​​What’s the secret to thriving in the ever-evolving world of digital marketing? On this episode of the Conquer Local Podcast, we’re joined by Tim Butler, a marketing expert with over two decades of experience in sales, marketing, and consulting.

As the founder and CEO of Innovation Visual, a leading UK digital marketing agency, Tim has been at the forefront of developing innovative solutions for clients in technology, manufacturing, healthcare, finance, and more since 2014.

From founding his first online business in 1998 to leading a dynamic team at Innovation Visual, Tim’s expertise spans digital marketing, e-commerce, and revenue generation.

Tune in to discover how Tim’s deep industry knowledge and hands-on approach are shaping the future of digital marketing! 

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The Single Metric That Defines YOUR Clients’ Success

Introduction

Jeff Tomlin: I’m Jeff Tomlin and on this episode, we’re pleased to welcome Tim Butler.

Tim is a seasoned marketing expert with over 20 years of experience in sales, marketing, and consulting. He founded Innovation Visual in 2014, a UK-based agency specializing in digital marketing solutions for a variety of industries.

With a deep understanding of digital marketing, e-commerce, business problem solving and a successful entrepreneurial background, Tim brings unique insights and experience to develop complete solutions for clients. 

Get ready Conquerors for Tim Butler coming up next on this week’s episode of the Conquer Local Podcast.

Focus on Actionable Insights, not just Data Analysis.

Jeff Tomlin: Tim Butler, founder and CEO of Innovation Visual coming to us all the way from the UK. How are you doing today, Tim? Welcome to the podcast.

Tim Butler: Hi, Jeff. I’m doing really well. Lovely to be talking to you today.

Jeff Tomlin: Hey, well, I’m pumped to jump into our conversation and talk all things digital marketing and marketing agency-wise. I was having a conversation with someone the other day about one of the performance teams, and it seemed to me that the team was spending way too much time, and I don’t know if this is a thing or not. I thought most people have a lot of practices and processes in place, but it seemed to me that this team was spending way too much time compiling data, looking at data, analyzing data and not really pulling out the actionable insights and doing the marketing work to action on that. And so you’re a data guy, and I’d love to hear off the top here… Tell us a little bit about how you think about using data and pulling out the actionable insights that ultimately give us the results that we’re all looking for in the first place.

Tim Butler: Yeah, I think what you’re describing isn’t unusual. People can find themselves getting pulled in and spending too much time just generating reports, generating graphs and metrics and going, oh, these metrics moved this way and things. And I think we have to remember what are we doing. What’s the purpose behind the data? And I always talk about, it’s about measuring the impact of a marketing decision. If you make a decision to say, test whether it’s the red or the blue creative. Are you gathering the data in order to be able to see whether the red or the blue is the better one? But then take that not simply to a matter of who clicked on the red one more than the blue one, but actually think, okay, which one generated the more revenue? Which of those opportunists were more valuable to the business or more profitable to the business? There’s no point in gathering data on metrics or metric differentiators that you can’t influence with what you’re doing with the campaigns. You need to really think about what are we doing here for the client, or if the clients are running it, what are we doing? What do we really need to measure to understand the impact? And at the end of the day, people don’t really want to buy marketing. They want to buy more profit, and they want to buy more revenue. And so the data and the use of data should follow that.

Marketing’s Evolving Focus: Technology, Machine Learning, and AI.

Jeff Tomlin: One of my favourite quotes from one of my favourite comedians, George Carlin, in one of his old talks, he said, “One of the jobs of comedians is just to remind of shit you forgot to laugh at the first time.” It was a hilarious bit. And then he talked about all sorts of mundane things that we see in everyday life, but he made it funny. I think oftentimes on the podcast, it’s our job to not always tell people brand new things that they’ve never heard before, but sometimes remind them of things that they might already know, but through getting involved in the busy work of day-to-day sometimes lose track of, right?

Tim Butler: Indeed. Yeah, I think that’s absolutely right. And I think there’s a thing when it comes to data, sometimes you do need to go detailed. So it’s not a matter of just take the top level and action from that, but it’s got to have a purpose, hasn’t it? And I think people sometimes forget that in the day-to-day.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah. Well, hey, one of the things I wanted to ask you about, and I don’t know if perspectives are different in different areas of the world, but our marketing landscape is constantly changing. It’s changing so much, so I always like to ask my guests what they’re seeing. And are you seeing trends and things that take up more of your time and attention or demand more of your time and attention today than what was in years past here?

Tim Butler: Yeah, I mean, we’re lucky because we operate in a really exciting environment that has always been changing. If you cast your mind back at a few years ago, even things like Instagram didn’t exist when I started doing these things. So we operate in the land of change, but the change at the moment is quite fundamental. The change that we’re seeing really is around the use of technology in decision-making when it comes to machine learning and then an extension of machine learning into the generative forms of AI. I think those are really fundamental landscape changes for marketing as a whole.

AI’s Growing Role: Transforming Marketing Decisions and Strategies.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah. And we’re seeing that here. It is a shift because like you said, it’s impacting decision-making, and we’re using AI actually to craft the decisions and also craft the questions that we’re asking on the top end too. And it is a shift in the way of thinking and the way that we do things for sure.

Tim Butler: Yeah, I mean I think that what’s interesting is that we’ve not acknowledged how much machine learning has been coming into marketing anyway over the years. If you think about something simple and straightforward like Google Ads and doing things like optimized for conversions back in the day, where do people think that came from? That’s machine learning underneath there going optimize for conversions. Okay, I’m going to use some algorithms, I’m going to use some learning and I’m going to optimize your campaigns in that way. And now because we’ve got Performance Max, people are going, wow, hold on. Where’s this machine learning suddenly come from? It’s like, well, we’ve been training it for the last, I don’t know how many years with all of these other campaign things. And for an agency, it’s interesting. I talked to a lot of agency owners, and you look at things like Performance Max as an example, and you go, can an agency actually beat it? And also is that because Performance Max is better or because the playing field actually isn’t level because Google controls what you can and can’t do in terms of the levers you can pull, and it wants people to use things like PMAX. Yeah. So it’s a really challenging time.

Rising Costs Demand Detailed, Data-Driven Marketing Strategies for Success.

Jeff Tomlin: In the more recent times, take the last six months or so, previous to that, probably for the last two years, we’ve been seeing the cost of acquisition and the cost of generating leads and any type of business, whether it’s transactional or not, is going up. It’s been more expensive to market online. Are you seeing any downward trend in that with the advanced use of AI and the newer technologies that we’re seeing? Or is a trend continuing that it’s getting more competitive and more expensive still despite the new technology changes?

Tim Butler: I think that the overall market trend is that it’s more expensive, but I think that that means that if you want to beat the trend, you have to work harder. With data, you can do that. You maybe go down more granular, you maybe go down more niche, but also I think that it means you have to look at your entire journey from the person not knowing you as the prospect arriving just with an unfulfilled need to becoming a customer and onto an advocate. You actually have to look at that whole journey in much more detail and put it under the microscope and go, okay, where are we leaking performance? Because it’s not going to get any cheaper to be advertising on any of these pay platforms, whether it be Metro or whether it be Google. It’s never going to get cheaper. So what’s the answer? The answer is you need to outperform at lots of different stages. I think that in itself is a challenge, but yeah, you can use data, do that, and you can also then use data to help you bypass I think some of those platforms that are getting more expensive and mine other routes to customer acquisition.

Prioritize Revenue Outcomes over Clicks for Marketing Success.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah, it’s interesting that you say that and specifically talking about paying attention to the full customer journey. I was just talking to an agency owner yesterday where he was indicating that a big advantage that he has in the agency space is that too many people that his clients have worked with in the past just seemed anyways to pay attention to driving traffic and maybe measuring the clicks and conversions, but not really providing insight into the entire journey and connecting it all together. And it makes an enormous difference. And like you said, it’s that type of attention that’s needed if you’re going to start bringing down the cost of advertising, right?

Tim Butler: Yeah. And I think it’s also understanding that not all clicks or conversions are worth the same. And I think again, this is where data can come in. We always advocate for connecting a marketing decision to a revenue outcome wherever we can. We’ll try and do that. And I know it’s not an easy thing to do, but that’s why we try and do it. But if we take, for example, some B2B campaigns that we’ve run for a client, we did a very definitive campaign test, same audience, but a different approach to the campaign, different kind of hook to get them in. And what was really interesting was campaign A had a much higher click through rate and conversion rate and put more leads in the database than campaign B, but campaign B, although the numbers were smaller at that initial point, most of the people in campaign B went on to become customers, whereas it was a very much smaller percentage in campaign A. Now, you got more revenue from campaign B. So that was the one that we prioritized on, but had people only looked at the click through and the conversion rate, they’d have gone, wow, campaign A, that created that approach, that’s the one to go for. And actually it was the wrong decision or would’ve been the wrong decision.

Building Trust, not just Sales, Ensures Long-Term Client Relationships.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah. It reminds me of when I look at customer lifetime values of different agencies, there’s a massive disparity. And I know that a lot of things play into that from the types of customers that they’re working with to the types of products and services that they’re selling. So I mean, there’s an awful lot of devils in those details, but there’s this huge gap between customer lifetime values and there’s some agencies that have customers for life it seems, and there’s others that on the complete other end of the spectrum that churn customers like crazy. And oftentimes the differences in creating trust and creating a long-term relationship. And so I just wanted to get your thoughts on that and how you approach on a regular basis connecting the business objectives to the outcomes that are desired and being able to then show the ultimate results of the work that’s being done. There’s a lot involved in creating a customer for life.

Tim Butler: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it’s interesting. I was meeting customer with some others for lunch a couple of weeks ago and she said, “I’m your longest, your oldest customer.” And I went oldest and she went, “Well, no, I’m not the oldest,” but she’d been working with me for 15 years through three different jobs. And I wasn’t even an agency 15 years ago. It was me on my own. But she’s continued to work with Innovation Visual, all that period, and what does it take to have those kind of relationships? And I’m really proud that we have got these really long-lived positive relationships. And I think that you have to understand that trust takes a long time to build, but a very short amount of time to destroy. And the agencies that I see that churn a lot of clients tend to be focused on being a sales engine. So they’re going out. They’re selling and they’re selling, and they’re not really thinking about what it is that their customer needs. We are a much slower approach to sales. I think the reason why we’re a platinum HubSpot partner, yet our retention of revenue and our performance in terms of what we do and our technicalities around HubSpot is really high. But we’re not a sales engine. We take our time. So I think if you want to have long-term client relationships, you need to take your time in understanding your client right from the outset. But then I think also you need to make some decisions and be true with your actions, not just with your words to the clients, but actually make decisions that are in the best interest of the client. Even if in the short term it’s not in the best interest of the agency. It’s like, actually we shouldn’t build this website because it’s not the technology that we’re good at developing, and we want to stay true to that stack and you said you wanted X or whatever. People will respect that. Now, you may lose revenue in the short term. And when agencies are, sometimes there’s the battle on for revenue at the moment with agencies. So it might be very hard to say, actually. We’ll kiss goodbye to that big project because it’s not right for us and it’s not right that we do it for our client. But that kind of behavior means that your customer trusts you, and your customer trusts you, your customer will stay with you. And then performance, I would hope that the people listening performance is in their DNA as long as they know what the customer wants. And that comes back to the need and the listening.

Avoid Dependence on One Marketing Channel; Use Multi-Channel Strategies.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah, a hundred percent. I couldn’t agree more. One of the things, by the way I wanted to ask you about was channel mix when you’re dealing with customers is that when you’re looking at marketing agencies, there’s a variety. You’ve got a variety of different customers from different industry groups right now, and their customers in turn hang out in different places. But all too often I’ve seen the agencies that you’re talking about, sales machines, oftentimes they’re bringing in a lot of clients and they have a formulaic way of sort of handling them. So if you’re very cognizant about who you’re bringing in and you want to provide a high level of service, channel mix is something that you have to determine on a client-by-client basis. How do you approach that?

Tim Butler: Well, I would say first of all, we try and avoid any client being dependent on a singular channel.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah.

Tim Butler: And in fact, really trying to be dependent on at least two or more channels is a minimum prerequisite because we have to understand as marketers that the big tech companies control algorithms and control effectively the rules of the game that we planned, whether that be organic search, whether that be the visibility of organic posts. If you take platforms like LinkedIn or Instagram, the way that they have changed their algorithms so non-paid content that used to get exposure doesn’t get the same level of exposures, those kinds of things as they’ve matured. So if your client only has one channel that’s working for them today, they are at high risk. And you as the agency, you’re at high risk because if the goalposts move and that was all that you were doing, well, there’s going to be a problem and your client’s going to have serious words when their performance drops off a cliff. So multi-channel has got to be the way and then I think looking, and it comes back to this cost of acquisition thing, looking at what the client can do to earn the trust and the attention of their target audience, we called it inbound, but it’s about being helpful. It’s about being the right organization at the right time in the right place.

Profit should be the North Star Metric for Clients.

Jeff Tomlin: Do you have North Star metrics that you apply to the companies that you work with and all of your customers in terms of the metrics that matter the most to you? What are the things at the top of your dashboard that you sort of follow for every customer, no matter what?

Tim Butler: Profit.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah.

Tim Butler: Because that’s effectively what they want from us is more profit. At the end of the day, a business leader doesn’t give a whether we’re doing PPC or SEO. They want to have a reliable profit positive cash flow stream coming in and know that if they pay X, Y comes out at the other end and Y is a multiple of X, right? So they’re not going out saying, I really need to buy some SEO today. What they want is they want profit. So you have to have profit as your North Star. If you can’t get the numbers underlying that, and when I say profit, I mean gross profit. So if you sell widget A, it’s got a 40% margin on it, okay, we can work with that. Widget B’s got a 60% margin on it. We can work that out. If they won’t tell you the margins, then we have to go with revenue. But the problem with using revenue as your headline is where as marketeers, I’ve seen agencies get lazy and they’re like, okay, well we need to boost revenue for this client, right? Well, what we’ll do is we’ll recommend that we do a 25% off everything special deal, and that’ll get them loads of revenue, and yet it does. But if that client’s margin was only 25%, then they’ve basically not made any money out of it. They’ve made a loss. And that being a zero sum game kind of thing there is an extreme example, but as soon as you start discounting, the first thing you take is the client’s profit. So if you’re only measuring against revenue as your performance metric, you’re missing that from your calculations. And okay, you’ve got to work harder by not discounting, by not giving stuff away. But my old boss when I was in sales back in the day, he said to me, he said, “Tim, remember any Muppet can give stuff away. I need you to sell.” And that’s what we should be doing for our clients because they don’t want to employ Muppets, do they?

Focus on Profit and Results, not just Engagement.

Jeff Tomlin: Well, that is a great way of thinking about it, and I didn’t know that that was going to be your answer when I asked the question, but it’s by far the best answer that you can come up with because revenue is easier to track than digging down all the way down to the profit. And counting leads is easier than revenue, and counting clicks is easier than leads. And oftentimes there’s this spectrum of what is the least deep I can go and still collect a paycheck?

Tim Butler: Yeah, yeah.

Jeff Tomlin: I mean, that probably speaks all the way back up to the question at the top when say, “Hey, how do you keep a customer long term?” That’s because you’re going deep into their business and understanding the true ROI and the profitability of engaging with you.

Tim Butler: Yeah. And also, I’ve got a pet hate at the moment, which is I’m seeing increasingly when we go into prospects that their agencies are talking about engagement, particularly when it comes to content and it comes to social media and it’s like, yeah, yeah, but this agency, they’re doing a great job because look at all the engagement they get.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah.

Tim Butler: And I’m like, it’s irrelevant. Your marketers are about persuasion. I don’t care whether a thousand people clicked like on a post. It’s irrelevant because if you didn’t change the mind of any of them, there was no point in doing it. We’re about changing people’s minds. So let’s not get hooked up as marketers about engagement metrics. Yes, they can give us a sense for whether the audience is finding what we’re doing appealing, but if it’s not changing people’s minds, it’s pointless. And there was a really good talk actually last year when I was at Web Summit in Lisbon and there was a guy there, and he actually played through two 30-second TV ads for the iPhone, and he said to people, he said, okay, “Show of hands, which ad do you think was the best?” And people put their hands up and people put their hands up and he went, “Okay, that’s really good.” He said, “You’re right. This ad had the most engagement by a far mile or whatever.” And he showed some metrics and they said, “Yeah, this ad not as good as engaging.” He said, “But look at the sales figures. And it was dramatic. It was like more than double the sales figures off the back of the other ad. And this is what we’ve got to remember. It can be all great to get engagement, be funny and things like that, but at the end of the day, our clients are paying an agency to deliver an outcome, and that outcome is revenue, not popularity.

Connect with Tim Butler via LinkedIn or Website.

Jeff Tomlin: Well, I couldn’t think of a better way to stick a big fat period at the end of the conversation than that. That’s the three pointer from half court and it’s a swish. So hey, first off, I wanted to thank you a lot for taking time out of your busy day to join us in the podcast. I know everyone that we have on here are very busy people, and so I do deeply appreciate that. Tim, if people wanted to continue the conversation with you, how do they reach out to you?

Tim Butler: Yeah, they can get in touch with me via LinkedIn. I’m Tim Butler 101 on LinkedIn. We’ve got a podcast digital marketing answered, which is a different flavour to yours. And I have to say, we’ve not got quite the production value that yours has, Jeff. I’m quite jealous of that. But they can come to digital marketing answers and get insights there. And then obviously the classic is come to the innovationvisual.com website and actually engage with us there. There’s plenty of ways. There’s phone numbers and there’s forms, and we’re really lucky as a business that we do work with clients all across the world. We’ve got North American clients. We’re happy to have Canadian clients as well as the US one. It’s really good. So wherever you are, we can reach out to you. And interestingly, we’ve done a lot actually with other agencies, onboarding them onto data platforms and helping them with data platform. So we’ve actually, although we’re an agency and most of our work is directly with clients. We’ve actually had a lot of agencies come to us and say, okay, we want to do this within our own systems. How do we embrace that? I find that really interesting, and I love talking to other agency owners as well. There’s so much more to share. We’re not competitors all the time. Let’s share and help us build positively together I would say.

Jeff Tomlin: Fantastic way of thinking about it, Tim. It’s been an absolute pleasure having you on the Conquer Local podcast. I bid you a fantastic day, a great week. Hope the rest of your summer is amazing, and I hope to see you back on the podcast in the future.

Tim Butler: Yeah, I hope so too. Thank you very much. I’m honoured to be on your podcast. So thank you, Jeff, and hope to talk to you again soon.

Conclusion

Jeff Tomlin: The first takeaway from our chat is to Utilize Data-Driven Decision-Making for Profit. Don’t get lost in a sea of data. Focus on metrics that drive revenue and profit. Understand the customer journey and use data to optimize performance and avoid costly mistakes. Tim summed it up best by saying engagement isn’t everything; conversion and profit are the ultimate goals. 

The second takeaway is around Long-term Relationships and Multi-Channel Strategy. Building lasting client relationships is crucial for business success. Focus on understanding your client’s needs and delivering real value. A multi-channel approach is essential to mitigate risks from algorithm changes and ensure consistent performance.

If you’ve enjoyed Tim’s episode discussing Profitable Growth Through Data and Customer Relationships, keep the conversation going and revisit some of our older episodes from the archives: Check out Episode 727: The NEW WAY to Optimize Marketing Campaigns with AI with Lomit Patel  or Episode 726: Using AB Testing and Segmentation to Improve Customer Lifetime Value with Valentin Radu

Until next time, I’m Jeff Tomlin. Get out there and be awesome!