Leveraging Your News Section for Growth and Engagement | Into the VOiD Podcast (Episode 6)

Neil: Hello and welcome to episode six of Into the VOiD, a friendly guide to Digital Marketing. I’m your host, Neil Cooper, as always, joined by Chris Carter. How are you doing, Chris?

Chris Carter: I’m good thanks. Yeah, Good. The sun’s shining.

Neil: Yeah. It is. The weather’s been nice, actually. Not to put a date on when we get these things done, because –  

Chris Carter: Spoilers, the suns out, we’re normally cold.

Neil: Yeah i’m going to try and get this one out faster, but yeah let’s not talk about that, anyway!

However, today there is a change in format. If you watch the video versions of the podcast you’ll see we’re seated a bit differently, and it’s actually worked out for the better with lighting and stuff.

That’s because for this episode, we finally made the jump to having our first guest in order to tackle a subject that every website or business that uses a website should get familiar with right away, and that’s ‘Leveraging your news section for growth and engagement’, and in layman’s term, that’s to improve your online presence by blogging and content sharing.

So without further ado, we’d like to introduce our first guest on the Pod, Director and Founder of Osborn Communications. Experts in content and PR, Chris Leggett. Can we get a round of applause, please. There you go.

Chris Leggett: Thank you very much. That’s great, thank you Neil, thank you Chris, and i’m delighted to be your first guest. Known you guys a long time so thanks for having me.

Neil: Yeah, we’ll be getting into that. Yeah, it’s worked out well because – well, I suppose we’ll go over it in the podcast, but we was in a position where we needed to get ourselves out there and we ended up networking with yourself and now it’s come full circle and it’s nice to be able to be in a position where we can have that conversation on camera, on audio.

Yeah, so jumping into it right away, basically could you give a brief overview of your background and what it is you do – and anything else that you want to share at that point? Because we’re going to be quizzing you for the rest of the episode.

Chris Leggett: So, to say thanks again for the chance to talk not just to you guys, but to your audience out there. As you described Osborn Communications has been running for five years now. I launched the business to provide affordable expertise for businesses looking to reach new audiences, reach as many people as possible, but also do it in a targeted and strategic way.

So, my background’s in journalism. I started out as a trainee reporter, worked all my way up to working at the BBC news website in London before relocating to the Midlands. I was in publishing for about 22 years – 23 years, the latter part of that was in Marketing and Comms, and so it was a natural progression to launch my own business, offering those services for businesses who I think [if] there was a thread through them – I don’t know whether you guys would relate to this, its businesses that almost feel as if they’ve been overlooked or they feel like they’re underdogs in their sectors and they want to get the news and their successes out there in order to grow. 

So, we see news sections of websites being really important to that, particularly in such a fast changing world but, myself and my team, we provide a range of SMEs and larger brands with some targeted expert, support around news writing, social media management, public affairs, dealing with people like local MPs or people in their ttrade organisations and then external media.

So it all starts with news and it all starts with stories and I think that’s where a lot of business owners, marketing leads and people out there who want to drive success and growth can use the new section of their website to really, reach a much wider audience and improve their search rankings.

Neil: Yeah. I think, if we talk about – a little bit about our relationship with them, we was in a position where we wanted to basically share what we’ve done, with our clients and we also wanted to, basically just win awards, which we went on to do anyway, and to do that, we had to leverage your services because obviously there’s a ways and means of writing PR, there’s a ways of means of advertising yourself to apply for these – it’s not just awards, but just to get in the public –

Chris Carter: To get the exposure I suppose. 

Neil: To get the exposure yeah, and we was in a position where we was at a loss, we didn’t know what to do. We was obviously writing about ourselves but.

Chris Carter: I would also say we wanted to work – because we’ve been doing our own articles for a while. We also wanted to get some PR that were picked, was being picked up by news agencies out there and different websites to link back to our website. So we get that backlinks because we wanted to increase the Domain Authority of our website as well.

Neil: Yeah we’ll get into that in a bit but yeah, with regards to just – we’ve all worked with the Black Country Chamber of Commerce, for example. We in 2023 – So that was our first time actually, applying for an award and it was through yourselves, wasn’t it?

Chris Carter: So Chris (Leggett) wrote the award bid for us.

Neil: And in the lead up to that we had a few other news stories, because – at that point you looked at our news feed, it was more or less like, we were trying to hit the key points of ‘How To’s’, understanding in our sector.

Chris Carter: ‘X’ vs ‘Y’, that kind of stuff.

Neil: And then it was when we worked with yourselves that we then started putting PR out that was regarding, working with the businesses that we had and shining a light on basically that business and what the problem we were solving. Right?

Chris Carter:Case Study PR, I would say, Chris.

Chris Leggett: Yeah. I think, what [with] you guys particularly being a digital-led business, with the nature of what you do, you were building a really good community, got your followers on social media, people who knew you and engaged with you. The big headache we all have as business owners is, how do I reach people who don’t know who I am. How do I reach people who are probably looking for somebody like me or what my business offers, but they haven’t heard of us yet, or they haven’t realised that we can address the challenge or situation that they’re struggling with, and obviously with you guys, that’s about how do I have a, a really good website that’s found in search, that I have a partner that understands my needs and also can do an efficient service that I can afford, but can do it bespoke for me in anything specific.

So talking about successes you’ve done with other businesses, explaining where you are, who you are, there’s always going to be hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people out there who haven’t heard of a business and we’ve all got short attention spans. You need to keep saying it not just once or twice, but again and again and again and again and that’s where it’s easy to perhaps think of the channels.

So we need to populate our LinkedIn feed, our business company page every day at 8 a.m. but if that’s not reflected on your website, you’re arguably sharing better stuff on one of your channels than your own website reflects. What’s going to happen when somebody’s three months down the line comes on and doesn’t know that, for example, with you guys – I mean, I think we had it on within a day that you’d won that award. 

You know, because it’s a big thing, but it needs to have a home that’s permanent, because social media moves on so fast. So yeah, the situation you came to us with was really, really stimulating one for us to work on because you had all the material, you just didn’t have the time or perhaps the expertise to understand laterally.

It’s not just what can we say about ourselves on our channels, it’s what do people out there going to [want to] publish about us on theirs and how do we meet in the case of the awards, what the chamber’s looking for in order to honor a really good business, it’s obvious to say it in retrospect, but it all starts with that nub of we’ve got a challenge here about how we reach more people.

It’s easy nowadays to think, well, we’ll do it on every channel that’s going to and not do it on your own home, if you know what I mean. Your own website.

Chris Carter: Yeah, I would say it’s – PR is a specialist skill. Completely different to just writing a blog post. It’s not just about writing a blog post, it’s about writing a post and a piece of content that will be likely be picked up by the people that you want it to be picked up by and you have that experience to know what they’re looking for, and also submitting it to them as well, because, you know.

Neil: Yeah, the submission process. The times that we’ve tried to just, put something together.

Chris Carter: Yeah, back in the games days, we’d create our own press releases and they’re basically just, you know, dust in the wind.

Neil: Go into the ether.

Chris Leggett: And that’s a difficult thing for people particularly who’ve got the tools to write marketing copy. You know, if you’re using AI to write stuff about your business, you’ve got more tools than ever.

With earned coverage. So stuff that content that’s going to appear in – on a news website, on a trade sector website, even on the organisation like the Chamber of Commerce and industry sector; I mean, you guys work with lots of manufacturers who may be members of export organizations, whatever that is. There is a line that you need to cross, which is how does that content become suitable for them to publish under their name, and that’s the thing where, big claims, bold things that you can’t really back up. You know, “we’re the number one”, “We’re the best”, “We go above and beyond”. 

That’s that’s not really editorial copy. So the reason, it’s great to talk to you about it today is that our business has evolved over those five years, and we are seeing more companies than ever. They want to get the News section of their website sorted. They want a plan, a program of content that really hits home. They want it to be shared through their social channels, shared through their partnerships and then if there is opportunities for earned coverage in a leading local business page of a – either on a website or a newspaper, that is important to them. But if you go back 15, 20, even 25 years, most people could only communicate about themselves to big audiences through external media and actually the process has flipped. We now start with your own channels and work out, but the thread that runs through it is; What are the best stories? What are the things that are of the most interest? What are the things that people are going to take the time to come andead? That bit doesn’t change.

But you need to have your game head on in terms of what is it I need to do that’s different for this, because just writing a story that reaffirms that we think we’re great is not – you know, everybody should be writing that or trying to be.

What has some substance and what is most important to your end audience and I think with you guys, the fact that you’d had the external endorsement, you know, because you’re a young business that’s growing, the fact that in the case of the Chamber of Commerce, which has been going since the 1880s, the fact that you are now…

Chris Carter: Has it?! Wow I didn’t know that. Congrats Chamber.

Chris Leggett: You are now an award winner from something as established as that. It’s a real badge of honor. But then we also had stories that we put out around, client wins you’d had, your growth, the fact that you were scaling up and taking on bigger clients or working with leading brands. When you’re kind of focusing on the day-to-day, sometimes you can lose sight of that.

So yeah, a bit of lateral thinking and a bit of expertise to see what those opportunities are in people. That’s what we enjoy because we can apply that.

Neil: Just to touch on that. Those are the things that then influenced us, with regards to what we share and what we put out and what we consider news and it’s something now that when we speak to clients, it’s like, what have you got? So when we’re working with clients, what new stories do they have? We need to do blog posts yes, yes, yes. But what about you and your business and what do you – What have you done? Is there been charity that’s taken place in your in your establishment? Have you won any awards? Is there anything we can pull [out]?

It’s influenced us directly to ask our clients, are they doing anything for occasions coming up and stuff, so yeah, it’s had a massive effect on us and how we deal with clients.

Chris Carter: Client Spotlights as well. 

Neil: Yeah. Our client spotlights. Like, we know we should have been talking about clients anyway and what we’ve produced to help them solve their issues and problems with regards to the digital work that we do. But just understanding the fashion in how to put that together, and that’s came from working with yourselves and yeah, it’s really – it’s a nice carry isn’t it – sort of thing, and it’s nice to have that conversation with people.

Chris Carter: We can see the value of it.

So what are the businesses that you predominantly work with or who are the decision makers that you find you have the most – you can add the most value for.

Chris Leggett: So that’s a great question. I think where we – where we find a lot of commonality is people who are tasked with marketing for an organisation. So they may be head of marketing, director of marketing and communications, or even the one person in the business who’s looking after marketing in smaller companies or business owners, people who are looking to promote themselves across different channels.

Most people fall within those things but what they do have in common is a lack of resource in-house to be able to take on a project like planning a six month, communications strategy. Just as with you guys who [they] probably don’t have somebody who can do a really, really good job of a website, that they’re all going to be proud of.

Time poor, you know, they don’t have – they want somebody they can trust to get on with it, and they might well be feeling a little bit overwhelmed that in this day and age, you know, every six months there’s another channel, there’s another audience growing on another platform and I think there’s that anxiety about not wanting to miss out on an opportunity or feeling that they want to have something covered off.

And I think that’s where we add value, and I know that’s where we’ve been able to complement one another in introducing people we work with, who are able to open up new conversations because there’s definitely an audience out there for people who want to improve themselves, improve their lot of their business but sometimes it can drop down to like number 12 on the company to do list and it’s easy to give it another six months but it never goes away.

Chris Carter: I also think if that person is in that position and they bite off, too many – try and do too many things at once, bite off too much – more than you can chew. You said that to me about something different yesterday. You end up not doing any of it. So, getting help to do one thing and then doing the other thing, and then you’re doing four or five different things, it’s making a difference.

Chris Leggett: Yeah, it is a service there where we – to complement and make the business look as good as we can see it is but it needs time. It needs inputs. It needs – sometimes the material might not be obvious, but we can draw that out of them. But it never stands still. I mean, only yesterday, a long standing client who we’ve worked with for five years in facility services, said to me, “should we have a TikTok channel?” And you think that was impossible to predict even a couple of years ago, so I never feel like it stays the same.

But the stories, the value of is there something really good we should be saying about your business and sometimes it might be better to say less, but do it well and say the right things than it is trying to just have a constant feed of stuff. But where TikTok and other things get involved, it is interesting. Sorry go on.

Chris Carter: We always get the; when we’re building websites for people, and we say can you send us your social links and we’ll get like, “Oh, which ones do I need? I’ve got a Twitter, I’ve got a Facebook” and I always go back to them, well, are you using them. If you’re not using them don’t have them.

Neil: Yeah it’s a difficult one. I think that’s something that we might elaborate on later as well.

Chris Carter: Are your clients there as well. Because if your clients aren’t on TikTok, there’s no point in you wasting your time on TikTok.

Neil: It’s a double edged sword because if you don’t do it and your client does and then for whatever reason, they end up getting good. It’s it’s like us, we’re not on TikTok, but we’re starting to move into that short form content just to show what we do in a more consumable manner. Yeah. 

Chris Carter: With reels.

Neil: Yeah, and it might get to a point that we have so many that it’s like, why not? But at the moment we can’t – I think it’s consistency. One and doning is not not the case.

Chris Carter: So yeah, I’d rather not have a channel than put one thing on there and not use it for six months. I think that was my point but yeah.

Neil: Okay. So I think we’ve started to answer some parts of the main discussion with that. So we’ve introduced yourself and what you do what you alleviate. We know you’re good at it because you’ve helped us. You’ve helped other people that we know of. So the main discussion being the crossover between us is why manage the news section effectively right.

And in previous episodes that we’ve had, we’ve talked about the strengths of relevant content [I am stuttering, sorry]. Relevant content and touched on how it can show authority within your businesses sector like we’ve just touched upon, right, so this may have been answered partially, but there’s other parts of the, question I want to try and coax out probably.

So with regards to what you do for your clients and what you’re trying to educate them on with regards to the use of their copy and PR, in your words could you explain, why you think it’s crucial for businesses to pay more attention to their News section?

Chris Leggett: Yeah. So there’s a whole series of answers but I think the most important one- couple, for this conversation are if you are going to invest the time and effort into having a website, doing it well, to then expect it to stand still – I mean, you guys are always launching new landing pages or new content sections for your clients because –

Neil:  We’re trying to.

Chris Leggett: Google is always going to or search engines are always going to favor the principles of it no matter how much the algorithms change or the advice changes is… the big search engines favour websites that are authoritative, updated regularly. People are engaging with and linking back to and that are, quite frankly, where there’s some visible effort on them.

I think that’s really stripping it back to the basics. You are going to be quite lucky if you launch a new website on the 1st of January and your website grows incrementally by doing next to nothing. Just because it was so well searched up, set up with search, it’s going to have to be quite a big website with lots of things on it.

So the very key thing is making use of your investment and getting a return on your time. I think it’s having that, almost like a river of news and information that may just be once a month, twice a month, but you can see it flowing through so that the search engines pick up on the fact that the website is being updated, it then feeds your social media accounts and people most importantly like it and respond to it, which can be a real overlooked benefit of it.

But you actually have something that people like on social media. For many people, they’re just kind of rolling the dice and trying to think of something each week. I think there’s kind of the new arrivals risk that if your website, somebody lands on your website today and one of the most recent pieces of news you have is ‘we’re still operating under Covid 19 restrictions’.

So like are you – if you’ve had a referral or recommendation, you may persist. But I think on the law of averages that’s going to sow a seed of doubt of are these people still trading well? Is everything okay? Are the lights still on there? These are extremes, but they are things I think we can all see in our own habits. And I think it’s also that thing of as a team feeling more confident, no matter whether you’re a four, five, fifty, one hundred and fifty, a thousand people, employees, your suppliers, your clients, they want to know what’s going on in a positive way so that, that relationship, which is the key to them working with you, either buying from you, supplying you, or working within the business – could be stakeholders outside of it. It could be people who just just want to see, a business that they know and trust doing well. If you don’t use your News Section, answering it in other ways, you’re going to have to put a lot of effort into other places – We talked a moment ago about, you know, video led things like that takes time, takes editing.

You know, inviting people in, trying to do guided tours to explain how the business is changing. Why don’t you just use the news section of your website and tell as many people as possible and then watch that grow?

Chris Carter: And also reap the benefits of the SEO that you’re going to get from it as well.

Chris Leggett: Yeah, because if you are… a VOiD Applications customer would expect when they buy a website from you, that you’re going to put the time into their researching their search performance and seeing what other people in the sector are doing, and then the hard part, which is creating pages, you guys consider it par for the course, but for outsiders, how do I create a page that pulls all that together?

If you can create news that mirrors that, has the right search terms in, reflects what your business is about, this is keeping it to real basics. It’s going to compliment that and grow your authority, particularly if people like it and link back.

Chris Carter: On an SEO point of view. If your website’s got the foundational tick boxes checked, you’ve got good content for your services pages. You’ve got your Google My Business accounts and stuff like that. The the next step and the only step is to start adding content to your blog, alongside case studies, but you need that churn of constant new content, talking about like what we said earlier, ‘How To’s’, ‘X & Y’, good news stories.

We’ve just done a post about – sorry, we’ve just done a website for X, Y and Z. Those things all feed through to your news and it helps show that your website is alive.

Neil: Alive, up to date.

Chris Carter: It’s an authority as well. It’s an authoritative place to be.

Neil: Yeah. With that being said as well, looking at the numbers with regards to our site, the high engagement areas are, our Portfolio, Case Studies and the News Section and it goes to show that they are important. They are like your end game. You have to keep my maintaining these parts in order to draw people in.

And just on the topic of seeing things that are out of date, we’ve took over a website and – not that it’s the same level or to do with it, but in the footer, the copyright was 2016 and you look at that and you immediately – if somebody knows – if somebody is just like looking at the website and they scroll and see that immediately, they’re going to think, are these guys still even in business?

And then if your news is out of date as well, it’s like – so there’s there’s little bits and bobs.

Chris Carter: Yeah the last news post you put was, you know, 2021 or something. It’s not a great look. Now a lot of people do take the dates off of them as well.

Neil:  It’s slightly cheating but it’s just those things that you need to look at. Because then when you couple that with your social accounts or where people can find you, it’s all moving, then they can see you’re updating, you’re alive, and you’re reaching out. So yeah, that was a great answer. Thank you.

Chris Leggett: I mean we’re gonna talk about some of the things – I mean, the big question for anybody watching this is what sort of things should I be putting on [your website]. We’re going to do that in a moment but yeah, I think that a lot of companies kind of know the sort of things they should be doing because they’re doing it on their socials already.

But to follow, I mean, I’ve seen examples where, they have been regularly, updating LinkedIn, taking on this new person, got this new manager, and then when I did a video call with a prospect who I had met two years earlier, and I said – you know, I was going through the new section to prepare to this.

“It’s great to see that the young apprentice who I met is still in the business.”, and they went, “Oh no, he left about 18 months ago”, I said, but he’s in like, number three on your News Stories and they went, “Oh no, it didn’t work out. That probably shouldn’t be there”, and it’s like, it should have been superseded by something else.

But this is – I felt really awkward because I’d spent about 15 minutes talking to this chap and he’d long gone, and they said, actually, a lot of the things on there are now wrong and you think, well, okay, you’re going to have to sort that at some point.

Neil: It only takes a glimpse, doesn’t it, to just just scan that area, that page – 

Chris Carter: To put you off a little bit.

Neil: Yeah, I mean, just from, if you’re the website owner as well, and you’re minding your own yard, basically. I mean, you can do all the work in the front garden, but if your back gardens overgrown, or even the reverse actually.

Chris Carter: Don’t bring my garden into this please.

Neil: But yeah that is the point, and it only takes a glimpse if you have access to your own site, you can hide those things. I mean, it’s not the answer, but just understanding what people are going to see as soon as they come onto these landing pages or News Sections.

Chris Leggett: And I think, you know, it’s so hard to get people’s attention nowadays. So if you do go to a networking event – I mean, so many people are still putting a lot of time and money into trade shows, but they don’t kind of do enough to say, we’re going to be at this show in February.

Your News Section of your website should do reflect some of that, but then, you know, you’re not kind of… if the website or your, wherever you host your news is not being updated regularly and we’ll come on to that later, It’s proportionate to how much news you’ve got and how much you want to do it.

But you can’t really blame people if then they get the wrong end of the stick or they overlook you, or they think, I’m not going to stop here for long, I’ll just have a skim about it because you’re not putting on as you’ve just alluded to –  I always go by the rule that people are pretty superficial in that they can only judge you by what they can see.

And if it’s something that just confuses them, jars them, they think I’m pretty sure that, that person’s left in there or in the most recent things they’re telling me about their business, you’ve probably probably just sown seeds of doubt.

I don’t think we should dwell too much on the negatives, because there’s so many good things that businesses have to say about them. We’re going to come onto that. It’s a massive opportunity to almost have like a fantastic place to say all the best things about your business on your own terms. It’s just a time issue. It’s a planning issue, and it’s just doing it to a certain quality and then thinking it through to where you going to share it. After that, you can build it up but if you guys have done a great website for them and they’ve got the right home for it, I’d almost say it’s set up to go really.

Neil: So some of the follow up questions with regards to that discussion, like we alluded to earlier; with regards to helping your clients understand news, what do you tell them qualifies as news? What should be considered or what should be the goal when writing content for your site’s news section, as opposed to social media, for example? Because everything goes on social media and it’s about taking those things and also applying it to your website.

So what do you say to your clients is news? What do you – how do you let them know that what they think isn’t news, like so-and-so got a promotion the other week and they just candidly say it, how do you get them to understand that, that is news and we should be shouting about it?

Chris Leggett: That’s a brilliant question and it can open up into all sorts of avenues. I think to keep it really simple. I think you have to make it relatable to what the business is all about, what your values are, what it is that you’re delivering to people and where it fits in. Sometimes time is tight, you just need to to do it.

But if, for example, someone’s been promoted. Was that the example we talked about there? Okay without overstepping that, but… that that’s an achievement. So it’s something to, on a real practical basis. If employee A was manager of and he’s now head of, or has gone from an, you know, a junior level, up to a, supervisor in possibly a managerial level.

It’s a basic piece of information. Say this person’s job title has changed. They’ve progressed, but if you think about it laterally from a new side that shows you’re investing in developing your staff, you’re promoting from within. So they’re good enough to take the next step, there’s an opportunity there to celebrate what they’ve achieved so far. Perhaps, align it with what the company’s values are in terms of recruiting from a local community, from a particular background, from a particular, skill set.

It could be that, that person is now bringing in a totally different offering for the clients and the customers. That means that there’s something new to share there. So the actual thing of… you guys are much younger than me, but there used to be real basic, like memos that go round that would be pinned on a company noticeboard that would say, “We are pleased to say that employee A, is now this, they will report into this person, ee wish them every well every success in their role”.

Yeah, that was okay, because you probably would be reading that physically in the building. But I think if you’re going to do it externally, it needs to be put into a different context. It could be that you open up an opportunity to recruit. It could be that you’re looking to take on apprentices or somebody younger to help, you know, bring somebody in to take on the next generation…

And that’s just one example. That’s just one example. But I would expect over the course of a year, an average business to have not necessarily average in what they do, but in typical businesses to have some set pieces around activity they’re doing in the community, whether that’s Christmas jumpers through to volunteering, through to climbing, jumping off, abseiling, any of these things for a good cause.

Chris Carter: Running 10Ks.

Chris Leggett: Running 10Ks, sorry I didn’t realise. Yes of course, yes, yes, yes of course. Exactly. So the fact that I know exactly what you mean there.

Neil: Thanks guys.

Chris Leggett: That could have been, well i’ll just put that on my own personal thing.

Neil: Which I didn’t actually do. I put it in the newsletter, I didn’t – yeah I gotta learn fom that.

Chris Leggett: There we go. So there’s stuff you’re doing in the community. There’s the progress of the business. Client wins that don’t necessarily have to be we’re not going to give you the name of the business, but you can describe them in a description. 

Anniversary of the business. Visits from people from, who are either clients or perhaps from overseas coming in. You going somewhere else. You taking your business to a trade show, local opportunity, national, international, all of these things. If you’re thinking of a content calendar or things you can plan in, I think we’ve gone from almost where do we start to 9 or 10 things there and none of those are necessarily bespoke to your business or are going to apply to everybody.

You may well be working with a local authority to access some grants because you want to invest, you want to grow, you want to make yourself more sustainable. We’re going to put dimmers on on all our stuff. We’re going to move to electric vehicless.

All of these things are part of a bigger strategy. What you can’t expect people to do is figure it out for themselves or notice it for themselves, if you don’t tell them, and that’s where your website becomes an asset rather than a headache, because you have got a plan that you’re working to.

Chris Carter: So would you say that the most important part of this is, from our point of view, when we’re doing SEO, we don’t just jump in two feet first without doing the research, without doing the plan. Content planning is one of the most important parts of this for you?

Chris Leggett: It is because otherwise you are probably going to do the last minute shoot from the hip. What’s the best thing we can think of job? Which going back to some of the things we’ve talked about. First impressions. People come on the website think that doesn’t look finished, but they’ve put it up there anyway, you know, that that doesn’t help.

I think that if you are going to use an outside partner, they should be coming to you with almost some vehicles or opportunities that work for others that you can expect. I think that if you’re going to do it in-house, you should with a couple of short brainstorming ideas, sessions, because it’s very hard to say on, you know, the beginning of a given month, right let’s write 12 months of what our company news looks like.

Just as it’s hard to most predict any, you know, sales exactly to the last pound for the next 12 years or what your costs are going to be, things are going to come in. But you’ve got to start somewhere and I think that’s the hardest part for busy business people is where do I start? It’s overwhelming. Should I just do what everyone else is doing?

Not if you’re not confident with it, and not if you don’t think it’s going to cut through to your audience. So I would say based on some of the things that we’ve worked together on, had the best spikes in traffic, whether that’s social media likes, because there’s got to be a visible result of it.

The things you should be looking for might be social media likes. So you guys putting your photo up in the news piece about the award wins, really well received. Lots of people engaging with that and then coming through to your site. The news things we do, really good photos, taking photos of you as a team, which again, not everybody wants to come into work and have their picture taken, but if you know it’s coming, you’ve got the photos for it.

I would say if you – to begin set yourself one piece a month, possibly two a month.

Neil: So yeah that was the follow up question with regards to this. We have our own answer with regards to how often should something be posted on a site. So when we have this conversation with clients, we try and say –

Chris Carter: As much as humanly possible.

Neil: I mean, yeah, to an extent, but it’s also at least once a month if you want your website to be alive in that sense, and you actually want to start to get other keywords from our point of view.

Chris Carter: We have seen the research, anecdotal research from people that we’ve worked with who have gone from nothing to one a month to two a month to one a week and you can see that hockey stick of engagement.

Neil: So yeah, with regards to yourselves, the question is, how in your opinion, how often should news be added as, as a minimum, as most, as like – as naturally possible.

Chris Leggett: I think if we’re starting from from zero let’s start from there. I think it’s like all the best habits. If you say one month, that’s going to end up once every two months, that’s going to end up once every quarter.

Human nature is what it is. So if you start with two a month and lock into that and plan three months of that. I think it gets easier, not harder, because you can see the results yourself. You’re putting yourself through a process. It’s going to be front loaded, like arguably all the hardest but most rewarding things in life.

You kind of have to figure it out and then apply it and learn from it rather than thinking I’m sure we’ll think of something in three weeks time or we’ll think of something like that. So yeah, I think that minimum of of if we’re talking about a company of say 5 to 50 people, if you think about the combined efforts of all those people, how many hours they do a week combined, if you’re seriously saying there’s nothing interesting going on, enough to document it without being contrary about it, but I think you got to back yourself that you’re going to find getting to some ways of seeing your business, because it’s hard. We’ve talked about this getting people’s attention and holding it is really difficult.

But if they can see that there’s evidence that you’re changing, your evolving, you’re improving. If the flip side is they listen to gossip or they listen to misunderstandings or, you know, I’ve noticed that they didn’t attend this or that and they’ve read stuff into it. They they might make up their own minds. So I think twice a month is a really good one to build off.

I think if you are a business of… I’d hate to put like a revenue level to it or to set a thing, but I think more than twice a month for most businesses except micro businesses, startups or sole traders. I think that you’ve got to back yourself. You should be able to do 24 things a year, possibly 36. Some of those could be Christmas jumper days. They don’t have to be –

Neil: Essay like news.

Chris Carter: Yeah they don’t have to be fiteen hundred to two and a half thousand words.

Chris Leggett: No, no, no, i’m talking like – what you reckon 350 to 500 words, is something that would –

Chris Carter: We would say, if you can get close to that 500, as a minimum for SEO. Then its a good blog post, as long as its actually you know, contents decent…

Neil: You can’t you can’t force content, right, in that sense? But a 350 word piece, that is, if it’s a company update and you’re updating on something significant in the business, then that’s – that’s a lot better than a 1000 word, i’m just going to- NO WAY IS THIS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW.

At least we caught this on camera if it does happen.

[Discussion regarding Fire Alarm ensues and Intermission plays]

Neil: Okay, so we’re back. Are we? We’re rolling yeah? We’re all hot from the sun. You’ve caught a tan, it’s all good.

Chris Carter:Two minutes in the sun. Sun burnt.

Neil:  Right, so I think we were talking about basically how often [should you post] and I think we got to a point where we answered that with regards to what it is we should be talking about, how regular. You made a point 24 to 36 times in a year is like what your aim is and when you’ve got 365 days in a year, and that’s the amount that you need to hit, it actually makes it a super easy and reachable goal when you put it in that vacuum.

Chris Carter: Yeah, chop it up into one a week, isn’t it really or one and a bit in a week.

Chris Leggett: Yeah and on the back of that, you’ve then got 24 or 36 good quality social media posts to do there, which you can include amongst other activity what that might be, but it all matches up. There’s a consistency, there’s a tone of voice there, and I think you have to back yourselves that if you put the effort into it or your partner does, or whoever’s tasked with this it’s probably going to stand up better than something that was rushed or was last minute because you thought, oh yeah, we’d better just think of something.

Neil: Yeah, so with regards to that, something that we do on all these episodes is obviously we’ve been speaking about the ‘whys’ and it’d be nice to just move on if we can is to the ‘hows’, especially if  – we try and pose the question, if somebody needs help, but they’re not in a position where they can approach us, at the moment because obviously services cost etcetera, what can they do?

So, the question that I have written down is like, what are some effective [strategies] strategies and tips – I always trip up on – it was that word last time.

Chris Carter: Strategy?

Neil: Strat-Er-Gies.

Anyway, what are some effective strategies and tips for doing this in order to create and maintain engaging or impactful content, specifically within the News Section of a website?

Chris Leggett: So if we cut it back to the real basics and work it up from there, because the principles are the same, whether you’re a marketing lead tasked with making maximum value, reaching the most relevant or largest audiences, or you’re a business owner, sole trader, somebody who’s wants to be active, I think you need to put your website on your business agenda, right?

That’s an easy thing to think there’s other more important things, that well may be the case, but your website isn’t going to go away. You need to make it something that you factor into your thinking because it’s going to get easier when you have it on your radar and it’s something that you’ve factored in each month, each quarter.

I think you need to, simply have 2 or 3, 4 ideas on the go. Not everything you think of is going to be coming on it, and you need to be anticipating the mechanics of it. So what is the story? What’s new about it? How are you going to show it? What format is that going to take?

You might be able to get a video clip, you might have some really nice photos or it might be some audio. Who knows? But if it’s just simple words, a photo and text, I think you need to factor in when you’re going to do it. What’s the substance of it? But the overriding thing is how is this going to be relevant to my end audience?

And if some of it is about enhancing your reputation, it’s not necessarily going to be a sales driven thing. That’s good. If it’s so, that could be. We’ve recruited a new member of team. It could be we have, past our fifth anniversary. Any of those sorts of things. Is it something that’s got some sales activity and is it something that’s going to be previewing something else?

So just give it some thought as to where it’s going to fit in and I would just have a regular document. Could just be a Google doc or a shared spreadsheet where you’ve got the months of the year and then what the story ideas are and then which what you’re going to be working on and what the contents are going to be, so that you then push yourselves or self to have that assembled.

In terms of what the mechanics of it are, and I’ll defer to you guys in terms of how this appears in the CMS and how it appears to get most impact on the the digital channels, but I think there’s some shared understanding. It’s got to have a really relevant key word led, if possible, headline.

So a headline on an appointment, ‘Three cheers for Dave’, is probably a bit cryptic when it comes to search, but ‘Name of the business appoints or promotes, new manager or new technical manager’, suddenly that’s [or new technical manager for exports] or something like that. That is particular. We’re up and running, aren’t we? And you guys would have a word – list of what you want to make it about.

A nice structured photo is always great and then the text needs to be written with an eye on SEO, but not so that the person reading it thinks, I don’t understand what this is supposed to mean, so that is probably worth another podcast another day. But in principle, something that’s done in a formal or semi conversational style that includes all the relevant info about the business and possibly quotes from the people involved, possibly case studies and you know, some references to the people you work with and I think you’re up and running then. 

There’s a lot to unpick from there and it’s easy for me to say those things because obviously we’ve been trained to do. But the principle of news, whether it’s 10 o’clock news, a news alert on your phone, a TikTok video, a YouTube video or a written story in the newspaper is ‘who, what, where, why and when’, and then you expand on those points to make it relevant to your audience.

Neil: Great answer. Yeah. There’s always something [take away]. With regards to, just planning. I think you was – you didn’t necessarily use the word, but the word(s) we use is ‘Content Calendar’.

To simplify it for somebody if you want to plan, like for us as well, we have in one of the marketing sheets, we also have like a hashtag list or list of events.

When I say list of events, I mean holidays or celebrations like Pancake Day and stuff, just we use that as an example recently with a client, like it might seem silly, but if your you or your business does anything as an activity, like if you made pancakes that day or whatever not to – I like pancakes, but just to use that as an example.

Chris Carter: I was gonna say, you do use that example alot.

Neil: Just to use that as an example or like the Easter Holidays coming up or something along the lines. If you have these things in a sheet, as you said, then you can either plan to do something or if you do something, and you know it’s there. You can share that whether it’s raising your business’s profile because you did an event that had something to do with those things or on your socials if you want, like if it’s a smaller, smaller task in that regard and you just did something with your family or something, you want to share it that way.

[A] Content Calendar allows you to scan what’s coming up and plan for those things, especially the larger events, because there’s always something that abusiness – like say for example, Red Nose Day being on there and you want to get into charity work, how can you do that? You have time to plan. That is something that can raise the profile of the business if you plan for it and if you’re getting all your employees involved as well and that can start from a content calendar if you have no idea what you’re doing.

Chris Carter: And also another example, if you know, you’re going to a trade show in September, don’t leave until you know the end of August to start telling people, you’re attending, that kind of stuff that.

Neil: Yeah, events – planning for your events and stuff. Yeah.

Chris Leggett: I couldn’t agree more. I mean, Content Calendar can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be. What we’re seeing amongst our clients and amongst businesses, we engage with is, these people tasked with marketing or promoting a business have never perhaps been more or felt more overworked than they are now. Not necessarily in the volume of work, but just because they are expected to be across so much.

So your content calendar should have structured properly and you visit it, revisit it every couple of weeks, should take a little bit of that pressure off because you can anticipate stuff that’s in the calendar when in advance, but also you can look at what’s out there. So particularly as people are being asked to work or have an eye on so many things, what could be better than to have one resource that tells you the months or the key weeks, key dates, and you work back from there?

And I strongly feel that maybe people are focusing too much on the channels or the outputs and not the source of it. And that content calendar can be a simple, yeah, structured document that simply says January, return to work or outlook for for the next year. Really easy one to overlook. We know we’ve had a positive or we’ve had a challenging previous year, but we are looking ahead for this.

You can do that on your own terms, but if you don’t say what the outlook is for your business, you’re asking a lot for people to assume that they’re going to find out about it. It could be that there’s stuff to do with stuff that’s in the calendar for January. February depends if your business is tied to some of the seasonal things, or if some of your activities as staff or as a business is done to it.

So one of the things that we know is that for many of our clients, the lead in might be 2 or 3 years for some of the products they do. That doesn’t mean that you can’t be talking about stuff that’s coming up in the future. Say this March, we’re looking ahead to, summer of the following year. Or if you’re a business that tied heavily to Christmas, might be hospitality, announcing you can now book Christmas parties, Christmas events, all of those things are there. It’s just trying to improvise them or see them without a simple place to do it. 

So that content can, that could simply be month of the year, 2 or 3 ideas, where we’re going to put the news and it could be some of that is not appropriate for LinkedIn. It’s perhaps more for your Facebook or it’s more visual.

I’d add a couple to that, anniversary of when the business was formed. I mean, it must be great if you were to take out a photo from 2012 of where you started and where you are on your anniversary month. I don’t know which is that June…?

Chris Carter: August. 

Chris Leggett: August. So you could say, you know, we’re marking this great [milestone] content on socials. People love to see, progress. They like people led stuff. It’s a really easy one for a small business to overlook, because you’re always looking forward or you’re looking around. Where we started we’re in  our – doesn’t have to be a round number, doesn’t have to be 5 or 10, 12, 13th. and this is where we’re going. Suddenly your Content Calendars filling up.

That’s the bit that you, you need to – and I think if you share out the responsibility and talk to people around the business, you get some good ideas. It doesn’t necessarily sit with that overworked or overstressed marketing lead. Who could be the business owner. Sometimes other people will be able to bring that stuff to it, and if some stuff doesn’t work out, it drops off the calendar or you put it ahead for next year, then you’re there.

But I think trying to, just think of stuff off the cuff when it arises. It’s particularly if you’re starting from zero. That time’s probably not going to happen. Just because you’ve got other focus.

Neil: Yeah. So I think with with regards to that, if you’re able to stay on top of those things and you’ve got your content calendar, you’re creating content, your news is updating. You’re looking out for more things to add. You understand that news… news isn’t just – news doesn’t necessarily need to be just like news as in informative, it can be about your business, it can be about you, it can be about the surroundings, it can be what or where you’re helping and what you’re trying to do community wise and you’ve got that grasped.

So that sections up and running, you’re adding content, you’ve started off consistent. Is there at any point – have you seen any pitfalls to this. Is there any downside? Have you… is there an opposite of this at all?

Have you ever I don’t know, is there something to be wary of if you’re hyper focused on the news? Is there anything you can overlook?

Chris Leggett: There’s a whole host of things. It’s a great question, Neil, because it can become… it can become a part of the website that is possibly even undermining what you’re trying to do and what I mean by that is there’s a lot of studies in digital marketing around echo chambers and around, content that is actually irritating your target audience.

So it says news, but it’s actually just a load of marketing messages. We have continued to show how great we are and how we’re the number one at being [brilliant] – I mean, you know, okay, you’d hope that most people would say they they’re good at what they do. Otherwise the business isn’t going anywhere. But you know, you need you need to make sure that it isn’t just marketing copy that has that tone of yeah…

Chris Carter: It’s not clickbait.

Chris Leggett: Yeah, quite. It needs to be something that has a base in reality. Now that doesn’t mean that you run yourself down or you scare yourself that we don’t have that sort of material. We don’t have that stuff, but – if you think of what news has been since before people could write or shared printed information, has been about people, places, things that have occurred.

That’s not to say dramas and crises, but let’s be real that’s possibly a topic that’s worth doing in about what to put on if you do have one. But if we we assume it’s about good news. It is about that stuff that – we was trained at journalism college. ‘How would you tell someone if you were in the pub? What’s happened?’

And that isn’t necessarily, I saw a house on fire. It could be, a business that we both know has appointed somebody into a new role. It could be that they’ve just got their first client overseas or, they’ve now doubled their workforce in ten years is probably realistic. I think it doesn’t necessarily have to be a very short, extraordinary amount of time. But what’s the landmark for people?

And I think sometimes it can be, the News Section, you don’t necessarily want it to be that the boss has brought their dog in, and we had a really nice day. That’s good on socials.

It could be that the boss bought in a really nice pile of pancakes. You know, it depends what you’re –

Chris Carter: He didn’t bring any pancakes.

Chris Leggett: There’s a lot of pancake talk around here, i’ve not seen any pancakes yet.

Neil: This stigma is being dropped immediately.

Chris Leggett: Yeah, that’s really nice, warm stuff that some people can respond to on LinkedIn. But your general and especially somebody whose new to you, they’re not not going to get the in-jokes of it. So that echo chamber thing is perhaps something not to scare yourself about, you can talk yourself out of doing it, but you do need to remember it’s not a social club.

It’s your professional arm, and I think if you kind of push yourself for what are the momentous things, all the things that we would find of interest in other businesses. You should probably back yourself again, have something good to say rather than it just being a quote, a feeling, here’s another reason why we’re great.

Which you might want to do in a different way, in an insight section or more of a blog and a thought piece. Nothing wrong with showing your expertise, your relevance, how you address the challenges that your target audience need. But perhaps do that more as a thought piece or a demonstration of knowledge.

Chris Carter: Adding to that. It’s the same thing when we’re talking about creating blog posts to talk about website speed or we talk about, SEO, why’s it important to, we don’t talk in those blogs about, you know, we’re amazing at making websites and they’re always quick and, you know, they convert and they – you find yourself top of the Google.

We don’t do that. We don’t say that do we.

Neil: No.

Chris Carter: We always – approach it from the point of view you need to know about this and this is the same point.

Neil: Because you can always put in call to [action] – like with regards to those topics for example, that’s why we put call to actions in, but the call to actions are more than likely separate to the text and it’s literally a call to action. If you would like to do this, it’s there. We’re not forcing that within the text, especially if you trying to be an authority and you’re trying to inform people because that’s the difference between – for us, informational and commercial Keywords and that creates the difference, yeah.

So that’s a good point as well, and with that being said, the… how do I phrase it? There’s something there with regards to splitting that content. This is for social. This is for the news. There is also a cross pollination. But understanding that helps you out in the long run with regards to what you share and how you share it.

Chris Leggett: Yeah. I mean I think… it could be that on your content calendar, you segment things for a certain audience. So a lot of the manufacturing businesses we work with, some of their staff might not be on LinkedIn, but they’ll be on Facebook. So we talked earlier about the, anxiety businesses have to have some presence on every social media channel.

But if they’re not doing it well, they’re not doing it regularly. But Facebook is an easy one to overlook as LinkedIn being the only place to promote your business. But there could be a tranche of your staff who don’t use LinkedIn, but who use Facebook, in which case, there could be some content on there that sits really nicely, that might be more social, might be more fun, you know, might be more stuff that that people think, yeah, good on them isn’t necessarily trying to [be] a message, and that might be where you pull that away from the News Section of your website and you apply it there. There is a risk that we kind of add to the stress of people think i’ve then got to feed that, but I think that, that might actually get a better response or a click through rate to your website.

Chris Carter: I always find that the better content on LinkedIn is the you know, this might be going on a tangent, but it’s the stuff that feels organic and genuine about what that person has been doing or what that person has been – what’s happening in the business? You know what I mean?

Whereas the spammy stuff, you know. Oh, you know, I was just sitting here thinking about this really profound thinking that…

Neil: Read More. Hit the button to read more.

Chris Carter: Yeah and its like that long. A lot of the content that I find engaging comes from stuff they’ve put on the website. That’s that’s personal for me.

Neil: Yeah, I think that’s – everybody wants to get clicks and you have to – There’s I mean recently, not to have a rant, but with LinkedIn, in regards to seeing some people say certain things in a certain manner, I’ve just started like [unfollowing], not, losing them as a connection, but unfollowing, just because it doesn’t come across as natural and I don’t know –

Chris Carter: It’s spammy clickbaity, but in a very strange, weird way, it needs to feel like your content that you created for your website and your social media, it’s coming from you. Like, would you talk like that in this setting? If you don’t then why are you putting it in your socials.

Neil: I think that’s where we – not to go into it on this episode – But that’s where like the use of AI comes into play, where people have plugged in what they want to say into there and it’s giving you something and they’re not – In that instance, you could just write the stats yourself, especially if it’s going on your social account, but then they’re not proofing it. They’re not thinking about it from like an emotional or yeah, perspective and stuff just to – And then you end up with these long statuses.

Chris Carter: I think we’re going off on a tangent.

Chris Leggett: I think if you if you follow that down the line, if everybody – So I think it’s really important not to expect everybody to communicate in a very formal news at ten, like, you know, like broadsheet kind of way. But that said, if we all message each other effectively through LinkedIn using AI because we say, can you write me a blog that makes me look authoritative about this thing?

And then we get AI to create a photo of it, and it just goes on and on and on. There is going to come a point where exactly as you described there, we all, even if we’re not conscious of it, we’re thinking, this doesn’t ring true, and I think I’d extend that the thread throughout all of the conversation we’ve had through all of this is the content we see people, on behalf of our clients that people respond to better is still people, places, faces.

And if you put a link through to your website so they’re encouraged to then read the full story as things stand and I would say that those sort of posts will perform as well, if not better than some of the AI content that you might have spent ages on, you haven’t just said, write me 500 words on it.

But it just doesn’t quite – It’s not quite rooted in the things that on a human level, we still look for in the people we want to work with or people we want to follow. Is it a face of someone I know? And you guys know this when we see with our clients and named as an award finalist, they put a piece on social media, photos of them and their team, and people say, that’s brilliant, well done.

I would argue that those sorts of things where there’s something new of some substance to share, will do better than something that says, you know, we’re having a great – “we’re having a great quarter and that’s made me think about the big issues facing the world.” And the more you read you think, I don’t know this person really well, but I’ve never heard him talk like these.

They’ve really thought this through in some quite, equally written bursts.

Where I know that when I see them outside of this, they’ve generally got 2 or 3 things that they talk about at length, but they seem to be doing it in like bullet points.

I didn’t know they were from America, but they use a lot of Zs in their content. All of those things will get ironed out as AI improves and AI is an amazing tool, whatever it is, as a general thing. If you’re trying to write content and you’re time poor and you know what to put in the prompts, and there’s some very good people in our networks who can help you with that.

It is an efficiency, a time saver, and it hits some marks there that might take you even as someone who’s trained to write for a living, it would perhaps take me some time to get to those points, but it doesn’t take care of everything and I think if you were to say we’re going to create a News Section, do the bare minimum, and let AI just generate stuff for us, just as the same as you wouldn’t ask AI to generate all your – you wouldn’t ask it to do your payroll, for example, or your other stuff without really going through it in some detail. I don’t think we’re at that point yet, but I’m loath to say, it will get better and better.

Chris Carter: It might be tomorrow. Either way its going.

Chris Leggett: But I think we can all – the frustrations – I think if we were to all you know, write on a piece of paper each three things that annoy us that we’ve seen, I think we’re all probably seeing the same things. But there’s that anxiety that, got to have something on there tomorrow because I haven’t put anything on there for a week. I’ll quickly go on ChatGPT or Gemini and that’ll be good won’t it.

Chris Carter: I do want to do a, an episode on, Prompt engineerinG, I think that’s the key to this and when to use it and when not to use it and stuff. But yeah, that’s for a different day.

Chris Leggett: I think that’s the bit where people can add real value, is to understand what they need to put in for the prompts… But marketing communications, they’re written based things, you know, if it’s a case of that’ll do, then if you’ve got other stuff to do, I’m not going to judge you for that. But is it going to grow incrementally?

I think that, we’re not a million miles of Google and other search engines being ahead of the person generating this stuff. We’ve been able to clock it. I mean, some of the readers on it now are really, really strong as to what they do and if everybody’s using AI…

Chris Carter: It’s pattern recognition I think.

Chris Leggett: Yeah – That will only get worse the more it’s used and if everything that, bar, for some very small posts that you did were written with AI, I think that’s gaming the search engines who want to know that it’s useful content. They want to know that it’s rooted in something and if it’s not resonating with people and there’s no backlinks, there’s no engagement, it’s only a short term fix if you’re not, if you’re not sure what you’re doing it for.

Neil: Great. I think we’re we’re coming to the end now and that’s been a really insightful conversation and hopefully everybody’s – anybody that’s been listening has been able to take away something, even us. I feel like I’ve refreshed on our News Section.

It’s reinforced what we learned previously and what we need to do going forward, especially talking about the marketing calendar stuff. It’s like you say, I’ve been overrun – We’ve all been overrun in the business. We’ve all got a lot going on sort of thing and the – just being able to look at it, even on a quarterly to know what’s coming up, it gives a clarity that you can’t – you won’t get if you don’t just check up you know what I mean? So even that for me is like, okay, you’ve been slacking in that regard, like get back on it sort of thing.

Chris Leggett: Yeah, and I think the message for people is not you have to have one. You have to keep feeding it. You need to have a good one. If you’re going to have a News Section on your website, make it a good one. How do you make it a good one? You anticipate what your audience is going to like, and that is trial and error, because you should be able to track in your own social media analytics and your web analytics.

If you’ve posted four things over, say, two months and there’s not been one spike of interest, it might be chance to come at it a different way. But it’s better – you got to start somewhere and if that means getting a third party to come and help you get up and running – and we coach a few people and train people, either through workshops or through, you know, projects for clients, you’ve got to start somewhere and I think that you need to apply the same rigor as you would to anything else to do with your business, that you make it as good as possible. But there’s some simple things that you can follow there and almost follow the end rule of thumb of what do you value in other people’s websites? What website news do you like about the people that you either buy from or you want to aspire to be?

Chris Carter: Yeah, or your competition.

Chris Leggett: Yeah. Let’s let’s be blunt about it. They may be performing better because they’re putting the time into it. It might just be an hour a week. It might be half a day, every two weeks but they are doing something. They may be using a third party, but there’s no, there’s no substitute for making a start with it, but also having the confidence that we can do a good job of this, we’ve got some really interesting things to share and we’ve got to back ourselves that we’ve got the material. It’s just a process, like anything else, to want to get the best out of it. But yeah.

Neil: Yeah, thank you. So yeah, it’s our first guest. It’s a milestone and really insightful conversation, as I said. So before we wrap up, if people want to learn more about what you do at Osborn Communications – I’m going to start that again. Tongue twisters. If people want to learn more about what you do at Osborne Communications or want to get in touch, where’s the best place to find you?

Chris Leggett: So URL is www.Osbornpr.com. You can find me Chris Leggett on LinkedIn – We post a lot on LinkedIn. That’s our preferred channel. You can find us on there at Osborn Communications.

Neil: Great. Thank you. We’ll drop those links in the episode description. So if you’re listening that’ll be in the summary. If you’re on YouTube that’ll be in the Read More section as well. So please check those out. As we’ve said we can vouch for Osborn Communications. We’ve worked with them over the past few years. We’ve managed to… help me out.

Chris Carter: I think Chris, wrap it up. You’ve written us 6 or 7 award entries, and we’ve been finalist for six of them.

Neil: Yeah. There you go. That’s it, that’s it.

Chris Carter: We won two and got highly commended for two, so.

Chris Leggett: Well thank you. Thank you very much for having me on here We value working with you guys. It’s been great to follow your journey and to be able to celebrate that and I think almost that little snapshot of what you give there is we haven’t made you winners. The material was there. What you wanted to do was get some external help to communicate that. 

Chris Carter: You also gave us the confidence to actually put, an application in, because we probably wouldn’t have written an application ourselves. We’d have gone, “I don’t know what to do here”, and ended up not doing it.

Chris Leggett: Yeah, we recognize that it’s a service. It’s a time issue. But what we love is to meet a business like you guys or so many of the businesses we work with who quite frankly don’t know how good they are or where they fit in or what’s great about them, or unusual about them, or different about them because they’re wrapped up in the day to day and that’s a great thing about the News Section, is you can make it look like the best of your business, but you need to put yourself through the process.

Chris Carter: Brilliant, thank you Chris.

Neil: We’ll leave it there yeah, thank you Chris.

Chris Leggett: Thank you so much for having me, guys. It’s an honor to be your first guest, and means a lot to me here.

Neil:  I mean – we’re sorry about the fire alarm and it’s going to be associated with us for a while.

Chris Carter: They won’t know in the edit.

Neil: Yeah they will because [inaudible].

But, other than that, if you’re on YouTube, then please think about liking the video and subscribing to keep up to date with the rest of the podcast episodes that are coming and also we’re on, I think the majority of popular, podcast platforms. So please subscribe and follow there and listen to the audio version if you prefer.

So yeah, I’ve been Neil Cooper, this is Chris Carter. Thank you Chris Leggett. Everybody say bye.

Byeee.

Chris Leggett: Thank you very much, guys. Thanks a lot for watching.