Catherine Langman:
Well, hello there. It’s Catherine Langman here back with another episode of the Productpreneur Success Podcast. Today’s episode is sponsored by the delicious espresso coffees that I’ve been making from my gorgeous Profitec espresso coffee machine. It’s a crazy week right now. I somehow find myself recording this episode right in the middle of Black Friday week. We’re all crazy busy right now, running our Black Friday promotions, and of course, gearing up for whatever we can squeeze out of the year before Christmas. Plus, of course, we’re getting into the end of the school year and there’s a lot of kid-related extracurricular stuff happening as well. So to say things are a little crazy right now is a bit of an understatement. But I’ve got my coffee here and I am raring to go, we’re just going to do it anyway, despite how busy and tired we all are. So let’s do it.

Catherine Langman:
The topic of today’s episode is really around what to expect when working with a marketing agency, because when it comes to launching and scaling and growing your e-commerce brand, there’s other than obviously designing and manufacturing your products or sourcing your products, really the two biggest expense functions of operating your business is going to be on the fulfillment side and the marketing side. And we have done a really thorough, great episode all about the fulfillment side. So we’re not going to dive into that today, but we are going to talk about the marketing side and what to expect when you are starting to work with other people to help you with this part of the business.

Catherine Langman:
There’s a lot of stuff that people just don’t know. There’s a lot of ignorance. I don’t like using that word. It’s a little bit slightly negative, but it’s a bit foreign to a lot of people. A lot of people don’t know how to do their marketing, or how to brief a marketing agency, or what to hire out, what to hire in, what’s the right way of doing it. Most people don’t know how to do this stuff, because they’ve never done it before, which completely makes sense and that’s why we’re going to talk about it today. But there’s definitely also a lot of fear around losing money and not getting great results and getting ripped off and all of that kind of stuff. So we’re going to speak to all of that today.

Catherine Langman:
And what many of you might not know about me is that … I think most of you listeners, you probably know me as having had my eco-friendly nappy brand, my modern cloth nappy brand that I started and grew and sold. But what many of you don’t know is that prior to that, I actually had a career working in ad agencies across Sydney and Melbourne. I had the privilege of working in some really boutique creative agencies, working with fashion brands and film festivals and some really cool kinds of clients like that, really, really creative stuff, all the way to working in some really big corporate agencies. I worked at Singleton’s in Sydney, I’ve worked on things like car brands, I’ve worked on cigarette brands that nearly killed me, I’ve worked on banks, I’ve worked on Microsoft, I’ve worked on Coca-Cola. There’s been a massive variety of very small and very large client accounts that I had the privilege of working on in that corporate career, that career in ad agencies prior to starting my own business.

Catherine Langman:
So there’s a whole process around the way a good agency works with clients that I can break down for you because I’ve been on that side of the coin, and then obviously, I had my own e-commerce brand, and experienced it from the clients’ perspective, and now of course, I run a digital marketing agency for e-commerce brands. So I can talk about this topic from all those different perspectives. And I guess, when it comes to really trying to build your business and grow your business, we all know that we need to be doing some marketing and it’s so easy to fall into the, I want to say trap, of getting advice from other business owners in free Facebook groups, you’ve just got to do Reels, or just got to do this, or you’ve just got to do that, and then it’ll all fall into place. This is what I did. I just did this and I made a million dollars overnight. Obviously, it doesn’t work like that and we can all end up feeling quite disappointed when we realize actually it doesn’t work like that, and maybe we might need to learn how to do some stuff that’s a bit tricky and hard. Yes, there’s a whole lot of anxiety and fear that can come into that too.

Catherine Langman:
And I think for me when I started my brand, my e-commerce brand, I … So I’m really, really good at the strategy and the creative side of marketing. So what I mean by that is really good about working out what I need to communicate to my audience and how I’m going to communicate it. What I’m not great at, or I certainly wasn’t great at when I had my first business, is the technical side of marketing, and for that business back then, which I launched in 2007, the technical side of marketing online really involved SEO, search engine optimization. And so my first experience of hiring a digital marketing agency was to get some help with the SEO. I knew that I needed to be getting traffic to my website, I was okay at getting my head around some advertising at the time, at the time it was very much Google AdWords and display advertising.

Catherine Langman:
But other than that, I didn’t know SEO. It seemed like a massive mystery and it seemed technical and difficult, and I wouldn’t get it. I definitely had that kind of experience that is so common along the way, where I hired the first person I spoke to, they told me what I wanted to hear, and so I started paying them, and then I ended up with a really poor experience, I certainly got traffic, but it was absolute junk traffic and it certainly impacted the business in a negative way. Obviously, we want to avoid those situations. So we’re going to talk about how we can avoid those situations, how you can just choose the right kind of partners to work with, and get some really great results, so that you don’t end up with one of those awful stories that we see all over the shop.

Catherine Langman:
I guess, before we even dive into to discussing agencies, there’s a variety of different kinds of help that you can get, in terms of outsourcing your digital marketing. You can go to a VA who knows how to schedule social media content. You could upload stuff to your website, or send some email newsletters out to your list. There’s freelancers who might be a little bit more knowledgeable and have a bit more expertise in things like Facebook advertising, or Google advertising, or SEO. And then you have your small digital marketing agencies that don’t cost a lot. They’re quite new in their business journey, they don’t have a huge team, they don’t have a lot of overheads, they probably don’t have as much experience either, and so their fees are not so big. Then you’re going to move up the chain a little bit, and there’ll be slightly bigger marketing agencies, maybe mid level in terms of cost, price, and the sorts of clients that they’re working with probably a little bit further down in their growth journey and revenue, and all that kind of stuff.

Catherine Langman:
And then you’re going to have your really elite, enterprise size marketing agencies. They’re the ones that are working with the really big brands. So for instance, when I was in Sydney and I was working at the likes of Singleton’s, Singleton ad agency, you might not know it by name, but they were responsible for some really, really well known TV ads back in the day. Gosh, the … what was that? The ad that was just on television in Australia for so many decades. [BB 00:08:55] I think. Anyways. So the fees to retain an agency like that are huge and you would only be going to work with an agency like that when you are much more mature in your own business journey, and you can fund it.

So what should you be looking for in terms of the type of partner that you want to work with? That’s probably one first question. What can you outsource, is another question. So let’s start there.

Catherine Langman:
So in terms of the kind of help that you work with, whether it’s a freelancer or a VA or a smaller agency or a larger agency, is going to depend a bit on where you are in your business journey. But it also you really need to take into consideration what your own expertise is, because something that I definitely see happen a lot is small business owners who are getting help from maybe one or two different kinds of technicians, might be a Facebook ad, person on one freelancer and another freelancer might be doing social media content, or VA might be doing that, and the email newsletters, and maybe a third freelancer might be doing Google ads or something like that. But if the business owner themselves is not skilled at the overarching strategic planning, and working out what your brand and your business should be communicating to your audience, and how you should be communicating it, then it’s kind of a bit premature to be going to those channel experts.

Catherine Langman:
You really need to find somebody to help you with that planning side of things first, so that the message that you’re going out with, the promotions that you’re going out with, is consistent across the board. You’ve got to think about it in terms of the customers’ experience, your customers’ experience. You don’t want to be confusing the absolute bejesus out of them because they’re seeing something very different from all of the different locations they interact with your brand. I think it goes without saying that as consumers now, we’re interacting with brands in multiple different locations. We’ll be on social media with them, seeing some paid ads there as well. We’re probably going to Google a brand when we’re ready to buy it, or we might see it in our email inbox, or getting a text message, or we might be seeing the brand in a store or at a market or an expo. I mean, we’re typically interacting with brands in so many different locations, and it can be quite a disjointed experience when there isn’t that consistency of message across the board. So, I guess, just bear that in mind, before you start to choose an agency.

Catherine Langman:
And then in terms of what you can outsource, I mean … really, these days, you can outsource just about anything, of course, probably even more so since COVID. A lot of people have been jumping on and doing some freelancing since they’ve been stuck at home. But you really can be outsourcing the marketing for those different channels that you might communicate with your audience on, plus, of course, that strategic planning side of things as well. So at the end of the day, if you have something that you are particularly skilled at yourself or you really love to do, so one of our clients this year is really, really amazing at creating content that is hugely engaging for all of the organic content for her social media stuff. Not so great at things like designing a website that’s going to convert, or setting up automated email flows in her Klaviyo account, and that more technical side of digital marketing. But that content creation side, amazing. So you got to work out, I guess, what you are really, really good at and you love to do, or you have that capacity on your team, if you do have a small team, and then work out what is missing and find a partner that’s going to work with you there.

Catherine Langman:
I guess in terms of starting to look for the right agency partner, you probably want to start thinking in terms of, what questions should you be asking before you do start making decisions to hire an agency or to hire a freelancer? I know that many of you, like me, have heard or experienced many horror stories about agencies not doing what they say they’re going to do. And so it becomes quite hard to trust somebody to do what they say they’re going to do, and to give you the results and get you the bang for your buck.

Catherine Langman:
So we don’t want you to go through that sort of an experience, or if you’ve been through it, how can you avoid repeating it? We don’t want to make the same mistake twice. I guess at the end of the day, look, we all go through experiences in business where things don’t go right, sometimes it’s our fault, sometimes it’s somebody else’s fault. Ultimately, if we’re the business owner, even if somebody else has done something not right by you, we do need to take a little bit of responsibility around making it different and making different decisions and moving forward, and learning from that experience. I often say that my first year in business was like doing an international business degree in 12 months, with all of the learning experiences, as I like to call them, that I had in that year. But of course, you don’t want to repeat them.

Catherine Langman:
So how can you ask the right questions and find the right partner for where you’re at in your business right now? Realistically, the sorts of help that you should be looking for at different stages of your business. So if you are a brand new business, you don’t have revenue really yet, you don’t really know what your customers are going to respond to, what’s going to make them convert from visitors into customers, you don’t really have revenue to fund outsourcing yet, that’s going to be premature to going to an agency, unless, of course, you have really deep pockets and you can fund going through all of that planning and testing before you can get the results. But generally, when you’re at that startup stage, you have to find ways to learn enough to get some traction happening, because if you go to an agency too prematurely and you don’t have the revenue to sustain working with experts, you can’t just assume that paying an expert is going to magically overnight make you a million dollars, because you’ve got to fund that period of time, where they are doing the strategic planning, and they’re doing the testing, and they’re getting everything set up and running, and you’ve got to fund the money to spend on advertising as well as their fees. So you don’t want to do that too early because you’ll put yourself in a really hard position financially and revenue and cash flow wise.

Catherine Langman:
So first step I always advocate is learning how to do enough that you can get traction and also learning what should happen and what you need to have in place with your marketing, kind of puts you in the driver’s seat as well when you do start to outsource, because then you know what somebody else should be doing. And that’s definitely what I did myself when I had that first poor experience with an SEO agency. I was like, “Right, I need to know how this is supposed to work so that when I work with somebody else, I’m not going to be hoodwinked in the same way.” I didn’t like that feeling at all. So you definitely want to be getting the right help at the right time. I think most of our clients would have, as a first step, they would hire a VA or just hire a free … like a casual staff member to come in and start helping with some of the stuff that’s easy to delegate, customer service, scheduling content for social media, order picking and packing, all of that kind of stuff that’s easier to get help with, while you free yourself up to do the more … the higher dollar an hour work.

Catherine Langman:
Planning the promotions that are going to help you grow and learning enough about email marketing and social media marketing and Facebook advertising and Google [inaudible 00:17:58]. Learning enough so that you can get that traction happening and know what’s going to convert a little bit with your audience, you really want to understand your audience and what’s going to help them convert into customers. And then as you get traction and you’ve got some revenue, consistent revenue coming in, then it’s time to take that next step forward. When you’ve got that kind of data coming through your website and through your business, the performance metrics, the data, that is what a good agency or a freelancer is going to use, that information, to plan out how to scale you from there to where your next goal is. So you should have the confidence that when you reach that certain point in revenue, whether it’s $10,000 a month, $20,000 a month, that you’ve got enough data there to move forward with confidence with a good agency. But you do need to be asking some questions so that you don’t just go with anybody.

Catherine Langman:
I think the biggest mistake that I see happen is people, business owners, they’ll go to an agency, and they’ll say, “I want you to promise I’m going to get X result”, and straight off the bat, their salesperson will say, “Yes, absolutely, we will definitely do that for you.” And how can they know if they don’t have a look under the hood? So a really decent agency or the salesperson that you might be speaking to, won’t make any promises until they’ve started to do a bit of an audit and starting to understand the current performance of your website, as well as the current potential that you have there and what needs to be put into place in order to get those results. So any kind of an agency that’s just going to tell you what you want to hear, without doing any research first, is something that I try and stay away from.

Catherine Langman:
Now, there’s definitely a step that you can take in between just going straight for, say, a Facebook ad freelancer or an agency who’s going to run some ads for you or something like that. There’s a step before that that you can do and say, right. Well, in actual fact, I want to grow from $20,000 a month to $100,000 a month in revenue, but I don’t know what I need to do. I think there’s definitely an assumption that a lot of us make, and I’ve certainly been in this boat in the past, where we think, okay, I just need to run Facebook ads, or I just need to do blah, or whatever the hot new thing is, in digital marketing, at the moment. I just need to start doing Reels. There’s always that kind of hot new thing and there’s that kind of shiny object that that people go chasing, and think, “Oh, if I just do that, then I’m suddenly going … everything’s going to be amazing and I’ll be making a million dollars.” That’s not how it works.

Catherine Langman:
So before you go chasing after a new channel like that, or hiring somebody because you think, “Oh, if I just do that, it’s going to get me from A to B”, I really, really, really encourage you to work with somebody to help you formulate a proper plan, and then you can start retaining the help to implement the plan, whatever is in the plan, it might be a mix of different things, you might have a mix of different paid advertising channels, it might be that your website itself isn’t actually converting very well and there’s some broken links and some errors and ways that you can optimize the website itself to convert better, or … I mean, there’s a lot of different things that could be in a plan. So before you start thinking, “Okay, I’m just going to get somebody running Facebook ads, and then I’m going to be hunky dory, and I’m going to be making a million bucks, and it’ll be great.” So before you do that, start finding somebody who can work on that plan with you. And then when you do start to speak to agencies, you want to be asking how they’re going to get you from A to B, not, can you promise blah results, and taking that immediate promise at face value, because you will be disappointed, and when that happens … we’ve seen it a lot, unfortunately.

Catherine Langman:
You also want to start just asking a few other questions about the kinds of clients that they’re working with and making sure that you’re choosing somebody who does actually have some experience and some expertise in your area. So for instance, in our business, we are purely focused on working with brands for women and children. So if we have someone come to us who sells some kind of tool that is for … gosh, I can’t even think of an example now, maybe a tool that you use while you are building construction related stuff, or something like that. That’s not our wheelhouse. I hate putting classifications on things that are for women and children. I mean, obviously, I have builders here right now and one of them is a wonderful woman. But at the end of the day, we have our niche areas, the sorts of products and brands and product categories that we work with. We don’t take anyone outside of that.

Catherine Langman:
So you want to start asking questions around, what kinds of brands have they worked with? And also, are they discount brands? Are they premium brands? Do they wholesale as well? What are they doing for these other brands? Are they just a one hit wonder agency? Do they only focus on one kind of channel? So they don’t have experience across different marketing channels. So you want to ask a lot about what their expertise is, what their areas of experience are. You also, I would think, want to find out what disciplines that they have on staff. I think that it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking, okay, I can pay $500 a month for a freelance Facebook ad person compared to maybe a few $1,000 a month for an agency that’s experienced in that area. So what’s the difference? What am I paying for here?

Catherine Langman:
And there’s a few things. Number one, in an agency, you should expect to have things like really great graphic design, video editing, copywriting, the actual ad strategist, as well as the marketing communication strategy side of things. And so there’s a whole lot of additional expertise that you should expect to get from an agency versus like a startup or freelance type provider. And then, you want to start looking around and asking for reviews and testimonials as well. One thing that I know is very tempting is to say, can I speak to some of your past or current clients? And sometimes, there might be some past or current clients who are happy to get on the phone and have a conversation. But generally speaking, that’s a pretty big ask, to take up somebody’s time like that. But that being said, you absolutely should be looking around, where would people typically provide real reviews and recommendations, and Facebook groups for business owners is a great place to start, and asking for recommendations from there and asking about people’s experiences in that sort of way. But definitely, you also want to see what amount of work that the agency you’re looking at has on their own website, and really trying to get a good feel for who they work with and what kind of results they’ve been able to get and how happy those clients are.

Catherine Langman:
All right. So really asking a lot of questions and try not to lead yourself into that situation where you’re being made promises that potentially can’t be kept, if they are, at face value and point blank without having had a look under the hood in your business first, is my biggest piece of advice there.

Now, what should you have in place before you consider working with an agency, and what stage of business should you be in, or looking to achieve, I guess, before you start scaling? And I guess I kind of hinted at this before in terms of revenue, if you’re a startup and you don’t have a big lump sum of money to pay for an agency to step in and do this for you, then obviously, it’s a pretty good idea to try and get a bit scrappy and learn as much as you can, do some courses, and start to get that initial traction yourself. But the other thing that you really need to have in place is ensuring that you’ve got enough product to sell. We’ve had a couple of situations over the years where clients had achieved some great revenue milestones and huge amounts of consumer demand for what they sell. But they’ve come to us just a tiny bit too early, because the supply chain side of their business was not secure.

Catherine Langman:
And by not secure, I don’t mean that they couldn’t actually make or get more product. It’s just that they didn’t really have that kind of consistency of production cycles or ordering from your suppliers to make sure that you always have stuff in stock. And there’s nothing worse than spending money on an agency or a freelancer and paying for ads as well. If you can’t have stuff to sell, your revenues just going to dive and that becomes an expensive, disappointing exercise. So you absolutely need to make sure that you have the inventory management side of things, at least, I mean, it might not be perfect. Look, at the end of the day, you’re probably not going to have everything perfect or anything perfect ever in business. So don’t try and aim for perfection, but at least have kind of consistent and confidence around how to manage it, and then of course, the fulfillment side as well. We’ve definitely had the odd situation where clients experienced pretty rapid growth and they just have not been able to keep up with the fulfillment side of things.

Catherine Langman:
And then customers can get a little bit cranky and you certainly don’t want to end up with bad reviews from customers because they had to wait for ages before orders were even shipped. Obviously, right this minute in time, we are all waiting for ages to receive orders, but that’s COVID induced logistic issue that’s a little bit out of our control. So those are the sorts of things that you really want to have in place, that kind of revenue, cash flow, or ability to invest in the help plus the inventory management and the fulfillment side of things before you really going to go. Because at the end of the day, it sounds really awesome when you read a case study, we took this client from zero to $300,000 months or a million dollar months within six months. And that sounds amazing and we would all love to have that. But what if you could not keep that up, sourcing, buying in the product, or you couldn’t ship orders out that quickly, or you just couldn’t build a team fast enough to manage that fulfillment or the inventory side of things. That’s really stressful, right? So don’t just go buy shiny objects, again, if I can use that term. You really want to do what you can feasibly manage through that growth period.

Catherine Langman:
Now, I’m going to try and answer another really common question. So how quickly should you see results, or how quickly should you expect to see results? This is a really big question. For obvious reasons, obviously, if you’re going to invest in getting some help with your marketing, then you want to know how soon you are going to make your money back. Completely makes sense. And so I want to give you a couple of different examples, because the answer is very much, it depends, and let me give you an example. So we recently started working with quite a well known kids fashion brand, they’re a New Zealand brand, but they sell here in Australia as well. And they were already quite well known, they were already making pretty decent money, and they just never really managed to scale out to colder audiences. So if you’ve ever run paid ads, Facebook and Google, you will know some of those ads are going to be showing to warm audiences, so retargeting people that are already in your audience, they might be on your email list, they might have engaged on your social media with you, but those are the people who are going to convert really easily because you’ve already primed the pump for that sale, or they might have already bought from you several times, is the case with this particular kids fashion brand.

Catherine Langman:
But they’ve never really managed to scale out to cold audiences successfully with their ads, and so that’s why they were wanting to work with an agency who knows what they’re doing with this kind of stuff. And because they had so much data already, we had a lot of website metrics, we had a lot of Facebook metrics as well and Google metrics to work with, we could very easily audit their website and their ad accounts to work out where the areas of opportunity were, what kind of creative that their customers were responding to, what kind of audiences and ad types and campaigns set up and all of that kind of stuff. We could very easily figure that out, because they had so much data to work with. And so that was instantaneous results, pretty much. It doesn’t mean that we don’t still start with our planning side of things. Of course, we do. But as soon as those ads went live, they started to convert hugely profitably, and that was because there was already that level of data to start with.

Catherine Langman:
But another brand that we are working with at the moment is very new. And they are an existing brand, internationally, but here in Australia, they were new. There’s the odd hyper consumer for this particular brand that had found them overseas and bought them from overseas and got stuff delivered to Australia. So those handful of hyper consumers already know and love this particular brand. But generally speaking, the Australian market does not know this brand. With this kind of a scenario, again, it can be really tempting to say, I just got to get traffic to my website and then I’m going to start making sales. And to an extent, that’s true, but just driving traffic to a website, when the brand is unknown, isn’t successful and it ends up costing you a lot more in ad spend than you’re making back in revenue. And so that’s not the way to do it, certainly not, again, unless you have really, really deep pockets, like Amazon, for instance, most of us aren’t Amazon, so most of us can’t afford to fund advertising in that way.

Catherine Langman:
And so what we need to do is take a different approach, in this case, which is all about, really getting the brand awareness pumping, it’s a different kind of advertising, it’s a different kind of content creation. It’s also using things like SEO, it’s really focusing on building the email list and really trying to nurture the audience and convert. And it’s going to be a bit of a slower burn, because there is no data to start with. If we are taking on a client, this particular client already has another successful brand. So it’s somebody that we’ve worked with before. But if we’re taking on a client like this, which is new, and it doesn’t have performance metrics on the website, we can’t assess any sort of website performance, we can’t assess any kind of social media advert or advertising performance, we can’t assess any Google Ad performance because there is no history.

Catherine Langman:
So those situations do take longer, and it’s going to be more like a three to four month planning and testing phase. But the marketing that we’re running through that period is of course cheaper because it’s more about the content creation and working with collaborations and search engine optimization, so it’s less about spending money on ads to drive traffic. And then obviously, we gear up to that as we start to get all of that data in and we can audit the data then, and then go on from there. So hopefully, that kind of gives you a little bit of an indication about what to expect. And again, if you are new in business, you don’t have much in terms of website analytics and you’ve never run ads before, don’t go to an agency and say, can you promise me X results and return on adspend in four weeks? If they say yes, they are lying to you. I know that’s a very blunt thing to say. But in terms of digital marketing, it’s a numbers game. And so if there are no numbers to start with, nobody’s going to know until they get those numbers. So we need to have the right strategy in place to help you get that data without breaking the bank, of course.

Catherine Langman:
So this is why, I guess, in our agency that we now start with what we call a Result Action Plan process. So it’s a methodical process. I’m all about process. I like to know things are organized, I like to know that there’s a system, a step by step process that we can follow, and it’s repeatable and we know that we can get the results that we want by following this process. If you asked my family, they’ll tell you, I’m like this at home as well. I cannot stand it when stuff gets just put in the wrong place in the house, and then I can’t find it, and it disrupts my flow. Terrible. Anyway, we have this results action plan process, and it is a process of research and auditing and analysis and discovery, so that we can find out exactly what’s happening in your business, before we can tell, we then work out how to achieve your goals. So if you came to us, and you said, “Catherine, I just want to do the plan. This is where I’m at right now and this is where I want to go”, we will do that whole research process and the planning process and map out that plan to get you from A to B, regardless of where you’re at, in your business right now.

Catherine Langman:
We were having a conversation with a client just the other day who was just being a client in one of our courses before that, interested in doing this planning process with us. And she’s like, “When would I find out what the results might be?” And really, the answer is, to an extent, you have to say, these are the results that I want, and then we work together to work how you can get them. And you might decide to revise those goals based on what it’s going to take to achieve them, in that, say for instance, you’re making $500 a week right now and you want to get to a million dollars a year and you want to do it in 12 months time, it’s possible, but I can tell you right now, that’s going to be really hard work and it’s going to be a lot to do in terms of the marketing, but it’s also a lot to do with inventory, making sure you got product to sell and the fulfillment side and making sure that you can pack and send all of the orders and all of the customer service side as well.

Catherine Langman:
So you might decide that the results … you might be okay to take a bit longer to get to that goal, so that you can manage the process a little bit more easily yourself, with or without help, obviously. And so it’s about really figuring out how to get from where you are now to the goals that you have for your business. And then you’ve got that whole entire strategy there that you can implement. And from there, of course, we like to work on the implementation side of things with our clients as well. But of course, that’s not essential. You can absolutely take a plan like that and you can implement it yourself or you can pull in freelancers, or whatever, however you want to work it yourself.

Catherine Langman:
Now, one thing that we do find, though, with clients that do work with us, because we do this kind of RAP, we call it a RAP – Results Action Plan. So we start there and then we want to move into implementation. It can be really a lot easier for clients to manage one … they’ve got one person, one point of contact to manage the whole process, as opposed to, say for instance, you’re the business owner and you’re having to project manage a Google Ad freelancer, a Facebook ad freelancer, a VA who’s scheduling your social media, a bunch of content creators like brand reps or whatever who are creating content for you and you have maybe somebody else who is sending emails for you. I mean, that’s a lot of different people that you need to be project managing, and that’s really time consuming and puts a lot of … it just takes a lot of time as well as headspace for you to to make sure that you’re on top of it, and you know what everybody’s up to. Whereas if you had one person that you were liaising with and it was their job to project manage all of the experts on a team, then that’s a whole lot simpler for you to deal with. So that’s certainly something that we see.

Catherine Langman:
But what we also see is that because when we implement our RAP, our Results Action Plan, we are going for those results that we’ve planned out, and we can pull in copywriters, graphic designers, video editors, Facebook Ads strategist, Google Ads strategists, email experts, website experts, we can be optimizing the website, all of this kind of stuff is included. Because we’re working across all of the elements, first of all, they’re all going to be really consistent in terms of messaging and the promotions are going to be going out consistently throughout, but also because we’re responsible for the results and if something’s not working as it should, we can jump on it really quickly and we can either fix it, or pivot, or whatever is required in that particular scenario. So sometimes Facebook goes down for 24 hours, yay, and so then that’s going to impact ad results and your social content, of course. So what happens in that moment? Sometimes these situations go on for a long time. So that might mean, right, well, we need to pivot and do more on Google advertising, or we might need to bring in another channel, and make sure that we are still getting the growth towards those results. So that can be a benefit from working with one agency to execute all of those different channels in your marketing. It’s not necessarily.

Catherine Langman:
We definitely have clients that we’re able to work on just some part of their marketing, and they’re doing great, getting really great results. But oftentimes, what we’ve experienced over the time, is, say for instance, we’re doing the Facebook Ads for a client and they’re not getting the results that we would typically expect, when we start to look into the reasons why, we’ll see that social media content’s not going up consistently. There’s zero engagement on their pages, or they’re not sending emails out, or the website’s got some kind of major problem with it and maybe all of the most popular product’s sold out and their customers are going to the website and then they’re bouncing off. I mean, there’s a million different reasons for things, situations like that that could could impact ad results. So it’s not very much fun for an agency to see results not happening, and, of course, it’s not much fun for the client either. I think that what happens is people just get so busy. They’re one person in the business. They can’t necessarily do it all. And so it’s very easy to understand why this might happen, but of course, it does impact the results. So that’s where it can … that situation can impact the results, and can be a scenario that is benefited by one agency being across all of it.

Catherine Langman:
Another thing that we know and that I have personally experienced as well, is a really big fear for business owners who want to retain the help of an agency is, what if I lose all my money? And so I really want to address this today. And it’s true. I’ve absolutely experienced that case where I’ve retained help in the past, I think I said that story earlier on. I’ve had similar stories a couple of times along the way, but I’ve seen it play out in so many businesses as well, where things just did not work. You hire an agency and they promise the world, and then they don’t really do anything. They take their monthly automatic retainer payment and bank it, and then they’re happy days, supposedly, but nothing’s happening and you’re not getting the results, which is just awful. And so something that we have done to try and combat that.

Catherine Langman:
I mean, number one, there’s always going to be cowboys out there. And so you want to do what you can to avoid working with them by asking the questions, as I mentioned earlier. But also, if you have a payment option where it can be part retainer and part based on performance, then you’re going to end up with a much more motivated agency than otherwise. So if you have a contract that is structured like that, they’re only going to get paid properly if they’re actually getting the results. So that is something that you want to consider. And then also trying to find an option where you’re not locked into any particular period of time. And so those are two things that we’ve introduced into our package, along with our results guarantee. So we have introduced our 12-month results guarantee, if you work with us on our RAP, Results Action Plan, and then you retain us to implement it, then we guarantee results that we have planned for. Hopefully that gives you a little bit of peace of mind.

Catherine Langman:
And I know that there’s still going to be cowboys out there. But hopefully, what I’ve spoken about in the episode today gives you a little bit of confidence about when you should start to look for outsourcing your marketing, questions that you should be asking, how you can try and choose wisely in terms of who you should work with and what you should look out for in terms of promises and services and all of that kind of good stuff. So that was a bit of a long, long episode. Hopefully you found that valuable, anyway. And obviously, if you are a brand for women and children and you are at that point where you are looking for some help, we would love to help you. But this is, I think, information that might be useful for anyone who’s running an e-commerce brand and hopefully it helps you to find the right marketing partners to work with in your business so that you can grow and be confident and achieve the results that you’re looking for. That’s it for me for today’s episode. I will be back with you again next week. Bye for now.