Digital marketing chat from people at the coalface delivering successful solutions to tech and engineering businesses in the UK, Europe, USA & Australia. It often descends into jibberish, but enjoyable jibberish.
Real Visibility for B2B Marketing Through Smart AI Workflows, Not Cringey LinkedIn Hacks
Are your social feeds filling up with automated slop and made-up stories? In this episode of Digital Marketing From The Coalface, Dave and Julie return from their summer break to tackle the fine line between smart AI productivity and cringey, low-quality automation.
If you're an engineering company leader looking for genuine online visibility without the fluff, this episode shows you how to put AI to work to provide high-value data analytics while keeping human strategy firmly in the driver's seat.
What we cover in this episode:
The cringey AI lead magnet test: Julie shares what happened when she tested a tool that promised 30 "tailored" LinkedIn posts, only to receive completely fake case studies and bizarre claims.
Talking to your data in plain English: Dave and Julie talk about how connecting tools like Windsor.ai to Google Search Console, Google Ads, and GA4 lets you query your marketing data in natural language, bypassing complex PowerBI filters and SQL queries.
AI watermarks & editorial control: AI watermarking isn't something to fear if you take ownership of your content. You need to make sure to apply human oversight, and refine every word you're sharing.
Strategy vs. "random acts of marketing": tech businesses need a structured marketing framework so that their teams aren't just creating ad-hoc AI content for the sake of it.
Plus, Julie and Dave swap summer highlights and office drama, featuring Edinburgh Fringe comedy, metal detecting adventures, a new coffee machine, and some spilled milk that no one cried over.
Enjoyed the episode? Browse more at redevolution.com/digital-marketing-from-the-coalface
21 Aug 2026
Why Your AI is Targeting Men, Ignoring Languages, and Boring Your Audience (And How to Fix It)
This week on Digital Marketing from the Coalface, Julie and Leslie dig into what actually happens when you hand marketing decisions over to an algorithm, including a few stories that are more entertaining than they probably should be.
When "optimised" budgets go rogue: a campaign built to get women into STEM programmes ended up serving ads mostly to men. Not, as we suspected, because of a biased dataset, but because of the maths. Women drive a higher share of buying decisions, so their clicks cost more, and an AI chasing a strict cost-per-click target will avoid them if it can.
The multilingual blind spot in AI search: if you're running non-English pages, they may be nearly invisible to tools like ChatGPT. One experiment run by Strategy Director Pieter Serraris found it favours English content even when other languages are available on a website. Featuring English versions of a website pages might well lift AI citations by ChatGPT by over 120%, but keeping that content updated is key to avoid negatively impacting your digital footprint.
Getting out of the bots-writing-for-bots loop: generic, over-bulleted LinkedIn posts are everywhere now, as the result of handing your whole brand voice to AI and letting it write in an echo chamber. Julie talks through how to actually train AI on your team's voice, so it speeds things up without smoothing out what makes you sound like you.
AI is a genuinely useful assistant for scaling what you do, it just still needs a strategic brain behind it. The people who will stand out in the midst of all the samey garbage are the ones who know how to blend machine efficiency with genuine, real human connection.
Have a listen!
10 Aug 2026
Gold Bangles At The Open, AI Blunders From HubSpot And All The Usual Mayhem
In this episode of Digital Marketing From The Coalface, Dave and Julie return from a brief hiatus to strip away the AI hype. From silly software oversight errors to the critical mechanics of B2B user experience, they once again bring a no-nonsense, practical reality check for business owners, tech leaders, and marketing directors working in the B2B space.
Key Takeaways for B2B & Tech Leaders:
The HubSpot AI nuance failure: Dave breaks down a real-world blunder where HubSpot's beta AI tool recommended reaching out to a competitor agency called "Blend" simply because the algorithm read the common noun "blend" in a text snippet. Be aware that AI still drastically struggles with basic context and business logic, so don't put all your trust in its supposed critical 'thinking'.
Google's crackdown on "AI Slop": Bringing up the recent experiment where 1,000 bulk-generated AI blog posts were completely de-indexed by Google within weeks, Julie and Dave discuss why automated content engines are a fast track to search invisibility and why subject matter expertise remains your best SEO asset.
Crafting an authentic B2B tone of voice: Avoid copy-pasted corporate speak when marketing to highly niche and technical audiences. You want to align your brand's vocabulary with the direct communication style of the teams you serve.
How "self-indulgent" forms kill conversions: A single "required field" (like "How did you find us?") at the final stage of checkout can completely halt a transaction. Dave and Julie discuss how to identify and eliminate self-inflicted user experience (UX) friction on your B2B landing pages to keep high-value leads moving forward.
The "pro bono" enterprise sales strategy: Dave shares how Red Evo recently won a highly competitive, 17-page HubSpot development contract by offering a no-obligation discovery session.
IP intelligence & perfect sales timing: Do not dismiss IP-tracking software. Julie and Dave share how using a budget-friendly tool like Leadinfo lets you see major prospects browsing specific pages on your site, helping your outbound sales team time your business's outreach perfectly when quiet deals suddenly warm up.
Listen (or watch!) the episode now to discover how to balance smart software with the irreplaceable human element in B2B marketing.
Reach and audience
Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.
YouTube views
14,794
Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025
Apple Podcasts (US)
5.0 / 5
1 ratings
Podcast Authority Score: 55 / 100
A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.
Quality
68
Social presence
0
YouTube
76
Engagement
30
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Dave and Stu and Alex host the show. Published by Dave Robinson.
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