you're looking to improve your online presence, all founders need to be able to understand, even at a basic level, what's going on with their website. What's a bounce rate? What does it mean if we have an 80% bounce rate, what does it mean? People are only spending six seconds on our website. Why aren't they buying? All of those things need to be able to take into account so you, as the founder or business owner or marketing manager, can come informed to make the decisions as to what to do next, and what to do to improve things.
I think what you've just said is, hitting the nail on the head with one of the things I was going to ask, which is what people should look for if they're looking for an agency. Because everything you just said, unfortunately, I as a business coach, hear so many stories where they're like, we worked with this agency and it's cost us $86,000 or $112,000 and these are small businesses that do not have that extra cash just sitting around. And yet, when I ask simple things like, what about your conversion rate? They don't know what it is. The agency didn't ask them. It's almost like, we got everyone to the front door. And that's why I always say, well, it's fine to get everyone to the front door, but if nothing's happening inside the shop, which is your website.
It doesn't matter. You've got 10,000 people in a shop. That doesn't work. There's nobody there to take the sale. There's nothing on the shelves. People don't know where to find things. It's amazing that you just said all that. Because unfortunately there are a bunch of cowboys, like you said, that offer things and they're like, we got you to page one, or, we did this or we did that. And they don't care about the rest of the journey. When people are looking for an agency outside of but they've got a beautiful website, or they've got a lot of followers, how do they do their due diligence? How do they know I'm going to get help if I go through this agency? Is there anything that you think they should look out for?
I've said this to people that we've not been able to work with. I've said, look, go and speak to this agency. What's the staff turnover? I'm very lucky. Our culture is strong on building culture even though we've got a distributed workforce now. Culture is important. A lot of our people have been with us for five years or more. How often are your account managers turning how often are the account managers turning over? Maybe speak to some of the brands all the agencies, everybody's got their brands. These are our successful customers. Go and speak to some of those successful customers and understand how that agency works. How many account managers have you had since you've been with them? If it's the same account manager, that's always a good sign because you've got a good culture in business and people sticking around, they're not getting burnt out.
That's a soft one to look at. The other one is, what's the reporting cadence like? Are you meeting regularly with that account manager? Are you getting a regular report or are you just getting a report and an invoice at the end of the month and you have to call them? I hear the same horror stories. We have to call our account manager all the time. We had to tell them what we wanted. I mean, just taking a step back, digital marketing is a huge opportunity. Because every business needs it. I can understand why there are people that are getting in there and going gangbusters. They're just loading up with all of these clients, but there are just no results. Ultimately, at the end of the day, you're paying that money to get a 3, 4, 10, or 20 times return on your marketing dollars.
I think it's important to understand what's the reporting like from the agency. Who's the account manager that you'd be working with? It's one thing to talk to the BDM or sales or the founder, but maybe have a chat with the account manager as well that you're going to be working with to make sure that you gel. Make sure that you are going to own all of the properties and it's not the agency that's setting up the property for you. When you leave, the agency still owns all of the IP and you've got nothing. When you go to the next agency, you've gotta pay that agency to build it all again. That data is, I was just going to say gold. Can I say it's crypto, it's Bitcoin? What's Bitcoin doing today?
But do you know what I mean? Like, the first part of data owning your data is super important. You're making sure that have a look at the reporting and agree in writing the KPIs we are working towards, and as you said, there are never any guarantees, but the team needs a North Star to work towards. They need to know we're on track. We've gotta get a hundred leads in this month. Ideally, the agency has visibility into the CRM as well. With big proponents of HubSpot for instance, if the agency got insight into the CRM, they can then optimize the campaigns according to the quality of those leads.
Because a hundred leads, a hundred leads a month is great. But then you probably also, people, they gave us a hundred leads, but they were, they were crap. They were rubbish leads. We're obsessed. I know Ben, my GM mentioned a couple of times, that he's just obsessed with this lead quality. It's a real fine-tuning to make sure that we can see the whole customer journey all the way through. And that's why we took a step back a couple of years ago and said, well look, we need to do more work over here on the brand, on the audience piece. Understanding the audience. And not only that but also we need to know what's working for the client so that we can do more of that and just make the campaigns more successful.
Which is a win-win for everyone. That's what all the agencies should be doing. And when you said the lead quality, I think that's the same with SEO when I have clients sometimes and they'll look at a report and they'll be like, but they got us on page one or two for these words. I'm like, do you think anyone ever uses that random word that is got like no traffic, no volume?
That's the other thing that I've seen recently as well. We had a client come to us and they said, we're going to stick with our SEO agency because they're doing a good job, but we want you to do X, Y, Z. And we're like, “Okay. Can we just have a look at their SEO report, see what they're up to, and make sure there's no crossover?” We had a look and we said the same thing. We're like, wow. They've got you on page one for like a hundred words. But we look at the search volume as in the amount of people using or searching those words and it's like five a month.
And you're like, of course, you got onto that. Because no one's using it. No one needs that. And the chances are that that's not going to be a quality lead for you.
An analogy I like to use is that this, this whole digital space, it's a little bit like, remember when we used to have to program the VCR for our parents they didn't know how to program the VCR. We are still in that age where it's not VCRs anymore, it's just digital marketing or even the iPhone. Most people just use calls and texts and maybe a little bit of social media. But to understand the power of what you've got in your hands, most people dunno how to go beyond that. It's the same with technology, which I have to say is great for us because it means that we have a solid reason, to exist. Because there'll always be people out there who just don't understand it or don't have the resources and the bandwidth to execute it with all of the nuanced moving parts that go with it.
When you mentioned the VCR, I am a child of the eighties and grew up with the VCR. And even I was saying to my son the other day, we didn't even have a remote. I had to go on my knees and flick around the TV. Because we had an old TV to start with, but I am in my forties. You are in your fifties. Is that okay to mention on the podcast?
Yes.
We were talking about this before, I had a client in her sixties recently, and she was talking about TikTok and she was saying, do I need to get on TikTok? I was like, I get it. I felt old sometimes I still am like, I'm in my forties on TikTok. But I love the platform. I said to her, if you get onto any marketing platform that you love, that you genuinely enjoy, chances are you're going to be more present there. You're going to create great content for it. I love doing a podcast. That's why we've had such a consistent podcast for years in terms of social media, digital marketing, and all of that. I work with people, a lot of people in their forties and fifties. You can see this resistance that comes up like, I didn't grow up with it. I'm not going to understand it the same way that other people do. What do you say to that from being in that age, but also running a business in this space?
It's for putting my agency hat on. It's tricky because sometimes you are there with somebody and you talk some numbers before people spend a hundred thousand dollars we're around that $120,000 a year which is still cheaper than bringing on an internal person. You're tapping into 14 experts as well. But when you start talking those numbers to people who don't understand the technology or don't understand how it'll work, let alone the work that goes into getting those results, it can be tricky to demonstrate value for them to be able to get their head around it. Being the founder and front of the house for sales, I do manage those conversations a little bit.
But in terms of, what do I say to that? I think you're right. There's so much information on these platforms that tells you how to get the most out of these platforms. YouTube, LinkedIn, LinkedIn Learning, TikTok, all of them. It's so accessible. I think it is a bit of human nature if you like to be scared of pushing the wrong button maybe, or doing the wrong thing or looking silly or not wanting to put you, so when I'm talking, I'm talking about going out on social media. And trying to build a brand presence LinkedIn, a perfect example. I think it's only 1% of their billion members is a creator. What an opportunity. And look how busy it is already. And there's only 1% of people out there creating content.
My advice is to look at the platforms that you enjoy the most and then maybe if you are again, if we're talking to this as, as a business tool, look at the platforms that you enjoy the most and start to look at the channels or the content that's entertaining you or educating you and look to learn from those. How can you not necessarily copy them, but replicate that style? Into something that feels comfortable for you. When my team started going on at me about seven years ago now, to start doing like a Facebook Live or doing some video, I think Gary V was like the big voice back then. Still is. But he, he was big voice and they were saying get out there and do some video. I started doing my first one.
I was like a newsreader honestly. I sat there and I had my blazer on and it was looking, I was all very proper and flowers on the desk and everything. It looked like a newsreader. But now I just throw my camera up anywhere and I'll just punch out three minutes of content. The key to growing your content following is consistency. That was the one thing. I just book it every week. I've gotta do a video, we've gotta write a blog, we've gotta write a couple of other posts. I just booked it in. It's in my calendar as important as a meeting, as is this podcast for instance. It's just immovable stuff. Whereas in the early years, I did it when I got around to it and it's a little bit hit and miss.
I haven't done a video for six weeks, better do one. But now I just go, no, this is important for my business. This is important for my clients. It's important to build trust and authority. I, I commit to it. And once you've, once you've done a few and you stumble and you there are things you can use such as teleprompters and there are all sorts of ways that you can overcome the fear factor, I guess, of putting yourself out there on social media. But I think a lot of people would be pleasantly surprised once they start on that journey.
And that you enjoy it. I think what you said about consistency is so crucial. This podcast is coming up to nearly a million downloads, which is amazing.
Congratulations. That's amazing.
Thank you. But a huge part of that is consistency. It's two podcasts every week, week in, and week out. I have a Sunday email that's gone out for years and has thousands of small business owners. When I started it was nine people. I was like, I'm going to talk to these nine people the same way that I would talk to them if there were 10,000 people on this list. I think people just don't just start. The other thing, and because I worked in magazines and books, like you put it out to print, it was out. You couldn't fix anything. I made massive spelling mistakes, I made big grammatical issues and they went out and they're in print. Whereas anything online can be changed. You can go in, you can edit it. If you don't like that video, you can take it down. But it's just like people people expect everything to be perfect from day one. Whereas if you just start to have a go have a fun experiment, which is all marketing is at the end of the day.
Do you know the saying eating your own dog food?
No.
A lot of people don't. Back in the I think it was the mid-nineties, there was a saying in Microsoft you have to eat our own dog food. Meaning that we practised what we preach. I thought it was quite a well-known saying. One of the videos that I did, I was quite a few years in, so I probably should have known better. But one of them that I did on Facebook, was I emptied out a tin of pal dog food and put some tuna inside it. I pretended to eat that, I was trying to make a point about eating your own dog food, but it did backfire, I guess in terms of people's comments and things. They thought I was doing it for real. As long as you are delivering good quality comments, as long as you're delivering good quality content, you don't go and do something too crazy.
Although these days are sometimes crazier.
Exactly. There's some crazy stuff out there. It is.
As we come to the end of this, can you recommend any apps or tools that have been either instrumental in streamlining the agency's operations or enhancing your digital marketing strategies? And likewise, you've been in this space for a long time. Who or what has been your mentor? Are there like great business books? Are there things that you're like, that changed the game? How have they impacted and what would you recommend to other people?
The one game changer for me in terms of books would be Brand Storytelling by Donald Miller. Breaks down the whole hero's journey laid undertones of Star Wars, which is such an easy analogy for everybody to get. That was a real game changer for us as a business in terms of how we approached the market, how we started telling our story, how we started telling our client's story. That was very good. Most recently, Walter Isaacson's, biography of Elon Musk, thought was brilliant. And just an insight into somebody who's so out there and visionary and we've gotta find a way. We've gotta find a way. You talk about persistence, and determination, which was good in terms of platforms, HubSpot, for a lot of small businesses, it's an investment.
But HubSpot, without a doubt, would be the number one platform that I would recommend for any business to manage their database, measure the interaction with their website, measure their return on investment from their advertising, start a newsletter from it, manage their social media campaigns from it, and build hugely customizable dashboards. Again, you can see and know your numbers consistently and all the stakeholders in the business can as well. Super powerful platform and easy to use built with marketers and founders in mind. That's a great platform. Loom video, we use Loom video now massively. Rather than write spending, I'm not the tidiest typist, so it's much easier for me to sit on screen and just talk somebody through some reports or a situation that I'm much better off articulating with my face and voice rather than through words as we know, they can always be taken out of context.
We use Veed.io for editing my social media content and videos. That's probably one of the best tools that we found in terms of throwing cool subtitles. And defects and things like that. And just balancing the content. Slack is a no-brainer, and HubSpot is a game changer for most businesses. We put it into one of our clients and the founder of the business was 1500 bucks a month, I'm not happy about it. But if you guys say so. And then within six weeks, there were other departments within his business that he wanted to upgrade the version of HubSpot that he was on to go to an enterprise version. Because they could already immediately see the power and the value that it was, it was bringing to the business.
I know it's an expensive pill to swallow for a lot of small businesses. But it's worth it. Those would be the ones that spring to mind immediately in terms of just influencing Dan Kennedy as well from a marketing perspective. Anything from Dan Kennedy. He's been around the game for 50 years, like old a lot. I'd call him the Colonel Sanders of direct marketing, but he is not a digital person. But his formula and his philosophy rings true across all media. He's somebody that I would be googling Dan Kennedy and his Magnetic Marketing, I think is his company.
Amazing. Thank you. What are you most proud of from your time in business to date?
I would say building a great team and having a great team stick around. Quite a few of them. After Covid said, I want to travel I still want to stay in the business. I love working for Sydney Digital, but can I travel? Given the team the flexibility to go and travel and live their best lives, I think that's cool. I like to know that people wake up on a Monday morning or a Wednesday morning and they're happy to open the screen because they're living their best life. Given that flexibility doesn't always work, I think it's one of the reasons why we had such a good tenure with our team last year. We made it onto the Smart company's Smart 50 list. That was a nice bit of recognition. We're not one of those agencies that go after awards all the time, but that one was nice.
It was a good group of peers others that were recognized as well. I'm only just getting started, I'm in my mid-fifties, over my mid-fifties now, and I'm excited for what the next phase brings. It's 10 years in business this year, and it's taken us 10 years to hone us as a business and as a brand. I'm glad we made it to this just surviving is a great achievement, isn't it? Just getting a business person. Pass those first few years. But I'd say my team, I'd be most proud of my team. Absolutely.
Amazing. Thank you so much. Where can people connect with you? And if they're reading this thinking, I'd love to connect with them or work with them. Where is the best place for them to check out you and these videos and Sydney Digital Marketing?
We're Sydneydigitalmarketing.com.au. I can be found on LinkedIn, it's linkedin.com/in/speaktosimon/. They're probably two places I think where we hang out the most. We're on Facebook, we're on Instagram, we're on Twitter which I handled there. We're not as active on some of the other social platforms as much as we are on LinkedIn. LinkedIn will be the best place to go to learn more about us or, our website, Sydneydigitalmarketing.com.au.
Amazing. Thanks so much, Simon, for your time and I'll let you get back to your busy day.
Lovely to be on. See you soon.
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It’s good to chat with Simon Gould from Sydney Digital Marketing. I'm going to highlight two things that stood out to me, as I always do with these interview episodes. The first is when Simon talked about setting an objective, and I think this is so crucial, honestly, I wish I could shout this from the mountaintops because I work with so many small business owners who engage agencies, whether it's a digital marketing agency or design or SEO or content, whatever. There's a million agencies out there. Often when I say, what did you define as the objectives? They haven't, either they haven't or the agency hasn't or they were going to have a catch-up about it and that didn't happen. Or they did two years ago when they brought them on. But they've never reviewed those, they don't look at those regularly.
I love that he said, we need to be able to do our job, but we also need to know what the North Star is. Where are we all headed? Why are we doing this together? On the flip side as well, a lot of people can get rid of agencies because there wasn't an idea of like, where are we going? They don't even know if the agency is doing a great job and they may be like, they're just costing us too much. And they're not looking at like, what did we set out to do with the agency outside of somebody telling us we should be doing digital marketing, or we don't want to do our content anymore. We're outsourcing it. And there's not this clear pathway for either party to understand, is this a successful partnership? Because that's what it is.
It's a partnership. You are paying for a service, yes. But you're both working together as a team, or all parties are working together as a team in order to hit these objectives. And if you don't know what the objectives are, it makes it difficult to do that teamwork together. I imagine it must be frustrating on the agency side as well. And I think for too long people have just paid an agency fee without questioning what they're paying for. But then on the flip side, I also think that sometimes people expect the world from an agency without saying, what do I want as a business owner? I love that he brought that up to be clear to understand what are we trying to do. I think second to that, I'm going to maybe say three things today, but second to that is the idea of the agency understanding its role in the bigger picture.
Again, I think this is something that gets overlooked, particularly when it comes to things like SEO, where it's like, we'll get you on page one. It's like, you got me on there, but you got me for some random keyword that no one's using. Or you got a whole bunch of people to my site or got them to sign up for something. But they're the wrong people. They're not my target audience, they're not people who are going to take action. But it's like sending, I don't know, a whole bunch of vegans into a leather shoe shop. No one's going to buy it. It's not the right fit. I love that he talked about the whole picture and your agency should be there, but they're part of the whole picture. What happens once that traffic gets to your site?
Does the site work to engage people? Have you looked at those sorts of things, your conversion, your CRO, all of that? I love that he brought those things up. The second thing that I was saluting over here was like, “Woo hoo. Yes, completely agree with.” Is this idea of culture and working with places where people stick around? I work with people who work with agencies, and that is part and parcel. A lot of my clients have agencies that they work with, and sometimes he heard their frustration that my account manager's not there anymore or he's not there, or they've moved on, or I have to explain myself to everyone. Even if you do have it's higher churn rate, the onboarding of clients shouldn't have to be something that the client does again and again and again.
It should be caught or captured somewhere that then even if the handling of the account management changes, the client isn't left to pick up the pieces, that there's a system in place for the onboarding so that that information is shared between people who are leaving and people who are coming. Honestly, this goes for so many industries. I'm not just saying digital marketing agencies at all, even in schools I've talked to lots of parents about things where you're like. How is that information not passed on from one teacher to the next teacher? I just think that this gets lost a lot along the way. And if you think about that customer journey or the buyer cycle, understanding that point of evaluation because things like great onboarding can be the difference between somebody renewing their contract with you or going elsewhere.
I love that he talked about that and he talked about how they've had people working there for years and years and honestly must be a good place to work if that is the outcome. That is it for my chat today. I hope that you took away all sorts of things from that. If you want to connect with Simon, you can head on over and Google them because they're doing well in terms of the keywords they need. But you can also just head straight to Sydneydigitalmarketing.com.au. You can find them on socials under that as well. And you can find a link on their website over to Simon's LinkedIn where you can find out more about him if you just go to their team page and then click on Simon. Or you can just go to linkedin.com/in/speaktosimon, and we'll link to that in the show notes, which you'll be able to find for this particular episode at mydailybusiness.com/podcast/416. Thank you so much for reading and I'll see you next time. Bye.
