We have loved tapping into the experience and knowledge of our business advisors, who we have been working with very closely during this time and with the rollout of our grants program.
One major area of need for businesses at this time has been their digital and online presence, and we selected advisors which had areas of both common and differing focus and experience to provide our businesses with the best advice for their business.
Steve Davis of Talked About Marketing shares his expertise and advice for businesses who want to maximise their digital marketing efforts.
How long have you been in the digital space and what made you interested in this area?
I built my first website in 1998, hand coding in html, and have since built more than 1000 using various languages and systems from ones I now "rescue" people from, like Joomla, to my go-to option of WordPress, which now accounts for 42% of all websites online. On the social side of digital, I ran South Australia's first social media marketing workshops in late 2005, and have been in the thick of it ever since.
I've watched us embrace it naively (over sharing every minute aspect of our lives and locations - I still remember the joy of earning the Mayor badge in favourite businesses using Foursquare) to our journey into cynicism and selective usage in the wake of trolling and invasions of privacy. It still has great power to connect people but it can also lock us into our bubbles and segregate us. For marketers, we need to approach social media with nuance and wisdom and, preferably, as a secondary avenue of action once we have our core content marketing strategy in place.
There are a lot of different types of digital agencies - specialising in a variety of things. Where do you see your agency sitting in this ecosystem, and what are your areas of specialty?
Firstly, I don't consider Talked About Marketing to be a "digital agency" but rather a marketing consultancy where we get the strategic foundations right so we can make the best use of digital platforms. There is a sense of "digital anxiety" among many small business owners and that makes them susceptible to agencies that strong spruik that Instagram or TikTok or Reels will be the panacea to their problems. This rush to publish and then getting caught up chasing likes can distract us from engagements with consumers that matter, that convert.
Almost everything we do is firmly embedded in the digital realm but it's the setting of custom goals for what matters that really makes the difference. For example, we produce podcasts for some clients that most of you will never have heard of. That's because they have very specific audiences. These shows might have download numbers that look small compared to pop media content, but they win deals and open doors where they count. That's what we strive for.
What are the main issues you see coming up time and time again for your business clients in the digital space?
The two most common issues are people believing that they are their target market and wondering why their content isn't attracting or converting customers, and people suffering "digital anxiety" or FOMO (fear of missing out) leading to them spending fruitless hours creating superficial posts in social media as they chase the almost meaningless validation of "likes". It's very common for us to meet people who complain their social media efforts are not yielding sales. What we typically uncover is that they have been caught up spinning their wheels amid the flood of shiny posts instead of doing the hard yards and starting their efforts with what matters most to them and their key customer personas.
A third issue is when people have let SEO agencies (search engine optimisation) get their hooks into them. I was working with a new client recently who had an SEO person charging them a monthly fee for writing bland articles stuffed with keywords placed on obscure sites in a vain effort to trick Google that the links from that article to their website was a valuable one. The most enduring value to hold in this space is that if you write earnestly for your people first, Google will follow. It's when we try to trick Google that we come undone.
One important factor in business is knowing who is a good fit for your business - those people who you work best with and who you can help the most. Who do you feel your agency is able to work best with and help the most?
We definitely have the best results when we work with business founders who are curious to learn and improve, and who still have a heart-led drive to "help" people with their products or services. Conversely, we struggle to make an impact when people come to us in an entrenched, defensive attitude. Like the Blues Brothers said, we are here to help, but we can't help people who already "know" the answers. The other group we've had great success with are small organisations or their boards, who engage us to hold a planning day. With David Olney's wealth of knowledge and real-life application of critical thinking, these planning days actually teach principles as we go through them, and draw people's own knowledge out from themselves in surprising ways. David is blind and it continues to astonish many of us about just how much he "sees" during these sessions.
What do you see as the biggest upcoming opportunities in the digital space?
Fortune telling is a miserable craft, especially in the realm of digital marketing. I will note, however, that figuring out the right way to blend some AI tools into processes, will help with some efficiencies for marketers. We will have cohorts of lazy practitioners simply using AI tools to churn out blogs and social media content of marginal value in bland ways. This means our long held mantra of urging clients to build their tribes, to build the list of contacts they have through producing helpful newsletters, will become more important than ever as a way to stay in touch with prospects and customers in a world flooded by spam.
If there was one key message you wanted to give business owners, what would that be?
I would ask them to take a moment to reflect deeply on the problems they solve for their customers, how this makes their customers feel, and what impact does this have on the world around them. Being able to connect with profound purpose, whether you are making sandwiches in a deli or fixing broken phones and devices, makes your work more fulfilling and sustainable and we (your customers) can sense that. Cheekily, the other message is to consider a careful diet of audiobooks or podcasts on topics that help you with your thinking about your business and, of course, I hope that includes listening to our short episodes of Talking About Marketing.
About Talked About Marketing
Talked About Marketing is named after Oscar Wilde's famous quip, there's only one thing worse than being talked about and that's not being talked about. Founder, Steve Davis, believes this witticism contains profound truth for businesses because "being talked about" is a symbol of our relevance and is the hallmark of referrals or word-of-mouth recommendations; the highest form of marketing. For the past 20 years, Steve has helped small to medium business owners and organisations get clarity on their marketing efforts by focussing on effective and meaningful ways to define their ideal customers and by then taking a structured, prioritised approach to putting their digital marketing elements in order. He's built more than 1000 websites in his career and run South Australia's first ever social media marketing workshops (late 2005), so he brings a perspective drawn from those experiences as well as his pre-marketing background in journalism, stand-up comedy, and podcasting (The Adelaide Show podcast won Silver for Best Interview Podcast in Australia in 2021). Fellow strategist, David Olney, brings a wealth of wisdom from his 12 years lecturing on complex problem solving and subsequent engagements with a range of organisations including Australia's SAS. Together they create a fortnightly podcast, Talking About Marketing, which models their philosophy that good marketing should lead by being helpful. The episodes contain insights for looking after ourselves as business founders or leaders, marketing principles, specific tactics, and reflections on if or how famous campaigns from the past might or might not work today.
Learn more: https://talkedaboutmarketing.com/
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Emma Grivell
Business Engagement Advisor - Urban Projects
E: egrivell@charlessturt.sa.gov.au