Choosing A Digital Marketing Agency - Episode 3

Agencies like us sell a combination of time and expertise.

That's what you're buying.

That's what you're buying.

When you hire an agency, you're buying access to lots of different specialists. Like you say, you can employ a generalist for fifty, sixty K, let's say. But there's absolutely no way that one person could do all the jobs that a marketing agency does. But ultimately, yeah, what you want is an agency who's going to sit down and work out what your problems are and how best to solve them. Not an agency that's going to have pretend to have the solution to a problem they don't even know about fundamentally.

Our proposals will say, we don't know anything about you. We don't know what the problems are. We don't know who your ideal customers are. And the first thing we're going to do is figure all that out. And once we've figured all that out, we'll then be able to put together a strategy. And once we've got a strategy, really the budget will dictate how quickly we can deliver that strategy. So the budget can also inform the strategy, obviously. Hello. Okay. Um, in this podcast, we're going to talk about how to choose a digital marketing agency. I can't even say it. How to choose a digital marketing agency. Now, this is going to be tricky, isn't it? Because that's what we are. Yeah. So we're going to make sure that we don't just say, hey, pick us, pick us, choose us. It's going to be pretty subjective objective. Come on. Which one is it?

Uh, objective.

Objective.

And we're going to do a very good job of it. We're absolutely not going to self-promote.

Well, no. No self-promotion at all. Pick us.

Say it backwards.

Yeah. That's right. Um, it's an interesting one, isn't it? Um, and I think what we'll try and do with this podcast is give a genuine, um, impartial viewpoint, um, and try and help people understand what it is they're getting into. Yeah. As much as anything, when they start working with the digital marketing agency, because for some people, it's a it's something they've not done before. It's something it's new. Yeah. I mean, if you've worked with an agency where, you know, for design, marketing, whatever, then yeah, you're probably in pretty good shape. But if you've, if you've neither worked with an agency of any description, certainly not a digital marketing agency, then it is tricky. It's tricky thinking about what kind of budgets because based on the enquiries we get, it's pretty clear that people are not that sure.

Right.

What kind of budgets are involved? So I mean.

You'll get them.

Yeah. On what? The money you'll get them. I mean, maybe maybe we should think about budgets. Talk about budgets first just to get the thing moving.

I think that's the big kind of elephant in the room, isn't it? This is the discussion nobody really wants to have. Certainly when. Yeah. I think asked to kind of give a budget or to say how much our services.

Well, unlike a lot of agencies we put on our website, we. We actually say, I think digital marketing, marketing returners, like from three grand a month, right? I mean, there it is right up front. You know, we're not you know, we're not trying to hide the fact that there's a certain level of budget we need to be effective. And, you know, most agencies are the same. I mean, you know, I know we're trying to give an impartial view of agencies. My view is there are a lot of really good digital marketing agencies out there, both in and around where we are in, in Scotland. And, and, um, equally, there are some bloody awful ones who really are trying to jump on the bandwagon and haven't got a Scooby. Sometimes agencies who have done something else they might be, might have been a design agency who went, oh, we better get into the whole digital marketing thing. Let's be that now. Yeah. As well as, you know, companies who are more into branding and stuff and they're doing, you know, saying, right, let's get into that now. So, you know, like I say, we're going to be impartial with this. But, you know, I will say straight away that, um, there are some bad ones out there. And maybe because we're talking about budget, maybe budget can be an indication of whether an agency is credible or not.

I think it's a really good starting point, for sure. I mean, like you say, I mean, I think what you said is you need a certain amount of money to be effective, right? Yeah, I think that's key. First of all, to understand that, you know, these things do cost and that a lot of the time, if somebody's coming to you and saying, you know, I can rank your website on Google for five hundred pounds, they probably simply cannot deliver the economics just don't add up. There's no way you could actually run an agency and charge those kind of prices.

My view is with the lower cost options, they basically rely on people like thinking they're going to get something paying two or three hundred quid a month, doing it for six months, realising nothing's happening, and then they just shrug their shoulders and think, oh, well, it was only two or three hundred quid a month. So they're not going to get really, you know.

Right. That's exactly it isn't it?

Wound up about.

It. Yeah. It costs X amount to run an agency every month. You can either do it by having a couple of clients that pay well that you do all the work for, or you can, you know, fill your books with clients that you don't actually do any work for and charge them five hundred quid each and still make some money.

Are you suggesting that some agencies might do that?

I. Yes, I think we all know it happens. Yeah, I guess I think that's one of the hardest things about being in this industry really. Certainly for me, from a kind of personal, professional standpoint, is the fact that we do rub shoulders with people every day who are simply taking people's money and not doing anything or not anything effective, at least.

Um, so budget is a good indicator, isn't it? Because let's, let's just, you know, distill it down. I mean, agencies like us, um, well, a combination of time, expertise and, um, what else? That's it. Probably time and expertise.

That's what you're buying.

That's what you're buying. So if you put a price on that, I mean, if you want to go out and hire a really good digital marketing person, and I say that carefully because that could be someone who's good at content, someone who's good at search, someone who's good at writing. it could be. I'm talking about a digital marketing generalist. Then based on the adverts I see online, then you really need to be paying fifty, sixty grand, something like that, probably of a salary, plus employers, National insurance and all that stuff on top of it. So, you know, just for one person who will not be able to do, you know, by any stretch, the whole range of stuff that you need, it's a lot of money. So when it comes to hiring an agency, although in some people's views, agencies charging five, six hundred quid a day, or if they charge using different billing systems like the points based system or, or just simply they give a price and do a price by value type approach. It might seem superficially like it's quite expensive until you look into the cost of building your own digital marketing team, right?

So this is the point, isn't it? When you hire an agency, you're buying access to lots of different specialists. Like you say, you can employ a generalist for fifty, sixty K, let's say, but there's absolutely no way that one person could do all the jobs that a marketing agency does, or have all the experience and knowledge.

That's right.

And I always think that there's a huge kind of opportunity cost to hiring a generalist instead of several specialists. Effectively what you're doing.

So although we prefer not to talk about hours and or day rates and things like that, I mean, we're realists. And that's something that a lot of people can relate to. So typically an agency will be at the very low end, say three hundred thousand four hundred a day. If it's a if it's if it's a new agency, an experienced agency, maybe they're just trying to break in and build up a portfolio.

Where did we start? We must have started somewhere around that.

Yeah, probably. Yeah. Yeah, probably. And then once you get more experienced agencies, then here in the UK anyway, you're looking at five six hundred pounds a day, maybe for some disciplines, seven, eight hundred pounds a day when you start to get into strategies and things. So just as a way of, you know, a very, very rough measure, if an agency is saying we can do, um, digital marketing for you. And it's, let's just say three hundred pounds a day or sorry, three hundred pounds a month, then you're not even getting a day. You're getting probably half a day with an experienced agency. And to be honest, not many experienced agencies would take a gig at that kind of level anyway.

No, I mean, that's exactly it, isn't it? I mean, at the end of the day, we are very careful to only take clients where we think we can kind of deliver results, and nobody in their right mind thinks they can deliver results for an afternoon's work a month. It's just not gonna happen.

That's right. No matter what you do. Exactly. Uh, you know, I mean, it is always something that we find quite difficult is when we really want to work with a company, but they haven't got the budget and we and we are we will never take a gig. Well, you know, let's just say it's a company. They say we've got a budget of a of a grand a month. And we look at what they need, you know, because we'll do a discovery session free of charge anyway. So we figure out, wait a minute, that is not going to move the dial. We won't take that gig on. So some agencies will.

We had a situation like that very recently, didn't we? I think somebody approached us.

Who was.

Yeah, but either way, I do remember having the conversation with you where you were saying, yeah, you know, we kind of talked to them. We said, this is what you need to spend. You said, can you do it for less? And you said, well, yeah.

That's right. Yeah.

It is a really awkward conversation to have because ultimately you don't want to send clients packing.

No, don't you don't.

You also don't want to be trapped in a situation where either you're forced to deliver something of value for no money or counterpoint is kind of that you're not really doing anything. Yeah.

So circling back again, you know, when you're trying to evaluate and find a good digital marketing agency, if they are promising to deliver, you know, great results, search results, run your PPC and everything else, and they're charging you, they're talking about, you know, retainers of maybe a few hundred quid a month. The chances are.

It's probably not very good.

It's probably not very good. They might be offshoring. So there are quite a lot of agencies who are offshoring to low cost economies. Yes. And you know, they're paying people maybe ten dollars an hour to do work and charging their customers. Yeah. Um, a lot more than that.

And to be fair, I guess from a certain perspective that's valid, right? Because what you're exploiting there is the, the difference in what you need to pay people per hour to work in somewhere. Like, I don't know, Ukraine, India, any of the places that are normally offshored to. Yeah. It's very cheap.

It's a global economy that we're operating in and it makes sense in a lot of respects. It does make sense.

It does make sense. But I do think that most people in our industry have some horror stories to tell about the quality of work from.

Yeah. We have I mean, in the long time distant past, we tried to work with a company in Poland on some development that we were doing because we were struggling to find it, find somebody who could help us. Right. And they basically buggered off with our money. I mean, they didn't deliver at all.

Nothing.

Nothing. No, it was just it was hopeless. And, you know, you do hear horror stories equally. you do hear stories of people who've done it properly, like they've maybe set a shop up in India and they go out there, they spend time there, and it's and it's a legitimate part of their business, but it's exploiting the low cost economy and that's fine. And if they're doing that and they're openly doing that, and you're happy that they're doing that, and I say that you're happy that they're doing it because, you know, we certainly make a virtue of the fact that we're all in house here in the UK. Sure. Uh, and we have been asked, you know, who does the work? Uh, you know, am I are you guys going to do it or are you just going to offshore it? You know, charge me seventy, eighty quid an hour and offshore it for ten dollars an hour?

Yeah.

That's right. Yeah. Past. Did you say.

Both? Yeah. I mean, that's the thing isn't it. You have to be very upfront about it. And I think it's an immediate red flag when you kind of, you know, are being charged very little. And nobody's saying specifically I'm going to offshore this to somebody on, you know. Yeah. In India, in Ukraine, on Fiverr, on Upwork, whatever. You have to be upfront about these things.

Yeah. So if we park the cost aspect, that's certainly one way of trying to choose a digital marketing agency is by looking at what they're charging and, you know, definitely buy cheap, buy twice, I would say. So what else, what else are you thinking about in terms of trying to evaluate and decide whether an agency is the right agency? What would you put at the top of the list of figuring out?

So I would always say that like talking to somebody past clients is probably one of the easiest and best ways, right? People should always be, if they're proud of the work they've done, they should have testimonials, they should have referrals. They should be able to say, you know, you can call up so-and-so who runs this company and he'll tell you what a great job we did. Yeah. I'm always very suspicious of agencies that won't or can't do that. Um, it makes me feel like what? How wrong.

I would rather do that than than actually just, you know, then just spray stats around. Sure. Which is effectively, you know, our client's private property, you know, the work that we've done for them is private because you don't really want their competitors to know what we did and what the results were. So you're right. I think putting them in direct contact with clients, existing clients, just to get a sense of what we're like to work with.

Plus, I don't think there's anything more kind of honest or reassuring than being told by another business person. Yeah, these guys did a great job, right? There is no better kind of. Yeah, I mean, what better barometer to use. I agree.

Yeah.

Referral business is actually trustworthy.

Yeah. I mean so I would put that high up as well. The referral. I also think that like for us a lot, most of our digital marketing clients are long term clients. We get to know them their business really, really well. We have to in order to do an effective job. And you only really figure out whether or not you're a good fit for each other once you start working together. And so my advice is like, if they won't do a small piece of work pro bono, I mean, we'll do a discovery session where we'll dig into the business. You can ask us questions and we figure out whether we're a good fit and whether the chemistry is right. And I'm not saying that, you know, you have to charge for that. I'm not saying rather you should have to do that for free. I'm not I'm not advocating that one way or another. But what I'm saying is it's a good way to do it. And if and the next best option is a small piece of work, a very distinct, easily quantifiable small piece of work. So you can actually work with them and figure out whether you like them, trust them, whether the chemistry is good or anything else. I think that's a really without committing to a sort of long term relationship.

Yeah, I think it's a really interesting one because.

Try before you buy.

From my experience, most agency owners are very reluctant to do that. Right. I think there's a stigma around that idea of doing kind of pro bono work or kind of test.

Yeah. And I buy into that. I mean, I would never have, say, Diana doing a load of design work on the off chance that we might do a great job and then they might hire us. Just no chance. Look at the work we've done and decide whether we are the kind of agency you'd like to work with. But I think if if we did a Two or three hour discovery session. And we all get to know each other and we actually unearth the problems that need to be solved. You can. Yeah, I think so. Really? Yeah. And I think it's a good spend of everybody's time.

Yeah.

Good use of everybody's time rather.

I think it's a really interesting one because I think definitely before I came to work here and watched you kind of advocating for those things, I'd have always been the first person to say, oh, you know, that's a waste of time. You know, don't do that. Don't spend time with somebody who's not definitely going to pay you money. Yeah, I think having seen how well it works in practice, it's really interesting that it's not kind of more common and accepted, I guess, because yeah, it is exactly right. It's all about chemistry at the end of the day, isn't it? You know, you've got to know that you get on with these.

Yeah. I mean, you know, all things being equal. So let's say you've got like you've, you've narrowed it down to three or four agencies and they're all credible agencies. Good track record. They clearly are what they say they are. And there are plenty of agencies like that out there. So there's no need to sort of take a high risk approach.

I think that's a situation a lot of like marketing managers, for example, find themselves in, right? You've got kind of a shortlist of four agencies. How are you meant to whittle that down to the kind of the final agency and their big decisions? Because ultimately you're going to work with these people for hopefully several years to come.

Which is why the sort of foot in the door, you know, discovery type project is good. Or even if it's something else, like, you know, we want you to, you know, you might get them to, um, research a specific specific topic or a specific page on the site and suggest some improvements to that page from a, from a search marketing point of view, maybe. And you see how that little tiny few hundred quid type project goes, you know, and that's another way of potentially sort of figuring out whether the chemistry is going to be right. Um.

It's interesting actually, because that's exactly the same way that people hire freelancers, right? You always do like a little test project first.

Yeah.

But it's kind of less common for agencies and it really does make the most sense, I think. So, yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I would agree that some types of work don't lend themselves, um.

Well, I think.

To working for free.

But the design work, like you say, it's any work where there's a lot of back and forth with the client, right? Because how often do you actually get a design right the first time?

That's right.

Yeah.

Yeah. So I also think it's if the agency that you're talking to are using plain language that you understand, or even if they use slightly confusing language, do they, when asked, explain exactly what they mean and do you understand exactly what they're doing for you and why they're doing it? Right. And if you can't get to a point where you understand what they're saying and buy into it, then I think that's another red flag that they're maybe not the agency for you.

Yeah. It's one of my kind of real bugbears with this industry, isn't it's the whole black magic thing, people.

And it isn't black magic.

No, it's not black magic. It's not complicated. And if you're good at it, there's no reason to obscure what you do. But an awful lot of agencies are very cagey about their strategies and tactics, and they will talk circles around you and not actually tell you what their technical SEO services or PPC services or whatever actually involve. And I think that is a major red flag If you're shopping for an agency and somebody won't sit down and explain what they're going to do day to day, it's because they're hiding something. Ultimately.

Yeah. And what about the subject? Thorny subject, if you like, of guarantees. Where where are you on that?

Where people guarantee you position one rankings. Totally. I mean, you should definitely try that.

Yeah, I know. What have you got to lose? Yeah.

Oh, man. I mean, yeah, there are no guarantees at all in this game. I think that's a thing that we have to be very upfront with people about all the time. And I think it's a really difficult thing to say to somebody. You can give us money, you're not guaranteed results.

And I don't entirely agree. Oh yeah. I get the sentiment and I'm and I'm not being dismissive. My view is, and I think the approach we would take is if we look at a business and what they're trying to achieve and the budget they're allocating to it, if we don't think we can move the dial, then we should not take that work on. Sure. So I agree that, you know, can you guarantee that I'll be number one when somebody types in car insurance? Well, no we can't. Of course we can't, you know. Dear Mr. Car Insurance Company. But can I guarantee that we'll move the dial? Can I guarantee that we'll improve things? Can I guarantee the graphs will move up and to the right then? Absolutely I can, and we have to be able to do that. Yeah. We have to be able to guarantee to a certain level. I think what you're driving at, so I don't disagree with you is when you get these ridiculous guarantees, like you will be number one in Google for this, you know, for whatever.

Well, it's specific guarantees, isn't it? This is the point. It's like, we can, we can say that we'll move the dial. We can say we'll find keywords and we'll rank you for them and they'll generate traffic. And those generate leads. But when you start telling people which keywords and guaranteeing that you are going to rank for them. I think anybody who's ever done any digital marketing will admit to the fact that, you know, it's very difficult to say sometimes whether the tried or true, tried and true tested tactics that you normally use are actually going to pay off in this instance. Um, so yeah, very suspicious of anybody who says we can get you position one for dentists in Aberdeen, for example. Yeah. Um they don't know that.

They don't know that and they don't. And you don't know what everybody else is doing. You don't know what your competition are doing. I mean you might be thinking, well we're chucking three grand a month at this. We should be able to move the dial. Yeah, but, you know, there's another five companies chucking ten grand a month at it, and they're doing a much better job and doing way more content than you. We spoke about content in the last podcast, um, or one of the previous podcasts anyway. Um, I mean, and that leads on nicely to the subject of trust, you know, so the guarantees question, if you like, leads on to trust. And for me, trust is probably as in as it is in a lot of relationships, both personal and business. The really important aspect to this, because, you know, one of the reasons we run this podcast is to try and help people understand for us to demystify the industry that we're helping people to what.

Do we actually do?

Yeah. And, and, you know, any situation in life where you're paying somebody money to do something that you don't really understand, then trust can be an issue. So being able to build trust, earn trust is really important. And so for me, the trust has to start to build almost from the first conversation. Yeah. I mean, there was there was a conversation I had recently with a, with somebody who was enquiring about search marketing. And we had a long conversation before she realised that the kind of budgets we would need were.

Well out of her.

Well out of her range sort of thing. But at the end of the conversation, you know, she said, this has been so useful. I mean, there was we'd given her lots of information, lots of help. And she clearly the trust had had was starting to build, you know, because of our sort of, you know, straightforward approach to the whole thing.

Um, well, we are very transparent. I mean, I think that's a, I think that's fair to say more so than most agencies, I think.

Um, yeah. I mean, I'd like to think that other classy agencies like us are, equally transparent and realistic and and don't speak in tongues and offer ridiculous guarantees and all that. I mean, I don't know, maybe because I've been cocooned in red evil now for the last seventeen, eighteen years, whereas obviously you joined the business six or seven months ago or whatever it was. So you've had more exposure to other agencies. So what's your take on it?

Yeah, I mean, I think my take is that whatever the size of the agency, people like to hide behind the kind of exclusivity of what we do. You know, nobody can understand search marketing except the search marketers. Nobody can understand pay per click marketing except the pay per click marketers. Okay. Um, it's not to say that it's all smoke and mirrors, it's just that there's a certain level of kind of detachment, I guess, that works in people's favor. Um, and I think it really sucks. I think it's probably the saddest thing about our industry because ultimately to sell somebody SEO services, you don't need to pull a hood over their head. You know, you don't need to hide the truth.

Absolutely.

You just need to explain to them exactly what you're going to do and make it clear to them that, you know, this is how you're going to spend your time. And ultimately, at the end of the day, most people are electing to work with us because we have experience and knowledge, and because we can do the hard work that they maybe, perhaps don't want to, don't have time to. Not because they have no idea how to do it. And I think it's a shame when you're kind of, I say blackmailing, it's not really like that, but, you know, kind of forcing people's hands a little bit by saying, if you don't employ us to do it, you have to employ somebody else to do it because you can't do this for yourself. And that's rarely true, I think.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's right. You can always do this stuff. I mean, one of the things that we do, if we get enquiries and it's clear that the people can't afford us, we'll try and give them advice first of all, and help them as much as we can. We'll also point them at resources that are freely available online, which show them exactly what to do so that they can do it for themselves.

Fair to say that Caron gets quite cross at you for giving people too much advice sometimes.

Yeah. I mean, there is an element of I mean, I find that I can't help myself. I mean, you know, I know it sounds a bit sickly sweet, maybe, but I genuinely love helping people. So when we get a business that we want to help, but we can't because they don't have the right budget, I find it quite frustrating, so I'll certainly try and give them all the you know, as good advice. I'll give them good advice, point them at some really good resources. And you know, in some cases we'll point them at maybe a good freelancer that we know of who doesn't have the overheads of an agency and can charge a little bit less, for example.

But I think it's fair to say that, to be honest with you, taking the approach that we have, where we are very transparent about what we do and how we achieve the results we get does get us into trouble sometimes. Right. So we've had conversations with people who are like, well, if that's all you're doing, I can do it, for example. Or yeah, you know, if that's all you're doing, why don't you do it faster or harder? Um, yeah. So yeah, I mean, it definitely does have its kind of downside, I guess. And I think a lot of the time with bigger agencies, that's what they're trying to avoid, right? It's just like, we can't be bothered with any of this. We don't want to have to explain to people. It's like when you go to the doctor and they'll write you a prescription, but they won't explain what the medicine does. Mhm. I guess it's that kind of arrogance that.

We're.

Combating a lot of the time.

Yep. Cheers. See you later. Okay. Steve. Just leaving the office.

Um, but, yeah, I've lost my train of thought now.

Yeah. It's okay. I mean, we're sort of talking around, you know, the whole subject of of how you choose a digital marketing agency and, um, and the things, the kind of conversations you need to have and the kind of budgets you need to spend and how you figure out whether they know what they're talking about and speaking to their existing customers and just building up this picture because it all leads to the fact that there is a really intimate relationship that's developed between a digital marketing agency and its clients.

Yeah. And it's interesting actually, just in you kind of going back over that ground, it makes me realise that, yeah, it's that whole thing, isn't it? If you can't sit down and ask the marketing agency, you're going to employ exactly what they're going to do day to day, how are they going to move the dial? What are they going to do for you? Really, there's no basis for a relationship there. Anybody that refuses to explain something that kind of fundamental and basic. Mhm. How can you build a trust and a rapport with them. That's right. And I think that really is kind of critical. You can't really work with somebody who you can't trust.

Well, that's why I think if you're thinking of getting a marketing agency involved to help you grow your business by getting more traffic to your website, etc., then leave words like vendor and supplier out the door. I mean, you're not looking for a vendor. You're not looking for a supplier. You are looking for a partner. And I get that. That seems a bit oh, God. Really? You know, I do. I get it because it's like everyone wants to be your partner. You know, it's my dentist, my dentist, or my tooth partner, I don't know, and I just made that up. I've never heard tooth partner before. But I think it could become a thing.

Hopefully we never.

Yeah, but it is like that because you're really going into battle almost with your new digital marketing partner to, you know, wage war on everybody else in your market to a certain extent in order to try and figure out and do things so that you, you know, you succeed. You're you're the victor. You you're the one getting the attention. You're the one getting the traffic in search and everything else. And you can't do that with a vendor. And if you if you I'm not saying that there aren't digital marketing agencies who are vendor like in their approach, but clinical if you like. But it's certainly not the way that we approach it.

Well, at the end of the day, like you say, you need somebody who's going to get out there and work really hard to get results, not just for you, but for themselves too. You know, there's an element of kind of personal pride to having a website rank. There's an element of personal pride to helping a business grow. And I would say that if the agency you're working with doesn't have that, they're probably not going to deliver the kind of results you could be getting elsewhere. You need to fire that drive to actually go out there and do well.

Um, you also need to be able to have difficult conversations because as we know, when you're on, when you're working on campaigns, when you're trying to find the sweet spot, when you're trying to get a company more noticed. You're trying to get their website ranking better, and you're trying to get enquiries generating some of the stuff you do works. Some of the stuff you do doesn't work. And you know, a robust partnerships.

So what Dave is trying to say is everything we try works perfectly.

I wish, yeah, I wish. So you need to be able to have. I mean, when, when I did the podcast with Bruce, I mean, after the podcast, we were talking about various things and I said to him, you know, because we've got a great relationship. Sure. And, you know, we have had one or two difficult conversations there in a very competitive market, right? Their website wasn't in a great place when we took it over. And we've spent a lot of the first twelve months of the engagement sorting things out, getting things into place. And, you know, and Bruce was like, oh, you know, when are the leads going to start coming in? And I get that. I mean, it's absolutely right. It's the same in the same way. He was also saying, you know, I realised that pretty much the whole twelve months budget so far has been getting everything knocked into shape. And we're now in a very good position.

But still, where are my leads?

But still where, where, where are the enquiries? That's right. And and, you know, increasingly people want to see results fast. And we get that. And again, you know, that maybe comes back to the trust thing. If a if we can get results quickly using, for example, paid search or Google ads, Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, etc.. Generally, if there's a market for what the person the business is trying to sell, then that's a quicker way to market. Obviously, it's, it's on a pay per impression, pay per click basis. But when it comes to the other stuff, like just having a website that is better ranks better, converts better, and we will in some of the other podcasts, talk about conversion rate optimisation. Um, you know, that that is more of a slog, isn't it? That's where relationships or the relationship will get tested.

Well, yeah. I mean, you're asking somebody a lot, aren't you? You're asking them to trust you, that you're going to do work that they can't, you know, necessarily see the benefit of for what, six to twelve months? Do you think that's probably realistic?

Yeah.

Yeah for sure. That's quite a long time. If I, you know, paid somebody to come and paint my house. And they were like, oh, it'll be finished in twelve months. I'd be like, uh.

Unless your house was massive.

But you know what I mean? There's not many things in life where you're happy to kind of sit back and wait twelve months. And I think, you know, a huge amount of sympathy for business owners, you know, who are looking for agencies because ultimately that business is their kind of baby, right? It's their child, if you like, and they want it desperately to succeed and grow. And you're saying, oh, well, you know, in twelve months time, maybe you'll see some results. That's that's tough. Um, but ultimately, I think that's also the reality of the situation. And like you say, if you can't have those conversations with an agency, if you can't sit down and say, you know, show me what you're actually doing and how it's going to pay off and trust them when they say, you know.

That brings me on. Interestingly, it brings me on to a slightly different approach. I mean, you know, we are advocates of the retainer where you're actually just constantly working towards, you know, improving things. Um, and, but as you know, I mean, you know, we work with another agency in America and they have this accelerator program.

Sure.

And that that can work as well because that can deliver results really quickly. Now, you do need to, you know, to have a lot of faith and trust in an agency because, I mean, the sort of accelerator programs they're talking about, they, they want their customers to chuck sixty thousand dollars.

Right.

So the idea in, in about four to six weeks and just and a ton of resource gets thrown at the problem and it really moves the dial from A to B very quickly.

Yeah. I think the idea is that you pay like the entire year's marketing budget up front, basically, and then squeeze all that work in and get your results there and then. That's right. And I think it's interesting because I guess just going back to your point about chemistry earlier, that's kind of like the pressure cooker, if you like, isn't it? It's like if you don't get on well with your agency, that's going to be disastrous because you have to work very closely with them. But if you do get on well, that's four to six weeks of very intense kind of yeah, you work together and what comes out at the end may well be very, very impressive.

I mean, the feedback from them is, is, is that clients love it. Yeah. They just love the intensity and the kind of full on nature and the real kind of wow. You know, we, we, you know, we hated our website. It wasn't producing the goods. And in six weeks time, you know, it within a six week period, if you like, it was visually transformed and we started to see results really quickly.

That sounds very American though, doesn't it? I feel like if you did that in this country, the feedback would be like, yeah, yeah, probably.

Yeah. That's right.

Worked okay.

Yeah, I think so. I think.

So. Um, but no, yeah, I one hundred percent agree. And I think it's something we, because I think it's fair to say when we're working on projects that we're really passionate about, right? Sometimes we're really annoyed about the fact that we have to stop. It's like, you know, if somebody says, I'm gonna pay you ten grand over the month or whatever, that's fine. You can do X amount of work for that, but you hit a wall where you know, it's not profitable for you to be working on the campaign anymore. You have to wait until next month until the budget tops back up, whatever. Um, and that sucks because we want to drive the results right now. We want to sit there and kind of grind away at it until it works. So yeah, I can see it working really well from that end too.

Yeah. I mean, just as we start to wind, wind, this podcast up, I mean, my, my, um, a thing that sometimes, um, perplex isn't the right word frustrate. Something that frustrates me is I don't think clients often get to really see how invested an agency, not just us, other good agencies, how invested we become, you know, they can they can focus on the, on the invoice that comes in. They can focus on the money going out. They can see things happening. But again, you know, if you get a good agency, it's incredible how invested. I mean, I'm talking lying awake at night invested. I'm talking about long motorway drives when you're on holiday thinking about a client's problem and you know it, that's the reality of running an agency.

Yeah, I think certainly when you're at the kind of level we are, you have to have that level of kind of drive and ambition, don't you? You have to be invested in people's projects. But it's interesting because I just want to take that back to what you were saying earlier, right. Ways to pick agencies. If the agency that you're picking doesn't want to come and sit with you and find out about your business and work out how you do what you do and get invested, if they don't seem passionate about what you do, I know you hate that word. I can see your face.

No, I'm not wincing at the word passionate. I do hate the word passionate because everybody's passionate about everything these days. And it's like, hmm, okay, overused.

But but, you know, if they're not, if they're not super interested in what you do and they're not coming in to sit down with you and say, you know, we want to watch you work for a day. We want to see what you actually do, you know, do you think there's something to be said there for the fact that they're probably not as invested as they could be?

I mean, you cannot do what we do. You cannot do what good agencies do. If you don't become that invested, you just can't do it. So, you know, I find it impossible to even contemplate that there are agencies out there that would start an engagement and not spend time really finding out about.

You see, I've seen people put proposals on the table that, you know, will deliver X amount of pages of content before they even know what.

Industry.

Somebody is operating in. And this is, I think this is the this is the problem, isn't it? When you're going out there and you're trying to hire an agency and people are saying, oh, we'll do X, Y, and Z before they even know who you are.

Yeah.

How can you possibly trust them?

I mean, our proposals often are short and sweet. They are. And fundamentally, our proposals will say we don't know anything about you. We don't know what the problems are. We don't know who your ideal customers are. And the first thing we're going to do is figure all that out. And once we've figured all that out, we'll then be able to put together a strategy. And once we've got a strategy, really the budget will dictate how quickly we can deliver that strategy. So the budget can also inform the strategy, obviously, which again, comes back to that like pro bono piece of work with the discovery session, because the discovery session helps us better understand the problem, because nine times out of ten, and I've mentioned this before, and it's one of the reasons I don't think public sector get best value when it works with agencies is, um, you've got to work with the customer, with the client to really find out what the problems are and where the roadblocks are and where the challenges are, etc.. And you've got to do that.

Yeah. You know, it's interesting. We started this podcast talking about how to pick a good agency. Yeah. But I think that's it in a nutshell, isn't it? And that's not to be kind of overly self-promotional about us, or to say that we've kind of figured it all out.

As have other agencies, I'm sure.

Yeah. Um, but ultimately, yeah, what you want is an agency who's going to sit down and work out what your problems are and how best to solve them. Not an agency that's going to have pretend to have the solution to a problem they don't even know about.

Yeah. And if the agency just accepts what's in the proposal, we, you know, we are a company A and we need um services B, C, D and E is.

They're not services are they. This is the this is the problem. This is what we come back to time and time again, technically what we deliver as a service. But it's not, it's not really just a service. You can't just do SEO for someone's website without sitting down with them, learning from them, getting them to write content occasionally. Painful as it may be.

Yeah, it's a relationship. It's a partnership. There's no two ways about it. One hundred percent. Yeah. So just to wind it up then, uh, pick a good agency, check the track record, speak to their customers. If they, you know, make sure they're using plain language or if they're not, make sure that they can explain to you exactly what they do and why they do it. Um, you've got to get good chemistry. Um, you've got to be realistic about budgets. Um, be wary of guarantees and you know, is trust being built up from the first point of contact, from the first touch with the agency? Are you starting to oh, like, like, like the cut of this guy's jib or like this? I like the way these guys talk. I, you know, it feels like they are the real deal if you're just not feeling that they might be the real deal. But if you're not feeling it, it's just not worth.

It's irrelevant at the end of the day, isn't it? Because all you really need out of this is a good relationship with somebody that you trust. So look for that, I guess. Yeah, there we go. Problem solved, problem solved.