Your Most Asked Marketing Questions for 2023 w. Kayley Melham

James Lawrence: Welcome back to the Smarter Marketer Podcast. Today I am joined by Kayley Melham. Kayley, welcome to the pod. 

Kayley Melham: Thanks for having me.

James Lawrence: So today I am the guest. I'm the one being grilled. So Kayley is our Marketing Coordinator and she essentially does all of the work on the pod. She does all the arranging of guests and dealing with my complete disorganisation. Generally. She edits things out that should be edited out. She tells me when I'm doing a good job and when I'm not. And so Kayley approached me just before the break and thought a really good idea for one of our early pods this year would be to actually just get questions from our listeners and from the community. And she's collated it down to kind of the ten top questions that listeners to the pod have. Kayley, I'm going to throw it across to you to put me under the iron, put my head on the chopping block. 

Kayley Melham: Well, the first question is an exciting one and it's one that's really popping up everywhere. Thoughts on AI content or AI marketing in general? 

James Lawrence: I think probably heavily chat, GPT driven, I would imagine. I think, yeah, we're all doomed. We're all going to have our jobs taken by bots. I think in terms of ChatGPT, I think it's kind of broader than marketing. In terms of this pod, it's not something that's going away. If you haven't played around with it, you should create an account that's free. Essentially we're dealing with bots, that vaguely resembles a search engine. You can put a question question in, you can give it directions. What are the top five marketing themes in 2023? If you're in a particular subject matter, you can punch in; what are seven things that my target market might be interested in? And it will basically give you what you put in. 

James Lawrence: I know that reading more broadly on it over the holidays, it's something that university school communities around the world are completely freaking out about. Some are banning it, some are embracing it. The reality is that it's not some fringe tech. Microsoft have just invested another $10 billion in it. They have already invested billions leading up to this. So I'd encourage all of us as marketers, but probably more broadly, just as users of technology, to create an account and start playing around with it. We as an agency have obviously experimented heavily with it. It's phenomenal in terms of creating content. Right? So if you wanted to create a 700 word blog article on the top five SEO themes in 2023, it will spit out a 500 word blog article. And it'll probably be of a better quality than if you had someone who was pretty naive in the space or was a content writer that was writing across a whole bunch of different verticals. It's going to punch out content of pretty comparable quality. 

James Lawrence: So we're playing around with it from a bunch of different angles in terms of ideation, in terms of of how to headlines and ad copy it creates. How do they compare to what writers are creating? It's really good for analytics and analysis, like trying to pull some trends out. So I think if you think it's going to go away, that's the wrong viewpoint. There's also some massive caveats around it. Right? And even the OpenAI, which has developed the tool and is continuing to work on developing it, has said it's not the answer to everything. It'll spit out lots of wrong information. 

James Lawrence: Google, if you kind of look at guidelines on it, it's saying if you're using just asking ‘build me a 7000 word website’ and copying and pasting it and putting it online, or ‘create 150 blog articles for me on digital marketing trends’, and then you're pasting it onto your website, that's kind of being viewed as contravening Google's terms of service and guidelines. And whether or not it's true, a lot of the reading I've done is saying that there are patterns in the actual results that will be able to be kind of diagnosable. So if you're relying on it to do everything, you're probably going to find yourself in trouble. But I think using it almost as a way to get around writer's block, as a way of introducing copy and ad copy that might test or compare to what you're already doing. 

Kayley Melham: Because as a marketer, you don't want to be copying and pasting anyway, because that's not going to differentiate you from competitors, it's not going to make you unique, it's not going to get across anything you're actually trying to sell. 

James Lawrence: Yeah. And I think once you play with it the first time, you get blown away by, wow, this is unbelievable. I think you should dig a bit deeper. Yeah, it's still unbelievable, but there are lots of imperfections in it. And the reality is it'll continue to get better. And I think because the question is probably broader than just Chat GPT. Google has for years invested in AI and machine learning and probably has been reluctant to roll something out like this for a bunch of different reasons. But all the ad platforms have always been making use of machine learning and AI for years now. And as an agency, when we're managing client spends, we're seeding a lot of optimisations to the machine. But then a lot of the times when we have done that, it doesn't actually drive the best performance.

James Lawrence: I think for the foreseeable future, it is going to be a case of taking advantage of machine learning and AI and bots, but also with a dose of realism and that they're probably not going to be the industry killer that some people are worried about. I think where we are in five years, not just as marketers, but in terms of any kind of service based business, any business of knowledge, I think we'd be naive to think the bots aren't going to kind of cut a lot of human time and human labor out, so it's going to be a very interesting space to watch. 

Kayley Melham: Yeah, well, this kind of jumps on from that. But are there any new and emerging platforms, I guess, aside from Chat GPT, that you would advise to keep an eye on in the coming year?

James Lawrence: Yeah, I think big platforms. TikTok is the one that probably has had the most noise just in terms of if you look at the data around the speed of growth of platforms over the years, TikTok's growth is kind of unbelievable in terms of how quickly it has jumped to a billion users worldwide. And the growth in Australia last year was really strong. And the increase in spend in the ad platform similarly. So I think just in terms of if you're looking at which platform is attracting increased impressions and eyeballs, then TikTok is the one. 

James Lawrence: The data is still Google control search, YouTube is still a big behemoth in terms of eyeballs on video content, but, yeah, TikTok in terms of where it sits with Facebook and Instagram over the last two years has massively grown. So I think if you're a business where TikTok makes sense - and it's not just a younger demographic anymore, and it's not just a B2C. If you think it's a young kids platform only good for B2C, then you're probably wrong. But generally it probably does skew a little bit younger and it probably does skew more towards B2C or brands that can jump in there and have a more playful experience. 

James Lawrence: I think Chat GPT in terms of as an emerging platform is massive, probably less from in 2023. Will it kind of erode Google's search impression share? Because I think over time, we will find that users are turning to things like Chat GPT. And whether Google doesn't roll out something similar, but who actually do a lot of those research type queries that currently take place on Google. If you do those types of more commercial queries; ‘best plumber in Sydney’, ‘best SEO agency in Australia’, Chat GPT is not really throwing up anything in that space at this moment. And whether it ever does… we'll see. 

James Lawrence: Then I think just from a general viewpoint, platforms like Clubhouse, I think virtual reality is something which I don't think it's a boom this year necessarily, but I think it'll continue to evolve and change and where things go with that and how brands play there is of interest. Podcasts continue to eat up lots of, not so much eyeballs, but impressions in terms of share of voice and people listening in. So definitely a place where if the audience is right, you can market your business. But yes, I think they're the ones that are probably emerging and then the behemoths aren't really changing. And I think a lot of the demise of Facebook type stuff, I don't think we're really seeing it from a brand viewpoint. Like, I think Facebook has definitely been impacted with the changes of targeting through iOS updates and those types of things, but still a big platform in terms of Facebook and Instagram, how many eyeballs are on it, how many valuable eyeballs are on it. So yeah, that'd be my kind of feeling there.

Kayley Melham: Awesome. This one's been a big one. Money in general has been a big one, but reducing the cost for marketing, specifically for social media. So whether that be Facebook, LinkedIn, Insta, TikTok…

James Lawrence: I think it's probably coming out of the broader discussions around the economy, I guess just in terms of most budgets are being scrutinised more this year than they say were last year or the year before that. I think probably not totally answering the question, but whether or not we go into recession, who knows? But it feels we're in for a tougher economic time this year than previous. All of the detailed studies isn't just a marketing guy trying to show for more marketing spend, but most of the legitimate research done around cuts to marketing spend during recessions says that if you do it, you're kind of setting yourself up for failure in the future. And when COVID first hit in 2020, we did some really good research in the agency around, not looking at anything in Australia, but looking at recessions in the UK, in the USA, in different markets around the world. And this is going back into the prior and looking at big studies around brands as large as Toyota. And all of the studies pointed to investing in marketing during tough economic times actually helps you to grow market share by more than investing in marketing during stronger economic times. 

James Lawrence: It's cheaper to buy market share when other people are pulling money out of the market. So I think if you're in a business where a lot of pressure and scrutiny is being put onto your budgets and you feel it's actually not in the interest of the business, then you can jump onto the Rocket website and there's a really good downloadable on that and it contains really good data, which I think helps to support arguments internally. It's funny, there's kind of two schools of thought, but if the reality is you do have to cut spend by 10%, 20%, how do you do it? During COVID a lot of the stuff we were seeing happening was around maybe taking spend out of short term campaigns that aren't necessarily performing as they once did and investing in longer term strategy. So putting in that CRM that you haven't put in, investing in the website that you've been putting off for the last couple of years, investing in content, SEO, those types of activities which are probably more investments into the future, and then investing in brand activities rather than bottom of the funnel performance type activity. 

James Lawrence: If your bottom of the funnel stuff isn't performing as it once did, then I'd be looking at how do we maybe reduce that area down to 70% or 60%, but continuing to invest in the top of the funnel stuff, the brand stuff? Because the reality is that in most industries, 95% of customers aren't in market at any one moment. So if you cut off six months or a year of continuing to reach those people and doing the top of the funnel stuff, things will change. And whether it's six months or a year or two years, economies are always cyclical. Customers come back. But if your competitors have been continuing to reach those customers, influencing them, whether it's offline or online, and if it's online through content and SEO and webinars and all those things that don't generally give a return straight away, then you're going to struggle in 18 months. 

James Lawrence: In terms of reducing costs within social media itself, it's a really hard question to answer without knowing who are they targeting, what are the channels, what's the business? But, yeah, it's a really tough one. One is often we'll find that businesses are spending heaps of money creating content, but they're not really amplifying it very well in social. So maybe just being more judicious there, focusing more on evergreen content, rather than creating kind of four average bits of content and amplifying them all with $1,000 or $10,000 or $100,000, maybe creating two pieces of content and putting two thirds the spend between them across those two. And I think you're doing all the stuff you normally do, right? Like, what's the measurement framework we're happy with? Is this bottom of the funnel? Top of the funnel? And then just being pretty ruthless if stuff's not performing right. 

Kayley Melham: Yeah. Google audiences, will they be affected by the sunset of cookies and targeting? Will targeting be affected? 

James Lawrence: So basically, Google, it was going to be this year, it's not going to be anymore. But essentially, Google came out a couple of years ago and said, we're moving to a cookieless world. So essentially the tracking of us as consumers across different websites, third parties, et cetera, we think that's invasion of privacy, whether or not they did that out of their own goodwill or because there was otherwise going to be kind of regulatory pressure put on them, they came out and said, we're going to move to a cookieless world. They've now extended that until the end of next year. I think it's probably proven more difficult than than they may have expected. I suspect that having seen the impact on Facebook's, targeting Facebook's ad revenue with all the iOS changes would be quite scary. I'd be lying if I said I know exactly what's going to happen there. 

James Lawrence: Google itself has publicly talked about using different ways to track users without cookies in terms of, like, digital fingerprints. They talk about, like, FLOCK, which the acronym I should know, but I don't know. But essentially it's kind of groups of users based on behavior, based on activity. I think there will be a lot of AI and machine learning in this as well. So kind of don't know where I go with it because I don't think Google is going to do too much, which, erodes our ability to reach the right people at the right time and in their own self interest. They'll want us to be able to target users. Google generally, I think does do a good job of trying to do the right thing by providing the right information to users when they search, trying to provide good content to users when they're in YouTube and have ads that kind of try to match interest and behave bureau and activity. So it'll be different. 

James Lawrence: We're already seeing targeting through YouTube display and back into search, which is probably almost more interesting than it was five years ago, where it's not just now, based on what people have gone to Google to search for, but we are through a whole bunch of different signals, being able to find users in a whole bunch of different ways. So I think it'll definitely be different. So I think as marketers have to stay on top of it, I think whether it'll be as extreme as some of the audiences that we've lost not overnight, but close to in Facebook, then I wouldn't suggest it will be, but I'd be watching pretty carefully for the next couple of years. 

Kayley Melham: Leaning more into SEO, this one's a bit more specific. Can old website content damage overall SEO if it's not optimised.

James Lawrence: Yeah, I won't mention the name, but probably our most successful SEO campaign in the agency last year was essentially a long standing client, technically continuing to do normal technical SEO offsite, didn't change too much, and the biggest piece of work we did was essentially all around content. And it was rationalising huge swathes of content that had built up over a very, very long period of time. Very, very large website. And just from a structural perspective, it was just a mess for Google. And over the years, a whole bunch of different marketers working in that team, different webmasters, different websites, it just became just this kind of outdated mess, I think from a recency of content perspective, but also just from an AI perspective and crawlability perspective for Google. 

James Lawrence: So for a whole bunch of reasons, old content can be very, very poor. So first of all, it can be outdated, which then leads into poor user experience. Google pays so much attention now to how users themselves are interacting with a website as to how to rank it. Really old content probably hasn't been set up very well from a mobile viewpoint. Probably was created for a desktop perspective. You're generally finding that your meta data is probably going to be out of date from a bunch of different reasons. The older the content, the more likely it is to have broken links, all those types of things. So definitely a lot of the work, not just at Rocket, but what we're seeing in the industry is around consolidating content restructuring. If you've got reasonably well performing blog articles or white papers or sections of your site from 2019. And probably that's my starting point for 2023, right, is to just work through those bits of content, make sure that that particular article is the definitive piece that Google's finding for your website that you're not cannibalising with maybe newer or older content. It's a massive issue and for lots of listeners, it could be the number one kind of SEO tip for the year. Right? 

Kayley Melham: And if you have that old content and it is back in 2019, was performing well, not so much anymore, are you best to just get rid of it, update it, just update the meta? Like, what do you think is the best? 

James Lawrence: I think it depends on the content. It probably comes just back to that fundamental of do the right thing by the visitor and can the content be useful for a visitor now? And if it was something that was relevant in 2019 but it's now just gone, then unfortunately it's probably just not that useful anymore. But if it was some evergreen content and you're a financial planner and it was all about, how much money do I need to retire? And it just happens you haven't updated it, and there's lots of great new content out there. Then just whatever your content process is, take that piece, update it, send the signal to Google that you have updated it. Make sure that there's not other similar articles on your website or sections, and you'll probably find that it does what you need it to do in terms of re ranking higher and starting to get more traction. 

Kayley Melham: And it takes time, but it's worth it. 

James Lawrence: Yeah, that's it. And if it's like, from a UX perspective, if a user hits a website and it says, this piece of content was last updated 2018, it's a really strong signal that you want to click back, right? And that then is a strong signal to Google that over time, that page isn't very relevant to visitors 

Kayley Melham: Advice as to attribution and what should you focus on in 2023? 

James Lawrence: I don't know how much different this is to kind of what we've been saying for a couple of years, but strip away all the pressure around monthly reporting and quarterly reporting and return on ad spend and have we hit our sales targets, et cetera, et cetera. But I think just take a step back and go, what is the actual path that our customers in our particular business take to purchase a product like ours? And are we an emergency plumber where things spike at 09:00 pm and you click on a Google Ad and you're there by 9:30? Or are we a complex B2B transaction where it's seven figures to install our software and it's procurement and there's 15 stakeholders on the client side and no one clicks on an Ad and buys our product. So I think, first of all, just looking at what is. 

James Lawrence: Typical path to purchase, then just looking digitally, does your attribution model kind of match that in terms of first click, last click, or something in the middle? And generally anything first click or last click is going to have massive failings. So it's kind of what is that multi-touch attribution that is actually more real world for you then? I think it's about the tech, right? And I think five years ago it was all about these amazing systems are coming out and half my marketing is wasted. I don't know which half is just out the window now and everything's going to be kind of nailed down to the last dollar. And I've really struggled to say that. I think the more that digital has evolved, almost, the less clear it is now on what those paths to purchase look like. And some businesses have it nailed because they've got a reasonably simple funnel, they've got great tech that ties it all together, and that's happy days. But most businesses don't have that luxury for a bunch of different reasons. 

James Lawrence: Looking at what your tech looks like, what cross device looks like for multiple stakeholders in your path to purchase, and then I think probably the biggest bit of advice is be realistic then. And a lot of the time, data is actually going to be really misleading for you. And if you're relying on data to make all your decisions, then you're probably setting yourself up for failure. Like, if I hear that from a prospective client, we rely on data to make all of our decisions, in my brain, I'm like, okay, let's test this because there's going to be lots of problems here. Not to say we shouldn't be using data to aid a whole bunch of decisions along the way. And I think often it's the marketers that we deal with that know that they know that data is really useful, but also can only do so much for you. In which case often it's about how do you arm yourself with information to push back on sales departments and boards and managing directors and all those types of stakeholders that kind of often think that because it's digital, it has to be measured perfectly. So it might be a bit of a ramble, but yeah, I don't think it's too different, really, from what I would have said a year ago on that. 

Kayley Melham: What  do you see is the biggest opportunity for B2B marketers in 2023? 

James Lawrence: Yeah, it's a good question. I think there's probably some of the themes we've already talked about leaning into some of them. I think evergreen content would maybe be one I often will come across. B2B marketing environments where there's huge amounts of effort, resourcing, pressure to just keep pumping out truckloads of content. And I even say that with the ChatGPT thing, which I think it's like, yeah, cool, we can now pump out 1624 blog articles, even if they are edited, but I'm not sure that necessarily will end up resulting in more high quality MQLs, more high quality SQLs and more high quality deals. 

James Lawrence: I think that the deeper organisations go with high quality content that actually resonates with their target market - they're the ones that I think actually get the results. So think maybe moving away from that kind of newspaper approach of every day, we need fresh content, we've got to pump out heaps of content. We always talk internally about the Hollywood approach, which is just that those blockbuster kind of themes or kind of movie categories, movie brands, Marvel, whatever else that Hollywood just keeps going back to because it works. And so I think looking at your business and what are those content pillars that you can go really deep at? Because I think in some ways the Chat GPT thing is just going to devalue the volume of content because you can go there and get average quality responses to anything anyway. So it's how do you actually create really expert content? 

James Lawrence: For most B2B marketers, I think that's often an area where they stand to gain massively. And then I think the second piece to that is just making sure that, because B2B can be quite transactional or it can be long. Buyer journey can be either. The general rule of thumb for us is that 60% of your marketing efforts should be in top of the funnel brand building activity that you're not really measuring at all from a cost per lead MQL viewpoint. And that's for businesses probably with a pretty typical kind of buyer journey. If you're in a more drawn out, longer buyer journey in B2B, then maybe it should be 90% to that type of activity and 10% to bottom of the funnel Google Ads search type stuff. So I think just making sure that you're applying your marketing budget along those types of lines and if you're not pushing back heavily on people in the organisation are saying that it all should be lead driven. 

Kayley Melham: That's good, that's tangible advice.

James Lawrence: I'm being grilled here, Kayley. I finally given one good piece of advice, she says number seven. *laughs*

Kayley Melham: This one's kind of tying back into what you were talking about before in terms of where to best spend money, how to make the most out of marketing efforts on a small budget. So what are some tangible channels that people can use? How can they use what they're doing with less money but make it more effective?

James Lawrence: I think small is so subjective. Kind of often we'll have people come and speak to us, it's like, I've got a pretty small budget and it's like that's actually pretty decent and vice versa. In some ways it shouldn't matter, right? Like all marketing budgets should be put into activities that are sensible and make sense based on the objectives of the business and the goals that you've set. So think more broadly. Results, budgets, marketing teams perform better when you've got a really clear idea of what success looks like. You then try to go deep into fewer things than go broad into many. So think it's first of all, what does success look like for our marketing efforts over this three month period or year period? Great. Well, we want to generate this many visits to our website, and we want to generate this many MQLs and this many SQLs. We believe that with this budget, we can, you know, generate half of that and the sales team will generate the other half, or whatever it might be. And then you just try to pick the channel that the market that you're trying to reach, they're playing there and you can attract them and cut through. 

James Lawrence: Often I'll find that the areas, the teams that aren't really performing very well, where they're just ticking tactic boxes and just trying to go, we're doing SEO, we're doing email marketing, we're doing Google Ads, we're doing above the line, we're doing letterbox drops, whatever it might be, TV, radio… but I think just going deep into a smaller number of channels that you think will work, learning and then keeping the stuff going that is working, and changing the stuff that isn't. If you're really, really micro, generally, and this is probably because this is where we've come out of as an agency, but I generally find Google Ads. If people are turning to Google to look for a product or service like yours, then that can be a pretty good place to start, just in terms of guaranteeing that you'll be seen, guaranteeing that you're only paying when someone clicks and an ad.

Kayley Melham: If there's one thing - I feel like a lot of these are somewhat similar - but they are different. If there's one thing you should be concentrating on right now, what would it be? 

James Lawrence: I think data is a big one, where often data is really important for businesses moving into the future. And if you look at the big platforms and what they're doing, their interests are in keeping eyeballs and users in those platforms. So Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, it's very hard to get visits and clicks from those platforms. If you invested heavily in trying to build an organic following in those platforms, unless you're pretty special, you're finding that very few people are now seeing your posts and stories and, and whatever else. Google zero click searches where people are finding out results on the search engine results page, and not having to go into advertisers and publishers, ChatGPT keeping you in platform. Things that you can do to have some control are really, really important, which is kind of why we'll often advocate SEO as being a big deal, because it will make up 50, 60, 70% of the traffic to your website. And it's something that to a large degree you do control.

James Lawrence: And data is the next piece of that, which is if you're relying on paid advertising to just keep replenishing the top of the funnel and bringing leads through, you're kind of then at the mercy of the platforms to continue to be as important as they once were. You're then at the mercy of CPCs going up over time, which they tend to do, and that sounds very immediate when maintaining a really good database, having high quality email address data, phone number data, you can segment on whether it's a B2B lead or a B2C lead, or what industry they're in or what their job title is. Most businesses we deal with data is a bit of a shamazzle. It's been kept in spreadsheets, it's never really been taken seriously. The sales team used to keep it up to date, they don't anymore. The CRM is hard to use, so it's a hard one to get right and it's a pretty unsexy one. But if you're investing in a CRM someone owns, or a team owns or a person owns the job of maintaining it, not necessarily really maintaining all of it, but just ensuring that it is being maintained, it's then an asset. And when you do have your marketing budgets cut or the next COVID type thing happens, you've got a database where you can send out emails basically for free. 

Kayley Melham: Exactly. 

James Lawrence: You can take the segments of your database that have lapsed, feed them into the platforms and show ads to those users. You can feed the data into the platforms and get their AI and machine learning find similar people. So I think data is a really valuable one and if your market has kind of cooled off a little bit and maybe marketing budgets are cut a little bit, maybe it is an area that is worth investing in until things pick up. But yeah, that's probably where my head would go on that one. 

Kayley Melham: Like you said, it’s not the most exciting thing to do in the world, but do it today and thank yourself tomorrow for it. 

James Lawrence: Yeah, that's it. And that's a lot of this stuff. I think it's easy to just want to jump in, get your hands dirty, spend money on campaigns, but often it's the taking the step back and doing the long term planning and being surgical with the campaigns you do run, rather than being very busy. They're the marketing teams that generally generate the best results. 

Kayley Melham: Well, last question. This kind of does tie into what you were just saying with email marketing, but email marketing for B2C businesses, this one's a bit more specific. So how frequently do you send them? How do you increase your subscriber list, how long should the emails be, what content, all that kind of stuff.

James Lawrence: I'm trying to give very direct, clear responses. But that's such a depends question, right? So the extreme to that big ecommerce site that has huge product range diversity, like if you're The Iconic, you're wanting to build an email strategy for your customers that transact between the 10th and 30th percentile. You might be looking at daily, right? Because you're hitting people that are interested in women's clothes, you've got specials, you've got trends, you've got whatever else. You've got customers that are loyal, they're buying off you twice a week, then daily probably makes a lot of sense. If you're in B2C and you're selling sunscreen or you're selling something that is highly seasonal, then maybe it is like if you're selling beach umbrellas and beach towels and whatever else, then maybe it is during winter a couple of sales or northern summer inspiration type stuff. And then you're maybe dialing it up a little bit around the summer period, but that might be an appropriate cadence. 

James Lawrence: So I think it's basically the same story as what should my marketing look like? What will my EDM look like? It depends. And you want to be looking at segmenting really carefully. And if that is just based on customers that are highly loyal versus those that aren't, the classic thing of giving people options is going to be certain people that do want to receive all your specials. There's certain people that do want your more inspiration driven content. As with all email, you're kind of trying to drive value, right? So if it's all about you and you're sending information that is just of no interest to your audience, it's just going to increase your unsubscribe rate. So, yeah, I think email cadence depends a lot on what you're sending and who you're sending it to and how relevant you are to the recipients. 

Kayley Melham: I think it was Ian's episode on Ecommerce, and I think he said that with email, if you don't have an open rate of at least 20%, you need to segment it further. Like it you need segmenting or it's just not going to work.

James Lawrence: Yeah, and that's a good point, isn't it? It's not just; what sort of business am I and who am I sending it to? What does it actually look like in terms of my database? 

Kayley Melham: Well, thank you very much, James. One last question for the pod.

James Lawrence: Yes, Kayley. 

Kayley Melham: It’s really fun because you always ask this one, but you've never had the chance to answer it yet. What's your one piece of marketing advice? 

James Lawrence: I actually did prepare for this particular question. 

Kayley Melham: Really?

James Lawrence: Yeah, 100%. Because I always think about it when I ask all the guests that for me, it's follow the money. I think it's an answer which probably 30%, and it's not necessarily the right answer. But I think for me, the marketers that we deal with, the ones that I think grow best in their own career, the ones that I think are most respected in their organisations, the ones that best work with us, for instance, they're the marketers that look at what the business is trying to achieve. What are we trying to achieve this year? What are we trying to achieve this quarter? What are the problems we have? What are the opportunities we have? They're the conversations you want to be having. 

James Lawrence: It's how do I align our marketing goals, our marketing budgets, with what we're trying to achieve as a business? Having mature conversations with sales teams, with product teams, et cetera. I think if you're getting bogged down with Chat GPT and TikTok and campaigns and ROAS and all those things, then you're always going to be, I think, pigeonholed as kind of an executioner of marketing as opposed to someone that's actually sitting above those types of areas. And that's not to say you shouldn't be across changes in the industry and all the things that we need to know and do as marketers, but you need to align your thinking with where the money is coming from in the business. And that's the revenue that makes profit, that makes dividends, that allows you to hire staff and put more into product and all those types of things. So, yeah, follow the money Kayley. 

Kayley Melham: Awesome. 

James Lawrence: It's been good to be a guest on the Smarter Marketer podcast. Would 

Kayley Melham: Would you do it again? Be a guest again? 

James Lawrence: Maybe. We'll see.