Season 1 - Episode 16

[00:00:09.550] - Gordon
Hello.

[00:00:10.040] - Taylor
Hello.

[00:00:10.510] - Gordon
My name is Gordon from Drayson Design.

[00:00:12.400] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:00:14.680] - Gordon
And welcome to "This Week With Taylor and Gordon," weekly podcast and video where we talk about the things that have been happening to us in the last seven days as self-employed company owners. So Taylor, what have you been up to this week?

[00:00:33.850] - Taylor
So this week I have been working with a Start-Up company.

[00:00:38.570] - Gordon
OK.

[00:00:39.700] - Taylor
They were, they're based in Dubai and I met them, not at a kind of local event. I met them online, with a tool called "Cafecito."

[00:00:53.080] - Gordon
Ok.

[00:00:53.080] - Taylor
Which is a kind of starter, it's another Start-Up where it connects people all around the world who, for people who work from home and work by themselves. And it kind of gives them a way to have a coffee break. Cafecito is another word for a type of coffee. And it lets them have, you know, half an hour coffee break with someone around the world. I think I've spoken about it before, I've met people from Colombia, America, Denmark, Sweden, India, Dubai. And so I've met loads and loads of people. And I was talking to this guy and he's a project manager. And he got headhunted in to Dubai, and he said he was starting up a Start-Up on the side and that he was trying to design his, re-do his website, his landing page, but he couldn't get the way he wanted. So I just said, you know, "if you need any help, let me know." And about a month later, I sent him a message saying kind of, "how are we getting on?" Because I said to him, I'll give him a message in about a month's time when he was looking for, more working on it.

[00:02:00.220] - Gordon
Catch up with him.

[00:02:00.940] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:02:01.270] - Gordon
Yeah.

[00:02:01.990] - Taylor
And he said, "oh, I was trying to do it yesterday and I thought of you." So I kind of messaged him at the right time. And so I've been working on that. And what he does is, he finds the flaws in products, more specifically apps, so mobile apps so that can be iOS or Android. And it's just before you're about to go in to launch it onto them, into the stores, making sure they're regulated and they're following the right kind of procedures and all the rest of it.

[00:02:30.850] - Gordon
And all the rules that are in place.

[00:02:32.890] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:02:33.232] - Gordon
Yeah.

[00:02:33.340] - Taylor
And making sure your user experience and journey is up to scratch and that there's nothing you've forgotten or missed, because as developers you're more thinking of how it works rather than the design, most of it, if you're a one man person really. So, yeah, I've been helping with that. And he gave me the file, so all I had to do was pretty much build it straight from a figma file, which is a mock up tool.

[00:02:57.550] - Gordon
Bit like Adobe XD, which we were talking about the other day.

[00:03:01.090] - Taylor
So that's what I've been working on. It's been really interesting and it's a different way of working because it's a lot more, they're much more design focussed and whereas I'm just the developer, you know, everything's been thought out, basically.

[00:03:17.530] - Gordon
So they've basically just given it to you as a 'this is what we need' and you've gone off and duplicated it, but in code.

[00:03:23.860] - Taylor
Yeah. And he said that it looks like I basically just uploaded a jpeg of the designs he had, which is nice to hear.

[00:03:32.440] - Gordon
That's exactly what you want.

[00:03:33.430] - Taylor
And I got a bit of a mention on the website, in the footer I've got my company logo and I've also got, it says 'coded by Taylor Drayson.'

[00:03:41.080] - Gordon
Which is always nice to have but not always possible. So that's a really good thing. So it's been one of those weeks. Both of us suffer quite heavily from hay fever and this week has been particularly bad for us, hasn't it? We've had lots of very hot weather, which, when you're working from home, means that you don't necessarily have the advantage of air con like you would do in an office block. You have to sort of make do with what you have. And we have fans in this house, which is fine. I have a filtering fan, so it'll check the air quality.

[00:04:25.390] - Taylor
Humidifier type thing.

[00:04:26.800] - Gordon
No, not a humidifier. I think humidifier sort of adds vapour to the air. What it does is it takes all the pollen and filters it out so that when the air comes into the room, it's sort of pollen free.

[00:04:39.640] - Taylor
Ok.

[00:04:39.640] - Gordon
And that's been helping me a lot, to stop me sneezing. But I mean, I know one of the things you've been doing this week is working later at night when it's a lot cooler.

[00:04:50.050] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:04:50.380] - Gordon
And sort of sleeping or just sort of...

[00:04:53.710] - Taylor
Lounging around.

[00:04:54.280] - Gordon
Lounging around during the day when it's just too hot to do anything.

[00:04:57.730] - Taylor
I don't like to do work if I'm not 100% focussed, or in a comfortable state to be able to do my best work because I don't feel like I can charge my clients, because I'm not going to produce the best work and it's you know, it's going to be half arsed in a way because it's not going to be my best.

[00:05:15.570] - Gordon
And that's why working at night is a good option, especially when you've got really, really hot weather. I mean, we've had...

[00:05:23.190] - Taylor
It's more humid in the U.K. compared to like 30 in England compared to Spain is a lot different because of the humidity in the U.K..

[00:05:31.890] - Gordon
Very true. So this week I saw something online and I thought, "oh, now that's a really good idea. I haven't done that yet. And I have a feeling that my customers would really appreciate this as a service." So what I've done is I've, I've got Taylor involved as well. I've created or I'm creating, because it's not finished yet, pages that I can then use for companies that I work for when I'm doing design. And this is going to be branding pages. So it could be that the logo has been designed by me or I have high res files for the logo. It could be that I have particular colours that are being used in the business for branding for, you know every company has a... If you look at some of the big companies, every single colour, whenever they use a red, it's always going to be the same red. And that's part of the branding.

[00:06:37.290] - Taylor
Brand guidelines then.

[00:06:38.230] - Gordon
Brand guidelines. That's pretty much what I'm building, a brand guidelines page for different companies. If there's any photos or stock photography that they use. These are all going to be on a page along with headshots of staff members, that sort of thing, and any designs that I do for them in PDF format and JPEG format so that any time they want, a client can just log in to a secret area on my website and they will be able to see all of their brands. They'll be able to download anything that they need and use it, without having to come to me and say, "you know, that design you did for us about sort of two and a half years ago? Can we get a copy of that?" Because that then needs me to go digging it out; bring it up; check if I've got the typefaces installed, etc, etc. And it's a lot of work. So by doing it this way, anybody involved in that company can have access to these files and then they can just download them as they need to. And it's something I'd never really thought about, but something I think is really important. And Drayson Design is going to be one of the first brands that I put on there so that if I ever need to give access to my branding to another company, maybe they're doing an advert for me or something like that, a banner, you know, it could be anything really, they can have access to that so they can see what colours I use, they can see what graphics I've paid for and what I already have access to. So if that's the sort of thing that would be of interest to you, please get in touch. It's something that's not finished yet. We're still going with it. So, you know, contact me and I'll let you know when it's ready. Taylor, tell us about how you get your work.

[00:08:31.440] - Taylor
So most of my work comes through network marketing or referral marketing and specific. And it's really important that especially if you're self-employed and you work from home or you work alone, is that you make sure you're socialising, even if it's not kind of networking, networking, I'm selling to you, I want business; even if it's just socialising with that group of people to make sure you're not just being on your own all the time.

[00:09:01.110] - Gordon
Well, also, they're like minded people, aren't they? Because they're business owners and they like networking. So you've got a lot of crossover interests there.

[00:09:09.990] - Taylor
Yeah, and you kind of basically you're just building your connections and your relationships with these different people. So I went out for a nice meal in Orpington with a couple of my BNI members, and it was great fun, we, you know, everyone was like drinking and stuff. Everyone was laughing about things that had happened, because we're now on Zoom and things like that, and how it's different to in face meetings. And it was just really nice because you got to see a less professional side where you can all relate because obviously you're all like just people trying to get by really, and it was really nice.

[00:09:46.890] - Gordon
And the nice thing is you went to a restaurant, so therefore you had the opportunity to take up the government on the eat out and the government picked up £10 of your bill.

[00:09:57.510] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:09:57.960] - Gordon
Which is great. So that's helping the restaurant as well.

[00:10:02.700] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:10:03.720] - Gordon
Yeah. All good.

[00:10:05.040] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:10:05.250] - Gordon
But networking works for you and it's a nice thing to see people outside of work as well.

[00:10:10.770] - Taylor
Yeah, definitely.

[00:10:11.970] - Gordon
OK, so the last thing that we're going to talk about today, I kind of sort of touched on a little while back, but it's 'remarketing.' Now, this is a very clever way of targeting people with your advertising. And the reason it's called remarketing is because you are marketing to people that already know about you or have shown an interest in your product, or service, or treatment. And the way it works is you, let's take Google as an example. There are lots of different platforms for advertising we'll take Google. Facebook is very similar, but Google is the one we'll talk about today. Google remarketing allows you to put a pixel onto your website. I should explain this right?

[00:11:10.060] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:11:10.060] - Gordon
OK, so a Google pixel is a one by one pixel, so it's a tiny little square, which is a bit of code, and it's given to you by Google, and you put it on the places where you want to track people. Now, it could be that you put them on all of your Web pages, on your website, and anybody who goes on to this page, Google will then be able to track them, not as a 'this is Taylor visiting a website,' as a 'this is Person X who's visiting a website.' They don't know who you are, but they do know that you've been to the website. And that means that they've basically held their hand in the air and said, "look, I'm interested enough in what you do to actually come and look at your website." And then you can put that person into a target audience and remarket to them, which means when they go to other places like Facebook or to other websites where there's Google ads using 'ad sense,' they know that you're interested in whatever service it is you're selling on your website where the pixel was, and they will then show ads to that person based on where they've been in the past. You may have found this has happened to you. You've been and looked at a website and then all of a sudden, everywhere you go on the internet, this business seems to follow you and advertise to you. And you're thinking, "how do they know that I went to this website?" Well it's down to remarketing, that's all it is, really. And this is a really, really clever way of marketing to people, because they do say that there is a certain number of times that you have to contact someone about a service, product or treatment before they'll buy. Now, the average number is 7, but it does completely depend on the cost of the item. For example, if you're selling a tub of paperclips, you're going to have a very different number of interactions before someone's ready to buy, than if you were selling a £35,000 car, for example, that could require a lot more points of contact. And the points of contact can be different types of contact. It could be email; it could be adverts; it could be a telephone call; it could be a letter; it could be lumpy mail, we'll talk about lumpy mail in another episode. But remarketing is a great way of getting your message in front of people who've already shown interest. And if you don't know about remarketing, I highly recommend you research it, because if you've got a service, or a product, or a treatment that you have people coming to your site and they don't buy on the first, second, maybe third visit, maybe it's the fourth or fifth visit before they actually buy, remarketing is a really good way of speeding up that process.

[00:14:32.430] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:14:33.810] - Gordon
And that's that's all I need to say, really. It's a big, big subject. The important thing is getting that pixel onto your website so you can build an audience. And I think, in fact, I don't know the rules currently, but I think you have to have a certain number of people visiting your website before Google will allow you to remarket. So you've got to have a fairly busy site before remarketing becomes available to you. But go do some research, have a look and see if it's the sort of thing that would be of interest to you. As a children's entertainer and a magician for adults' parties, this is the sort of thing that would work really, really well for me. I haven't done it for that side of the business, mainly because I've always had phone calls. It's very rare that I've had to advertise that for, well for a long, long time. However, we're in a pandemic and magic business is non-existent at the moment, so it could be something that I will be looking to do once we get out of lockdown and I want to build up my shows again. So now is a really good time for me to actually get that remarketing pixel on my sites. And that is all I have to say on remarketing. Have you got anything to add today, Taylor?

[00:15:55.270] - Taylor
No, that's everything.

[00:15:56.910] - Gordon
Well, as always, thank you for joining us. If you'd like to follow us or talk to us about anything we've said, then we can be contacted on our Facebook page, which is /thisweekwith or we're on YouTube, and again that's /thisweekwith.

[00:16:16.560] - Taylor
And we have our website: thisweekwith.co.uk.

[00:16:20.250] - Gordon
Yeah. And all of our latest episodes and past episodes are available on there. Apologies to those who were there at 1pm last week to see our episode on Facebook. We had a bit of a technological streaming issue that was down to a third party, not down to us. It did eventually appear on Facebook, but not until about half past fours, so I apologise if, apologies if you were waiting for that. Hopefully this one's all coming out fine. I was going to say something about, oh yes, I was going to say if 1pm on a Friday isn't the best time for you, please get in contact and let us know. We chose 1pm on a Friday because it was just after lunch for us, and it was sort of the end of the week. But it could be that, you know, a later time or even an earlier, Friday is a day I think we want to stick with because it's the end of the week; we can talk about everything we've been doing during the week. But please let us know which time suits you best to watch it live. We'd love to have people join us live on these on these video and podcasts. So that's it. Thank you very much for joining us. We'll see you next week. We're leaving it at one o'clock until we make a decision another way, but till next week at 1pm, it's goodbye from me, I'm Gordon from Drayson Design.

[00:17:46.470] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:17:49.020] - Gordon
Goodbye.

[00:17:49.680] - Taylor
Goodbye.