Speaker 1right oh well look it looks like we're already there we go it looks like it's already started recording it was it was it was tricking me thinking it hadn't started so uh welcome to the simo uh marketing podcast that's thrown me completely now i've forgotten where i am and who i am and all these kind of things um before we do the introductions to our guest uh my name is simon dell i'm the ceo of simo uh if this is your first time here you spell simo c-e-m-o-h uh if this is not your first time here you already know how to spell that um but you can find out more about us if you want at simo.com or you can come and email me simon at simo.com or find me on linkedin we are australia's largest fractional marketing network we find marketing solutions to marketing problems or groups of people who are interested in marketing and we are a group of people who are interested in marketing and we are a group of people who are interested in marketing and we are a group of people who are interested in marketing and we are a group of people who are interested in growth problem growth solutions to growth problems because we're trying not to say marketing anymore so um but my guest today is uh danielle coffin now danielle it's cold where you are where exactly are
Speaker 2you i'm in melbourne so yeah middle of winter okay uh yeah it's pretty crisp and we've got the
Speaker 1heater heater blasting in there keeping you warm
Speaker 2yeah yeah yeah that's the background noise
Speaker 1okay so cool all right well let's go first of all uh tell us a little bit about you you've obviously been in marketing for a fair few years but give us the give us the edited highlights of uh of the danielle's career
Speaker 2uh yeah so pretty squiggly career um but yeah started in uh at uni uh literally after finishing year 12 uh studying marketing as my dad said i'd be good at it i didn't really know what it was um so yeah and i i fell in love with it um just the the people side the psychology side um the communication side like everything about it really uh resonated with my personality and my strengths um and then yeah started internship at ibm at the age of 20 um in marketing and yeah that kind of kick-started my career so um yeah it's nearly it's about 18 years so not trying to tell you my age but uh yeah it's uh and um yeah it's just been such a great experience for me and i've been doing it for a long time and i've been doing it for a long time and it's been such a a fun i just yeah lived overseas did all of the things whilst you know still building my career um had my own side ventures have worked in-house i've worked agency have worked as a consultant um so kind of seen every side of of the marketing landscape and and from different lenses so um that's kind of got me to where i am today to actually run my own consultancy and fractional marketing so i've been in the marketing industry for a long time and i've been in the marketing industry for a long time and i've been in the marketing industry for a long time um uh kind of offer that i i have for some retainer clients and then i have some kind of other offers for the for people that aren't as like ongoing um and yeah i just love it and i just um think that you know to me marketing is quite simple and i think uh the industry and uh everyone in it can over complicate it and now with ai uh it has uh kind of brought a different aspect of business and lowered the barrier for everyone to be a marketer
Speaker 1what's been your highlight of the career so far what's that what's the favorite bit that you could go back to if you
Speaker 2could um to be honest it's right now um yeah i know that sounds uh maybe a bit fluffy but i've been literally working towards running my own my own kind of consultancy and managing my own hours and owning my time for about the last seven years i've been working towards this and um yeah this year i was able to uh financially be able to do it um you know we've got a young family mortgage all of the things so i didn't do it um you know willy-nilly there was a lot of thought a lot of planning a lot of preparation um and yeah so i'm just absolutely loving my weeks i wake up monday morning just
Speaker 1so excited cool well look we're going to talk about ai today because obviously it's everyone's favorite subject to talk about at the moment especially it's its impact on uh marketing and design and creative and all the other aspects of uh growing a business um but before we sort of do that because the title for this was why ai is making is making bad marketing um and i kind of wanted to get an understanding of what you define as bad marketing because that's uh that's a fairly open-ended you know statement in terms of open-ended definitions anyway
Speaker 2yes so i mean from the outset you don't know if people's marketing is working or not because you're not inside the business so what might look like it's working might not be underneath um and that's where kind of i look at it differently because i've i've had so much exposure to businesses the inside of businesses um working in agency we had about 20 clients at any one time so we had like a front row seat to their data what was working and what wasn't working and a lot of it wasn't working um and you know there's all those vanity metrics of like oh they've got so many likes they've got so many followers um all of the things that can really make you look like you're doing well to someone else but at the end of the day it's the conversion metrics of sales leads um booked calls you know all of those really um uh really strong metrics that that you need to be looking at as a business owner over oh did that go viral or why did we you know did we get that many how many likes did we get or how many impressions and i'm like how much traffic do we even traffic to the website i'm like cool but is it converting what's your bounce rate so um you know having that exposure i now see as well with all of the ai use um you can kind of see an ai produced um you know ad or uh social podcast or even website from a mile away because there's they haven't done the foundations um and so if you don't have your foundations right you are feeding ai just absolute bs um and it's just not going to produce the outcomes and the growth and uh the you know at the end of the day everyone wants sales from their marketing right that's what we're doing marketing for um so you know it's just starting to kind of help business owners and leaders in businesses start to kind of call out some of the bs that they might be fed by their agency or their marketing team or even themselves they don't know um to try and help them really get those foundations right so that then you can produce good marketing that actually works and
Speaker 1converts let's well let's take it back a bit before like let's go back three or four years um because obviously we we didn't want to talk about how old you are and how old i am but um you you've alluded to you know almost a 20-year career in marketing before before ai rolled around what was what was bad marketing then what what would you what would have you called out even maybe before social media maybe you know what what was what was what what is taking ai out of it because we know that the slot that that can produce but yeah what is what is bad marketing
Speaker 2yeah so mine is my take on it and this doesn't matter what channel you're using um how you're getting your word out there if you don't know who you're talking to and you don't have messaging that actually helps them feel heard and understood then you're not going to cut through to your audience no matter where you're doing that whether it's an event marketing whether it's big billboards whether it's radio whether you know back in the day when we kind of you know we're doing that more whether it was um you know commercials um you know you just those that's kind of the main crux of it and i see it time and time again that people get into business and a lot of them are technicians you know they've they're good at some sort of technical thing whether it be hairdressing whether it be making something with wood wooden things um candles whatever you're good at that and then suddenly you have to know how to do business and market yourself they're not good at doing that and so suddenly you're trying to talk to someone uh to sell them something um or promote something that you're trying to sell but you actually haven't done the the nitty-gritty work to really understand who they are what their you know motivations and i'll go into this as part of my like you know ways to fix you know bad marketing and yeah so if you and you don't have the time to do that because suddenly you're like i need to make money i'm stressing um and you get into that kind of rat race cycle and it's not till you know maybe you make a certain amount that you start kind of building on that but you haven't still done the foundations of who you're actually talking to and i think people get a bit scared so they start to broaden their um audience parameters which can sometimes dilute then your messaging yeah
Speaker 1Well, I guess the-- sort of next question I have is is how is a you feel obviously AI is amplifying the problems rather than fixing problems you know often we were told in marketing throughout the years that more output is supposed to help like you know if you listen to if you listen to the likes of someone like Gary Vee you know you know years ago not years ago no actually not years ago but in the in the near past he would sort of say you know just volume of content volume if of volume of content volume of engagement out is the solution the more you do the more these channels will notice you the more you'll get shown to the customers the bigger your business will grow and and obviously what we're seeing now is that is that solution to a degree on steroids because you know AI is doing it all for us have we have we sort of gone out the other side or do you think that more is better was never actually the right solution I think it
Speaker 2is if you were giving the right content so you know Gary Vee is very much around the give give give give give and then you ask to receive so you know he gets a lot of free advice a lot of free tips a lot of these and I think you know he's very you know he understands who he's talking to as well so you know the you know the producing more and more content that's not the issue here I think the issue here is they're producing content that is either confusing it doesn't it's not consistent on message on brand it's it is you know it might even contradict each other and I'm a big you know if I'm reading someone's content suddenly they've brought something in that they you know if you I've got a bit of an elephant memory a few weeks ago they said something different I'm like whoa what's going on here okay I'm starting to lose trust in this brand and so it's just very you got to be careful if you're pushing out a lot of content you really need to have those foundations strong so that you are staying consistent because once you start pushing out inconsistent messaging that's when you start losing trust which is what I just kind of was saying before and then you start confusing your audience and then once you confuse you
Speaker 1lose we were before we come on to the sort of solution side of things you're sort of you know the three things that we you're going to talk about in terms of fixing this it's probably worth stressing that this isn't an anti-ai argument it's not at all it's not saying you know we need to go back to the the basics of writing stuff down with a pen and paper you know you know so it's but but the struggle I think a lot of a lot of businesses sees that there's they don't know where the line is they don't know where the line between making something better and something worse is do you kind of have any ideas as but how businesses should sit to understand where that line is
Speaker 2yeah so I think what I say to my clients and and things is just like what can you physically do like from a resource perspective are you able to push out content every day or is that going to stress you out you know because we're starting to kind of come out the other side a little bit with you know the way that we consume content you know I have real strict restrictions on myself with my phone and my social apps and the way I consume content and I you know I know a lot of other people are starting to do that too so I think it's important to think about that as well because we've kind of gone down here and then out the other side like we do with everything that's new and exciting and different and then we realize the behavior of it isn't probably as healthy as we thought and so that's where we start to be a bit more discerning and and start to you know put those human barriers and boundaries around ourselves and so I think you know a little bit we are we have been consuming content so much and so rapidly that you know sometimes we forget to enjoy life and be in the real world the amount of kids I see walking with just a head down don't even see me walking in front of them and looking at their phones and so I think you know there's definitely a line and I just say to you know the business owners or leaders you know what can you from a resource perspective or from a realistic point of view like what can you produce each week from a content perspective what makes sense for your business as well so instead of like oh we have to be the next Gary Vee which is not the business model I want I don't want to be in front of the camera all the time but you know he does and I know other people I've got other friends who do want that they've got a camera person with them all the time and you know all of that drivers they can do content in between meetings and stuff and I'm like that's awesome for them but is that what you want so I think that's just part of that like self-awareness and really feeling figuring out what you want for your brand because once you start producing that content and you get known for that it's kind of hard to kind of stop and change and divert yeah well
Speaker 1let's think about this the three things that you that we that you'd like to sort of fix this any yeah any particular order that you want to approach them
Speaker 2in yeah so the first one is 100% knowing your audience because that's filters into the next kind of two steps so this is not like you know putting together a demographic of you know females aged 20 to 30 who live in this area like yes that forms part of it but it's really getting into the deeper side of what they need what they don't even know they need what are their pain points what are their motivators you know how do they spend their day what are they where do they spend their time so that you can really understand you know how you can get in front of those people and then from there you can start to figure out what kind of messaging and stuff is going to cut through because I always say to my clients that you know if you're trying to reach a cold audience having kind of a problem solution style messaging is the best way to kind of get in front of that those people to take some sort of action whether that be click something to your website even download a free piece of resource you know a lead magnet that can get them into your email list so kind of you know really understanding what their problems is and how your product or service is going to solve that is a key key thing to kind of unpack here as well as elephants in the room so I know a lot of people like to shy away from things that are kind of you know taboo or gonna make their audience a little bit squirmy which could be price it could be you know one of the downsides of your product or service or something like that but I might call that out honestly like it's gonna help people feel seen and heard and understood as well as going through objections that you might get when you're going down the process of call-out objections earlier yeah and and frequently asked questions so there's a few things that can be unpacked in this to kind of really understand your audience better and then yeah my kind of little actionable tip here is that one of the things that is really interesting around what motivates us is that as humans we're actually more motivated to move away from pain than we are to move towards pleasure so pulling out pain points and things that might be you know they might be experiencing now and then how you can solve those is a really strong place to
Speaker 1start yeah okay so that's number one what's the so and and again I think number one is number one number one feels like more number one feels like traditional traditional marketing like what we should what we were doing you know twenty years ago when we started out you know started out careers um and and just before we sort of jump onto number two um I think this is I think one of the solutions or one of the processes behind number one is is to which which I think a lot of people forget to do is actually go and talk to the customers is use a level of market research and yeah you know actually sit down with them and go you know what is it that you want what is it that you need and you know how can we help you and those kind of those like nice long open questions where you get some insights from them yeah you know rather than making assumptions based on even even if you've got data never never make the assumptions based on that data you need to sort of find out the motivation behind that data
Speaker 2it's the emotional the emotional motivations yeah which you can't get from data and um I think as well what I say to my clients as well is don't just pick any client any customers like who are your like best customers who you want to get more of those people in you know so you can think about like-minded you know okay what what motivated you to need this you know and all of that stuff so it's really important and a really easy thing you know a low-hanging fruit to to
Speaker 1action yeah yeah um okay so uh number two what's your sort of suggestion
Speaker 2yes number two is then starting to really pad out some really strong messaging and a really strong value proposition so this is where you talk about your audience yeah not about you which we can all get really uh you know it's really easy to start talking about ourselves like we do this our mission is this we do that i and i think you need to flip the script and it really needs to be about your audience so using what you've done in uh you know unpacked in in the number one of round you know knowing your audience and stuff is then really and you can use ai to help you kind of craft this but really having some strong messaging some strong um positioning and value proposition statement that really brings the value you're going to bring to that audience and making sure that you kind of have i like to have it on like one or two max pages because once it starts to go down to like an 18-page document which i have seen from of many clients i'm like you ain't gonna remember that um and i get you know where you you want to feed ai with a lot of this stuff and train your ai um agents and whoever whatever platforms you're using to understand your audience but if you have too many different messages it can again start to dilute your content and your marketing um so my thing as well here is you know marketing is not about saying a hundred things once it's about saying one thing a hundred times so consistent uh you know repetition repetition because as you as we said before we're all consuming content so rapidly and if i see something here and then i see it here and then i see it there and then i see it there and it's all the same messaging and then i get an email about it it starts to cut through right um so i think it used to be kind of the seven touches of marketing and now i think we're looking at like 15 because we are just in a content driven world um and a lot of it is white noise so i think yeah having a really starting to really unpack those messages um and and again you know talking to your customers about it talking to your clients um starting you know i also do research around competitors here okay what what are they doing how are they doing it um and then also like forums and things where you your audience might be hanging out reddit i know that sounds bad but um there's a lot of people trying to get answers and asking questions on reddit um facebook groups that uh kind of are in your industry or the type of work you do so you know there's really um interesting places where you can find this content and again like you can help uh ai can help you do a lot of this research as well um so i think that's kind of a good way to go um but you need to prompt it properly otherwise you're just gonna get uh crap
Speaker 1in crap out um that's an interesting you know that's an interesting conversation because um you know give example me and my business partner been having a similar conversation with claude in the last couple of weeks and um but we both ask slightly different questions so the conversation goes off in a different direction um and i think there's a there's obviously a danger as you say that if you if you ask the wrong questions you get the wrong answers um and sometimes you know sometimes actually understanding the questions you should be asking is the first step of all of this otherwise otherwise you do you just end up going in a in a circle of you know you just end up producing a false what i would call force positive you get the answer to something that you think's right but that wasn't the point in the first
Speaker 2place yeah yeah and you know ai doesn't have a frontal lobe so it can't um it can't kind of you know when clients ask me questions i'll be like oh do you mean this like because i can kind of troubleshoot and figure out kind of what they're trying to do without um whereas ai is you know they want to please you so you know i actually prompt i tell my claude to say um you're my devil's advocate like tell me this is crap like um so and that actually does give another another lens which i've done for a few um a few things recently and i'm like oh that's actually really good um and yeah because you you don't want to just have someone pandering to you the whole time because it's just not how you're going
Speaker 1to grow yeah yeah yeah yeah okay third third and final kind of tip in terms of the ai here yeah
Speaker 2so the final thing is a channel strategy so this is where instead of being on every platform known to man kind or womankind whatever we can say now um uh actually think through back to your audience and knowing where they are who where they hang out what channels do you need to be on it doesn't have to be all digital you know where do you need to be do you need to be in a certain expo every year do you need to be at certain networking events do you need to be um you know sponsoring an event or a podcast or you know where do you need to be where do you where are your audience hanging out and where are they going to be taking notice um you know so obviously there's the social media and lower barrier less expensive platforms like social media where you can show up on instagram and facebook and um you know tick tock and uh linkedin and all of those places but you know but are your audience there like you need to be um a bit more discerning around it like i've had clients you know say oh you know i think we need to be on tick tock and i was like why you're not you're not targeting anyone under the age of 30. um and they were like oh my daughter i'm like oh okay well let's uh uh just be a bit careful so um i think it's just really thinking through and using that human brain it is just such a wonderful thing to figure out you know and you know a lot of it is trial and error too but you know finding out where your customers did find you again talking to your customers again how did you find me um so yeah it's just i think back to talking to your customers i'm not sure if it cut out just yeah no i got cut out
Speaker 1there i don't i think one of us got cut out there so yeah okay yeah we thought that in the edit so
Speaker 2yeah so i think just not having to be everywhere and really thinking through that and you can do that you know through chatting to your customers again um and doing that kind of audience um research uh to really figure out okay where where am i gonna be able to cut through and be
Speaker 1noticed yeah yeah okay look i think there's a lot of there's a lot of good insights there i think there's a lot of good ideas um i think i i think the the general gist i get from that is that ai is there to support you know not traditional marketing but you know more solid marketing um um approaches rather than replace all of those is that would is that sort of a fair conclusion for for what you're saying
Speaker 2here yeah so really having those marketing foundations understood from your end so that you can prompt your ai to really do good marketing for you and cut through to your audience
Speaker 1yeah okay thank you very much for your time today um no thank you for having me glitch at the end there. But hopefully that wasn't that didn't affect anybody else. And look, if people want to reach out to find you, what's the best way of what's the best way of getting in contact with you?
Speaker 2Yeah, so my Instagram is my marketing makeover. That's my handle. Or my website is my marketing makeover.com. They're kind of the two avenues best to contact me on. And then I'm also on LinkedIn as well.
Speaker 1Yeah. And of course, you're on the SEMO website as well. I'd have to keep telling everybody that as well. Thank you very much for that. Some great insights. Really appreciate your time today. No worries, Simon.
Speaker 2Thank you so much for having me.
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