What we're going to look at today are the the benefits of working with a partner agency. If you've decided to invest in some marketing automation, CRM, business growth type software, and we're talking about things like HubSpot, our favorite. We're also talking about things like Parador, Sharpspring. There's a whole load of these tools out there. Ultimately, what you want to do, the position you want to be in is you want to have, you know, you want to have a great website full of the kind of content that your ideal customers are looking for. You want to be nailing it in Google search. So that's generating enquiries, generating interest in your business, and then a sales team. You've got a great set of tools to help them deliver something a bit special in terms of a sales process, all of that. You could probably try and figure it out, but you can fast track it. If you bring in an agency who've done it many times before for other businesses, and they've done it successfully, and they can draw on all that experience and expertise so that you go from zero to hero really quickly. Okay. Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. And I'm with Alex, who's coming at us across the wires because yet again, he's not in the office.
It snowed. There were three inches of snow.
It might have snowed, but by not coming in the office, you didn't get a delicious cup of coffee and a bacon roll made by me, and everybody else did. So there you go. Um, okay, so what we're going to look at today are the benefits. And there's a danger this will just come across like a big sales pitch and it's not meant to. So bear with us if we do get a little bit off off the track with it, but we're looking at the benefits of working with a partner agency. If you've decided to invest in some marketing automation, CRM, business growth type software, and we're talking about things like HubSpot, our favorite, we're also talking about things like Pado. Um, sharp spring. I think there's a, there's a whole load of these tools out there which are pitched at companies, uh, specifically marketing departments to help them achieve more and measure more, get more leads and do a whole raft of fantastic things with their digital marketing.
Yeah. And I think, you know, one of the, one of the, I guess, contradictions we should kind of embrace first is that these platforms are often sold as simplifying things out there. They're supposed to make marketing easier or quicker or more efficient. I think that is true, but I guess a lot of the time, only if you know how to use them, right? They're really good tools in the right hands, but they're not necessarily kind of all singing, all dancing straight out of the box.
Yeah. But and the other thing, and we'll kind of go through this in a systematic way. But the other thing is even if you know how to use them, I mean, I kind of know how to use Photoshop. I don't actually, but I kind of do. But I'm rubbish with it. I'm not creative enough. Yeah. I'm not, I'm not creative enough to do anything worthwhile with it. So having the tools there doesn't magically transform you. I mean, the, the, the thing that people often speak about to try and get that point across is when desktop publishing tools became, you know, widespread when, you know, Apple Mac came out and suddenly you could buy stuff, then suddenly, oh, well, that's graphic design has done for everyone can just do their own design now. And, you know, we all know what the outcome of that was. Yep.
A bit like the, uh, automated AI copywriting we were experimenting with earlier where it's like, oh, that's it. The end of copywriting because this tool exists. It's like, well, you don't know how to use it properly, then it's not actually very helpful at all. But yeah.
Yeah. Okay. So the first thing I would say to anybody considering any of these tools, and I don't know if the, um, if like, pardon sharpspring and all of the various others, I don't know if the people who sell them are as full on as the HubSpot guys. I mean, we love the HubSpot guys, but they are full on. So what can happen as soon as you make an enquiry and start looking at these tools? Um, you're going to get potentially you're going to get bombarded with, with, um, people from the software vendors saying, oh, you know, can we, can we interest you in a free trial? Would you like to try this? Would you like to try that? Can we talk about this? Can we talk about that? And have you any idea when you're going to sign up? And you know, they can be really, really quite pushy? And I think almost that's the first benefit of doing this with an agency. Because if you speak to an agency, first of all, they're not going to be as pushy as the salespeople at the vendors, as the vendors are. And secondly, they can give you a more holistic view of the software, more realistic view of it, perhaps.
Yeah, how you're going to use it, how it's going to benefit you instead of just trying to push features on you and subscriptions for sure.
That kind of thing. So, so what I would say is, you know, you really need to understand what you think it's going to do for you. And you really need to understand how you're going to use it. Um, if as a starting point, you know, as the, as the first thing to do, in my opinion.
Yeah. I think it's interesting, isn't it? It's like the top level, kind of like you say, holistic view of it because I think it's fair to say, you know, we've, we've worked with clients who have kind of gone away and got things like HubSpot on their own, kind of installed it, employed it, but it just kind of sits there in the background doing nothing. It's not part of their processes. They don't really know how it's supposed to tie in with the rest of their marketing efforts. And I think that kind of strategic perspective from people who are used to integrating HubSpot or part or whatever into other people's workflows, who are used to showing people how to use it in a way that benefits all of their marketing, rather than just a small part of it is really useful.
Well, I mean, a simple example of that is we've got a customer who shall remain nameless, who, who've been using HubSpot for quite some time, and they haven't sent any newsletters out with it since about twenty nineteen. And the reason for that is that they tried to send out a lot of newsletters to a list that wasn't very clean as in it had all kinds of. It had all kinds of stuff going on inside it. And so HubSpot part way through the send process went, wait a minute. Loads of these emails are bouncing. There's something not right here. It blocked them and they haven't been. And they haven't even got around to unblocking in order in order to use the tool that they're probably paying quite a lot of money for. And that's not that unusual. There are agencies out there who specialise in jumping in and helping people who've maybe been using something like HubSpot or Sharpspring for a long time and are just not making any headway with it. In fact, it just becomes like it just gathers dust.
Yeah, well, that's exactly it. I mean, I think the other thing, the other kind of use case, I guess we see a lot, isn't it, is people who are using something like HubSpot CRM to collect contact details from people on their website, and they just kind of sit there in the CRM, this massive long list of people building up that nobody assigns to anyone, nobody contacts. And you kind of look in there and it's this treasure trove of potential leads, but they're all two years out of date and there's nothing you can do about them. So yeah, that's right.
Okay. So having so having paused for breath before signing on the dotted line and actually thought about how you're going to use it, and that is definitely something that an agency or freelancer, I guess can help you with. The next thing to consider is right, we've now decided we're going to use it. We're going to use the CRM, customer Relationship management system. We're going to use some marketing automation. We're going to use landing pages. We're going to create a newsletter. Um, and maybe even, you know, you're going to build your website in it, which is perfectly possible as well with, with some of these tools. But let's just take, you know, taking the build a website bit out of it. Um, you've got to stop and ask yourself, have you got the skills in-house to do that, to do all of that stuff, which involves creative work? It involves a little bit of technical work. It certainly involves some strategy and some thinking. It involves having to write content, etc. now, HubSpot will be the first people to tell you, and I'm sure the others are the same, that these tools don't do that for you. They're not artificial intelligence. They don't say like, tell us what you do. Oh, we sell widgets. Right. Great. Right. We've got a newsletter ready for you about widgets. Just send it out to your list. Haven't got a list. Oh, here's a list. Just send it to these people. They'll probably buy it. That's not how it works.
No, and I think, you know, things with like HubSpot, for example, the whole kind of like ethos of inbound marketing, that is something that you, you know, you really do have to put the legwork in yourself, don't you? The tool is fantastic for making it more efficient, but it literally, until you've got that foundation of good well-targeted content, until you've got that lead generation machine down, the software doesn't do anything really. Um, so yeah, you have to be able to, like you say, do the keyword research, find the search phrases that people are using, write the content, optimise the content, publish the content. And if you haven't got the results to do that in-house, you are going to be sat with an expensive piece of kit that does nothing.
Mhm. I guess you could use some of these tools, um, by running purely paid search. So there's nothing wrong with sending paid search to a landing page that you created in your, in your, in your platform, which then people fill in the form. They then go in and you start to build a list.
Are you suggesting that paid search is easier than SEO?
No, it's quicker though. It's quicker.
But there's still, I mean, you know, even with paid search, I mean, even if you're going to leverage this just, you know, with PPC ads, there's still a body of work to be done. Again, keyword research, writing the ads, capturing the people browsing, making sure that you stand out from the competition. It's not easy, is it? It's not like you can just kind of set all this stuff up, forget about it, and get some leads from HubSpot.
That's not it's probably easy to do it badly. It's easy to create a badly designed landing page. It's easy to not do split testing to figure out which version of your landing page is best. It's easy not to set the CRM up so that you can get useful information out of it. And, you know, make sure that you're contacting the right people with the right messages at the right time and all that kind of thing. It's, it's kind of, you can, can get lulled into. And the thing I wanted to just mention next was like onboarding. If you go through an onboarding process with the likes of some of these software vendors. They'll show you how to use all the software so you can like, have a go.
Yeah. Yeah.
And again, I think that's where people slip up. If you work with an agency through the onboarding. And to be fair, some of these vendors do push customers to say, look, we can onboard you, but it'd be better if you find an agency partner to help you do it, even though they think it's a better idea to do that.
Yeah. Well, I think probably because they know, don't they? At the end of the day that I mean, I'm going to go out on a limb here, but I'm going to say that, you know, kind of seventy to eighty percent of the people using a given piece of software won't be using it. Well. And I guess if you're a vendor and you know, you're kind of selling the software and you see people not using it properly, you know, they're not going to stick around. So it's probably in their best interests to say, find somebody competent to teach you how to use it.
Yeah. I mean, that is exactly the philosophy at HubSpot. That's why they you can't even buy the software unless you agree to, to pay for onboarding, whether HubSpot delivery or whether, whether an agency delivers it. But if an agency delivers the onboarding, they're going to take the time to find out more about your business and make sure that you're onboarded in a way that makes sense. And you get the absolute maximum out of out of the system, out of the software. Whereas if the company onboard you, it's going to be a bit mechanical, it's going to be a bit prescriptive. They're going to follow a process, follow a template and, and then basically let you loose.
Yeah. It's that whole getting to know your company, isn't it? An agency has time to sit down and say, what are your processes internally? What do people like to do? Who will look after this? If we set up some email automation, who's going to make sure it works properly? A big company hasn't got the time or the inclination to do that, really, have they, to sit down and actually get to know your business. So. Yeah.
That's right. Okay. Moving on then another killer reason, if you like, um, to use an agency to onboard and get going with marketing automation software is that they will help you develop a strategy because we always talk about strategy, this strategy, that strategy first. And like a lot of tools, whether it's social media tools, or whether it's full marketing automation tools. There's always a there's always a kind of you're always drawn to start playing with it and start doing stuff with it and start sending emails out or doing things that that isn't necessarily going to work or almost certainly isn't going to work because there's no thinking going behind why you're doing it. I mean, Mike Lieberman at square two talks about random acts of marketing, and I really like that idea.
Random acts of marketing.
Well, but it's exactly what you can do with with a platform like Pardo or HubSpot, you can basically start executing random acts of marketing and just see what happens. But you really need to develop a strategy. And it's pretty much it's just not going to happen. HubSpot. Pardo, etc. are not gonna spend the time with you to help you develop the right strategy for your business, but an onboarding agency partner will take the time to do that, obviously for a fee. Well, yeah, I mean, they'll do it, you know, if you don't want to pay them, they're not going to do it. But I mean, assuming that you're going to pay them to do it, that is they will do that.
Yeah, yeah. I think it's fair to say that random acts of marketing is probably like the biggest danger of using any of these tools, isn't it? You either go with it once, like you say, randomly, without any real thought behind it. It doesn't work. And then you're going to think you are going to think whether you whether you want to or not. Oh, this doesn't really work that well. It's not that great. And shelve it. That's kind of inevitable. It happens all the time. But yeah, if you get off on the right foot, if you set everything up properly before you wade in, then it's all going to work a lot better. And yeah, like you say, the only people, I guess with the real kind of strategic overview and the chops to do that are good agencies.
Yeah. Agreed. So looking at some very specific stuff, we, if we if again, we've agreed that without a, without a strategy, you're not going to make much progress. Um, I believe if you haven't got in-house creative capability. So if you haven't got graphic design capability in-house, then none of these tools are going to be particularly effective for you. Um, it's got, I mean, Hubspot's got a great tool for creating newsletters, web pages, landing pages, blog pages. It's great software. It really is easy. I mean, this software is designed so that marketers can do the communicating rather than relying on the geeks. And that is what it does fantastically well. But it doesn't, you know, with the exception of the fact that you can grab templates. So if you're happy for, for your communications with the outside world, with your potential customers to be pretty much made, then that's fine. Use a template, you know? But if you want to create something that's not me, then you really should be spending a bit of time on design. And if you haven't got that resource in-house, can you justify hiring somebody? So you've got the resource in-house. You're going to find enough work for them to do. Or again, would you would it be better if you work with a creative partner on that?
Yeah, it gets complicated, doesn't it? Trying to employ independent specialists to do every aspect of your marketing for you instead of one kind of cohesive provider. I guess the other thing as well, just to pick up on the whole kind of strategy thing. Do you think another potential massive advantage of working with people like us is that we do know what the kind of cutting edge strategies are? I mean, it's a really over kind of used phrase. But, you know, I was just thinking then that when you if you use HubSpot now, just like straight out of the box and you bought into the whole idea of, say, gated content, for instance, you'd set up something that didn't really work as well as something that we'd set up now where we're maybe thinking, you know, gated content. We talked about that previously, but the whole idea of like providing a download or a resource that somebody has to give you their personal information to download, that used to be really popular. And you probably, you know, if you're setting HubSpot up now without any kind of input from an agency like us, you may be tempted to try the same thing because you've read an old blog post about how well it works or that kind of thing. Whereas now we'd be going in and saying, actually, don't do that, do this. And I guess you'd lose a lot of that, wouldn't you?
Well, well, we wouldn't because come on, Alex, let's be honest. We haven't got a clue. We're just blagging it. I mean, the fact that we can produce these podcasts and sound like we know what we're talking about is amazing, isn't it? Really? I mean, you know, anybody with a brain cell, they can probably tell that we're just winging it, but. No, no, you're absolutely right. I mean, the tools maybe don't keep up with I think maybe this is the point that you were making. The tools are not necessarily keeping up with what's currently happening. Any sort of software development's going to lag. So people suddenly go, oh wow, I can create this content and people will have to tell me who they are or they won't get it. And guess what? People are going to go, yeah, well, I'll get it somewhere else.
Right? Because digital marketing changes fast, doesn't it? People adapt and learn very quickly. And I think, yeah, I think you're right. Is that the tools kind of trail behind a little bit? You need somebody who's actually doing this stuff actively day in, day out successfully to tell you what's actually going to work and what isn't. Because if you take the kind of tools, advice and that's not to, you know, slag off hubspot's content, which is often excellent, but it is a little bit behind the times. I think a lot of the time.
Yeah. I mean, just because Microsoft Word lets you use the Comic Sans font doesn't mean you should use it. Oh yes, another another chance of bashing Comic Sans, I love it. Okay, so the creative aspect clearly. Now, the thing I think that most businesses struggle with is content. Yep. And that can be as simple as writing cohesive, plain-english content that tells the world what they do all the way through to really engaging, educational, and entertaining content that shows people that they are the bee's knees and a company that should be in the frame. Next time you want to buy a particular service or product.
Like this podcast.
Yeah. That's right. What, what, like this podcast.
It's hard work creating content, isn't it? I mean, let's be honest, like it's what we spend most of our time doing for clients. If it was easy, there'd be no market for, for that kind of work. And there is. It's, it's time consuming. It's difficult. It's arduous. But yeah, you can't do it yourself. Really, can you? Well, I don't know. I'm sure there are people out there with big businesses, with in-house marketing teams and fantastic content writers, but they are few and far between. I think it's fair to say.
It reminds me of, um, was it the the thick of it or was it the film they made based on the series, The Thick of It and they are talking.
About the old thick.
Of it. Chris Addison I think he was. Is he Chris Addison, the comedian actor? He was he was talking to he was actually Tom Holland, I think was playing the MP. And Tom Holland said, surely you can do this. It's easy peasy, lemon squeezy. And he came back and said, no, it's not. It's difficult, difficult, lemon difficult. And I thought that was brilliant. It was very anando. I Nietzsche, um, comedy. I just thought it was genius. So I'm sorry, I've nicked it. And if anybody else gets a giggle out of it because they've never heard it before, it wasn't me that thought it up. It was Armando Iannucci I'm sure.
Also The Thick of it's amazing and definitely worth a watch.
It really is, isn't it? Is it a documentary, do you think, or is it actual? Is it actual comedy? It looks more like a documentary to me. Mind you. Yes, Minister was the same. Do you do you remember? Yes, Minister, with Paul Eddington and Nigel Hawthorne. I mean, uh, Hawthorne, was it Nigel? Um, I can't remember the civil. It was it was genius. It's. If you watch it today, as long as you can get past the fact they haven't got computers on the desk, it's still brilliant. I mean, you know, it is. It isn't even of its time. Still genius. I love it.
Particularly relevant to the current situation politically. I think so, yeah.
I think so. Without without, uh, sharing our political colours. I think you're absolutely right, Alex. Um, okay. So the whole idea of having a team of people who can help you create content is so important because everything you do with modern marketing, even using paid search, it's all about right, the right messaging, the right story, the right content content that's engaging, written in a way that people actually enjoy reading. So you're actually entertaining them as well as educating them if you can educate and entertain. I know this is a much hackneyed way of looking at it, but if you can educate and entertain, you're onto a winner. You really are.
I don't think it is hackneyed. I mean, that's the thing. I think, you know, we'd love to. It would be delightful if marketing was more transactional, simpler. You know, you could just pop up some PPC ads and sell people things, but it just doesn't work like that anymore, does it? The only way to make sure that you're standing out and to make sure that you're giving your customers what they want is to invest heavily in that content. And yeah.
Agreed.
That resource really.
So yeah, just like you need, um, the resource, it can help with the creative resource that can help with the technical, the set up, the running, etc., making sure that there's, um, you know, the data is properly cleansed and continues to be relevant. Um, you know, you also need to consider how you're going to use it to sell more stuff. So the actual sales process now as a digital marketing agency, we don't claim to be sales experts, but we do get involved and we do work with businesses and help them better understand how to sell more effectively in the twenty first century. And if need be, we know we work with some great consultants. We can bring dedicated consultants in who can work, work with, work with our customers to help with their sales process. But this old school kind of diving on top of customers as soon as they show even a slightest bit of interest, isn't isn't going to work a bit like sort of the people that who sell digital marketing automation software do.
Um.
Isn't going to work. You've got to continue to help and provide a great experience for potential customers right up to the point they become customers. And then beyond that, so that they become great advocates for your brand and your business. And I don't think I don't think everybody gets that. I mean, they just see the digital marketing and the marketing automation tools as a way of sort of filling the top of the funnel so that you get stuff coming out the end and you get opportunities, and then the salespeople pick the phone up and everything magically just happens.
Well, it's even like really simple things, isn't it? Like, I know companies out there where, you know, like they treat every lead the same, irrespective of how somebody lands on the site or what page they look at. They give them to the same salespeople. The salespeople ring them up and just try to tell them, sell them the company services in general. And it's even just stuff like that, isn't it? It's like sharpening up your kind of bucketing, I guess, of, of incoming leads and knowing what they were looking for when they contacted you and being able to give them like a kind of relevant sales call is a simple step in the right direction, but it's something you can only do if you understand how something like HubSpot CRM works, isn't it? So. Yeah.
That's right. Okay, so we're a digital marketing agency, so we're bound to come across as a bit biased because basically we want companies to hire us to help them do all this stuff and ideally do it all using a fantastic piece of software to make sure that everything we do is is really effective. What if it's a larger organisation and they can afford to build a team? So what is the actual bare minimum team? Do you think that a big organisation should consider investing in if they're gonna make proper use of this software and are going to do really effective digital marketing.
Um, good question. Seven um, I mean, realistically, like you're going to need what, like a couple of writers, a couple of paid media specialists, right?
Stop. Who's going to run the show? Who do you need to run the show? You need a CMO, chief marketing officer probably that might be there might be somebody who can who can step up and do that, do that role as well. I don't know, possibly. But you're going to need somebody to run it, aren't you? Somebody who can think about the big picture, create the strategy and somebody who understands, uh, all of the various skills and how to manage those people who have those skills in order to get the most out of the team. So you're going to have to have somebody to head it up. Now you can, you can outsource that role. You can get like, um, uh, what they call fractional CMOs. you know, as soon as you get fractional financial, uh, um, directors and things like that. So you could consider that.
And it defeats the purpose of building an in-house team though, doesn't it? I feel like yes, maybe.
But then again, then again, that person is almost certainly going to be the most expensive person. So if you can't afford a full time CMO, then a fractional CMO. Is that right? Yes. CMO, um, fractional Chief Marketing officer. It could be an option for you, but whatever you do, whether you get somebody in-house who wants to double up and do that role as well, because they've got the capability, or whether you want to bring in a CMO or whether you want to go the whole hog and hire, you're going to hire somebody full time. That is, you're going to have to have somebody running the show. So there's a starting point.
Okay. Yep.
Right. So that's a good thing, right? What's the next most important thing? Do we think?
Um, I don't know. See, I'm gonna just, I'm gonna lean on the whole kind of writer thing again. You're going to need somebody that can produce decent content in-house, reliably, consistently.
Okay, so we need a content team or a content person. Could a person potentially do this?
I don't think so. I don't think I've never seen a big company do it well with a with less than kind of three or four people.
Okay, so going back to the idea of using an agency, I mean, you do a lot of content, but what you do is you write the content, you'll then get the content sense checked, sense checked. Somebody else might add some more value to that content. It goes around the team. The designer will then move in and start looking at how we're going to, you know.
Lay it out on the page. And then a developer will be involved in actually building that page. And then even before that, I think loads of work goes into kind of brainstorming strategy with different people. Like you can't, I don't know, like at the risk of kind of just sounding like we're saying you need loads of people and you should get an agency instead. I really don't think that unless you've got a team that works well together, kind of throwing ideas around and kind of, you know, passing ideas back and forth, you can really get good content out of one or two people. Well.
That's what we're trying to wrestle down. And I'm not as convinced maybe as you, that you can't do it. So if, for example, um, somebody with your capability was involved, uh, say you were hired by big.
O, you can't win by flattering me into agreeing with you.
I'm really not. Yeah. Trust me. Um, big oil company, come along and give you a job, then. I know that your capability is around, uh, content and search engine optimisation and paid search and conversion rate optimisation. If I haven't already said that, there's a heap of stuff that you've, that you're across, so you could probably fulfill a few roles. All right. You might burn out, you might just be completely flat out trying to spin all them plates. But, but people like you are out there, um, you know, big oil company, come along and do that and offer you some crazy salary. Then you know that there's an opportunity there. And we do know that, you know, a lot of our customers have in-house capability up to a point, and then they only outsource the bits to us that they can't do. so.
There's a danger though, like at the risk of taking this like wildly off topic, I think there's a real danger in kind of giving too much authority to one or two people like that, because at the end of the day, like you end up very siloed, right? You end up thinking the same thoughts over and over again. This is what works. This is what doesn't work. I think there's something to be said. I mean, I used to work freelance, doing a lot of this stuff, like on a consultancy basis, and I ended up kind of giving out the same advice time and time and time again. I think there's a real value in having conflicting and varied points of view. You know, if people kind of feeding in and saying, actually, why not this instead? And I think you'd lose all that if you just put all your eggs in one basket, got one kind of super member of staff, they'd be super when they started. But three years down the line, are they going to be up to date? Are they going to be thinking about things in the way you need them to? I don't know.
Okay. All right. Just to finish off that piece, we've we've got our head honcho. We've got somebody who's all across content. And that person's kind of doubling up knows a bit about PPC, SEO, maybe just enough to be dangerous, but they certainly know something about it. Um, then we need somebody creative. And once we've got those people in place, you could probably have a decent go at it. Probably.
Yeah, I think so. I think so. I mean, there's, there's other skill sets. I think that like massively help, right? Like having somebody who's a cross kind of paid advertising, having somebody who's across like social media advertising, having those specialties definitely helps to kind of bring people into your, your kind of content funnel or flywheel or whatever HubSpot call it now, whatever it will be called by next Tuesday. But yeah, I think you could probably get away with that.
Okay. But one of the other benefits of using an agency, he said, sounding like a salesman, is.
How smooth that transition.
Having an agency. I mean, we would never recommend that people do this stuff in fits and starts. It's not a good plan to do that. You'd really be better off just being consistent. All right. So find figure your budget for the year and stick with it and work through a process, you know, execute a strategy systematically. but, um, if you build an in-house team, you haven't got that flexibility to say, you know what? There's a lot of there's a lot of leads coming in. Things are going really well. We're not expecting an awful lot of activity over the summer. So let's just scale back a bit and speak to the agency and say, look, do we. And the agency then might say, well, you know what? We've got a lot of people on holiday through the summer. It suits us to scale back a bit as well. So you've got real flexibility. Uh, if you work with an agency as opposed to trying to build that team in-house, I think probably you have to be a pretty big company. And we work with some big companies who've got very little in-house resource when it comes to marketing.
Well, for good reason, right? Because a lot of the time, like you say, when you're kind of scaling back, they end up sitting there twiddling their thumbs. And that's, that's an expensive overhead, isn't it? At the end of the day, a marketing team that isn't doing any marketing.
Yeah. I mean, ultimately what you want to do, the position you want to be in is you want to have, you know, you want to have a great website, you want to have a website that's full of the kind of content that your ideal customers are looking for. You want to be nailing it in Google search. You want to be ahead of your customers. Sorry, competitors. You want to be ahead of those people, not just chasing them and trying to catch up with them. You want to be like the one that they're all trying to catch up to. If you like. Um, and you want, um, so that's generating enquiries, generating interest in your business, and then a sales team, we've got a great set of tools to help them deliver something. Um, that's a bit special in terms of a sales process and all of that. You could probably try and figure it out, but you can fast track it. If you bring in a company, an agency who've done it many times before for other businesses, and they've done it successfully, and they can and they can draw on all that experience and expertise so that you go from zero to hero really quickly.
I think that's exactly it, isn't it? The more times you do this, the better at it you become. I think it's fair to say that when we started doing inbound marketing for people, we probably weren't nearly as good at it as we are now. We know what works and what doesn't because we've seen it time and time and time again. And that's, I guess when you're engaging an agency, that's what you're actually buying. They've made all these mistakes before. They've done all the things wrong that you were going to do wrong. They found a better way of doing it, and now they're going to come in and give you that experience. Really?
Yeah. So the benefit of working with an agency, if you want to implement HubSpot or Sharpspring or any of those things, uh, Manyfold, they are basically, there are so many things that you're going to do better if you work with an agency, unless you can find a really good team of people. I would say in the current climate agencies find it hard to recruit and find good people. Um, and the agency environment is pretty full on, pretty exciting and, and good fun. Um, I'm not saying in-house can't be, um, pretty full on as well. I think it absolutely can be. But if you, if you're into being creative and you're into, you know, marketing, digital technologies, building websites, etc., you're that kind of person, I would imagine the best people. This is going to sound really rude, isn't it? I would imagine the best people finish up in agencies because they want marketers. Well, yeah, but they kind of want that dynamic. I think I don't think I would have enjoyed working for, say, a single brand for the last ten years. And I get that some people do enjoy that. And you get all the perks of working for a big company maybe, and everything that goes with that, and maybe more job security, although I'm not so sure. Um, you know, but it's a certain personality that can do that as opposed to the agency people who are, I think, you know, hungry for information, always trying to stay ahead and figure stuff out. And if you're hiring an agency, you're getting all that, you're tapping into all that.
Yeah, that's exactly it is the kind of excitement, isn't it? It's, you're always kind of pushing yourself to do more, to do better. And I don't know if maybe it does exist in-house. Maybe there are some really kind of dedicated people out there that I'm sure there are.
But yeah, yeah, of course there are one hundred percent. There definitely are.
Um, I think the thing is, you can't really survive in an agency environment without that. So when you employ a good agency, you know, you're getting that.
Yeah. I mean, that's a good point. Not we didn't actually discuss that. But if you build this in-house team and they're not killing it, then it's not that easy to move on and change that in-house team out. Whereas if, you know, we will get customers who, you know, most of the customers we work with, apart from the people that we've worked with as startups, have worked with other agencies. So people work with an agency and they don't always fall out. They don't always get to a point where the agency is like, no good and not working for them anymore. They just get to the point where, fancy a change? Yeah. So they just decided, you know, go for that. Go for that approach.
Yeah. Oh, you've grown, you know, your business to the point where the agency can't really support you anymore and you move on to a bigger one or whatever. But yeah, it gives you much more flexibility and freedom, doesn't it? You're not tied down in the same way.
I think so, yeah. Well, I'm pretty convinced that working with an agency is the best way to go. And you might not be surprised to hear me say that being an agency owner. But, um, but I do, I do think it makes sense. I think it's a solid argument. I don't think it's, um, I don't think it's one of those arguments that politicians make because they've been forced to come on the radio and talk about something and defend it when you don't, you know, inside they're screaming, I don't believe this.
No, I think yeah, I mean, I'd love to see some stats like, you know, I'd love to know what the percentage of people who end up killing it on something like HubSpot are, who don't employ an agency, but it just makes perfect sense, really, doesn't it? It's the best way to use the software.
I think so, yeah. Yeah. And again, I'll say it one more time. I've seen in-house teams killing it. They just live and breathe that one brand. They they are totally part of the business and you know, probably will stay there their entire career. And, and they and they are fantastic. But it's unusual. It's not the norm, in my opinion.
In my.
Experience.
Find somebody who runs an in-house marketing department and invite them onto the podcast now. So yeah.
And just, just, uh, yeah, you lead us on to the, to the outro. As we always say, uh, we have got some great guests, uh, booked in to come on to the podcast on the show. And, uh, if you're interested in coming on, then please get in touch. We want to hear from people who are interested in business growth, digital marketing, videography, podcasting, any aspect really of growing businesses using digital technologies or some of the component parts of of that, you know, how to create great content, etc.. So if you want to come on the show, you can either go to red evolution dot com and get in touch with us that way, or go to the podcast website redevolution.com/digital-marketing-from-the-coalface with us that way. Um, in the meantime, um, it's Friday and yeah, I'm driving south this weekend, which I'm looking forward to. And, um, what are you up to? Anything interesting?
I'm going to go build a snowman. Maybe if there's enough snow in the garden. Who knows?
Yeah. Good luck with that. I don't think it's going to snow that much, is it?
I don't think there's a fair bit here, to be fair. Oh.
Okay. Enjoy building a snowman. And, uh, we'll speak to you next time. Try.