When it comes to a five grand a month digital marketing retainer, which sounds like a lot of money to a lot of people. I think what you're actually getting is you're getting a fractional search engine optimisation expert, a fractional design expert. You know, you're actually getting a fantastic team of people and you're paying a premium.
You're just paying for part of their time, yeah.
You're only buying a bit of their time, but you're actually getting a very experienced squad. And that's why digital marketing costs what it costs. Yeah.
Well, like we said before, like the idea, the purpose of this podcast is to help people who are kind of out there trying to make a difference, right? And the honest truth is a lot of people come up against this. You know, should I be just paying somebody in house? Am I being ripped off? Is a is a six grand a month retainer way too high? But actually, you know, if you are listening to this and you are trying to grow your marketing, that's, you know, that's the reality. That is what you're paying and what you would be paying to do all that stuff in-house and employ all of us, you know, to sit in your office twenty four sevenths and do this work for you is much, much, much higher.
So welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. This this episode, I don't even know if this episode will see the light of day because I think, I think probably five minutes in, we'll just be like, oh, this is a bit rubbish.
Oh, we'll inadvertently put ourselves out of business.
We might just put ourselves out of business as well. Um, this is Dave and Alex from Red evolution. Uh, on the podcast today and the subject, uh, well, the subject up until about five minutes. Well, up until pressing record was going to be why digital marketing costs, what it costs, but actually a chat in the office. And as you know, we record these things in the office at the coalface. Um, just before we started, Caron chipped in and was kind of talking about how to create your own digital marketing team. So recently we've had some great conversations with potential customers And some of them have resulted in gigs and some of them haven't. Um, they've, they've kind of, I don't know, I think some of them are reluctant. Once you go through a discovery and you diagnose the problems and you create an outline strategy, and then you put costs to the delivery of that strategy. Suddenly people, even though you've maybe had a conversation beforehand, which says, look, customers are paying us. You know, some customers are paying us a couple of grand a month, some customers are paying us three, four, five grand a month. It depends what we need to do for them and how quickly they want to see results. Even though you've had that conversation as a kind of pre-qualifier, when it comes down to it, some businesses seem reluctant to spend money on external resource, even if that resource is a partner. Um, so if that's the case, let's sort of chat through how you create your own digital marketing team.
Yeah.
Should we do that?
Yeah, I think that sounds like a really good idea. Um, yeah, I would just press. Sound enthusiastic? I'm just gonna preface it by saying that I think one of the things that happens often is when you kind of you drill down to, like you say, the costs and how much it's going to cost to deliver every month. And they look at it and sometimes the number looks quite similar to somebody's full time salary, right? And, and then they think, oh, well, hang on a minute. I could just pay somebody to do that in house. And I guess that's kind of what this episode is going to end up being about probably is not to dissuade you, but just to kind of explain fully how much it actually costs and what it actually takes to do this stuff in house, I guess. Yeah, because it is a legitimate thing to do. Right? And probably like long term for a lot of businesses, it does make sense to build an internal marketing department if you want to kind of keep growing for the next five or ten years or whatever it does.
I mean, the only thing I would say is that the turnover in staff, um, that we've seen.
Yes.
Some of the businesses that we work with, we've seen digital or rather marketing managers come and go. We've seen business development people come and go. We've seen salespeople come and go, and all the time we've been a constant for that business and helping them.
Yeah, it does kind of, I think, make a mockery of that idea, doesn't it, that you kind of investing in people who will be the future of the business, because in reality, it is quite difficult to force people to stay part of the business forever. But yeah, I mean, we should, we should go through and kind of talk people through, like you say, the, what you actually need to, to set up your own marketing department.
Yeah. I mean, you do also lose when, when people come and go, you do lose that. I think it's referred to as corporate memory. I think something like that. So if you get like somebody in heading up the marketing and then they leave, then you know, you've lost.
All.
Their knowledge. That's not to say that you that an agency, an agency might go out of business or an agency, you know, principles within the agency might leave and go somewhere else and you also lose it. So it's, you know, it's not as if going down the agency route is foolproof.
No, I think that the thing is, there are no guarantees in this industry or any other. So everything can and will go wrong at some point.
So okay, so if you're a business, you're turning over, I don't know, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty million decent chunk of money. So you've got budget, you're in a position where you think, right, we, we need our own marketing team. And in the twenty first century, that has to be a marketing team with digital expertise, aka a digital marketing team. So let's just, we'll kind of quickly go through the roster of what what a team might look like. Yeah. Um, starting with leadership.
Yeah. Yeah. You're gonna. Well, yeah, it's a tricky one to define, I guess. Yeah. You're gonna need somebody to kind of provide vision to come up with strategies to look at all of the data and information available and say, okay, these are the, these are the, the people we want to go after. This is our audience. Mhm. Um, as to it's a tricky one though, because I guess if you're setting up your own marketing department, you probably don't want to start out by going out and just kind of like hunting for a senior marketing manager from somewhere else. Do you necessarily. Why not? Well, I don't know. Maybe you do. Maybe that's exactly what you should do.
Well, what does leadership look like? I mean, does, does it look like, um, is leadership, uh, a business development specialist or is leadership and marketing specialist or a sales specialist or a hybrid or what does that person look like nowadays?
Like you were saying before? I think personally, I'm of the opinion, and I'm just basing this on the kind of clients we work with and where I see the kind of most synergy and where we find it easiest to work with people. They are normally marketing specialists and they normally have a digital background. They are, you know, well versed at things like SEO, PPC, that kind of thing. They know all the tactics are about, they know what it all means. They can dig in and start making decisions straight away. Where we work with business development people, sales people, um, you know, that side of things. Yes, there's crossover, but lacking the kind of detailed on the ground knowledge of the kind of tactics and platforms you end up having to educate them a lot. And I don't know if you were setting up a brand new team, whether or not, you know, will there be anybody in-house who can do that educating, I don't know.
Uh, how do you mean in-house? I mean, you're bringing you're bringing the expertise in. You haven't got the expertise in-house, or the answer is like, you're.
Gonna have to have somebody who is familiar.
With all of.
Those digital channels. Yeah, absolutely.
But I don't think it makes any sense to think about having an internal department without having leadership. In fact, if you were only going to hire one person, then that person should be a leader, should be at C-suite level, or at least be reporting to the CEO and have the ear of the CEO and the CFO and be able to, you know, be part of that company's leadership team. If you only had one person in this whole sphere, then that is that that is who that person should be. And then they would coordinate the outsourcing of all of the requirements.
Yeah. And that is a model that a lot of people do use quite effectively, isn't it? It's just a liaison between an agency and a and a board, like you say. Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. So if you were going to buy in, if you were going to bring in a true thought leader in the digital space, somebody that could head up all of the digital activity and take a business who is maybe either floundering in the digital space or if not floundering, they're kind of not really acing it. They're kind of just bumbling along somewhat. What we're looking at to get a person like that salary wise, if you go onto LinkedIn.
And I get paid.
Yeah. More than I get paid as well. I think you're looking at probably forty five, fifty K a year at the lower end, going up to seventy, eighty, maybe even ninety K at the higher end.
Yeah.
Let's just go somewhere in the middle. So let's just, let's just be generous and say you might get somebody for circa fifty K. Yeah, yeah. Okay. That's a good start, isn't it? Because you know, we are talking about like, how do you go about building a team and what, you know, ultimately, what's that going to cost you? Um, okay, so fifty k a year as a salary might get you somebody who's.
Has the kind of vision and strategic knowledge needed to coordinate.
The subject matter expertise around, as you said, search engine optimisation, pay per click use of social media, implementing a good customer relationship management system. Yeah, yeah, all of the stuff that fantastic agencies like Red evolution and lots of other fantastic agencies do.
That was a really subtle.
Plug. Customers.
Yeah.
You know, well, yeah. I mean, you know, clearly, you know, clearly as we're chatting away, you know, we're going to sort of at least show how sure these, this all sort of fits in with the reason that, that we work with a lot of customers on retainer. Um, okay. So. what's next in the pecking order, do you think in terms of putting together a team? Are we going dev. Are we going design. Are we going content? Are we going.
Well you know that like you know what actually I'm gonna say like analysis next. Personally, I think having somebody who can interpret data around what people are doing on your website about where people are coming from and kind of create or develop meaningful insights out of that data is probably next because you can, you know, you can. And I think a lot of people approach this problem as like, you'll start paying for people who can do the tactics, but the tactics are the last thing you want to be thinking about really, aren't they? Like that's the executing on a plan to build a decent plan, you have to have a decent knowledge of what's going on.
See, I'm thinking if you're going to do this right, then that leadership role.
Should be able.
Should be able to do the stuff that you're talking about now.
Yeah.
Should be able to do the high level analysis, look at the data, see where the company is currently performing well and underperforming. See where the opportunities are. Understand about looking at competitors. Looking at the general marketplace. Building out buyer personas and doing keyword research to try and find out what people search for when they're trying to solve the problems that that organisation solves, all of that, all that kind of thing.
Yeah, yeah, you'd hope so, I guess. Yeah, I guess my only kind of thought was, you know, they're kind of probably be very busy doing stuff and having somebody there that can kind of jump through those hoops and pull data from Google Analytics or a platform like that is probably useful. But no, yeah, I mean, you're probably right.
So maybe you can hire that person and nobody else for, I don't know, a month, two months, maybe three months. Yeah. While they learn about the business and do all of the analysis, collate all the available data, such as from the search console, for example, which is a really valuable data source. Bring all that together and actually start formulating. Yeah. And start to formulate a plan of attack and understand. Yeah. So, okay, maybe that person, you know, maybe you're not going to find that person for that sort of salary. Maybe we need to nudge that up a bit, but let's just let's just keep it generous. Let's keep, let's, let's stay around generous from the businesses point of view. I'm saying not generous from the recipient of the salary. Um.
In which case, I think the first place you have to go after that then is content. Um, and I'm gonna say that very confidently for two reasons. The first is I think whatever you're doing in the digital marketing space nowadays, content is like the linchpin of all of it, right? There is no channel or platform you can work on from, from social to PPC, where you don't need somebody who can write with authority about what it is that you do. And the second thing is that I think it takes quite a long time. And I think people often underestimate the length of time that it takes to get a content or copywriter up to speed on what the company is about, what you offer, what you can do.
And I think the voice.
Yeah, exactly. And for that reason, I would say that they should be somebody that you employ, like towards the beginning of the process, right? So they've got time to bed in. They've got time to learn how to do everything okay.
I mean, it really depends, I guess, on what the leader, the leadership team or leadership person, leader of the market. I'm just going around in circles. The person that you bring in first to lead the team and give direction, it depends what they uncover, doesn't it?
Yeah.
I suppose, you know, if an organisation is say, content rich, but they're just not using that content effectively, then maybe it's not a writer. But generally speaking, most businesses in our experience are pretty awful at creating content. And content is at the heart of most successful digital marketing one hundred percent.
Yeah.
Okay. So we need a good a good content person and we're not going to pay a fortune for them, are we?
You should, you should, he says, almost as if he has his own agenda. No, no, I mean, not at all. I, I think the important thing. Yeah. I mean, and I think the thing with content writing in-house especially, is you don't even need somebody who's particularly experienced. You just need somebody who's got a knack for writing and who is interested in the business. I think a lot of people start out with quite kind of young entry level kind of content and copywriters, and it works out just fine. Okay.
Yeah, I mean, I think what I would, I would, I would, um, counsel against is thinking that you can put together a team of people who've just left uni and pay them all thirty bob and a fried fish and think you're going to get a good result as the, as a result of that, you're not even with good leadership, you're not going to get that. So let's say we go for somebody who's got some, uh, yeah.
Like a few.
Years, some real world experience. Yeah. Okay. I'm just going to stick a sort of, I don't know, what am I going to stick against that? Twenty eight twenty eight okay.
Is that too high?
No, it's just an interesting kind of random number that you came up with. I thought it was quite good. Okay, so we've got our content person. So we've got a leader in place. Um, we've got our content person who's going to help generate most of, if not all the content. Um, let's assume that some of the more specialist skills like, uh, videographers, etc.. Yeah, let's assume we're gonna outsource that, you know, we're not quite at the point where we're gonna have an in-house videographer, although we might find that one of the team at some point shows an aptitude for producing videos, or at least shooting the raw footage, which you can then put out for post-production.
But I think, yeah, I think you hit on an interesting thing there, don't you? Which is like when you're setting up your own internal digital marketing department, what you probably shouldn't be trying to do is do everything, absolutely everything in-house. It's like cover off the main things and let it evolve over time. You know, like you say, if you if you end up with a team of ten people, probably one of them can be a videographer. But to start with, you're not really going to be producing enough video for that to be a worthwhile investment. Okay.
Okay. So I think really the next two are kind of we. We bring them on board at the same time. And that would be the developer and the designer.
Yeah. Because you need. And I guess a lot of people listening to this, certainly on the developer front, their initial thing would be like, well, why on earth do I need to employ a developer? Like I've got a website management agency or, you know, like somebody else is responsible for looking after my website. So can't we just send them content? Yeah. Um, but I mean, that's just not true. Is it really, I don't think.
No. Maybe not, maybe not.
Um, you need some kind of internal resource that is capable of developing and implementing things, especially if you're gonna kind of dabble with kind of UX or conversion rate optimisation sort of stuff, right? You need somebody who can go in and implement changes to your website on a, you know, kind of day by day basis.
Okay. All right. So now we've got to the point where we have now got sorry, I'm scribbling at the same time, just cause I'm trying to keep track of everything that we've decided to do. Um, okay. What about things like search engine optimisation, PPC? I mean, are we are we are we assuming our content persons got that nailed as well or not?
No, I don't think I think it's a tricky thing because I'm just thinking about organisations I know of that employ kind of in-house SEO people who don't actually write. But I think it is. I think it is kind of mandatory nowadays, isn't it? Like you can't content writing and, and a deep knowledge of SEO, the kind of tactical awareness, the ability to, you know, know what content needs to be made aren't necessarily the same thing. Um, so I don't know about you, but I would say you probably need somebody who can kind of own the SEO stuff independent of the content.
Okay, so we need an SEO person as well. Okay. And I'm going to put sort of not, not, not, um, I'm going to put sort of mid, mid level ish type salaries against all that. And so we've got our leader, we've got our leader, we've got our developer, a designer, a content person, and somebody who can maybe double up doing search engine optimisation and PPC. I mean, they are quite different skill sets, but.
There's a lot of crossover. There's a lot of crossover. And the reality is that managing one account, one campaign for PPC probably isn't enough for it to be somebody's kind of sole job, right? I mean, normally when you're paying an agency, the person who's looking after your PPC is looking after at least five or six different accounts. So yeah, if you are trying to employ somebody internally to look after PPC, they're probably going to be scratching their heads looking for something to do. Most of the time, unless you can find someone who doubles up and does two things.
Yeah. Okay. So I've now just in terms of salaries. Yep. Um, I'm, I'm sort of putting that round about the one sixty mark.
Yeah.
Okay. That's roughly. So one hundred and sixty grand a year for salaries. Um, then we've got offices we've got or even they might be working from home post Covid. So we've got, but we've got equipment and we've got software. Yeah. And all of that good stuff.
Well, yeah.
So that's the overhead there.
That's the stuff, I guess, that a lot of people don't really consider, right? Because it's like you've employed an SEO person and now you need to buy them a subscription to something like SEMrush, Ahrefs, whatever it is that's going to cost you money. Your design is going to need all the relevant general shout at me, I'm sure, but like Adobe subscriptions, whatever I'm assuming. Yeah. Um, yeah, you've got your PPC budget to think about. You've got yeah, whatever tools your developer is going to need. It's a lot. It racks up quickly.
It does. That's right. So if we, if we add on, you know, computers, software, uh, offices, all that usual kind of overhead type stuff. I don't know that sort of, uh, one, two, three, four, five person team, a couple hundred thousand a year, something like that. Yeah.
Yeah. I'd have said so.
Yeah. Mind you, once you've got that team and you've and you've got that level of expertise within the organisation, assuming that you can keep them happy. Um, they're just going to be working flat out on growing your business on, on building up your digital presence, managing the social channels, building out the content on the website that that could pay dividends, couldn't it?
Yes. Yes. All I'm thinking is I don't know about you like, but like the times when I've done this stuff in house, the only thing that's quite difficult about it is you end up very isolated, like. So you're talking about a team of five specialists there where none of them really have any crossover. There's nobody to kind of confer with. There's nobody who shares your skill set. There's nobody to talk to about a problem that you've encountered. So you kind of like paying a lot of individual people who are going to be kind of completely autonomous, and you are depending on them to come up with solutions to the problem. I just, yeah, do I think that that actually happens in real life? Or do you think you end up with somebody like a content writer who sat there kind of doing okay, work that could be better if they were surrounded by other content writers who were, you know, there to help them improve and critique their work and that sort of thing.
Is it is it also possible as well that unless you are a quite a large business, that that that whole team that you put together could run out of steam. You could actually start to run out of things to, to do. Or do you think they'd be able to keep them busy?
I think that comes back to your leadership, doesn't it? But it also, I guess I don't know about you, but the other thing I think happens quite a lot is these marketing teams end up quite siloed from the rest of the business. They've got no real idea what's going on or, you know, like you say, like what to kind of be talking about. So I guess if you are trying to build your own internal marketing team, that's something to be super aware of, right? They have to be integrated with the rest of the business. I think otherwise, yeah. Like you say, they could just end up running out of things to do or traction.
Yeah. Okay. Given that a lot of businesses don't seem to put great store in marketing, they don't seem to make the right level of investment. They don't seem to take it seriously serious enough. And when things get tough as things are getting tough in the world just now, um, it's often the marketers.
To go, yeah.
That gets binned straight away. Isn't it so?
Which is ironic because, you know, because if business dips, really it's your marketing team. You need to be going out there and winning you more business. But I guess that's the.
Well feeding the sales team. Yeah. Because none of this, uh, that we've spoken about here, none of this, um, involves the sales side of things.
It's just awareness, isn't it? Really?
It's really. Yeah, that's exactly it. So I don't know, it's this, I mean, anyone listening to this is going to say, oh, I see what you're doing. You're actually just painting this picture of, of, of how expensive it is to build your own team. So we come in, hire an agency instead.
But I don't think it is. I mean, I think the maths, I mean, you've been very conservative there. Let's be honest, most decent sized businesses turning over a couple of million pounds a year should really be thinking about employing two or three copywriters and a couple of SEO experts and like, say, a videographer, a couple of designers, like there's enough work there to sustain a team. That's for most businesses. I think that's like at least double the size that we're talking about there. And then suddenly you're doubling that two hundred and something thousand pounds a year overhead. Yeah. Yeah. It's not cheap. And I don't think we're being unrealistic about that really. It's just a kind of yeah, I agree.
I mean, my personal view is that that any one of us here at Red evolution could go into the marketplace and earn more money than were earning here at Red evolution. I think I think the salaries that I'm seeing, if I if they're to be believed. Um, I certainly when I, when I look at what I do is, is like heading up this agency, I, I, you know, whether or not anyone would want to employ me, I have no idea. But, but when I look at when I.
Look at you and when.
I look at some of the organisations, I mean, it's not unusual to see six figure salaries to head up the digital, um, side of the business.
I mean, you've been running this business for twenty odd years. So if you went and got a job.
Quite twenty years, sorry, not twenty odd years. You're making me I know I'm old, but I'm not quite that old.
You just look wizened.
No. Well, yeah. That is. I didn't. I didn't take my pills this morning. You can stop laughing as well. You're even older than me.
It's a good word. Um, but no. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you could you could absolutely go away and be chief marketing officer for a company and charge. Yeah, like hundreds of thousands of pounds, potentially.
Yeah. I don't know why I don't do that. I don't know. I don't do it because I love what I do here. And we've got, we've got. Yeah. There's lots of reasons why we're part of this agency and we're running this agency. There's a lifestyle element. There's lots of other things involved. But just, you know, if you're just a hard. If you look at it from a hard nosed point of view, if you're going into the marketplace, you want to hire somebody who's got a really good track record. You're right. The numbers that we've put in there are pretty conservative. Yeah. Um, I'm not sure where we're going with this because I don't want it to sound like, like this is way out of your price league guys. That's why you need to pay us three or four thousand pounds a month, or five grand a month, or whatever it is to do all your marketing for you. But if you if you look at it, I mean, a five grand a month digital marketing retainer might sound like a lot of money. It's sixty grand a year. And you compare that to two hundred grand to put together really quite a basic team that, as you say, don't have necessarily the exposure that agency people have to lots of other businesses and, and constantly evolving, um, landscapes.
See, that's the rub for me. And like, maybe, maybe I'm being a bit biased here. Maybe you'll kind of shoot me down, but like, you certainly couldn't. You'd have to pay me about twice what I earn here to go and work in-house, simply because it means being cut off from the kind of, you know, wider community from from learning from kind of doing interesting jobs. And I just think that, you know, ultimately, at the end of the day, if you go out there with the intention of hiring your own internal team, unless you're paying a lot of money for staff, you're not going to get the best because it's, is it, is it elitist to say that the best normally end up in in agencies in that environment? I don't know, I think.
I think we need to be really careful. But the answer is yes.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah.
Well, I mean, I think really bright people need more than, uh, a good salary and a pension. Yeah. I mean, uh, you know, a good salary and a pension has got a lot of merits. Um, but I think, I think a certain type of people end up working in agencies because they like the variety, they like the challenge. Um, because it is a challenging way to earn a living working in an agency. There's no two ways about it. You know, you've got so many bosses in inverted commas, i.e. lots of different clients, lots of different demands. Mostly clients are lovely and reasonable and great to work with.
Oh. Are they?
They know they are. They are. Diana, stop looking at me like that. But you do get arseholes as well. You absolutely do. You know, I mean, I know that's maybe a weird thing for us to say because we're sat here and basically saying that, you know, some of the clients we've had in the past are assholes and they are. Yeah. And they have been. And you.
But it's not all sunshine and rainbows.
You get that in all walks of life. You know, I mean, for goodness sake, if you're a bus driver, you probably deal with with horrible people every single day of your life.
Yeah.
And look unreasonable and ridiculous.
The other thing is, you know, you could take an in-house role and end up working for a boss. That's an asshole twenty four over seven, and that's your only boss. In which case, you know, this way you just kind of spread betting, I suppose. Um, but yeah, no, I mean, and there are, and there will be people listening to this podcast who are in-house and will be like, how dare you, you know, I'm brilliant at what I do. It's, you know, it's a generalisation. There are fantastic people out there in in-house positions. I just think by and large, we have been quite conservative with the salary estimates there, because if you actually want the creme de la creme, if you want the people with the experience and the knowledge, and you are, if you've got a team of five or six people, you're gonna need a lot of self-starters. You're gonna need a lot of very motivated people there. You are going to have to pay for that. It's not a you can't just luck out and find a student like you say, or a graduate who is fantastic and motivated and will work for you for twenty grand a year is just not going to happen.
Mhm. That's probably true. That's probably true. Um, so the first subject we were going to talk about today was why does digital marketing cost what it costs? Um, but that morphed into, well, what does it cost to put together a digital marketing team if you want to do it in-house? But I guess we've gone full circle when we talk about why digital marketing costs, what it costs. If you want to build your own team using conservative salary estimates and, and a conservative team, um, team demographic, if that's.
An unlimited skill set. Because again, you know, we are talking there about, you know, you know, you've got an SEO or PPC content writer designer. Fine, fantastic. But that's, that's scratching the surface of what you actually need to, but we're actually.
Looking at a couple of hundred grand a year probably. And I think we've written about this before in blog posts. So when it comes to a five grand a month digital marketing retainer, which sounds like a lot of money to a lot of people.
I.
Think what you're actually getting is you're getting a fractional search engine optimisation expert. A fractional design expert. A fractional strategic digital marketing expert. A fractional fantastic author writer. Um, kind of, you know, you're actually getting a fantastic team of people and you're paying a premium. Yeah, but you're only buying a bit of their time because that's all you maybe really need. And, uh, but you're actually getting a very experienced squad. And that's why digital marketing costs what it costs. Yeah, it sounds like a justification because we don't have to justify what we charge for what we do.
I think it's useful because.
Look at the.
Books. Well, like we said before, like the idea, the purpose of this podcast is to help people who are kind of out there trying to make a difference, right? And, and the honest truth is a lot of people come up against this, you know, should I be just paying somebody in house? AM I being ripped off? Is a is a six grand a month retainer way too high? That seems silly, but actually, you know, if you are listening to this and you are trying to grow your marketing, that's, you know, that's the reality. That is what you're paying and what you would be paying to do all that stuff in-house and employ all of us, you know, to sit in your office twenty four sevenths and do this work for you is much, much, much higher.
Is it possible to put together a really good team of people who are all freelancers?
Yeah, probably. The problem, I think, is that like so much of like making a real difference with digital marketing comes down to like the kind of vision and getting people on board. And if you're just paying people who are freelancers, who don't know each other, who don't work together, who is there going to be any kind of synergy or coordination between what you're doing? I don't know.
Because some agencies run that way. I mean, there's agencies I've come across that have got like basically an agency owner and every single person and, and there are big agencies who I know have a significant number of people who are on, on not on retainer, they're basically, um, freelance.
You know what? I think it depends on how you view this stuff, doesn't it? Because if it's just what's, what's the way of like phrasing this? What am I trying to say? If it's purely transactional, if you're just buying work of somebody like, say, when you're paying me for like an hour of my time, that's just you're just buying like a piece of content, then yeah, sure. That works if what you're actually buying is like somebody kind of like, you know, intelligence, their career, their development, all of their energy going into something and growing and learning as part of a team. I don't think you can do that. Transactionally with a freelancer, I don't think they're going to improve. They're just going to give you the same five hundred words of content every time, right?
See, in days, in days of old, when I worked in the oil industry as a contractor, um, there were big organisations and I'm talking like the shells and the BP's of this world who had four freelancers on eye watering hourly or day rates who'd been with them forever, like they'd been freelance.
But I think.
For like ten years, they were a key part of that organisation.
Is that not just. Yeah. Is that not just like tax dodging at that point? It's just like they're basically an employee, right? Yeah.
It was. That's what it was. I mean, it was, you know, basically that person got themselves into a position where they were valued by the company and would refuse to go onto payroll, onto staff, and so could earn freelance.
Yeah. Well, I was gonna say, because that's the that's the other thing, like, yes, you can do that with good freelancers though. You're gonna end up paying a fortune. Right. I mean, before I joined Red evolution, you know, my day rate was three hundred and fifty pounds a day. It's not that high. It's not even particularly high for a day rate. But if you think about paying that every day for somebody to sit in on your team, it it gets expensive real fast. So yeah.
Yeah. But the thing about freelancers is you might just buy two days of the SEO expert, three days of the writer, four days of the dev. And so you're not actually paying like five days a week, twenty eight days a month or whatever it is.
It is still probably going to work out more expensive in aggregate than paying the agency. Yeah. You know, I.
Think I think it's more I think it's the way that agencies and I'm really not just talking about red evolution. I'm talking about all good agencies. Agencies become invested in their clients businesses without. And so the clients benefit from that. And Julie and you, Julie, and you were talking about this, and I know that Julie and Caron have spoken about this possibly on the podcast where, you know, when Caron and I are driving, we're going down to the ladies, the Women's Open golf today. So we're driving down to North Berwick, um, in the motorhome. And as we drive down, we'll be talking about stuff. We'll be talking about the business. We'll be talking about life and fishing and golf and all sorts of things. And, you know, invariably conversations will go around to a client and we'll start talking about their business and we'll start talking about, well, what if we did this? And what if we did that? And how are they doing this? And they could be doing that. And so you, you, you just become invested in the client's businesses as an agency person. I think.
I think this is a lot of what without turning this into like just self-promotional wank, I think this is an awful lot of what you are paying for when you pay for an agency, isn't it? It's for a group of people who are used to working together, who are used to solving problems together, to sit down and mull over what you're doing. Like all of that stuff. It's not kind of like the it's not the ticket price, it's not what you think you're paying for. But yeah, it's all that kind of problem solving expertise. It's the fact that they're gonna sit there in the evenings and kind of mull over these problems until they come up with a solution.
It's caring, isn't it?
Yeah.
Do you think do you think people recognise that? Do you think maybe agencies sell themselves short in this on this front?
I think the problem is that it's only true for like a specific subset of agencies. I think a lot of agencies are just there to make money and people don't really give a shit. But yeah, I think the problem is you can't I mean, you're trapped in that awful catch twenty two situation because you can't be like, oh, we care. It sounds disingenuous, right? There'll be people listening to this now who are like, oh, bollocks. Like, do you sit at home and like, worry about our business? Like, you don't care at all. You just like counting your coins.
No, just just pick into that for a second, you know, why do agency people and agencies care about their clients businesses?
Well, that's a leading.
Question and you have to answer it.
Um, I don't know.
Why do we care that with our clients they get great value and see good results?
This has gotten very philosophical. Um, is it so that they keep paying us?
Brilliant. I mean, yeah, just the power of deduction you use. I mean, this is it. I mean, agencies are performance driven because we.
Have to get good results.
Otherwise we just model collapses.
Right. Yeah.
So it it there's lots of is that a really noisy thing outside because I've got my headphones on.
Yeah. Tractor right outside ourselves as country folk.
Yeah. I know it's. Yeah. Is it gone yet.
It's just about just about. Yeah. But yeah I mean, well yeah, I don't know. I mean but but then there is the I don't know about you, but like, I always think I'm quite motivated by the actual kind of like problem solving bit of it, right? I like winning, I like seeing the numbers go up just because it means that I've beaten somebody else. But maybe that's just me.
Yeah, no, I think you're right. We do get genuinely excited again. I've said this before in previous podcasts. You know, when you know, when we get like some customers are in a very niche area of business. And so, you know, they're not making sales and getting enquiries every single day. So like, you know, it's like, it's really exciting when we see these enquiries come in for these, what can turn out to be chunky pieces of work for customers. And customers don't really see that. They don't really see that how invested we are, I suppose. I think there's a danger here that we're just getting into a self-congratulatory sort of circle or whatever.
It's interesting, though, because I do wonder what would happen if like, because yeah, there will be people listening to this who are kind of like rolling their eyes. But I do wonder what would happen if you sat these people in an agency office and they actually got to see that we do get excited that we do kind of shout and cheer when things go well.
I think some of the bigger agencies actually, uh, encourage customers to come in and spend a day or a couple of days in the agency, maybe working on their own account just to see how it all works. And I think that's, I think that's a great idea. Maybe we should do it. I'd be more than happy for any of our customers to come and spend some time with us and, and work with us on solving their problems and doing the work that we do for them and seeing how it all goes to come together. I think it'd be a great idea. Okay. Um, I'm kind of bored now, so I think we'll stop. Uh, I think I think that's maybe been somewhat useful. I think it has. I think there's a danger that people will misinterpret what we've been saying. And you know what? What kind of like playing devil's advocate when we say how much it's going to cost to put a team together? I don't know.
But I mean, somebody's got to say it. That's the thing. And it's very easy to get wrapped up in this idea of, oh, I'll just do it in-house. But I think, you know, just hearing a breakdown of what that's actually going to cost and what it looks like is, yeah, useful. Hopefully you found it useful.
Yeah. And businesses who are working with agencies, uh, us other agencies are paying two grand a month, three grand a month, five grand a month, ten, fifteen, sometimes twenty grand a month. I think there's always a danger that when you're new to the idea of bringing in external resource, partnering with an agency in order to solve some problems and and take your business forward.
It's intimidating.
You feel like, well, is this what I should be paying? You know, it's not like trying to buy a car when you can go on AutoTrader and see that a VW golf GTI ninety, you know, to twenty twenty should cost about this and that's it. So people are a bit confused about it. But I mean, you know, speak to people in your business network, ask them what they pay. Um, I think, you know, we've certainly had conversations with people where expectation was wide of the mark. We're wide of the mark. And once it was explained, it kind of made sense to them. But at which point, you know, but whether or not it was beyond what they're capable of paying, I don't know.
Yeah. I mean, it is expensive digital marketing that is the problem. It's not a cheap kind of commodity.
Well, no it isn't. It's not like um I don't know what's it not like. Well, you know, in again, going back to olden days, uh, when I was a contractor, I mean, if you wanted to put advertising adverts out there and you were using the likes of the P and J or something like that. I mean, that was thousands of pounds for one advert on one day. So promotional stuff, marketing etc..
Costs a lot of money.
It does. Yeah. I mean, you know, it's.
But it does cost a lot of money because it can and should deliver a lot of value. I think that's the other thing, isn't it? It's like the more you pay into this stuff, the more you do get out of it as long as you're working with decent agencies.
Yeah. That's right. I mean, that's, I think, I think that what most agencies should guarantee is to improve the situation that you're in. Yeah. They might not be able to be particularly specific about exactly what that might look like, because they've never done what you're asking them to do. They've never they've never promoted your business before. They've never, you know, I think there's, I think there's a danger that that agencies or people who work in marketing, in house marketing can be held responsible for the sins of their fathers.
Yeah.
So lots of businesses that we've worked with over the years have basically done reasonably well over maybe fifteen, twenty years doing virtually no marketing and in an ever more competitive world, have decided right then I'll need to do marketing and they now need a better website, social presence, use paid search, use search engine optimisation and everything else. And they're starting from a position of having nothing. Yeah. And it becomes the responsibility of the in-house team or the agency to work miracles over a short space of time. I mean, we're going down a rabbit hole.
Well, no, it's an interesting point, though. I was just it's interesting because I was reading something in the Financial Times yesterday about this. That was specifically why chief marketing officers never last. And they were saying exactly that. It's because they kind of come in and they're expected to turn the company around, but they're not really given any kind of input on the product or any input on the pricing or any input on the sales process. It's like, oh, just work wonders. It just doesn't work like that. But yeah, it doesn't.
That's right. And then there's, then there's the, the marketing team have to work very closely with the sales people. And quite often sales teams are a very insular group. Oh no, this is how we do it. We we go out, we knock on doors. we form people up. You know.
My experience of sales teams is, yeah, they wander around wearing flashy Rolexes and do very little actual work, but it might be slightly biased.
I think that does sound like a fairly biased view. Yeah, but let's just leave that hanging there. You've been listening to Digital Marketing From The Coalface, with Alex and Dave talking a lot of nonsense about what digital marketing costs and what it would cost to put together your own digital marketing team. If you'd like to come on the podcast and talk to us about some aspect of digital marketing that interests you, or if you've got any questions we did in the last podcast, answer a question that came in.
Yeah. And I think we've got a couple of questions to answer. Oh, good.
Excellent. Good stuff. That's good. We love getting questions and answering them in an informative and hopefully entertaining way. Uh, meantime, uh, have a, have a great weekend because by the time this goes out, we'll have had a great weekend. It'll be Monday. So, um, we're going have a great week. Yeah, absolutely. Good stuff. All right. Bye.