Matthews on Marketing Interview

Summary

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The Digital Marketing Podcast – “Matthews on Marketing” Interview (April 3, 2016)

Episode Overview

In this episode, host Ciaran Rogers talks to Tim Matthews, Silicon Valley marketing leader, author, and founder of the blog Matthews on Marketing. The conversation explores Matthews’ foundational views on the practice of marketing, the enduring relevance of the four Ps, debunking myths around “no marketing” startups, the blend of traditional and digital marketing strategies, and practical advice for marketers on testing, optimization, and building foundational skills. The episode also discusses Matthews’ book, “The Professional Marketer,” and his most valued sources of ongoing inspiration.

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Main Discussion Points & Insights

1. Defining Marketing: Beyond Promotion

Timestamps: 00:51–03:52

• Tim Matthews emphasizes the importance of the classic “four Ps” (product, price, place, promotion) as the true pillars of marketing, highlighting how most people myopically focus on promotion alone.
• He credits Jerome McCarthy for this enduring framework, noting its ongoing relevance:

  “A lot of us only think about the promotion part of marketing. But if you think about what you’re building, where you’re selling it, and how much you’re selling it for, there are so many levers in marketing to pull using those concepts.” (Tim Matthews, 01:12)

• Applying the four Ps is about diagnosing business challenges and choosing the right lever to remedy a specific issue (e.g., not every sales problem is a promotion problem).

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2. Debunking Marketing Myths in Startups

Timestamps: 03:52–05:22

• Matthews critiques the narrative in Silicon Valley that some unicorn startups “do no marketing” when in reality they excel at forms of marketing that aren’t always recognized as such, e.g., content or influencer outreach instead of traditional press releases.
• He lampoons the perceived division between what counts and what doesn’t:

  “Just because you don’t go to a trade show and go to a meetup instead doesn’t mean you’re not doing marketing. You’re just doing a different form of marketing.” (Tim Matthews, 04:13)

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3. Rethinking the Digital vs. Traditional Divide

Timestamps: 06:01–10:44

• Both host and guest underscore the need to meet audiences wherever they truly are, whether in digital or physical spaces.
• Matthews stresses pragmatism over trend-chasing, using platforms only where their audience actually spends time:

  “Don’t be led by the shiny new object just because somebody else is doing it. Make sure it’s applicable to your marketplace because you’ve only got so many hours in the day and so many dollars in your budget.” (Tim Matthews, 06:06)

• Revival of “retro” tactics (e.g., direct mail, scratch cards) can cut through digital fatigue—especially with smart digital integration like QR codes.
• Measurement is key:

  “Now you can combine the old and the new with a QR code or a promo code or some kind of offer... you can come up with some really innovative stuff.” (Tim Matthews, 11:00)

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4. Site Optimization and Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

Timestamps: 11:41–16:18

• Matthews shares that CRO is a major focus for his team, using tools like Optimizely to experiment constantly with website changes—sometimes yielding dramatic results:

  “On our website, we changed the words ‘talk to sales’ to ‘get quote’ and we saw over 200% increase... because that’s what they wanted. They didn’t want to talk to a salesperson... they wanted to get a quote.” (Tim Matthews, 12:15)

• He advocates for continual testing and using case studies from platforms like Conversion XL and Unbounce for inspiration.
• The importance of optimizing user experience post-click is often underestimated:

  “If you’re going to get people to your front door and they’re not going to walk in, then what’s the point?” (Tim Matthews, 15:16)

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5. Bridging the Creative–Analytical Divide

Timestamps: 16:18–17:15

• Matthews contends there’s “room in a marketing team for the extroverted promoter... and the guy in the back room tinkering who’s really going to make your stuff look better and yield better.”
• He stresses the balance between creative messaging and analytical optimization, seeing value in both for strong marketing teams.

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6. Tim Matthews’ Top Marketing Resources

Timestamps: 17:31–18:50

• If stranded on an island, his essentials would be:
  1. Conversion XL
  2. The full catalog of TED Talks
  3. Every book by David Ogilvy
• He values Ogilvy for direct marketing and copywriting, drawing parallels between mid-20th-century direct response tactics and today’s digital optimization:

  “So much of digital marketing today has to do with headlines, subject lines, hooking people. And that is not something that’s new.” (Tim Matthews, 17:52)

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7. Timeless Lessons from Classic Marketing

Timestamps: 18:50–22:03

• Early direct marketers eagerly split-tested headlines, calls-to-action, and offers—much as modern digital marketers do, but at a much slower pace. Matthews encourages learning from these pioneers.
• He lauds tools like Crazy Egg and Hotjar for providing data on user behavior, paralleling the careful customer analysis of classic direct mailers:

  “It’s really cool now that you can use these tools to watch customer behavior. And then if you talk to your customers, you can find out what was it that was said that really intrigued them.” (Tim Matthews, 21:10)

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8. “The Professional Marketer”: Book Origins & Purpose

Timestamps: 22:03–26:02

• Inspired by gaps in marketing knowledge among new leaders and by “The Professional Chef” (a chef’s reference handbook), Matthews wrote “The Professional Marketer” to be a practical A-to-Z reference.
• The book teaches fundamentals, not trends:

  “I can teach you the fundamental concepts, the four Ps for example, that will allow you to then put them together in a way that makes sense for your business.” (Tim Matthews, 23:20)

• Matthews intentionally avoids over-focusing on fleeting tools, pointing out that while context changes, enduring concepts like strong ad copy are always key.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Four Ps:
  “It’s the best framework I’ve ever seen for how you think about marketing writ large.” (Tim Matthews, 02:45)

• On Startup Marketing Myths:
  “I kind of want to debunk this concept that it’s all about just building a great software product… and I don’t need marketing, which has never been the case for any kind of product.” (Tim Matthews, 04:50)

• On Staying Focused:
  “Don’t be led by the shiny new object just because somebody else is doing it.” (Tim Matthews, 06:06)

• On CRO Discovery:
  “We changed the words ‘talk to sales’ to ‘getquote’... over 200% increase… people responded well because that’s what they wanted.” (Tim Matthews, 12:15)

• On Classic Lessons:
  “There’s a lot to be learned from the guys who in the 50s, 60s were really pioneering the concept of direct marketing. And we have it so easy now because we can get almost instant feedback.” (Tim Matthews, 19:22)

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Resources and Where to Find Tim Matthews

• Matthews’ blog, book, and talks: Matthews on Marketing (26:08)
• Tools mentioned: Optimizely, Conversion XL, Unbounce, Crazy Egg, Hotjar

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Takeaways for Listeners

• Think in terms of all four Ps, not just promotion; use the best lever for your context.
• Cut through marketing hype—great brands may not “advertise” but still work hard at marketing.
• Blend traditional and digital approaches, but always let the customer’s actual behaviors guide you.
• Always measure impact, leveraging modern analytics tools to combine creativity with proof.
• Build your skillset in both creative messaging and analytical optimization.
• Fundamental marketing principles remain constant, even as tools and trends change.

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Transcript

[A]

Welcome to the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by targetinternet.com hello and welcome back to the Digital Marketing Podcast. My name is Kieran Rogers and today I'm really excited. We've got Tim Matthews on the line on Skype. Tim, tell us more about yourself and your background and what you do.

[B]

Sure. I run marketing for a software company out here in Silicon Valley, far away from where you are now. And I spend my days trying to acquire leads from any channel possible. And when I'm not working in marketing, I am writing about marketing. I write quite frequently on my blog and I've also got a book called the Professional Marketer, which is the A to Z of marketing.

[A]

Great. And I want to talk to you about your book. But before we get there, I really want to explore what your definition of marketing is with our audience because you've written quite extensively about this. And I think that when many of us think about marketing, we tend to overlook an awful lot and just focus in on maybe one or two aspects of it. So could you run through us with that?

[B]

Absolutely. It's a topic I'm very passionate about. There's the concept of the four Ps of marketing, which some of you folks may have heard of, some may not have. And it's a great way to think about what you should be doing in your job. And the four Ps were created by a gentleman by the name of Jerome McCarthy and they are product price, place and promotion. And to your point, Kieran, a lot of us only think about the promotion part of marketing. But if you think about what you're building and where you're selling it, which is place, and how much you're selling it for, are you the premium brand or the low cost brand? There are so many levers in marketing to pull using those, using those concepts.

[A]

And so, I mean, how do you apply that in day to day marketing? How does that kind of pan out?

[B]

Well, what I do is I think about, you know, what am I trying to accomplish? Which sounds like an obvious thing to ask yourself. But there are a lot of ways to achieve your goal. For example, if you're trying to sell more of your product in a certain market, should you be doing more advertising, which is promotion, should you get more partners or more distribution, which is place? Is it a pricing issue? Certain markets are more price sensitive than others? Or is it the product itself is not the right fit for the marketplace? There's famous stories of products from the US that just didn't work in Japan. They seemed alien to the marketplace. So how you apply it depends on your business. But if you think about the problem you're having, those are the four levers, as I call them, that you can move to try and make some headway in the marketplace. And I think it's a really, it's the best framework I've ever seen for how you think about marketing writ large. It's a great framework to try and problem solve in because you can always try something that's not typically what you would be doing, which is not advertising or more emails or more trade shows, and see if it has an impact on your market and on your product.

[A]

Jerome McCarthy came up with these four P's of marketing.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

He's a fairly epic figure within marketing. But he was writing about this when it was quite a while ago, wasn't.

[B]

It, mid 20th century. So it's, you know, it's been around for, for quite some time as a, as a formal structure and, you know, like a lot of things that, you know, smart people figured out, all we need to do is remember to use them. Right. We don't have to create, create them from, from, from scratch. Right. So if we just step back for a moment and I will say that, you know, I am, I have mixed feelings about things you learn in business school as they apply to the real world of marketing. I think many of us have that same sentiment, but this is one thing that I think all marketers can benefit from.

[A]

Definitely, definitely. And you wrote a really fun blog post just after Christmas for any of you that haven't found it. Matthewsonmarketing.com It's Tim's blog and he comes up with some really great, great posts. But I particularly like this one, which was entitled Startup Companies that say they Do Know Marketing Are Full of it. Explain yourself. Explain yourself, Mr. Moore.

[B]

Double entendre intended. Yes. So here in Silicon Valley, we're surrounded by unicorns who apparently are making lots of money by doing no marketing. And this is a hot button topic for me because in most cases those companies actually are doing marketing. They're just doing it in a different way. And so I like to remind people that obviously it's my profession. I feel passionately about it. Just because you don't go to a trade show and go to a meetup instead of, doesn't mean that you're not doing marketing. You're just doing a different form of marketing. And I think that's what McCarthy was talking about. Figure out what makes sense for you and your market people. For example, Think that just because they don't do press releases, they do blog posts, that they're not doing pr. Well, you are doing PR because reporters these days tend to follow companies on Twitter or follow influencers and read blogs as much as they read press releases. So I kind of want to debunk. I kind of want to, I want to debunk this concept that it's all about just building a great software product, which might be a Silicon Valley thing. And I don't need marketing, which has never been the case for any kind of product.

[A]

Yeah, certainly I've heard people say we don't advertise and I get that. But I think sometimes people see advertising as marketing and the two are. Well, they're related, but they are different activities, aren't they?

[B]

Absolutely. If you think about some well known famous companies, Rolls Royce come to mind in your neck of the woods. They don't do a lot of advertising, but they're a worldwide brand. And so they rely more on exclusivity, on the power of their brand, on the product, on a price premium. So there's, you know, thousands of examples you come up with. And they're just doing marketing in a different way, a different marketing mix, as it's called.

[A]

And I guess it's all about finding where your customers are and, and reaching that way.

[B]

That's right. This is another pet peeve of mine, talking to people in Silicon Valley, typically board members, who ask you about what you're doing on Snapchat. And my first question is, well, are our customers on Snapchat? And if they are, then I'm all over Snapchat. But if they're not, I'm going to ignore Snapchat. And I think people tend to become smitten with the latest, greatest technology. And maybe it's because we're here in California, we hear more of this, or it's probably a worldwide thing. Don't be led by the shiny new object just because somebody else is doing it. Make sure it's applicable to your marketplace because you've only got so many hours in the day and so many dollars in your budget and you can just waste a lot of time by being, as we say here in the US because we're not on the metric system, a mile wide and an inch deep.

[A]

So, I mean, I really like that approach. I've been having some interesting discussions with my colleagues here in the UK about the traditional marketing versus digital marketing. And there tends to be this view that you have to separate the two out, which fundamentally I kind of find that hard to do because for me marketing is all about great communications, about finding ways of communicating with target audiences that are important to you. And I just haven't yet seen a consumer who only lives in a digital bubble. They interact with the real life world. And actually we're all used to hearing, well if your customers are on Facebook, you should be, you know, interacting with them on Facebook. But actually customers are still maybe paying a fair bit of attention to that doormat at home that the post arrives on or on TV or actually God forbid, newspapers and magazines, last time I checked, they still get sold and people still read them.

[B]

That's right, somebody's reading them. Yeah. I mean here for example, where I live, around the San Francisco area, you can't walk 100 yards without seeing an Apple billboard. Apple has bought up, it seems like half of the outdoor advertising space in some of their key markets. So obviously that's working. Yeah, I mean they're all over the place. Maybe it's different, maybe it's different in the uk.

[A]

Yeah, well their adverts are so stylish. Has it really lifted the neighborhood? Has it affected real estate property prices?

[B]

Yes, actually it's in demand by the residents to boost their property values.

[A]

I've got an I house to sell.

[B]

That's right. Or are you near the Google billboard or the Apple billboard or the Samsung billboard? It's going to make a big difference. But you're right, I mean typically now as a consumer you're hit by all kinds of media, podcasts, television, YouTube, you name it. And you've got to figure out where the preponderance of your users time is spent and try and hit them there. And you're right. In many cases there are some really smart, great looking direct mail pieces that are being sent around that are quite effective because people don't read email anymore. So people going back to the old way, which is sending someone a nice letter or a nice looking package and those do have decent conversion rates.

[A]

So are these techniques that you employ with any of your colleagues in Silicon Valley? Do you think this could be the new trend, kind of retro style marketing retro style?

[B]

So I have myself done some direct mailing, in my case I've done here in the US FedEx is the most, you know, most popular rapid delivery service and especially for executive audiences, but not just for them. We've, we've seen some pretty good lift with direct mail via FedEx and I guess it's not mail. So direct delivery and especially if you think about, you know, if you're selling, you know, in our case, we're selling to the, the lowly IT guy who doesn't get a lot of glory. You know, they don't get a lot of packages, so if you send them something nice, the odds are they're going to open it. And so, you know, just think about how to, how to stand out from the crowd, which is something I know Apple, for example, is big on. But, you know, what could you use as a retro technique that's different? We're actually thinking about using, I don't know what you call them in the uk, but those scratcher cards like the lottery cards. Yeah, scratch cards as a way of just doing something different at a meetup. People don't get lottery cars or scratchers, and they're super cheap and they're a lot of fun. And so, yeah, think about how to make what's old new again and different. And then of course, you can combine it with digital. You can have everybody wins QR code on the scratcher. So there's ways to combine old and new. So the fun thing about marketing now is there's so many possibilities, so many tools, the stuff is so cheap, relatively speaking, that you can have a lot of fun. As a marketer these days, I do.

[A]

Often wonder whether the reason why traditional marketing techniques have really fallen out of favor is it's so damn hard to measure return on investment. Unlike digital. When you start to combine the two, hey, that's a real sweet spot, right?

[B]

Well, there you go. Because I have to say I'm going to sound a bit hypocritical because on the one hand, I'm really enamored of some of the old techniques. I love print magazine. My father was a typographer. On the other hand, I really can't stand marketers who come in and try and BS the room without real numbers. So I'm a numbers guy as well. So to your point, yes. Now you can combine the old and the new with a QR code or a promo code or some kind of offer, and there's some amazing historical examples of combination of television and print, for example, that have worked really, really well. So if you take that analog and apply it to web plus print or mobile plus web or whatever it happens to be, you can come up with some really innovative stuff.

[A]

What are some of the most interesting trends in marketing that you're seeing at the moment? And think of our audience, what should they really be sitting up and taking notice of, in your opinion?

[B]

So what I'm paying a lot of attention to these days are CRO. So optimizing my website. So conversion rate optimization. We use a product called Optimizely quite extensively and it's fascinating to watch how people behave on your website with different treatments, little things like changing button colors, changing the words on a call to action. I'll give you an example. On our website, we changed the words talk to sales to getquote and we saw over 200% increase when we wrote getquote which we didn't think was going to work as well. But people responded well because that's what they wanted. They didn't want to talk to a salesperson, no offense to salespeople, but they wanted to get a quote. And so that's kind of fun because you can experiment. You know, we right now have about eight different experiments, as we call them, running on our website to try and optimize the traffic. So that's, that's really cool. And that's that, you know, that's for example, technology that was out of reach of most companies, you know, even three, four years ago, but now you can get for a very low amount of money per month using a product such as optimization. Optimizely.

[A]

Optimizely. As I understand, it's relatively easy to set that up. You don't need a lot of technical experience.

[B]

You don't really. You just have to have ideas, ideas for experiments and a bit of fearlessness just to try stuff. And it's great because it runs for a while and it stops itself when it has a result that's meaningful. So you can run it as long as you like.

[A]

And where do you go for inspiration for experiment ideas? How do you approach that?

[B]

In addition to talking to my peers and kind of talk to people in the company, there are some great blogs. There's a favorite of mine called Conversion XL which talks about different experiments that people have run. And it's a very detailed, long read blog. Unbounce, for example, is another great blog. So so much information out there. So you can get a lot of great optimization ideas very quickly. You can look for similar kinds of businesses to yours and see what others have done. There's so many great case studies. And that's the thing going back to our earlier point about having the data Conversion XL runs experiments and then shows you the results so you can see literally what they did and what the results were in great detail.

[A]

And I guess to a certain extent your website almost becomes a product that you're enhancing and improving when you start running these kind of.

[B]

Yeah, it's interesting that it's half product, half place in our case because we're a SaaS vendor. It's really a continuum. People go from the website, our front door, into the registration pages and then into the application itself. So we're trying to make that path, so to speak, as smooth as possible and as inviting as possible. In fact, we work very closely with our product team to make the transition very smooth, make the product look the same, remove obstacles, automatically fill in forms if you've already got the form fields, rather if we've already got the data. So yes, it is in fact kind of becoming more of our product.

[A]

Okay, so you really putting a lot of time and effort into really refining the user experience once you've got people to your website.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

I think a lot of people miss out on that aspect. They're so busy funneling money into advertising to get people to the site, they. They forget about the backend level stuff. It's really important, isn't it?

[B]

Yeah, it's a great point. Yeah. Because if you're going to get people to your front door and they're not going to walk in, then what's the point? And you can make huge, huge gains with some of these more subtle changes to your site and some really obvious stuff. Trying out a video to see if it improves conversion rate. And you can, you can show a 5, 10%, 20%, 100% increase is significant. You can show real dollars against that?

[A]

Well, absolutely. I mean, to get 100% increase, you'd normally need to at least double your advertising budget if you're just focusing on funneling more bots into the site. So these numbers, actually when you start, they sound small and they don't sound as sexy. And in my experience, marketing teams aren't as excited by the option of conversion rate optimization because it doesn't have big numbers and big spend. It doesn't feel like we're doing enough. It's just kind of tweaking it. But actually that's not really the case, is it?

[B]

Yeah, I think there's room in a marketing team for the extroverted promoter who you send in to impress people with the cool new programs and the guy in the back room tinkering who's really going to make your stuff look better and yield better. It's somewhat of a mind shift for a lot of marketers who are so used to BSing their way through their budget meetings or their quarterly board meetings. And if you can show real numbers and a cool concept, you can do both. I mean, I like to think we've got nice, creative and a very well optimized site. So just make sure that, you know, you mediate between your ad guy and your metrics guy. But, you know, it's going back to my initial introduction. I'm kind of half math, half English, the language that is not the country. So I really enjoy doing the real analytical optimization stuff as well as working on the messaging and the site and making things creative and cool. There's room for both.

[A]

Fantastic. I really wanted to grill you on your key sources of inspiration and I thought long and hard about this question. Tim and I decided that I'd send you to a desert island and ask you which three digital marketing sources of information you just couldn't do without.

[B]

I see. So apparently there's WI fi on this desert island, is that right?

[A]

Absolutely, yes. WI fi and plenty of electricity.

[B]

Got it. So my first one's going to be Conversion xl, which I mentioned earlier, because there's so much information there and you can read on and on and on. So that would be number one. Number two, I think I would say I'd want access to all the TED talks ever done. That's less marketing, more business. But there's so many interesting creative people who are speaking on TED Talks that I think I would have a lot of great ideas if I were to actually be there on a desert island with hours and hours to consume. I think that my last resource would actually be an old school resource, which would be every book that David Ogilvy ever wrote. So. David Ogilvie? Yeah, he's a, you probably know, legend in advertising. That's appealing more to my creative advertising side. He's also a master of direct marketing and copywriting. And so much of digital marketing today has to do with headlines, subject lines, hooking people. And that is not something that's new. And I think that whatever inspiration and knowledge I could glean from David Ogilvy, I would definitely want to get.

[A]

I mean, a lot of these traditional marketing masters, when they cut their, their teeth on kind of trade advertising and advertising in the classifieds. And what fascinates me is you look back at what they were doing and they would run experiments on calls to action and different headlines, different copy and different lengths of copy and all the things that we're doing now in digital, the difference was that each iteration took them months. That's right, because we can turn this stuff around sometimes in a matter of hours.

[B]

Yeah, there's a lot to be learned from the guys who in the 50s, 60s were really pioneering the concept of direct marketing. And we have it so easy now because we can get almost instant feedback. Whereas as you say, they were waiting for weeks to go by for the mail to drop, for people to call, people on the phone or what have you to actually see what happened.

[A]

And how did those guys go about sorting out the width from the trees when it came to analyzing their data? Did they have any cool tricks up their sleeves that we could apply? Because I think that's one of the challenges with this stuff is you get a lot of data and it can be a little bit overwhelming when you first embark on it.

[B]

Yeah. So first of all, I want to mention a great book called Being Direct by Les Wonderman, who along with Ogilvy, they were contemporaries and they both pioneered and there's some great stories about literally selling mail order rose bushes via letters, direct mail. And they spent a lot of time sitting down with the business owners just talking about customer profiles and successes and really digging into the business. And we try and do that here and talk to the salespeople. What was it? What word did you say that cause the customer to pay attention or to light up? And I think those are the nuggets you can glean, but it takes a lot of time either talking to customers or talking to salespeople. So one way to separate what works from what doesn't is to really look at your successes. And it's not going to be easy. It's going to take a bit of sleuthing. And the other thing now is you're asking about tools before I'll bring that back here. There's some amazing digital tools now. Two of my favorites that we're using currently are Crazy Egg and Hotjar. And Crazy Egg will give you a heat map of your website and show you exactly where people are clicking, looking, scrolling, scrolling past. Hotjar literally records every session on your site. It's kind of like recording phone calls. You can see what they did. Did they stumble somewhere? Did they not know how to fill out a form field? So it's really cool now that you can use these tools to watch customer behavior. And then if you talk to your customers, you can find out what was it that was said that really intrigued them or made them pay attention. And that to me, those signals are what makes great marketing. Because if you can find one or two of those you can add into your emails or find a way to make all your landing pages look like the one that really worked, you're going to be so far Ahead of your competition, you're going to be getting a better yield on your advertising.

[A]

Okay, fantastic. I really want to move on to your book now. So you wrote this book, the Professional Marketer. Tell me, how did that book come about and who's it for?

[B]

Yeah, so I had two inspirations for the book. I've run marketing teams for over 10 years now. And one day I thought to myself, how is it all these directors of marketing don't know about blank? How to write a press release, how to build a budget, how to write a positioning statement. And I had this realization that most marketers are never really trained, they're just thrown into the job. And so I thought what's needed here is some kind of handbook that I can give to someone and say, you don't have to read the whole thing now, but everything you're going to need to know is in this book. More from a pragmatic approach, not a theoretical. And I went looking for this book and there are a lot of great individual business and marketing books and lots of great blogs. I couldn't find an A to Z a soup to nuts book. And so that's when I began to think about it. And then what really crystallized it for me was my wife is a former professional chef and she's got a book called the Professional Chef, which she got. It's essentially the textbook from the Culinary Institute of America, which is a well known culinary school here in the US and they don't teach you recipes in the book, they teach you the fundamentals. They teach you the mother sauces, different methods of preparation, how to use heat, and you then put all these together to make whatever you're going to make. And so I put those two ideas together and came up with this handbook that teaches you the fundamentals. I'm not going to tell you how to sell cars or sell software or sell candy, but I can teach you the fundamental concepts, the four Ps for example, that will allow you to then put them together in a way that makes sense for your business. That was the inspiration for the book and how it came out as a handbook format.

[A]

Fantastic. You now obviously work within, you do a lot of digital marketing. Is this very relevant for digital marketers? And what kind of feedback have you had from people in digital marketing about the book?

[B]

I've had great feedback and what I typically find is people refer to the book for things like building competitive positioning, building a budget, writing a release, thinking about how they're going to deposition their competition. I had to resist the Temptation in the book to talk a lot about things like hotjar or Optimizely or mobile trends. I mean, you know, God knows there's news every day about that. So I, I tried to make it relevant without putting. Without locking it in time, so to speak. I do have examples from the 1800s, 1900s, the 20th century, and more digital stuff. So I tried to pull the best from throughout history that I knew about, But I still believe that there's so much that's relevant. So, for example, if you write bad ad copy, which we talked about being something that was really perfected in the 1960s, it doesn't matter if it's on your digital phone or Snapchat or Facebook or wherever, it's not going to yield. So the techniques really are relevant. I will say, however, there's a bias against looking backward in marketing, and maybe it's true of lots of professions. And so I would just caution people don't get too caught up in the modern marketing technology and just look for great examples wherever they are. Online, offline, today, last year, 10 years ago. There's so much to steal from.

[A]

Absolutely. And a great communication, it transcends whatever this year's trend is, doesn't it?

[B]

Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, the, arguably the greatest commercial ever made was the, you know, the Apple introduction of the Macintosh. You know, nothing has transcended that. And that's what, 20 some years old now, Maybe longer than that.

[A]

Great. And I love the book because it's got a fishing analogy on the COVID So it's got, it's got a hook and fish. And anybody that listens to this podcast know I love, I love fishing. And so it's got to be good from that perspective. Never judge a book by its cover, but we like this cover.

[B]

Excellent. I'm glad you like it.

[A]

So if you want to find out more about you and what you do and the book, how do we go about doing that?

[B]

The best place to go is my blog, Matthews on Marketing. Two T's and Matthews. And you'll find my blog, my book, my talks, interviews. So that's the one stop shop for Tim Matthews.

[A]

Fantastic. Well, Tim, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. And yeah, I've been really, really interesting learning more about you and what you've been up to.

[B]

Great. Thanks so much, Kieran. Appreciate it.

[A]

Thanks for listening to another episode of the Digital marketing podcast brought to you by Target Internet. If you'd like to get more information on the show, get hold of back issues of this podcast or get details on any of the links we mentioned, please visit our website at www.targetinternet.com. if you've enjoyed the show, we would love to read your feedback. Please rate us in itunes or even better, write us a review. Or if you have any questions, please get in touch. We'd love to help.