Paul: 0:29

And welcome back for this week's MarketPulse Pros and Pioneers podcast. This week, I have the pleasure of being joined by Paul Warren, founder and CEO at, and I love the title of your business, Paul, I absolutely love it, Making Websites Better. We overcomplicate so much in the marketing industry. It's refreshing to come across somebody who named their business, What it is on the tin. It's like Ron Seal. It's brilliant. Making Websites Better is for want of a better description, a website performance agency. It's a combination of website design and digital marketing. But your career goes back a long way. What, 30 years, Paul, the graphic designer.

Paul Warren: 1:07

Yeah, it's great. And thanks for having us on. I worked out the other day that I started my career in graphic design 30 years ago. I put a post on LinkedIn about it. I think it was my eng most engaged post this year so far. And hopefully'cause people were thinking maybe I don't look old enough, but I know I am. And it was, my dad ran a printing company and I used to go in with him at the weekends when I was a teenager to. I used to muck around on the Apple Macs back then and got a passion for graphic design. So yeah, going back quite a while.

Paul: 1:31

it's a fantastic skill to have. I wish I had more graphic design capabilities cause it's definitely one of my weaknesses. But you know what, aside from that you've also got your fractional CMO services. So you're launching PW and Air, Paul Paul Warren and Associates, which we've been talking about recently. And, but your goal is to help people reach their full potential, right? That's where you want to be, whether it's business, whether it's Professional, whether it's personal that's where you sit. Thank you very much for coming along to the show. I know you're also, this is your first podcast, I would like to see some of my MarketPulse audience giving some nice positive comments on Paul's performance here today. If he says anything he shouldn't, I'll just edit it out. I would say you'll get better. I don't get any better, so why should you?

Paul Warren: 2:16

my podcast cherry, so really grateful, man. Thank you.

Paul: 2:19

Awesome. Tell me then Paul, how did you get from being a graphic designer to run in your own web performance agency. Where what's that journey look like? Jeez.

Paul Warren: 2:31

Yeah, it's a long journey. I think there's some really interesting stuff to start with. Obviously, I had a career in graphic design. I was a really good designer from my teenage years through to my twenties. And one of my clients, my private clients, was spending an awful lot of money on printing. And I know a bit about print cause I was designing for print back then cause that would seem to be the one medium in the late 90s, early 2000s. And the client was spending so much money on print that we decided to start a printing company together. I formed a print company bought equipment, employed staff, got premises, did the things that you do, but learned very quickly, as all entrepreneurs do, that being good at one skill set does not mean you're good at the other 99 it takes to at least survive, let alone thrive. So that was a real eye opener. I've got some crazy things that I want to tell you that happened in our first week of trading, our building flooded. So I had a quarter of a million pound worth of printing equipment underwater that I just bought and hadn't even turned on yet. In our second week, there was a global economic crash in 2008. And my investor and my other two clients said, we need to pause all work. And by, by sec, my second month trading my, my investor and my only client went into liquidation. So I lost all my work. And my financial backing. So resilient, I learned from an extraordinarily young age in entrepreneurship. Amazing I survived that, that experience. And what it taught me was to go out and sell. Being a graphic designer and sitting in a comfortable office and being good at your skillset was great, but I had to go and get new customers and it wasn't necessarily first nature to me to do but we had paper, we had print machines and we had feet and we knew where businesses were. So we printed flyers, we went around and walked the boards of Hertfordshire and got to know businesses. And within a couple of years, we turned the business to really good profit. And we ended up winning a national print award for innovation. And I won a a contribution to the industry award in the print sector within my twenties. Purely, I think, is it a story of how we went from Probably should have gone bust, but had personal guarantees on stuff to, to thriving and becoming a really successful print company.

Paul: 4:22

It's amazing what happens when, you don't have a plan B, like when plan A is everything and you're willing to give everything for that, you can move mountains.

Paul Warren: 4:30

Most definitely. Most definitely. Yeah. It's you don't know what, you don't know things about yourself unless you're put in a resilient state. And I think a lot of people today talk about things like mental health, but actually talk to our team about things like mental resilience, because, I'd rather personally, I'd rather someone's run a business 20 years to run a country than someone that's good education because the resilience skills you learn from running a company or being in a senior position in any occupation It's amazing. Good foundation. But yeah, that business unfortunately didn't thrive after about four years. My, my investor came back into the play and it, and unfortunately that business did actually fail as a company. We, we moved on to doing other things. So I went into working with a lot of other sort of printing companies coaching them and consulting with print companies on what they do and trying to help them replicate what we were doing in terms of sales and marketing. And we were very innovative in terms of technology. So instead of buying a piece of software to make us the next moon peak, we went and built our own technology. So I had my first taste of development and that side of things. And after the consultancy side of things, I just looked at it and thought, Hey, Every web agency I've ever used, every SEO agency I've ever used, doesn't work the way I think they should. And that's where MWB was born a few years ago, was to try and do things the right way, in my opinion.

Paul: 5:38

I resonate very much with that and it's one of the main reasons why I ended up in my own business as well it's why I first took the leap out of corporate, because I was sick of being told what to do prescriptively, and then ended up in a startup where I had a lot of freedom to do what I wanted to do, but it was still somebody else's business and I just wanted to do my own thing in my own way, in a way that I thought was would make the most sense. And I don't know whether that's a neurodiversity thing for me. Certainly I think it is for me, but it's not necessarily for everyone. But I do think that belief in yourself comes from something you experience. Like it's amazing how many guests I get on the show that went through that 2008 crisis that went through the COVID crisis. And consistently everybody comes back to those as key points in their career of My business was, should have failed. My business was crumbling, but we did X, Y, and Z, and this is the skill set I learned as a result, and this is why I'm now successful. And I think there's something in that, if you can thrive in those environments, or at least survive in those environments, then you set yourself up to do really well when things are more stable and sensible. I'm not going to say golden,

Paul Warren: 6:52

No, definitely. We're in an uncertain time now. I think it feels like we've been on uncertain time for at least five years, hasn't it, haven't we? But I think a lot of clients ask us, Oh, should I stop? The common question is, should I stop marketing in a downturn or in a bad economic environment? It depends on you. There isn't a right answer such as. Oh, if you don't, people say this, don't they, if you stop marketing in a bad economic climate you're going to be in trouble, but it's not necessarily the case. It's case by case and it's business by business, I personally believe, but resilience, you can't you can't get from anything else to other than experience. Sadly, is learning from what doesn't work in marketing, what does work in marketing, what works in life and what doesn't work in life.

Paul: 7:26

What I find really interesting about making websites better is, obviously, you set out with the intention of being a web design and web development agency. And then found that digital marketing was something that you also needed to help your clients with in order to do the website side of things better. And I think that's interesting because there's elements of that mirrored in my own business. So walk us through, that journey from like, when did you first realise that you needed to offer something other than just website design and development?

Paul Warren: 7:55

I think we were on about our sixth or seventh SEO partner within about 18 months of starting to trade. But I realised that we weren't gonna find a, an SEO agency or digital agency that aligned with our values. It feels like the whole industry, it felt, this is not a wide statement. There are some great people, obviously, in every industry, but it felt like the people that we'd chosen to work with were more interested in the sale and more interested in the contract and weren't willing to qualify the work and put. The hard graft in finding out what's going to work. Things like SEO, in my opinion, is a bit of a dark art. There isn't, there's less tangibility to it than other channels. And people are scared of saying things like that because it might put clients off investing in that channel. Our values were extremely honest and, our brand values as a business are smart thinking. Passion, Empathy, and Telling the Truth. And for me, telling the truth as a brand value is not just honesty, cause honesty is, ah, we got caught out. That didn't work. For me, telling the truth and our team speaking to clients and the truth is, we don't think, all the data we're looking at, we don't think we're going to yield a result return for this client. So we're going to be upfront about it. And if we want to work together, that's the best way to start a relationship. So it came from values basically.

Paul: 8:59

I like that. And you also mentioned there empathy. I know from your LinkedIn profile, et cetera, you describe yourself as an empathetic marketer. You must be the only marketer I know that, that has that word empathy in there. I've talked to a lot of people who are business counselors, co marketers and similar, but where did the word empathetic come into this for you?

Paul Warren: 9:17

For me, I started to learn from the first part of my career being a graphic designer and always trying to think about the target audience, even though if the client briefing me wasn't so concerned, they wanted to say what they wanted to say. Through to then getting more into consultancy and working with print companies to coach them on being more successful commercially and understanding their point of view. And then now being more in broader marketing web and digital. Those sort of three experiences have led me to believe that like in my personal opinion, we can do our best work as marketeers when we really genuinely care about the person we're marketing to, not for. It's great that our client is telling us what their business does. We're never going to know their industry like they are ever. But it's fantastic to really genuinely think about the emotion, the rational and emotive parts of the Audiences, tastes and wants and needs and challenges and how do you solve their problem? So for me, empathy is driven around a user experience, customers experience, focus to everything that we do in marketing.

Paul: 10:34

And Leading then into kind of where the market's at right now, it's like, what's, what do you see as being the next big trend in digital marketing that's ahead of us? What's coming down the line that particularly makes you curious? I

Paul Warren: 10:48

One thing right now has got me really curious. I am not an AI expert whatsoever. And it is one of them, like everybody has a little dabbled and looks at things. But one I'm really fascinated with is Can marketing be flipped on its head? So we're going, we're moving into a world where things like cookie policies and advertising to us is being a little bit diminished. And we know this from running social ads and things like that is becoming more challenging to genuinely target people that might be interested in the product service. We're going to have phones and the next round of iPhones that have just come out have got your own personal AI. And I imagine every device we're going to have is going to have our own personal AI. I wonder whether we are going to move to an era of marketing where We'll be able to almost train through our behavior and give permission to our devices that I might go to a holiday to Thailand next year, or I might buy a car in spring next year, or I might do these things in my life. And the middleware, whether that's OpenAI or other, selling that algorithm to marketeers and advertisers that want to put the products and service in front of people. So almost moving away from a I, I once clicked on this product, now I'm going to see it forever, market, to expressing interest in a different way. I think that AI may be training ourselves to find advertise, products that advertise to us.

Paul: 11:57

suppose a knock on effect of that as well is that perhaps we'll find that more people have The basics of marketing in their pocket, as AI gets better and believe me, it's absolutely not there yet, but as it gets better, and we're talking about, OpenAI was talking about releasing a model that's a thousand times better by the end of this year or a hundred times better, I think maybe it was, but the model that they were planning for next year, because it's exponential in its development, The model for next year was in the millions of times better than what we currently have. That scares the shit out of me, I'm not gonna lie. Cause what we've got right now is pretty, pretty good. But, if I consider what outputs we get now, when I ask it a marketing related question, it's actually really sensible and decent and, can guide you through processes. So I think personally that the other advantage of all of this is that most it's going to democratise marketing to most people, which means I'd like to think, and I know it won't work this way, I'd like to think that marketing would get better because it would force more. Genuine marketers to rely on their genuine experience, knowledge and skills that make them a human. And it'll get rid of some of the crappier marketers that are out there that are just, to your point, they're just out there to make a book, put an invoice in, we'll lose you in three months but we don't care cause we've got ten other people doing the same thing. Is that something you can see coming or?

Paul Warren: 13:20

think quality is going to come into play. One of my things I think we'll probably come to is like some don'ts and that. And I feel like the AI space is where there's a lot of people rushing into producing content using AI. Great. But don't rush too fast. I still think that people want to buy from people and hence your business Javelin, like where you're producing phenomenal content for people professionally. And it's, it makes sense because there's connection and trust and authenticity. Yeah.

Paul: 13:43

Yeah, absolutely. Where does making websites better fit? Who are your clients? Like when you're, if you were to pick somebody who is an ideal persona,

Paul Warren: 13:51

We went through this over the last few months, looking at our brand and looking at how ideal clients are, and I think everyone wants to find like a sector or a super niche. And in our industry, the agency world, all the agency bodies say, oh, you've got to niche. So everyone does that process of thinking, who should I focus on? I think we've more, we've settled on, we can't really find a sector, we found state or stage. Working with startups is a personal passion. That's why I'm launching PWA, which we might talk about, but the making ourselves better, we're really good at opening up channels when we get to work with someone. Quite often people come to us and say, I need a new website. Obviously you can imagine giving our name, but we're very good then at looking at you, you're doing very well at getting people to your website through PadClick, for example, but you could be doing better organically on search engines and et cetera. So I think what we've found is our sweet spot being full service digital, is trying to find the right, most effective channel for our client. for their goals. So a scale up is what we call it. So a fast growing business that has clearly outgrown their brand or website, but just needs to now look at what's the most effective channel and complimenting their in house marketing team. Because obviously a lot of these businesses we work with tend to have marketing professionals in

Paul: 14:55

have some folks who are a little bit cagey, right? A little bit edgy. Is that a challenge that you come up against a lot? Is it? Do you get a lot of pushback from the internal market ears or are they pleased for the

Paul Warren: 15:05

little bit, but I think that comes down to it. I think that's that empathy word again, like if we can understand what they're trying to do in their roles, we want to make marketing managers we work with look like rock stars to their boss, right? So it's a case of, just trying to listen to what they obviously feel they're capable of doing in house and trying to find a solution that's best for them. Yeah, it's agile.

Paul: 15:23

So then going back to, we discussed kind of crisis points in economic times and things like that. As you said, like things aren't exactly the most stable at the moment. There's a lot of significant changes impacting on the market. Almost daily at the moment, like you never know where the next thing is going to come from. So for those people that are considering, what do we do with our market next in this changeable environment, what's your advice for them to help them make that decision as to what that needs to be?

Paul Warren: 15:52

Yeah, obviously it depends on the channel. We have a process to understand why you're marketing in the first place. So we've called it TRACK. So it's understanding the target audience, how you reach the audience, activate their interest, convert their interest, and keep their interest, but more importantly, right? So website's only a small part of that. It's part of, we're going to get them to a website, but there's a lot more to it. So I think that it's really important to consider those things. The other thing I think with marketing today is people are a bit afraid to experiment, and marketing is experimentation, really. It's building a brand, a product, or service, and putting it out there and hoping the market, reacts to it, and you don't know that they will or will not. So a big thing I believe is failing fast. So putting something out to the market a short campaign with a short budget and with enough data that you can test and learn from that. Rather than saying, I'm going to invest in SEO for 18 months and not know whether that's going to yield a result because you might not get the right audience.

Paul: 16:42

I think you hit the right thing on the head there in terms of enough data. And I think that's where an external market and consultant or support team can really add that value is. With the best will in the world, you can go out all sorts of different, I find lots of businesses just jump around Oh, we're going to try this week. We're going to try that next week. And even the best ones that have a plan sat behind that don't know enough about what the outcomes they're looking for that show. The likelihood to succeed in the longer run, because I think the problem with a lot of marketing is the results don't happen within that timeframe of that experiment, only indicators of the results. And so they've then got to choose have we got enough information here to gamble on this? Or actually do we just drop it and go with something else? And a lot of the time I think those indicators are hidden, is that fair?

Paul Warren: 17:31

I totally agree. And I think brand seems to be being pushed down a bit in the priority list for SMEs where, obviously every small business and every young marketeer tends to want, believe that everything's tangible and it's instant gratification where we're in now. So if I want something delivered, I can get delivered right this second. I don't have to wait a week anymore. There's things like that where we can get access to information quickly everywhere in our lives now. And marketing has become, I think, the same way. Brand is a bit ignored in that growing your brand isn't just having, a billboard, it's not just having a TV ad there's far more to it. And it's extremely hard to measure where, so younger marketers and small business owners tend to lead towards, if I spend a pound on ads and I get 120 back, I can keep doing that. And I'll invest in the channels that are a bit more tangible in data. But brand we all know is what will grow and scale a business without you doing too much work, if you get it right.

Paul: 18:20

Yeah, I have to agree and I think that I was talking with a guest on the show last week, Chris Reeve, who was talking about something similar in that you know, now is the time. If you're active on LinkedIn, like never before have you been able to grow organically in the way that you can on LinkedIn right now, certainly magnified by the, Focus on video that LinkedIn have and the ability for that to create what I call trust at scale, that the fact that you're really only having a one to one conversation like we are right now, but this is going to be seen by hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands of people. Who will all gain that trust from watching it as if it was a one to one. So I just think there are so many people out there and I think this extends beyond the time you started your own business. I'm a big advocate for your personal brand is the one thing that will survive everything. If you're in corporate right now and you can build a personal brand. When you move to start your own business, it comes with you. If that business fails, it comes with you. When you start your new business, it comes with you. And when you retire, it comes with you. And it's the one thing that you can focus on building that will, it's just like a savings account that you never need to take out of, but it will give you interest. I think that's key for a lot of people that, that probably you're working with as well, right? That personal brand element.

Paul Warren: 19:38

We didn't necessarily want to offer social media as a service. Social ads comes into our warehouse, I think, in terms of skills, so we didn't really necessarily want to offer it. But when we started to work with business leaders and realised that they're better at representing their business in some situations, like digital marketing, when you think of personal branding, than the business. We've got one particular client, that's one of Lord Sugar's businesses, and we work with his son really closely on their social media content. And the business content, He's reaching the business audience, but him as the thought leader, the CEO, the expert in the business, his content hits and it got much higher engagement. We're not, we haven't got goals on this particular client, a client like eCommerce, like measuring click throughs and whatever, but the data we're looking at is that the personal brand content works better. And it's really effective for that client and many others we work with from the leader of the business to gain that trust and authenticity.

Paul: 20:25

And I think that's what makes it so hard to do without that external support is just keeping that faith in the process, that it will lead to the things that you want to achieve. And if I think of the amount of times I almost come unstuck in the first two I spent six to 12 months of building my LinkedIn presence and the fact that I was in a business and being held accountable for growing sales within the business meant I needed to stick with it. Otherwise, I probably wouldn't have if it was just something on a personal mission. So I think having that accountability is crucial for personal brand.

Paul Warren: 20:59

Yeah,

Paul: 20:59

Circling back to a couple of the questions that I generally ask all of our guests, Paul the first one being, what's one piece of marketing advice that you would give to business owners now around strategy, tactics, et cetera, that they're probably not considering? What's underrated in your opinion?

Paul Warren: 21:19

Underrated focus, I think. We're guilty of it cause we're full service. And our name started off indicating one service. So it's something we're looking at ourselves, but so many businesses I work with don't focus on what they're really good at. And I always give this an energy that if you imagine that a business is a Swiss army knife and you, on your homepage, you've got all your blades out, right? You're telling, you're trying to cram everything into the person's psyche. Like we do all these 45 services. Great. Are you an expert in any? What's your sharp blade? And I feel if you can Try over the years, first few months and years in a business to identify what your sharp blade is. Lead with that, but don't ignore obviously everything else that you do. And obviously that mainly applies to multi service, multi faceted services businesses, but we see that a lot in the professional service sector where, you know, a law firm or something or an accountant will focus on one thing, but not won't focus on one thing. They'll focus on too much perhaps. Another one is, Again, I think this comes down to audience focus is we tend to, with terms of strategy, so many people that will put on a website, they're still in the printing industry, so they would talk about their certificates, their accreditations, their ISOs, things, and their equipment. I've got this print machine, I've got this thing. For me, that's like going out for dinner with the missus on a Friday night, but phoning the restaurant first to ask, has the chef got a health and safety certificate? And what oven manufacturer do you use? And what are the pots and pans made of? I don't care, I care about the experience and I think that a lot of people get confused by broadcasting, then marketing, I want to say this, but actually you've got to consider what the audience is interested in.

Paul: 22:45

That's a really important point for people. And also to consider that the audience that you have right now probably aren't the audience that you want to have. Again, that focus and belief in the process that if you create the right content and it is targeted at the right people, that they will eventually find you and start to align with you and support you. But it's tough going because there's, it's lagging indicators, right? Like you, you don't find out that's working until you've been doing it for three, four, five, six months. But yes, I think on the focus side of things, there are a lot of businesses that are, I'm unfair, like I can be the same, right? The shiny object syndrome's real for me. I'm a DHD, and I'm like, oh, new tool. Are you kidding me? Let me play with this for six days when actually I should just be doubling down on the stuff that I'm already doing really well, because that's delivering results. And it's hard to just keep that question in your mind do I need to be doing this right now? Is this aligned with where our future's at? And I think, again, to your point, that's where having that external advice can be really useful.

Paul Warren: 23:46

yeah,

Paul: 23:46

Flipping that question on its head then, what's one thing that you wish businesses would just stop doing? What's not working or maybe never worked?

Paul Warren: 23:55

Oh, that never worked, that's a good one interesting. I don't know how to answer that one. I think, not having a strategy, not having a budget, even if you are a marketeer, you need to define who your audience are. Perhaps I say audience, people just completely forget about their audience and they think that I sell red pens to people that want red pens. I'm going to broadcast that I make red pens better than anyone and cheaper than anyone. And perhaps just think about the fact that. Who wants a red pen? Don't broadcast. So I think that'd be one thing. I think there's an over, over reliance or overcrowding in terms of people rushing to AI at the moment that worries me a little bit where people are just trying to produce mass content cheaply. And I think more authentic content's better. There's a tool I love at the moment called VideoAsk, and it's a chatbot for your website, but it's frequently asked video answers that you would record like this. And I think it's far more authentic if the founder were an expert in the. That area of the business is on that page, answering customers questions. But I see a lot of clients that are trying to cut corners and use these AI video bots to produce it. And I'm thinking you're going to get on the first Zoom call and they're going to know that was a bot. And it just, I think it's just, you can cut corners in marketing to save budget, of course, but there's places to cut corners.

Paul: 24:59

I think you can get caught up in the silver lining around the shiny tools that you're looking at, but if you look at it objectively from a client's perspective and wonder to yourself, if the client realises this isn't what it's supposed to be, or it's not doing what it's supposed to do, or even if it is, what sort of representation of my business does this give? If I'm being disingenuous with my video messaging, for example, they're going to assume that I'm disingenuous with my reports. Not consciously maybe, but subconsciously there's going to be a red flag there for anyone. And yeah, I think for a start, I think all that sort of stuff's got quite a long way to go yet. There's some really interesting growth in that area and I think it will come. But I think it will probably move to a

Paul Warren: 25:43

There's some good execution, I'm sure,

Paul: 25:45

Yeah.

Paul Warren: 25:46

but it worries me a little bit about the mass AI driven content. It's surely going to drive quality down and quality is going to affect trust, right?

Paul: 25:54

It's funny. I was talking with a business on this show. One of our first episodes was called content at scale. They've now ironically rebranded that because they don't want to be seen as content at scale anymore. They're I can't remember the name. I'll have to post it in the links. And I was talking with their technology officer and basically what the whole point was, yes, we want to help agencies create SEO quality content, but we want to help you do it at an experienced person's level. And we only want it to be about 80 percent there because we want you to be able to finish it off. It's not about us creating that content that just gets pushed out to the end results. It's about, we want to, Shave 75 80 percent of the time off the time it takes you to do that task. Give you all the tools you need to go I've got everything all in one place now. All my research is done. This is done. That's done. Now I just need to tweak this and make it human. And I think that's a really powerful message. Even the AI companies are starting to recognise that actually, This is doing more harm than good. And by interjecting that human in the middle, you can really augment what that human's capable of. And I use AI all day, every day. Like I love it. I'm very cautious about putting raw AI outputs in front of anyone. Because.

Paul Warren: 27:11

Yeah, I'm personally more of using it for business automation and market automation and tasks, but stuff that's really important that represents your brand and authenticity, it just worries me when clients say, I'm going to Get some AI videos produced. I don't think that's one particular, it doesn't feel like it's there yet, but there's so many that it is. AI is great at many content production spaces.

Paul: 27:31

fantastic. Paul, I have thoroughly enjoyed our chat today. It's been great to catch up with you. Thank you very much for breaking your podcast virginity with us.

Paul Warren: 27:39

Thank you.

Paul: 27:39

if people want to get in touch with you and find out a bit more about PWA or making websites better, or just reach out to yourself what's the best way to do that?

Paul Warren: 27:48

LinkedIn is my home. It feels like, so definitely look us up on LinkedIn. Be great to connect. And the make a wishlist is better if that's, there's nothing there for people then. I'm also launching PWA, which is a more of a fractional CMO. So trying to help the people between small businesses and the scale ups like get to the point where. They can then really scale. So yeah, I would open to the chats with anybody and be great.

Paul: 28:08

Perfect. And I'll get the the links for those and I'll pop them in the show notes. So if anybody wants to find out a bit more, just have a read down. It'll be there somewhere. Thanks for your time, Paul. Great to have you as a guest and I hope you have a cracking week. Thanks for coming along and watching us. I'll see you next week on MarketPulse Pros and Pioneers.