It's Not A Retainer, It Is A Retainer, Is It A Retainer? – Episode 68

When you're paying somebody regularly, they're always there and they're like your own marketing department going, right. You know, these are our marketing objectives. How are we going to fulfill them? And the agency's job is to, to work towards that, just like our marketing department does. And the agency are always thinking about how to advance your business, even if you don't have time to.

What typically do we think businesses should be investing in a in a monthly ongoing relationship stroke retainer.

How much.

How long is that piece of string?

It completely depends. It depends what they want to achieve. It depends how much they're doing themselves. If they've got some capacity in house or not.

The idea of paying an agency might sound expensive until you work out what it would cost to build your own team.

Yeah.

Okay. Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. Um, today, Julie and I are gonna have a chat about retainers. Not retainers.

Retainers. Not retainers. Yeah. Okay.

Well, I said retainers because we kind of call them retainers in-house. But you rightly pointed out, I think that it's probably not the right name.

I think for them. Caron that said that. But yeah, I agree with Caron and it probably isn't the right name for them. But we'll get into that, I'm sure as we discuss.

Yeah, but what we're talking about is working with a digital marketing agency so that you more or less pay on an ongoing basis to get stuff done. And this kind of harks back, if you think and if you haven't listened to the podcast we did with Bryony Thomas, I definitely recommend you listen to it. It's two or three podcasts ago, isn't it? Something like that from Watertight Marketing. I definitely listened to that. And one of the things that Bryony spoke about, uh, where marketing's concerned and you've always said it as well is consistency.

Totally. Yeah.

Um, she spoke about consistency. And that's why working with an agency on an ongoing basis, whether it's called a retainer or not, is a good idea. You know, big companies have marketing departments for a reason. They have people dedicated to doing nothing but marketing all the time.

Yeah, because it's something that shouldn't stop it. It needs to be happening all the time. And yeah, some some companies have massive marketing departments and that's all they do. They're not just fitting it in beside the real jobs. It is their real jobs.

That's right. So most of our customers are on retainer. Um, yeah. But it's still relatively new in the sort of web stroke digital marketing space as opposed to PR, for example.

Well, I mean, in the, in the website building or website design and development space, I think it is quite unusual. We do something called growth driven design, which again, we can describe in more detail in a minute. But, um, it's not just like build a website, send a big bill, walk away. It's build a website, gradually pay monthly and the website can evolve as your needs evolve rather than having that really, really painful process that I'm sure most listeners have been through where you, you know, you try and get a website built and it never quite gets finished because the, the brief keeps changing. So, you know, we don't do that. We get a website up and then gradually look at the data and actually evolve it the way it needs to evolve. And you get your website up much quicker then, and you're paying a monthly fee rather than paying sort of one bill at the end or halfway through or whatever, which, you know, can be quite painful.

Yeah. What you're talking about, and it came up in that opportunity that's landed on our lap just recently where you have a, you work towards developing a minimum viable product. Yeah. So you get the and they're the actual words that they used in this, which.

Is exactly what we call it as well.

Exactly that. Yeah. So you get like the best version of your website that you can get done quickly, done quickly.

And the things that expand. Yeah, the things that absolutely have to be in there or it's not going to make sense to build it, but just that just the absolute essentials. And then yeah, add on all the other sort of nice to haves.

It doesn't always work. If you've got a website that's already got five hundred pages and you've got search rankings and everything else, you can't just suddenly reduce that to a twenty page minimum viable product and expect that you're not going to get severely penalised and hurt in in search. So it wasn't.

Always for small websites, new websites, um, websites that aren't working very well and need a complete overhaul and things like that. So, you know, from a, from a sort of low, low, hanging, low standing start, if you like slow start, I don't know what the.

From a standing start.

Yeah. Well, or a nearly standing start is what I'm trying to say. Um, to to build a website gradually is a good place.

The reason I thought we'd cover it in a, in a podcast is because some customers get the idea of a regular payment and some don't, some just kind of can't you just do a thing and then that's it. Um, and this goes back to, I suppose the problem with that being that that means that you haven't got consistency.

You haven't, you do something and then you have a big gap. And then by the time you come back to it, things have changed. And so you have to kind of redo the first thing rather than actually building on the the first bit that you built. You can't tend to kind of keep having to redo the, the big thing over and over again, rather than just sort of gradually evolving it, which is just so much easier. And it helps you, you know, if you want people to find you and do business with you, you need to be seen all the time. You need to be findable and you need to have a presence. You know, they're not going to do business with you unless they see you somewhere. So you need to be, you know, in front of their faces all the time.

When we think about regular payments, retainers, whatever we want to call them, there are some different models that agencies use. So you could find yourself being offered as, as a consumer, if you like, of a, of a, of a retainer, a fixed amount a month. So it's like three grand a month. I mean, we've got a number of customers that pay us a set amount every month.

Yeah, most of them do. Most of it is just a standard. They pay they pay the same every month. Yes. And we, we work to create that volume of work within the the amount they're paying.

You've also got things, like fixed term. So some, some agencies will say, we want you to pay X amount per month, and we want you to sign up for a minimum of twelve months. Now there's two reasons they might do that. One is the no good, but they want they want to tie you into a contract.

They're scared that you're going to walk away. So yeah.

And the other reason is that they to be more positive is that they understand that if you don't do things consistently over a long period of time, like for example, twelve months, then you're going to be disappointed. So if you're not prepared to think about things as a long term endeavor. So we would always say to customers, like, we want you to think about this as a long term endeavor. We've got customers that have been paying us every month for the last three, four years.

Plus.

Probably. Um, but if you're, you know, you need to have that conversation because if you're thinking, yeah, I'll get this agency to do this work for me. Yeah. I kind of get the idea of a regular payment. We'll do it for three months. Well, that's probably not going to work unless.

It's going to.

Be unless it's an accelerator where you're actually chucking an absolute ton of resource at something for three months in order because, you know, maybe, for example, you've got access to people. The company's a bit quiet. So, so their people, their subject matter experts are available. And you think, right, so you blitz it and then you could then sit back and, and, and then just keep a, like a watching brief on that before you sort of start on the next bit of work.

Or if you've got an in-house team that can then pick it up and run with it after the three months you build the website or you put a plan together, you say you put a content plan together, and then they've got a team in-house that can actually create that content and take it away. But you're giving them the, the sort of starting point and the plan that they can then go on and run with, but don't just do the three months and stop and then forget about it. And then three years later, do another three months. That's never going to work. It's only worth doing the three months if you've got the means to continue without the agency, but still do all the the activity.

So my question is why not just do ad hoc? Why not? Why not just say, right, well, we'll get that bit done. Then we'll pause or then we'll sit down and discuss what needs to be done next and we'll get that bit done. And then if there's something else, we might do that or we might not do that. But you could still do a lot of work on an ad hoc basis.

You could, if you were committed to the ad hoc basis, as if you're committed to doing the ad hoc work every month, or more or less every month. But we know that it doesn't work like that if you don't have the commitment, if you don't have the agency contacting you at the beginning of the month saying, right, let's sit down and have a, have a chat, Zoom call or have a meeting or whatever it is and plan what we're doing next month. If you're not paying the agency to press you for your priorities and for doing doing the things that are important, it's not going to happen because people get busy. They rush off doing other things, you know, servicing their customers and they forget about the marketing stuff. So even if they think they'll do the ad hoc stuff on a regular basis, they'll find it a year down the line and they haven't done it, and then they're back to square one. So paying an agency every month means that the agency are being proactive. They're going, right, okay, we think this is what you should do this month. Does that fit in with your business priorities? Or can we have a meeting to discuss this idea we've had, and the agents are always thinking about how to advance your business, even if you don't have time to. And that's what you get. I think when you're paying somebody regularly, they're always there and they're like your own marketing department going, right, you know, these are our marketing objectives. How are we going to fulfill them? And, and the agency's job is to, to work towards that, just like our marketing department does.

You could almost think of working with an agency on an ongoing basis as hiring a superhuman, somebody who could work for unlimited hours, somebody who's got design skills, strategy skills, technical skills, creative writing skills, you know, just.

Video editing or.

Video.

Editing.

Skills.

Anything you want from a team. Yeah, they're all they're all there. But yeah, it's way, way cheaper than hiring an entire team.

So but but you say that and, and I'm not disagreeing with you, but one of the things that people struggle with, and again, one of the reasons I wanted to do this is, Is. Businesses of all sizes seem to struggle with the concept of paying an agency on an ongoing basis three, four, five, six, seven thousand pounds a month. They seem to struggle with that idea.

Yeah.

But do you think is that because people have always struggled with spending money on marketing full stop, or do you think there's another reason?

I think a lot of it is that a lot of companies don't prioritise marketing. I mean, you know, you have your big companies and, you know, they've got massive marketing departments and, you know, they are marketing focus. I think we've had this conversation before, but a lot of companies, it's an add on. It's like, right, well, we'll make this thing and then we'll kind of try and advertise it to somebody and see if somebody will buy it, which is completely back to front. Um, but they don't see marketing as being an integral business process. They see it as a thing you do on the end. Mhm. So I think it is a, a sort of focus.

As you often say, the colouring in department.

It's not the thing that the the people that kind of just go and, you know, do social media posts after you've, after you've done the important stuff of making the product rather than the people that are involved in making sure the product's the right thing for the customers. And then, you know, working out who the customers are and, and talking to them. And, you know, they don't see it as a, a vital part of making your company work.

Mhm. So we've explored a little bit the why side of working with an agency on an ongoing basis, which is a real mouthful compared to retainer.

Yeah. Well, that's probably why we call it retainer, although I'm sure there's a better name.

There is because I, I do wonder if part of the reason people push back on retainers is they think of a retainer as wasted money. It's money. You pay somebody to be available and then you pay them again if you need them to actually do.

It has that connotation. And I'm sure there are industries where you do you pay someone on a retainer just yeah, just to be on call. Yeah. And then when they show up, you pay them for the thing they do. Well, I'm trying to.

Think, as you know, I'm a retained.

Firefighter.

The fire service paid.

Me a certain amount.

They pay me three thousand pounds a year monthly.

Don't spend it all at once.

No. Well, I can't, because they pay me monthly. They pay me three thousand pounds to be available.

Yeah. And then that's the retainer.

That's the retainer. And then they pay me every time I attend training. Every time I attend a shout. Yeah. All of that stuff gets paid at normal fire service hourly rates. And so but but the retaining fee is irrespective of how many. You never.

Get called out.

You never get called.

Out.

You still get the three grand.

So that's like um. Yeah. Somebody it's like, almost like paying for your washing machine insurance or something. You know, you're, you're almost paying to have a contract with a repair company. And then if you call them out, they charge you extra. And our retainers are not like that. So it probably is completely the wrong name. It's, it's a fixed fee for ongoing marketing, isn't it?

The money you pay an agency every month is used to do stuff.

Well, in this case anyway. Yeah. And I've worked with PR agencies where the retainer is exactly that. You pay them an amount to be your PR agency. And, you know, if you need to communicate something to the newspapers, they will write your press release and send it out or do whatever needs doing. But regardless of how many press releases you do, the the retainer amount is the same. And if you don't, you know, if you don't think you've done enough press releases to justify that fee that month, that's irrelevant. You've you're paying the fee to have the PR agency on call for you. But ours aren't like that. Our our retainers say somebody's paying three thousand pounds a month. We will do three thousand pounds worth of work in a month, and we'll sit down at the beginning of the month and go, right, what do we want to do? How much of that can we manage for three thousand pounds? And we will do all of that work. So they will always get all their money spent in the month.

That's right. Well, that leads me on because we've talked about why the whole idea of consistency. Yeah. So let's just explore a little bit further. You've already done a nice job on it there, but but what what what is the return and what does it actually look like month to month or even week to week? What does it actually look like?

Do struggle because. Because we can't tell them. It's not like every month we will do this thing or that thing and that thing. It's every month we will sit down with you and work out what your priorities are and look at the data and work out what's been happening so far. And we might, we might look at what tool called Hotjar that we like to use, because it actually records how people sort of work their way through a website. And we might look at that one month and go look at this, you know, recording. We've realised that people go to this page and they don't, they don't get that. They're supposed to press that button and they keep scrolling and then they get lost. And what we actually really need to do, if you want to make more sales of this product, we need to sort this page out because we want people to press this button. And it's not obvious. And, you know, we might use a chunk of the retainer to sort that page out, which might. And then the following month, obviously we do something completely different because that thing's fixed. Yeah. Or we might say, look, um, you want to, you know, show up in the search engines for people looking for X, Y, and Z. So for the next three or four months, we will put a content plan together and we will absolutely focus on working to, to build that part of your website up so it gets found and we'll work work on that for the next few months, and then we'll reconvene and work out what's next.

So one thing I would say is that what we do, and not all agencies do this, but what we do is we insist that we meet every other week as a as an absolute minimum.

Try to.

Yeah.

Some ongoing clients don't need that.

Some of.

Them don't.

But every other.

Week we do.

Yeah, preferably every week.

More often some clients we meet just like a ten fifteen minute meeting every week. And that that works best because you always keep up to date with them.

When it comes to the what we're not, you know, the what isn't you, the agency, some money and something happens. You don't know what what's going on. You know exactly what's going on. You know, you know, we all agree as a team, that's agency side and client side as to where the budget should be spent and what needs to be done, why it needs to be done, how it's going to be done, when it's going to be delivered, how we're going to figure out whether it's successful. All of that stuff. It's a it's very much a team effort. So the what is it's just like any other department in in your business. And that even goes for really small businesses. You know, for really small businesses, if they have a, if they work on an ongoing basis with an agency, they've suddenly got a digital marketing department. I know who they meet with every week or every other week, and who are constantly working towards improving their digital footprint and making sure that the right people are finding them and all that stuff.

Yeah, they're just, you know, always thinking about them. So, you know, if we, we've got a client, if they're on a retainer and we, we sort of see an opportunity or we think of something in the bath, you know, we'll tell them, we'll be like, we thought of this because, you know, we're always, you know, you're on our radar and we're thinking about your industry and we're, we're learning as we go on and you really get to know people's industries. I was in a meeting this morning with a potential client and we were saying, you know, we've worked with a lot of different types of companies. And I was explaining that we used to work for a company that make retractable retractable seating systems for theaters and sports stadiums. And I started talking very knowledgeable about retractable seating systems and realised that you just absorb this knowledge as you work with a client for a while. And it means that they really do have their own department because we, we get to know their industry and we're actually able to, to sort of, we know how they would think or how they would react to a specific situation because we know them.

So we talk about these things, the, you know, having this conversation in order to help people understand how it, what it looks like, you know, working with an agency and the way most of our clients work with us. And it would be remiss of us not to mention the benefits to the agency. I mean, I think that being able to spend more time thinking about our customers and benefits them, but it also benefits us. You know, we're we're not in a situation. If you think back to the early days of our agency and, you know, even before you joined the agency, it was very much like most agencies project driven. So, you know, if you're not out looking for work, you're working on a project, but while you're working on a project, you're always thinking, you know, what are we going to what we're going to work on.

Next.

Month? What's next? You're always there's always that almost slightly panicky situation, if you like.

And it's very difficult to recruit and keep a team if you don't know how much money is going to come in every month. That's right. If you've got sort of regular customers paying regular amounts, you can actually comfortably recruit new people and get new skills, which means you're offering new services to your customers because you can be at least fairly confident you can actually cover the salaries. And so, you know, it helps an agency be more stable. I think if you're not in that position with retainers, you almost have to use like freelancers and outsource a lot of your work because you can't guarantee you'll be able to pay these people every month. But if you've got customers paying you every month, you know, you can pay a salary every month, you can actually have a stable team who are used to working together and who get to know the client because it's because you've got employees who are the same, you know, every month, rather than just random off the street who you rope in if you get busy.

I mean, can you imagine if businesses, um, operated by not having staff, for example? Because I think when you work with an agent, when you work with an agency or you know, when you work with a, when we work with businesses on an ongoing basis, we, it, it starts to feel like we're part of the team. Yeah. You know, part of their staff almost. We've, we've been invited to things that have involved, you know, like almost like a staff, a staff kind of meeting. Um, I forgot what I was going to say.

You're saying if I imagine if people didn't have staff.

Yeah. Right. So if you think back to the Great Depression of the thirties, so a business owner, a business owner would go out and you've read about it.

I'm actually reading.

Even.

I'm reading a book about it right now.

Oh, well, there you go. So read evolution would every Monday morning we would open our door. We would stand there and there would be a the car park out there would be full of people. And we'd say, right, this week, we need a, we need a designer and we need someone who can write. Yeah, I'll do that. Yeah. And okay, well, this is what we'll pay. Oh, I need a bit more than that. Right. Forget it. You will you do it for. Yeah, I'll do it for less than or whatever. You know, it's not always about the money.

It's called Fiverr now isn't it.

Yeah. That's right. It's called Fiverr. So you know, you you can do that and it could. But if if you were trying to run your business, if you think about all aspects of your business, if you're an engineering company, every Monday morning, there's a queue of welders and we only need two welders this week. Uh, you know, the quality of the work that you would produce and the consistency of the work that you just never operate your business like that. Yet with marketing, that's often what people do. They kind of dip in, dip out. We need this now. We don't need it anymore. And I don't.

Know, a lot of agencies.

Go with.

That. There's a lot of agencies who, who have very few staff and actually use freelancers. But you know, which means that for a client, it's not always the same person designing their stuff or the same person writing the content, which makes it less joined up and less consistent. So I don't think it presents such a good, um, sort of outlook to the outside world. If you've got bits and bobs happening with all different people, if you've got a fairly consistent team, then you know, everything you do is going to look more professional.

You're always, you're always going to get agencies that rely heavily on freelancers will always present a good case, a good defense of that business model to me. I can see the the attraction of.

Benefits to the agency.

There's benefits to the agency owners because.

They don't have a salary. They don't.

Have.

An overhead overheads at all. And if you know, if things get tight, they can just, you know, drop people. But I don't know that there's much benefit to the client other than maybe it keeps costs down.

Maybe it keeps costs down. Yeah. But you know, our.

Clients.

Our clients know the team. First name terms.

Yeah, absolutely.

Maybe ring up or send an email. You know, I need to speak to Rob about so and so so and so. I need to speak to Diana.

I'll send messages directly to some of the, you know, as they get to know them, they'll send messages directly to the developers and say, can you have a look at this? And I need to change such and such. And, you know, sometimes we don't even know what's going on, although we do like to.

Yeah.

But they have that good relationship.

That to me makes everything less transactional. I think if you go down the agency freelancer hired hand approach. If you take that approach, if you go down that road or take that approach. Stop mixing your metaphors, David. Then I just it's different.

It is different.

It is like Fiverr.

Yeah. And it's not like having your own team there. And you can call them any time. You might have somebody that you call on, but you don't know who's going to do your work. And I think it's got a different feel to it. Mhm.

Um, some businesses might not care. Businesses who don't value the marketing discipline won't care. I need a, I need a, um, what do they call it a infographic. Yeah. I need a blog post, you know. Yeah. I'll pay. I, you know, you see adverts on Fiverr and stuff like that, you know, like I, I need a fifteen hundred word blog post about, uh, meat cleavers and I'm, I'm prepared to pay five dollars for it. And then you'll get like a queue of people in low cost economy countries. Yeah, yeah, I'll do that. I mean, how would you do that to your own brand? Why would you why would you do that?

I mean, you know, we've seen the quality of some of the stuff that goes on people's websites. And it's not not to be recommended. Oh, he might strike lucky. You might get somebody decent, but you don't you don't want that happening. You don't want your potential customers, you know, coming on your website and seeing stuff that's just a bit dodgy.

So what's really missing? Um, when you think about, um, not going down the avenue of working on an ongoing and consistent basis with an agency.

For a fixed fee.

Or a fixed fee every month. Some people.

Might call.

Retainer. Yeah. Um, you're not, you're not going to get that group of people who really understand and get to know the business.

And you're not going to get people sitting in the bath going. I've just thought of this great idea because the, the people are, aren't.

You spend a lot of time in the bath.

Don't I very rarely have a bath. I should say.

No, actually.

Yeah. Walking the dog. I have my best ideas walking the dog or out for a run. But um. Yeah, you're not going to do that.

Are we really saying that freelancers who do work for a business on an on an ad hoc basis, wouldn't have a great idea and phone up the business and say I was. I was out walking the dog and I thought I just had this great idea and I thought it might might be good for your business. And this is why. And, and I could deliver that for you. Did they do that or not? Or are they just busy just thinking about the next gig coming their way?

They might, you know, a good freelancer who's looking for business and really trying to grow, might come up with a great idea for a company and then phone up that company or contact that company and say, I've had a great idea that you could use for your business, but it may or may not, you know, take off. They might already have an agency or, you know, it's a bit of a long shot. Whereas we have ideas about someone's business because because we understand this, we've got to know it, we've got to know their market. And so it's just sort of always sort of bubbling around in the back of our heads. So that's, that's why we can go out for a dog walk and, you know, think of an idea because it's, it's, we're sort of it's in our consciousness all the time.

Yeah. It's almost like in design terms. People talk about design gain or something. Is that a thing. Design gain I've heard. Right. Okay. You know the Fedex logo?

Oh yeah. Then it's got the extra bonus little thing that happened from the design. That wasn't even meant, but it actually really, really works. Yeah.

That sort of thing. And the idea of the, the, the sum of the parts being greater than the whole or something like that. But what I'm, what I'm saying is if you, if you hire a designer, a freelancer, if you hire a freelance writer, or if you take this very ad hoc approach, that's fine. You might get favorable hourly rates or whatever. Um, but it's almost like something else happens when you work with a team, an agency on a more regular basis. Yeah. Um, perhaps on a monthly basis, perhaps on retainer, if you work with them.

They're invested in you. Yes. They're invested in your business and There, they get you. So they kind of I mean, you get to a point where you're doing stuff for a client where they barely need to check your work. You know, they don't they don't really need to spend an awful lot of time editing or approving it. You know, you're just part of their team. So they know that what you're going to put out there is, you know, on brand or whatever, because you get them. Mhm.

That's right.

And I think that's a huge benefit. Just the, the extra intelligence, I guess.

Is yeah, it's that X factor, isn't it? It's, it's, there's something, there is something. And you know, anyone listening to this might think, yeah, well, they're bound to say that because they're trying to convince people to sign up for retainers because, because it's good for them. It is good for us. Of course it's good for us.

But by but by being good for us, it's good for, for the client.

I like the fact that on the first of August, which is Monday, I think on the I know, I know, on the first of August, we've already sold sixty, seventy percent of our resources, our capacity for August. Yeah. Already we you know, we mapped it out. You know, we've developed some software. I retain a management system which helps us like so that when we're working on something this month and when we recognise through a chat with a client or whatever, that there's other stuff that can be done, we can actually put it in. So we, we start filling up.

Well, that's right.

We're ready for next.

Month. You know, pretty much what we're going to be doing in August. That's right. Um, but also, you know, because we've got this regular ongoing work, our clients know we're still going to be in business with any luck, you know, at the end of the year or whatever, you know, the agencies come and go quickly. They do, um.

They've seen a lot.

And, you know, if you've got a sort of fairly stable business model in terms of clients paying you every month and you being able to pay your wages every month, then you know, you've got that longevity that agencies don't always have. You know, you've always got the worry that, you know, okay, well, this agency's going to see all the time. The agency is an agency has built your website and then they've gone bust or they've closed down or, and then suddenly, like, nobody knows how to update your website or nobody knows your passwords or anything, and then you're stuck with a website that's absolutely unusable or unobtainable.

So you've got this idea of accountability then.

Well, that's it, you know, because you know, there's still going to be. Yeah, there's still going to be around. They're going to look after you. And you know, if you need to make changes, it's not going to be a big deal.

Well, there are variations on this theme. And I think maybe as businesses start to get a little bit bigger, then there's more of a hybrid model. And I'm thinking of some of our clients and some of our more recent clients where a business will hire a either a chief marketing officer or a senior marketing person who can help to figure out, to formulate the strategy and, excuse me, deliver that strategy with the help of an agency such as us or another agency.

So you're a marketing manager, a marketing director, sort of doing the planning, doing the strategy, kind of gathering various agencies together. Maybe they would have a PR agency, a digital marketing agency, and, uh, you know, some other agency doing something else, for example. And you know, that that person would manage the agencies and they would put the plan together and they would, um, you know, make sure that everything is working towards the same goals, but they wouldn't be doing the stuff that we do every month.

Yeah. That's right. And that's, um, that's definitely the case with I think. Yeah, certainly some of our more recent, um, customers that have come on board have been in that situation. I mean, one conversation I was having this morning, um, was around the idea that the, the person who is now charged with marketing is currently liaising with the purse string holders, the accountants or whatever to secure a budget. And she's, you know, she said to me, like, I actually can't do all of the stuff that I need to do.

You see that a lot.

Until they give me this money so that I can get you guys to do all of this stuff that needs to be done in order for me to be able to do my job properly.

Yeah. I mean, there's no way like one person could do, can do all the stuff that needs to be done. And in digital marketing, it's completely impossible.

Yeah. So if one person isn't enough and you don't like the idea of paying agency rates.

Mhm.

What are the alternatives?

Hire more. More than one person.

Basically build a team.

Yeah. Build a team.

So is that easy?

It's easy. Is it? Well, it's actually it's quite hard to hire at the moment. I think there's quite a shortage of people who actually know what they're doing. But I mean, you can do it. Why is it you get marketing manager. And then they would hire maybe a content writer, a designer, um, uh, techy person. Yeah. Perhaps. Um.

That sounds that sounds expensive.

An event organiser they might hire. Just a junior marketing exec to sort of do all the running around.

Yeah. So the idea of paying an agency three, four, five thousand pounds a month or whatever, more than that perhaps might sound expensive, uh, until you work out what it would cost to build your own team.

Yeah, yeah, it's going to be a lot more than that. I mean, obviously you get your team are there every single day, but to begin with, you know, you've got enough work. Do you know how to shape that team should take, you know, do you need two content writers and one designer, or do you need two designers and one content writer? Do you only need them part time? You don't really know how much of them you'll need because an agency that you've got the flexibility, you don't need to know how much of them you'll need. You just need to know you've got them there.

The more challenging aspect, I think, to not outsourcing working with an agency is the creative disciplines. People who work in the creative industries are quite often difficult to manage. I mean, we we are we are an agency and we are a creative agency. And most of the people who work, in fact, everyone who works here do in different ways are creative people, whether it's writing, coding, developing, designing, whatever it is. And yeah, we've got, we've got a great team. We've got, you know, people who've been here for donkey's years and, and it works well. But I think if you just want to go down the route of saying, right, we're going to have a creative department, a marketing department, a colouring in department, whatever you want to call it, we're going to have those people and say, for example, you're an engineering company. So like we're going to create a marketing department. I think you'd find that quite challenging. I think it'd be difficult.

Yeah. I mean, I think you'd need to get the right sort of head of marketing in who can then build their team because they would know what they were looking for. I think, you know, an engineer or an engineering sort of Board would struggle to know what sort of people to recruit. They'd need to get somebody in.

Yeah, we're certainly seeing some of our engineering clients struggle to retain creative people. We've seen massive churn rates. And and I think generally in marketing, we see we've seen people come and go a lot with some of our customers.

With high turnover. Why is that? I mean, I, when I was client side, um, well, marketing tends to work on a sort of annual sort of cycle. So you get into a job and your first year is all new and you have no idea what you're doing and you're learning fast and you're sort of figuring it out. And then the second year you do it again and you think, oh, that's much better. Now, you know, I knew what I know what I'm doing now. And the, the plan I made last year has really helped me do it this year. And then you're like, I don't really want to do it again, though. I'm bored now, so you can then move on to another, another company. So I mean, marketers tend to only loss of two or three years because, you know, you're just, you're, you've got a, you're only working for one business. So you're just doing the same thing over and over again.

I think there's more to it. I think I think the other the other side of that is that marketing is hard. It's not it's not, you know, it's not a defined outcome. You know, you've got a budget, you analyse, you create a strategy, you execute that strategy. Some of the stuff you do works. Some of the stuff you do doesn't work. It's not like an engineering project. Now, don't get me wrong, engineers cock up and, you know, engineers have to re-engineer something that they've designed because it turned out it didn't work or couldn't be manufactured or whatever.

But it's it's more sciency, it's more scientific. You've got a pretty good idea whether it's gonna work or not or what it's not going to work.

That's right. Whereas with marketing, you know, I just traditionally people in the marketing role haven't lasted long, I think because expectation has been has been skewed.

Or they just find that they're not getting support from the, the board or the C-suite, whatever you want to call it. They're just not getting the buy in from their. Sometimes they just find that they're just like battling all the time to, to get anything done because they're just not getting that buy in. Yeah. And, um, they can't move forward. They can't, you know, they've got this plan and they know exactly what needs to be done and they're just not getting the budget. So they're not getting the buy in or they're just not getting the back up. So they're, we've seen, we've seen marketers who are just like doing these massive jobs all by themselves and they just can't get it all done. So they can't achieve the objectives because they just can't manage or they just aren't being given budget or aren't being given the responsibility to get on with it. So they're just not not able to move forward. So I think that can be a problem. And I think people do leave just because they feel just really frustrated and they, they want to go somewhere where there's more of a marketing culture. So it can be a culture thing within a business.

Yeah. So again, going back to working with an agency, the the the agency. I mean, we, we set our customers, um, we tell them that we don't ask them to sign a contract. We want them to work with us on an on going basis, because we're delivering value, because they're getting the leads that they want, because they're, you know, their websites getting the traffic and the enquiries, etc.. So another benefit you might say of, of a retainer is, um, that you, you're not going to be stuck with either a person or a team of people who are not delivering. If the agency doesn't deliver. And it's perfectly possible that the agency won't deliver. I mean, some agencies deliver for client A, but for whatever reason, don't deliver for client B. It's it's not an exact science. Sometimes it just doesn't work out. Culture doesn't fit whatever. Lots of reasons. They just have the wrong strategy. Um, but if you, if you're working on a, with a client, with an agency on a return basis, you can very quickly recognise this isn't working. We're not getting the results. We're not being unrealistic. And we need to pivot. We need to change. We need to. You know, thanks very much, guys. This hasn't worked for us.

Yeah. That's right.

Yeah. And that's that's fine. Which takes me on to just our final point before we close this one out. Um, we've talked about like, you know, why retainers, what are retainers are the how excuse me, the how bit I think comes down to something as simple as trust you. If you were in a, if you are thinking about a retainer, you've got to find an agency who you can trust. You've got to believe that they're going to deliver what you need, and you can work with them and trust them implicitly and not think, are those guys really doing three grams?

Are they ripping me off? Yeah, you can't work if you've got that sort of suspicion in your head that they might be ripping you off or you're, you know, where's your money going then? Yeah, it breaks down pretty quickly. You need to understand what they're up to and they need to be really upfront with you. Yeah. And also you need to be able to have the conversation where you're like, I don't think that thing worked. You know, like, can we, can we revisit, can we have another look at that? And, and you need to be able to, to have these hard conversations and, and they need to be prepared to, to listen to that and go, okay. Right. You know, let's try something else.

Just finally, then what typically do we think businesses should be investing in a, in a monthly ongoing relationship stroke retainer. How much how long is that piece of string?

It completely depends. It depends what they want to achieve. It depends how much they're doing themselves, if they've got some capacity in-house or not.

Well, I'm being a bit facetious. If you're a small business and you think, yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna outsource the marketing and I've got I can probably scrape together two hundred quid a month. What would you say to them?

Well, I mean, that's if you think how much you would pay a person for a day if they were on salary, it's not even gonna get you a day. Yeah. Now, for less than a day, a month. You can't do anything.

I mean, I only say that because over the years and not quite so much recently, although it still does, it still comes up with some quite large businesses, you know, where you've maybe put a bare minimum package together of a couple of thousand pounds a month and they're like, ooh, sounds like a lot of money that it's like, goodness sake, you know? Yeah.

Yeah, it comes down to get getting enough work done during the month. You need enough to pay enough to get to make progress. So depending on what progress looks like for you, you need to be paying enough to make that progress.

So something I often say to customers or potential customers is that budget dictates the pace of work, the cadence, if you like.

You do like that word.

I do like that word. Yeah.

But yeah.

And do you think that's true? Do you think that's absolutely true?

It is. Because yeah, you're ultimately, you know, you're buying a chunk of work and the, the more you pay, the bigger chunk of work you can buy. So you're gonna go forward faster.

Mhm.

That's perfectly fair.

Okay. so when it comes to here in the UK and, and I know for a fact over in the US as well, if you're thinking about going down this route and you're thinking, well, what, what does it cost then certainly here in the UK, sensible digital marketing type retainers, which includes search engine optimisation and web design and a whole range of different tactics and skills. Um, a couple of grand a month is probably at the lower end.

Yeah. That's fair. That's very much the lower end. I think on, on the whole, across the UK.

three, four, five grand a month is not uncommon. And we've certainly come across businesses who've been paying retainers in well into double figures. So ten, fifteen, twenty thousand quid a month depending on what they need to be done. And I certainly know across across in the States we've, you know, we've got customers in the States that again, uh, three, four, five thousand dollars a month is, is quite normal.

That's pretty standard, I think. Yeah, sort of five ish seems to be fairly standard in the States. Um, obviously some are paying a lot more. You know, the the bigger agencies are billing a lot more than that. That's right.

But I mean, what typically do PR agencies in the UK, I mean, I seem to remember donkey's years ago when I was working for another big agency in Aberdeen, that sort of twelve hundred fifteen hundred a month type numbers were being bandied around for PR retainers.

And the, the businesses I've worked with, it was a lot less than that. But that was very much just a kind of holding.

Yeah. Almost like a retainer. Yeah. Sort of thing. Yeah. Okay. All right. So hopefully that'll give you some idea of typically what other businesses are paying if they're in marketing, digital marketing, retainer relationships with agencies. If you've got any digital marketing related questions that you want answering, or if you want to come on the show and talk to us about any aspect of digital marketing and business growth, you know, get in touch. Red evolution dot com. Um, in the meantime, we might manage another podcast before you head off to America or. Yeah, it's a week on Friday, isn't it?

Yeah, but I'm not working. I'm only working Monday, Tuesday next week, and then I'm on holiday.

Why did you do air quotes when you said working there?

Um, I don't believe I did. My arms are very firmly folded. I need photographic evidence here. No, I'm only here till Tuesday, so you might have to resort to Alex.

Yeah, okay. That's fine. Um, thanks for listening. In the meantime, have a great week, weekend, whatever. And, uh, we look forward to hearing from you. Oh, we did have a question, which we haven't answered, which I'll do in the next podcast, I think.

Yeah.

We did have a question about LinkedIn and how Google views LinkedIn content. So we'll definitely look at that. That's, I think maybe Alex and I are overlooking.

Alex, like digging.

Into that. Yeah. I mean, I've been doing some research in preparation for that. So, uh, it was great that we got that question.

That LinkedIn changes every five minutes. So what worked about two months ago doesn't really work anymore.

So probably, yeah, but we'll leave that for another podcast in the meantime, uh, Dave and Julie signing out. Cheerio.