On this week’s episode of The Engaging Marketeer, it’s going to get very, very meta, because I am speaking with Scott Gould, who is a keynote speaker and engagement consultant. So I am going to be talking to Scott about engagement.
And the word engage is going to come up quite a lot.
What does engagement mean to Scott? How can businesses use engagement within their business to better retain, attract and convert more of their clients?
So let’s see how many times the word engage is used in the next hour.
You describe yourself as an engagement consultant. What exactly does engagement mean to you?
It’s a great question.
Oh, thanks, mate. I’m off to a winner. I like it.
Yeah. I mean, you run Engage Web, right?
That’s right.
Loads of people work in engagement. Often, people can’t explain it. I like to simply say engagement is when you and me becomes we.
I like that.
Put another way, it’s when we’re together. When we are you and me, we’re separate. When we are we, we are together, we are engaged. And there’s nothing wrong with being separate or unengaged, because we’re unengaged from the majority of things in the world. But where we need to be a we, or where there’s leverage and benefit to being a we, then we should be together.
And so then that would lead to the next question. Why bother with engagement? Quite simply, we’re better together. We recognise as a species that we just work better together.
The clothes on my back, the coffee I made this morning, the technology we’re using to record this — none of this you and I made. We’re all standing on the backs of each other. And so engagement is what drives our species forward.
When we created this company, we had a big, long session to work on the name Engage Web. There were loads of words that we came up with in this session, but engage seemed to be the one for me, because if you’re going onto somebody’s website and it doesn’t engage you, you’re not going to buy from it. It’s not going to convert.
Since we called it Engage Web, I’ve seen a lot of businesses using the word engage. Maybe not just in their name, but in their marketing. Engage seems to be a big thing in the last 15 or 20 years.
How important do you think it is for businesses to do it? And I almost want to wait to ask my second question, but I’m going to throw it in anyway. How many do you think are using it cynically because they just want to actually sell, and they’re kind of faking engagement?
I’ve got no bones with someone who’s faking engagement, nor am I a grammar Nazi who requires that people use my correct language. I think it’s useful to use the correct language when we are trying to understand what we’re doing, when we’re trying to strategise, and when we are looking at things academically. But day to day, call it whatever you want and do whatever you want, as long as it works and as long as it’s ethical.
But to your point specifically, it’s important for us to engage because…
Engagement creates resilience
Just in terms of us as business owners, the more that we engage with our clients, the more resilient those relationships are going to be. The less that we engage, the less resilient they might be.
There’s something there around engagement denoting a sense of strength. It’s like a chain. The various links in the chain are held well together, as opposed to being loose.
We can also think of, as you’ve said, how important it is for us to help our clients engage their customers. So you’re Engage Web and you recognise the importance of a website needing to engage the visitor.
We’ve got something there around holding their attention. I presume we’ve got something around going from holding their attention to actually getting action. Because you can have a very attention-grabbing thing and then not have any action. Well, that’s going to be a negative.
Then, ultimately, that action is turned into some sense of affection, some sense of ongoing relationship, bond, friendliness, loyalty, brand fandom, whatever it might be. Something that says, “I like you and I want to buy from you again. I want to stay involved.”
It turns out it’s the same process for how we engage with anything. It gets our attention. That’s engagement type one. We have action, and that would be engagement type two. Finally, we have affection. We have a sense of bonding, and that would be the third type of engagement.
There’s the whole package right there.
The way it’s described in our industry, and I didn’t coin this so I’m not going to take credit for it, would be attract, engage, convert, retain.
Most people in digital marketing understand the attract concept: you’ve got to get people to your website for it to work. That’s been pretty understood for a long time. If you don’t get people there, it’s not going to work. If there are no eyeballs on it, no visitors, it’s never going to work.
The engage is something that many people don’t get. They just think getting people to the website is enough to make it work. Then, as you said, the actual conversion, the call to action, the convert, that’s pretty critical as well. A lot of people miss that.
And then there’s the retain afterwards. As you say, once you’ve got a client, what do you do with them? How do you make sure they come back to you? How do you make sure they stay?
There are loads of stats thrown around that it’s three times or four times or five times more expensive to get a new client than it is to retain an existing client.
How does that fit in with what you’ve just said there, from your perspective?
Engagement is this massive topic. We can think of engagement broadly as employee engagement. How do we engage those inside our organisations? Those listening today may not realise that there are loads of books and courses and programmes and research around how we engage internally.
Then we’ve got customer engagement, which would be how we engage the customer. As you’ve described, part of it is around how we go from just getting their attention to getting action. It seems to be a link in the chain.
But a lot of people, when they talk about customer engagement, are not even thinking about the conversion. They’re thinking about the long-term ongoing relationship.
So if we think about companies like Disney, Apple or Google, they have such a massive portfolio. Their job is just to engage you in the suite of products that they serve and to keep on engaging you in their products and services over time. Their idea of engagement is different again. They’re not thinking about a one-off conversion. That’s not what they’re thinking about here. This is a far longer play.
Then we’ve also got community engagement, which is where I came from. I used to be a church minister. My thing was: how do I get people to be engaged in the community? How do we create a space where people contribute towards each other’s lives?
The definitions of engagement are massive and varying. We can think about this whole chain and so forth. I always find it useful to come back to: how do humans relate to ideas, things or each other?
Then any form of engagement is just scaling that to be bigger in volume or size or whatever it might be. Ultimately, it’s how a human builds a relationship with a thing, a person or an idea.
It’s interesting that you mentioned being a church minister. I’d say that’s critical, that you engage people there, because it’s vital for churches. They bring people in, the people come back, and if they’re not engaged then, presumably, they would go away. Some churches don’t survive as a result of that.
Yeah. You’ve got the whole suite going on there. Churches need to engage people in the existence of the church, which would be to get their attention, which would be their promotion or their marketing, whatever it might be.
For a church, that’s going to be done very relationally, although there might be adverts that they run and so forth. For a brand, it’s going to be a different thing again. But there’s this first part of engagement, which is: how do I get them to the door?
Then we’ve got engagement as in: how do people actually become involved a little bit more?
I definitely found that if people came to our church, if they could be involved in volunteering in some way, they’d stick around. Even if they were helping out with laying out the chairs, teas and coffees, or greeting visitors, the moment they became involved, their involvement created far greater engagement.
I also figured out that I had one request to all my congregation, which was: if a newcomer comes, would at least two people say hello to them?
It meant that if anyone new came along, at least two people would say hi. We’re not going over the top with saying hello, but we’re also not completely ignoring them. Many people go to a church and no one ever says hello to them because they’re too embarrassed. So either it’s too much or it’s too little. I just said, can two people say hello to them?
We had this really great rate of retention. People came and they would generally come back because we very quickly made friends with them.
My goal, and I was a bit of a renegade I think, wasn’t to convert them to a religion. My goal was to have a space of care for people, knowing that community spaces just seem to be declining. My goal was just: how can we be a space of care to people?
People generally like to engage with that, but we still had to make sure that we got to know them.
This is the stuff that I now train organisations in: greeting people. I work with teams and they’ll be like, “No one’s engaging in my meeting.” I’ll say, “Do you greet them at the beginning by name?” Generally, they don’t. They’re too busy to greet people by their name.
Little things like this make a massive difference. We see the way that this is mirrored in marketing online, because we know that when your name is mentioned, it stops you in your tracks. It feels more personal.
You can go over the top, but you can also massively underplay it. So there’s something around the right level of engagement. Not too much, not too little. The Goldilocks effect, whatever we want to call it.
Really simple stuff. Taking it a bit further, we know that faces on a website help the website convert more. Again, we have to recognise that we’re running 100,000-year-old brain software with the latest hardware, but our software is ancient.
Things like saying someone’s name, shaking their hand, greeting them, looking people in the eyes, or digital versions of that, are what we as humans like. Really, really simple.
I love that analogy. I’ve never heard that before, the 100,000-year-old brain software. Of course, it makes perfect sense. It is, isn’t it?
Yeah. Even our hardware is 100,000 years old. It’s the environment that we’re in. It’s the ecosystem. Psychologists understand that we live in a society that we’ve not evolved for.
One of the ways that I train people is we play a game called 10,000 BC. We take any challenge that you’re facing and strip it back. What does it look like 10,000 years ago?
There was a film called 10,000 BC, so I show the poster and it’s got a big sabre-toothed tiger or whatever. I say, “Right, strip it back.” People begin to talk about tribes, danger, food, procurement of resources, safety.
You strip it back to what we as humans are. We are still living with those core basic things. It’s just that it’s no longer the sabre-toothed tiger. It’s the bailiff come to collect the debt.
But it’s the same mechanism. We can use that to figure out how people are going to engage with a website.
There’s plenty of research. There’s a great book called The Media Equation. It’s 30 years old but still not understood, by Reeves and Nass. They say that people engage with media naturally and socially. In other words, people expect a computer to work something like a human.
I’m not saying that it should have a smiley face, although we recognise that pictures on a website do convert better. I’m not saying that we go crazy on skeuomorphism, but there is something around expecting things to work in similar ways.
They did this great study, called The Man Who Lied to His Laptop. They found that someone would be disparaging about their laptop if it was in a different room, but if it was in front of them, they’d speak more nicely about the laptop, which is a massively social human thing to do.
Because we imbue it with life. Digital devices are, you know, here’s my laptop. Even my phone — when this is in the other room and you can’t get it, people’s cortisol levels go up. They become more stressed. Even though we know rationally it doesn’t make sense, subconsciously we love these things. We treat them as humans. We treat them as people in our lives.
It’s like when I go with my girlfriend and her son, and he goes swimming. We go into the swimming pool and wait. We’re just sat on the side. But you’re not allowed to get your phone out in a swimming pool because it’s not just in case you’re taking photos of people, it’s totally banned.
You’re sat there going, “I can’t look at my phone and I really want to look at my phone.” It doesn’t make sense because it’s only 40 minutes, but I’ve got that burning desire to get my phone out just to see if I’ve had a WhatsApp message or notifications.
That’s addiction and dopamine and all of that stuff.
That’s part of it. And of course, this device is filled with faces. All those notifications are going to be showing you faces. They’re also going to be showing you micro-animations.
Do you remember when phones were really basic and then they began to adopt all these micro-animations? The reason why micro-animations work in apps and on websites is because movement to our 10,000, 100,000 or million-year-old brain says, “That thing must be alive.”
When something moves a little bit, you go, “Oh, that must be life.” Which is why a TV with the volume off can’t remain unwatched, because your brain naturally gets drawn to movement and also to the narrative, the story that’s going on.
So if you want to get someone’s attention, you just create a little bit of movement and immediately we look at it. It gets attention. It might not get action, but it does get attention.
Which is why on social media videos, a lot of influencers and salespeople and people who are marketing, and really good at it, right at the start of the video they’ll do a pattern interrupt, which will create movement on the screen that you’re not expecting, so it drags your attention to it. Whereas if you’ve just got someone sat there talking, you’ll scroll past it.
Yeah. They constantly do it. They show their face. They zoom in, zoom out. They chop in, chop out, which again is a pattern interrupt, as you’ve said. I like to call it puncture the pattern. There’s a pattern; I’m going to puncture the pattern.
But they also use things where they completely follow the pattern, because you’ve just gone into auto mode. Where you don’t want to puncture the pattern is subtitles. We completely just follow the pattern. We just read. We naturally look at the subtitle words even when we don’t want to.
So you stick words on the video, people immediately look at those words. It’s fascinating. So much of this stuff is so basic.
There’s this thing called the Doherty threshold. Three hundred milliseconds is the time that we expect something that we interact with to respond to us on a screen. And that’s the same amount of time that we expect it takes us to react in human terms to things.
If a website is slower than the Doherty threshold, or if a Zoom call is slower, people begin to assume negative intent. They assume that you’re being rude, you don’t care, or you’re not very competent. Research demonstrates that if you keep having a lag on your Zoom call, people assume that you have lower IQ.
Really?
Yeah. Part of it is because when we respond slowly to things, if I’m talking to you and you respond slowly to me, I’ll think, “Do you not understand me, or are you just being rude?”
We apply the same rule socially to media. Hence, when something begins to go slow, we think it’s rude. Devices that begin to go slow, we begin to view them as aged members of society and we begin to think, “Right, time to recycle them.”
Even when it’s been proven that Apple admitted they deliberately slowed down phones to make you buy…
Of course. Of course they did.
So slowing down something, you go, “Why can’t I handle it?” Because literally our brains, when you go slow, think you’re being rude or you’re being incompetent.
Websites need to be fast because it demonstrates competence and care, which is really interesting. Just a thing that’s going on immediately. Hence, all those micro-animations need to be speedy. It’s fascinating.
Again, absolutely fascinating that this stuff happens the way it does.
I love what you said as well when you were talking about the church, and you mentioned how you get people more likely to stay if you give them a role, give them something to do, get them engaged with it.
I’m in a networking group — I don’t know if you’ve heard of it — called BNI, where we try to get people in the group to do things, to become a visitor host or to help set the room up. It gets them more involved with it.
It’s the same with businesses, which is probably what you help people with. If you’ve got employees in your business and they just turn up, do their job and then leave, they’re not engaged. But if you empower them to take action, to become responsible for certain parts of the business, they’re going to be more engaged. They’re going to feel more ownership within it and they’re going to stay longer if they do that. So it’s about empowering people and giving them responsibility.
Ownership’s the word. You have ownership. You have skin in the game. A little bit of this is actually going to reflect on you. You care about it.
There’s a concept known as the IKEA effect. Subconsciously, people value furniture they’ve made more than furniture they’ve bought but didn’t make. Again, it’s subconscious. Rationally, I go, “Well, that’s BS.” But subconsciously, something that you’ve actually put together with your own hands, because you’ve put in effort and you’ve customised it, you value more.
So one of the really easy ways to engage someone in an initiative in your company is involve them as opposed to tell them.
Obviously, this can be done badly, but again, there’s a good median of involvement. Any parent knows this. You turn something into a game with your kid, you give them a role, and all of a sudden they’re loving it.
We can also do this with customers. We can even do this on a website. One of the techniques that we understand for onboarding with an app is you get people to customise the app slightly to themselves. Not so much that it creates friction, but just a little bit of customisation.
Now I’ve got skin in the game with this app. I’m less likely to delete it. Obviously, we’ve got to get the right amount. Not too little, not too much.
Even the act of visiting a website — if there can be some subtle customisation, such as filling in preferences, getting it to be just the way I like it, whatever it might be — little things like that.
Even personality tests. Quickly diagnose if you land on a website.
There’s a great thing called RightMessage, I think, by a guy called Brennan Dunn. What it does is it customises a website to the person who’s visiting it, which is really smart and kind of obvious.
Let’s say you’re selling websites and someone comes to your website. Somehow, you’re able to pick up the signals that they’re into farming. You might put your farming case studies at the top of the page. Someone else visits and you know they’re into sports, so you put the sports case studies at the top of the page, or whatever it might be.
One of the things that they do is they have a little survey that comes up. If it doesn’t know who you are, it pops up a little survey saying, “Delighted to meet you. Tell us a bit about yourself.” People love it.
What’s really good about RightMessage is the survey is a pop-up in the bottom right-hand or left-hand corner. It’s not a full-screen, “I can’t do anything.” It’s not an annoying cookie-consent thing. It’s this little thing, and it’s done in a way that feels conversational.
Again, this mirrors human behaviour. If I come up to you in the street and get right in your face and say, “You cannot walk past me unless you answer these questions,” you’re like, “Get out of my way. You’re irritating me.”
But just to the side — “Hey, I’d love to hear a bit about you.” Now that’s the right amount.
Again, a lot of these things are not too little, not too much. It’s the Goldilocks. It’s the nice middle ground.
It’s funny you mentioned that. We’ve done stuff like that, because one of our web designers was investigating this about two years ago now. It was specifically with businesses that have a very different kind of client.
For example, an electrician might have residential clients, but they might also have commercial clients. There’s always that question of where do I pitch my website? I don’t want to put the residential clients off by making them think I’m too expensive or they’re too small for me. But I don’t want to put the commercial clients off by making them think I just do stuff in people’s homes.
The website was dynamically built to change the content based on what somebody had searched on or where they had come from. So if they’re looking for residential rewire, they come into a page on residential rewire. They then go to the homepage. The homepage knows where they’ve come from, changes the content so that it’s predominantly about residential stuff, so they’re not put off by it.
So it doesn’t mean two different websites. It doesn’t mean two different pages. It’s just dynamic based on what the user is looking for. And the user has no idea that’s happened.
Yeah, it’s fantastic. It’s kind of obvious.
Seth Godin wrote the book Permission Marketing, and it’s funny that such a simple idea is still hard. He was saying the idea here is that someone gives you their permission that you might market to them in a timely, relevant manner.
Once they’ve given you some information about themselves, then, yeah, customise the website. Someone who visits the first time might get something a little bit different to someone who visits later. This was back when the mechanism for this was cookies and so forth.
We now have so much that we can do, and yet still so little personalisation happens. It’s a shame. We miss out.
But we do this as humans. You meet someone and they’re evidently a child; evidently you talk to them in a younger manner. Someone appears to be more important; you might adapt your register accordingly. This isn’t actually lying. It’s just emphasising the part of me that’s relevant for this moment, not denying the other parts. It’s putting forward the part that’s relevant.
Our communication should be the same. There’s an art then: how do we design communications to be adaptive?
I like to use the analogy of an egg. If you crack a dozen eggs, they’re always going to have roughly the same size yolk. But it’s the egg white, the albumen, that changes or adapts. You can customise it to how you like your eggs, or whatever it might be, but the yolk is always the same.
So it’s this idea that we want a consistent core. This is our core thing, but the outer can adapt. You want your website to be able to adapt. You want to be able to create campaigns that adapt.
This is what we do with A/B testing. Consistent core, and then we’re just adapting. Is it A or B? We’re just seeing. We’re adjusting. This is what we do when we run campaigns. Consistent core, but we’re adjusting the message to see how it might suit.
I think it’s a really simple concept, but definitely a very human thing to do.
It’s a bit frustrating more people don’t do it, to be honest, because this kind of technology has existed for 25 years. When I was building websites in the late ’90s, early 2000s, I had functions on them where you could choose the theme and the colour of the website yourself with a drop-down based on what your preferences were, what you liked.
As you said, it was cookie-based, so it remembered. You go back to the website and it puts the same cookie on it.
When I worked at GAME in 2000, 2002, they had newsletters that were sent out. There’s no point sending out stuff about Xbox if you’re a PlayStation player. You would be able to log in, subscribe to the newsletter, and tick what consoles you had, what type of games you were into. Then the newsletter was written in a big content management system, and it went out with different bits depending on what you’d actually selected.
If you’re an Xbox player who’s into RPGs, you get that content in the newsletter. There’s no point sending you something about FIFA on the PlayStation because it wasn’t relevant.
All that functionality existed back then, but a lot of people aren’t using it now. They’re just shouting out the same message to everybody. To bring it back to it, they’re not doing the engagement.
Yeah, you’re right. They’re not engaging. So what does that tell us about engagement? They’re not seeking the we. They’re going, “Me, and I hope you like it too.” Sometimes you strike and it lands and you get a we.
But the better way for me to get a we is for me to go, “Hang on. Let me figure out what you like and let’s find where we have common ground,” which we would call product-market fit if we were in SaaS.
How do I find the thing that I can supply that you want, and it’s hand in glove, recognising I’ve got a lot of different gloves for a lot of different people with different size hands? I can adapt my message to fit all of them.
You’re right. It’s work, isn’t it? It’s work. It’s effort. It takes a bit of time.
I think also this is where you’re well positioned as Engage Web. It takes, I think, an external company to help people with engagement, because we can’t see the wood for the trees.
A hundred per cent.
That saying, “You can’t read the label from inside the bottle,” is perhaps flawed, but it makes sense. You need someone else who doesn’t have the cognitive miasma.
People are like, “But we could do it.” Really, no. All of us are better at observing others than we are at observing ourselves. It’s called the Solomon paradox.
King Solomon was really wise on other people’s affairs, but really bad at managing his own. He was known as the wisest king, and yet he made the worst personal decisions possible, as it seems. That’s because when we’re so involved, we are over-involved. We’re so affected that we then have all these biases, whereas someone external doesn’t.
So, yeah, you definitely want to work with an external CRM person. You definitely want to work with an external agency. They’re going to see things you just do not see anymore, because your brain has trained itself to not see them because you’re too close to it.
You want both. I’m not saying you want to be completely outsourced. You want a nice mix of the two working together. The outside keeps you fresh, and internally you build up your capabilities and so forth.
It’s why even Richard Branson has a business coach.
That’s why any professional sports person has a coach.
Yeah. Don’t get us started on that, because so much of our work in businesses, we just have this arrogance of, “We can do it ourselves.” And yet, if my plumbing goes — well, actually I do my own plumbing.
Bad example.
Yeah, bad example, but come on. Let’s get the specialist in.
I do come across a lot of people who try and do it themselves. Whatever it is — marketing, web design, content — they try and do it themselves because they know best. They know their industry best, or they think they do.
What I tend to find is that most people, particularly when it’s a very niche, specialist industry, want to do it themselves because they know it best. They only know it from inside. They don’t know what their audience is looking for, what their clients are looking for, what their target client is looking for.
You see that a lot with websites, such as IT websites. They’ll use terminology that their clients don’t understand.
I was looking at one yesterday which was a removals website. It was about heavy lifting, very heavy items down blocks of stairs, and it kept using this term “RAMS” all over the website. I’m looking at it thinking, what the hell does that mean?
At no point have they explained that in their industry that means something. They get it. Their target audience is someone who wants to move something. I don’t understand heavy moving of machinery. I just have something that wants to be moved. So why are they prattling on about RAMS when nobody’s going to understand what it actually means?
The curse of knowledge.
Yeah.
I can’t imagine what it’s like to not know this.
A friend of mine did teacher training, and he said they taught them to count with letters. A plus A is B. What’s B plus H?
J?
Yeah. That can disconnect with you.
I get your formula now.
So his whole thing was that we are so used to counting with numbers. The way to remind ourselves what it’s like to learn numbers and how hard it is for kids is to add letters, and suddenly you go, “Oh, flip.”
In the same way, we are so in it that we forget what it’s like to not do it. Hence, you want the outside. I think the nice mix is going to be someone on the outside helping you build internal capability and keeping you fresh, and you retain both. Again, nice middle ground, nice medium of both elements coming together.
Yeah, that’s what I’d like.
Something else you mentioned as well about the church, which again I wanted to draw back to because I think that’s really important. When you get new people in, you make sure that at least two people say hello to them, and you bring that into business as well as greeting people.
Again, that’s something that we try to do within our networking group, because there’s nothing worse than visiting somewhere for the first time. You don’t know anybody and nobody speaks to you. You come away thinking, “That’s really cliquey. It’s very impenetrable. I didn’t enjoy the experience. I don’t want to go back.”
Yet so often I see it where you’ll go somewhere and people will just ignore you. They’ll stand in their little groups because they all know each other and they’ll talk to each other. Somebody new, they’ll completely ignore. For the life of me, I don’t understand why businesses don’t get a hold of that and why networking groups don’t get a hold of it.
Often people do it because they don’t want to overload you. But in not wanting to overload you, we completely go under.
I always liked two because, from an engagement perspective, three is a great number. If I meet you at a networking thing and I come over and say hello to you, you and I have a one-on-one conversation. I have to be completely focused on what you’re saying. You have to be completely focused on what I’m saying.
You add in a third person and immediately I’m able to be 50% less focused because we’ve now got three ways of conversation. I can relax a little bit. Someone else can pick up the slack in the conversation and so forth. It also means that I’m twice as likely to find something in common because there are two of you, not just one.
So I really like the idea of a three-way conversation. It just takes the pressure off. While I’m speaking, two are listening. So it’s a little bit more relaxed. Two can respond rather than one.
In the same way, if we’re talking about networking, a three-way thing is good.
I advocate in organisations, one-to-ones are good and you should have one-to-ones certainly, but actually one-to-twos, little groups of three, are great. At Oxbridge, Cambridge and Oxford, they teach tutorials: the professor with a group of two or three students. That small, intimate group is more leverage than just one, because we learn socially. We learn by connecting horizontally, not just upwards.
The more that I’m able to have people who are peers that I’m able to talk with, the more I can internalise this and learn this.
One of the things that I do when I’m working with teams is I’m looking for the way that people connect to each other, not to me. What do they say to each other? I’m listening in the breaks. What are they saying to each other? Because that’s the gold. What they say to me is going to be filtered.
In the same way, that mechanism works really well on a website. If you go onto someone’s website and they tell you what other customers have said, I like that. That’s good.
When we go to see films, they’ll have the reviews. This is the concept of social proof. Again, it’s the recognition that we as humans are not solitary. We like there to be a few of us.
Two’s company, three’s a crowd. Actually, three is a great number.
Three’s company.
Three’s company, four’s company, two is a date. And actually, maybe I just need to soften it from being a date.
No, I get that. When I’m in a group of three, I’m usually the quietest, if you can believe such a thing, because I will relax. I’ll think, right, other people. I’m just going to listen now. And if I hear something I need to jump in on or suggest, then I will. But I’ll let you guys do the talking. So I do much prefer that.
Even now on this podcast, if there was a third person, I’d be listening to what you say and what they say, and I’m a little bit like, “Ah, I don’t feel the pressure to speak up.” But then when I have something interesting, I’m vibing off what you’ve been saying to each other.
Whereas this right now is a bit more intense, isn’t it? There’s a greater weight on me and you to come up with great stuff.
Do you know, this is something like the 218th podcast, I think. They’re not all interviews, so some are solo podcasts, but it’s probably about 150 interviews, maybe more. I do find them very tiring. This is feeling like therapy now, like I’m confessing to you.
I do find them very tiring because I have to really concentrate on what the other person’s saying. I have to listen. If I’ve got a question that comes up from what you’re saying, I have to think about it. I’m not making notes. I tell people I don’t have any questions in front of me. I genuinely don’t.
I’m listening to what you’re saying, I’m remembering it, and I’m coming back with a question based on something you’ve said. So I really have to focus. When the podcast episode is finished, I am drained.
Yeah. Totally. And you would be less drained if it was a small group, just because of the dispersal of the need for you to handle it all.
Again, which is a thing around humans: we find comfort in that small group number. Each person doesn’t need to contribute as much for it to be sustained. We rely more on synergy. Engagement, yeah. You and me, a bunch of you and me, creates a really nice we. But then, of course, it gets too big at the other end.
So there’s just a nice happy medium. I always say three to five. Three to five for a group, for me, is lovely.
I’ve done a couple of podcasts where there have been two guests at the same time, and they have been much easier. Much, much easier.
Yeah. Or you get that thing of there being two hosts, and then they get the person on. Obviously some of it might be harder because of the individuals, but it’s interesting that you would reflect on that.
How do we use that same thing for our marketing? Well, certainly when it comes to LinkedIn, let’s say, mentioning other people makes it less me talking to you. It’s more that there’s a we. There’s a few of us here.
If you were to invite someone to BNI, you’re not saying, “Come along to BNI, it’s me, Darren.” There’s a group of us.
A group denotes safety
One of the things around how I get someone engaged is that you and me becoming a we is quite intense, but you lot and me coming together is a little bit less intense. Let’s go from the singular to the plural.
So a we and a me is even easier, right? There’s a sense there of safety in numbers.
Hence, when someone goes on your website, the ability for them to recognise this is what others have said, this is what others have bought — all of these things are good mechanisms. McDonald’s: six billion hamburgers sold this week or whatever it might be. That number just denotes a sense of, “Ah, not just me. There are others here.”
It’s why — and I’m sure it’s a common sales tactic — it’s something we do. I’m revealing information here. This is possibly jeopardous.
One of the things we’ll do in proposals, or when we’re doing presentations to people, is say, “Most clients go for this option,” because everybody wants to be most people. “Oh, if most people have gone for that, that’s probably the right one for me.”
If I said, “Very few people choose this one. This is the one hardly anyone picks,” you wouldn’t want to do it. So “most people choose that,” which is what you said about McDonald’s. This many hamburgers sold. “I want to be another one of those people, because everyone else is doing it, then I should do it.”
Yeah. The saying with social proof is: to the degree that we are unsure, we rely on the actions of others.
When you go to passport control, or you’re at a till, and there’s a long queue and there’s a cashier next to it, but no one’s queuing there, everyone assumes, “Ah, there must be a reason why.” Then someone goes, and all the others go, “Oh, flipping it,” and get across, and then it will even out.
The reason why we don’t at first is because I’m unsure. However, if I’m arriving in the UK, I’m totally going to go to the shortest line because I’m familiar in my own country, whereas I’m less familiar in another country.
So the degree to which we are uncertain, we rely on others.
Your leads are going to be uncertain knowing what the most popular option is. However, a lead that knows you very well, or is very proficient in web marketing and all of this stuff, they’re going to want to know, “Okay, what’s your recommendation here? What’s the elite pathway?” And that “most people choose this” now becomes a negative, actually, because when you say that, it would denote sloppiness.
Again, the same tactic can be good in one situation and bad in another based upon the relationship.
If you think about your partner — you’ve mentioned your girlfriend — you’re not going to say, “Well, most people I date choose for me to take them here.” That could work really well in a different scenario.
It definitely would not work well with her, I can tell you that now. She would not go for that.
One thing I wanted to pick up on as well that you mentioned about visitors, about introducing them to people and speaking to them. One thing we do with visitors to our networking group is that we don’t want to leave them alone.
If someone is speaking to a visitor and they’ve come for the first time, they’ve never been before, someone will talk to them. We drill it into all of the members: don’t just talk to them and then walk off and leave them on their own. Introduce someone else. We call it pass the parcel.
Pass the parcel is a great name.
Don’t try and sell to them about what you do. As you were saying, it’s not me, me. Ask them about themselves. Ask them what they do, who they would like to speak to, who would be a good contact for them, and then introduce them to that person. Give them a good experience of being there. That’s what we try to do.
You mentioned some good things there. We could call what you’re describing social threading. You’re weaving together a thread.
This is a classic one. Someone comes in and you talk to them. You go, “Okay, well, I’m going to go and get some breakfast now, but let me introduce you to so-and-so before I do,” or whatever it might be. Really simple.
I would also say that it’s not all about them. Actually, the best way to engage someone is to find out what you and they have in common.
If I was at your networking group and you were the visitor, I wouldn’t be going, “Who are you looking to meet today, and let me find someone.” I’d actually be looking to go, “Tell me about what you do. Oh, yeah. I’ve done something like that too.” I would look to build the common ground.
Common ground is what engages us
Because common ground is where we already are a we. Then, all of a sudden, we get engaged by virtue of what we have in common. That’s what we do. We engage over we.
If I can demonstrate that we are already a we in a number of areas, instant engagement kicks in. We all know what this is like when you meet someone and you go, “Oh, I do that too,” and then all of a sudden you feel it click. The you and the me clicks. We become a we, and now we’re a little bubble.
The analogy I use for this is you’re walking down a street in a foreign country and you hear someone speak English. What do you do?
Well, I run away personally, but I know what most people do.
That’s fantastic.
Particularly if it’s a Cockney.
Actually, I’d love a Cockney. It’s more Brits, the lairy type. But Brits abroad notwithstanding, what most people do is their head will crane to go, “Who said that?” It’s an involuntary response. Commonality is so powerful.
Again, the website that adjusts itself to the search terms is just demonstrating commonality quicker. A very human thing that we can achieve digitally. Really simple.
There is a fantastic clip that goes around social media every now and then with Henry Cavill, who was Superman. Henry Cavill, if you don’t know, is a massive nerd. He builds his own computers, he plays Dungeons and Dragons…
Warhammer.
Warhammer, yes. He’s making a Warhammer TV series or film now. There’s a clip where he’s talking about Warhammer, and there are two actresses in the shot and they’re bemused by all of this. The host is on the verge of taking the piss out of him for Warhammer.
Then one of the other guests says, “Oh, you play Warhammer? What army are you running right now?” He starts describing the army, and there’s almost an unspoken thing. They don’t even finish sentences. It’s like, “Oh, I’m running…” “Shall we?” “Yes. Yeah, let’s do that.”
It’s how quickly they connect just because they’re both into Warhammer, which you wouldn’t normally get when you were on a chat show with other actors or music.
The more that commonality happens within an uncommon space or an unexpected space, the more it connects us. Again, to the degree to which we are uncertain, we follow the actions of others. The degree to which commonality is unexpected, it becomes more potent.
If I’m walking down the street in Djibouti, and then someone says to me, “Hello, Scott,” that’s an incredible degree of commonality.
I travel a lot, particularly in Eastern Europe, it seems. I’ll be in cities that no Brit, I can imagine, has a reason to be there. Then you hear a British voice and you’re like, “Oh my goodness, why are you here?” You can’t help but ask, “Why are you here?”
Again, the degree to which the commonality is unexpected, it becomes all the more potent. Imagine it in 10,000 BC. I’m a tribe and I meet someone who’s in my tribe, even though I’m miles away from my tribe. I immediately feel safe.
Really simple mechanisms. How can we then apply that to our website?
Even the saying, “You’re in the right place.” If you’re looking for X, you’re in the right place.
“Oh, I am looking for X. I’m glad I’m in the right place.”
Really simple language formulations.
I’m a bit of an Apple fanboy, although they’ve certainly lost a lot of their polish in recent years, but I’ve always appreciated the way that they have used human things in their marketing.
When you update the new version of iOS, it will say hello. That’s been a longstanding Mac thing. The examples they use have always been friendly, human, everyday examples. They try to use the everyday stuff.
Do you remember their Get a Mac advert? “Hi, I’m a Mac. I’m a PC.” They personified them.
David Mitchell and Justin…
Yeah, David Mitchell did the UK version.
The American version was Justin Long. Again, just really humanising it.
I need to check them again actually. Thank you for reminding me of the UK ones. The fact that they did UK ones — yes, another layer of that. The American ones wouldn’t have landed as well if they had done that here.
They landed in a British way that helped them expand in the British market. Really good.
Even Apple is a perfect example about engaging and speaking to the customer on what it is they actually want. The iPod came out around the same time as, I think, Microsoft or Samsung…
Zune.
Zune was later, but at the time there were a few other MP3 players. They were ugly things, but they were all on about the gigabytes, the storage capacity and what it was. Whereas the iPod was “10,000 songs in your pocket.”
Amazing line.
It was such a good line. Again, it got right to the thing of don’t sell the feature, sell the benefits.
I do a lot of training with this in engagement. Even today, I sent a proposal to a client and with the outcomes, one of them was: you will be less worried.
Nice.
So, yeah, better staff retention, improved profits and, critically, less worry. You say better performance and that looks good. But this project isn’t really being done for prestige. One of the fundamental things is they’re worried about staff retention. This will just reduce your worry.
Ultimately, that’s what I’m buying here. Less worry.
That is what people want. It’s like with us.
We don’t talk about websites because businesses don’t want a website
They want what comes from it. They want the sales. They want the enquiries. They want the business. They want the new clients. That’s what they want.
The line I use is: we don’t build websites, we build businesses.
A frightfully simple concept that even 20 years ago people were saying, and 10 years ago particularly they were really emphasising this: you’re not selling a website, you’re selling a business outcome.
But you’re right, it still hasn’t caught on. The reason why it doesn’t is because we’re there talking about RAMS, whatever it was with the removals company, which I still don’t know what that is.
Still don’t know what it is.
We’re talking about the stuff that we care about because we’re too deep in it, because we need the fresh eyes. We’re now back where we started, aren’t we?
We are. We’re so deep in it.
About your guest:
Scott Gould is an author, keynote speaker and consultant specialising in engagement. A former church minister, Scott works with organisations to help them engage employees, customers and communities, and is the author of The Shape of Engagement, a book exploring how people engage with ideas, products, organisations and each other. His work focuses on turning engagement from a vague buzzword into something practical, human and actionable for businesses and teams. You can connect with Scott here:
Website: https://scottgould.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottagould/
Instagram: https://scottgould.com/
About your host:
Darren has worked within digital marketing since the last century, and was the first in-house web designer for video games retailer GAME in the UK, known as Electronics Boutique in the States. After co-founding his own agency, Engage Web, in 2009, Darren has worked with clients around the world, including Australia, Canada and the USA.
iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/engaging-marketeer/id1612454837
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darrenjamieson/
Engaging Marketeer: https://engagingmarketeer.com
Engage Web: https://www.engageweb.co.uk
