Deciding on SEO, PPC and PAID SOCIAL agencies

[nik82]

we are launching a new e commerce website selling luxury beds and furniture.

We are searching for an agency that will help us plan strategy with PPC, SEO and PAID SOCIAL

We have contacted many agencies and have struggled to get any real help.
On the other side of the phone is a sales person.
Nothing wrong with sales people, every business needs sales.

It's just that these guys don't seem to have a clue.
It seems like they want me to sign up to a package and then only after that will we sit down and discuss what they can offer us :/

Can anyone help me?

We are going to be competing against some big players in the market so we need a very capable agency.

But at the same time we need an agency that we can have a real conversation with.
We need an agency that will help direct us, and develop strategy.
And ultimately an agency we can trust to deliver.

Has anyone else had similar issues when searching for an agency?
What did you do?
Can anyone reccomend a very capable agency that they have worked with?

 

[fisicx]

One of the problems you face is getting one agency to do all three. They are related but not the same. It's like trying to find a tradesman who does plastering, plumbing and carpentry.

 

[Chris @ businesshands]

Hello Nik, As the owner of a marketing agency let me try and shed some light on your query.

Firstly it's unlikely, unless you are planning on spending tens of thousands of pounds, that an agency will provide you with a detailed strategy up front. Even then, they're probably going to leave the finer points for after you sign on the dotted line. The reason for this as you might have gathered is because putting together a detailed strategy takes a lot of time and many agencies, like us - have been burnt in the past by providing a detailed strategy, only for the customer to decide they will then do it themselves in-house, or find an "intern" or office junior to carry out the strategy we've spent hours creating.

It''s a bit of a catch 22 situation of course. After all, how can you figure out which agency is good if you don't know what they're offering? Well, an agency should still be able to sit down with for a detailed fact finding session and then put together a reasonably detailed proposal for you without giving too much of the finer points away. Your role in the meeting is not only to provide the level of detail required to the marketing agency, but also to assess the agencies capabilities and also whether you feel you would like them to be your marketing partner. Some key questions include they should be asking are:
1. What do you want to achieve through your marketing (brand awareness / website visitors / enquiries / sales / appointments etc)
2. What are the goals of the company? What do you need to achieve in year 1?
3. What does success look like to you? What are your expectations about what an agency should be giving you and what results do you expect?
4. What is your budget?

You might feel you want to shy away from the budget question, but the bottom line is if you have great expectations and a small budget, your expectations are not going to be met and this needs to be addressed at the start rather than you spending money, not getting what you expected and then hopping from agency to agency trying to find a better quality one.

Things you need to think about during the meeting are:
1. Are they nice people - do you feel you could work with them?
2. Are they communicating with you in a way in which you understand rather than trying to bamboozle you with technical showmanship?
3. Are they willing to let you speak to some of their existing customers as a reference?
4. How will they report on their activities so you know they're do a great job?
5. How long before you start to see the impact of their activities?
6. What are their high level, early thoughts on how they would approach your requirement?

That's not an exhaustive list Nike, but I hope it helps.
Chris

 

[nik82]

Hi Chris,

You hit the nail on the head.
I agree with everything you said.

I certainly don't expect an agency to go into too much depth.
however a clear idea of what the plan is and what direction we're going in is essential.

The budget question is fair and I agree needs to be addressed early on.
If I'm honest Id want to sit down and go through all of the above questions, explain what we want and then be told by the agency the amount that will be required.

tens of thousands is fine, but we need to know what the ROI looks like.

 

[Chris @ businesshands]

Thanks for your response Nik. I'll focus in on two points made, one by yourself and one by someone else on the thread. The first is that it will be a challenge to find a single agency that is an expert in all three skill-sets. That's true. Those that claim to be, will either be outsourcing one or two of those skills without telling you or will be hoping to wing it in-house. Both of those reasons could be why you won't get a half decent strategy out of them.

The second point is your ROI and being able to put a figure on it from the get go. Let me give you an example with two of our customers - one who is selling items at around £900 and is in the motorsports industry. They're an established business that has been around for about 10 years. After a year of working with them, they have gone from being a "just getting by" company to someone that is booked up for months in advance. On the other hand, we have a recently opened cafe /bar spending roughly half the money, with an average product price of around £5 and we're struggling to justify ROI. Why? (i) we're starting from zero in a brand new company (ii) the company does not have a strong brand, concept or message (iii) we've not been given enough money to do anything meaningful (iv) they're very bad at communicating with us. They want us to just " do marketing" without sitting down and breaking out their business and focusing on key campaigns. Incidentally, the cafe is doing very well and profitable - it's just difficult to say whether it's our marketing that's giving them the success, purely because we're having to run fairly generic campaigns.

Overall, we've got a range of customers in different industries and I have to say, the success of their campaigns varies hugely depending on their offering, their industry, the amount of budget they have available and their branding / messaging. For that reason, as an agency, we would find it difficult to say "you'll get ROI within x weeks/ months etc". Our goal is to deliver ROI, because ultimately our customers stick with us if we do, but we can never guarantee it.

Here's what i'll end on. As an agency, we specialise in providing a one-stop-shop outsourced marketing department service. Our core specialisms are social media (inc. Paid Social), content writing and email marketing. However, we recognise that customers want more than what we can offer and so we partner with a very good SEO agency (they were the best of about 10 agencies that tendered for the partnership). We can therefore offer you that as well. We do not have PPC skills in-house, however we can source a PPC person and bring them on-board on a contract basis to fulfill that need as well if that's of interest. In doing so, you would get (i) an expert in social advertising (ii) and expert in SEO (iii) an expert in PPC. We could be your single point of contact and billing to make it simple for you.

If that sounds interesting and you would like to chat more, i think the following would work.
1. A meet / chat with me so I can fully understand your requirements
2. A secondary online meeting with us, the SEO agency and a PPC contractor so we can brainstorm and full breakdown the requirements and ask any questions needed
3. The SEO and PPC people will then provide and pass on to me a detailed proposal for their parts of the equation. I'll put our social advertising campaign on the end and after you've had time to digest it, we can arrange a further call to go through the full proposal, asnwer any questions and hopefully move it forward.

It's an option - it's not perfect but i think it could meet your needs. Let me know what you think Nik and if you're interested, we can move it forward. If you're not, I won't be offended. It's important you make the right choice, particularly if you have that kind of budget.
Chris

 

[nik82]

Thank you Chris
You make some fair points.
I will drop you a call today to discuss this further.

 

[fisicx]

Looks like Chris can help but like I said, finding one agency to do all three isn't easy. What you end up with (as in this case) is one agency managing sub-contractors. And there is nothing wrong with this.

But...

SEO and PPC are built into the core of the website, it's not something you can normally bolt on afterwards. So you may discover you will end up having to recode and reconfigure whole chunks of your website to accomodate your three marketing methods.

 

[Oliver King]

Can anyone reccomend a very capable agency that they have worked with?

Hi there. I'm a freelance marketing consultant, but always happy to answer questions at any time.

I personally think that agencies can offer a lot of value - certainly good ones! - however, it's very much horses for courses. By looking for a lot of different aspects - you will either need to find one agency that covers all of those aspects - OR separate agencies, which becomes more expensive.

Reading the comments above - I would highly recommend working to make sure you have at least some sort of plan in mind to approach agencies with - for example, will paid social fit your industry, do you need faster results - in which case a PPC campaign would work better in the shorter term and SEO as a longer term objective.

I speak from my time working on 'client-side' - and every time I spoke to an agency their recommendations matched exactly the skills they offered (as you would expect!).

Like I said - I'm happy to answer questions etc and I can guarantee you I have no sales person answering the phone!

Regards, Oli

 

[Digihound]

Hello Nik,

Chris has highlighted some of the key issues that you face when talking with agencies especially when looking for a combination of the specific skills required.

It seems to me that, what you are looking for is a full service digital marketing agency that can offer you a complete mix of expertise and also one that is well-schooled in e-Commerce and the challenges of an overheated market sector.

We can certainly offer you in-house expertise in all disciplines be they, SEO, PPC and Social and our team is well-versed in growing e-Commerce businesses here in the UK and across Europe and the US too.

Incidentally, when meeting with prospective clients, we do outline the base strategy that is likely to be adopted and once we have agreed to work together, a full briefing document of the exact strategy is provided at the start of the campaign.

We also firmly believe in skill-sharing throughout the life cycle of the campaign, so that our clients can make informed decisions on product launches, seasonal variations, trends and other factors that may affect outcomes.

If you're interested, I can send you a couple of recent case studies highlighting the challenges, processes, strategy and results that were achieved and we can then progress this further from there.

Darryl...

 

[extulsftjz]

The trouble is almost all agencies will claim they can do the job even if in reality they'd be looking everything up on Google.

I would expect a good agency to be able to give you some idea of the approach they'd take. You'll probably find most agencies use the same tactics for each client, on the whole.

I'd also expect you could get proposals outlining potential strategy. If they think they can get your custom and you're a good sized client then you could find some.

I'd make sure they have experience in getting results for e-commerece too.

 

[Digihound]

The upshot is agencies will layout a plan that consists of some of what they will do, but never reveal what goes on behind closed doors, and even if some detail is revealed, we believe this is done to show a result enough to keep the client assured of 'good service' when infact vital information about results are withheld for obvious safety net reasons, unfortunately not in the clients best interests.

I can't speak for other agencies nor on the experiences that you personally have had, but
clients, like agencies are all different. Some like detailed reports on strategy, process and outcomes whilst others barely look at the reports and are only interested in the bottom line namely the results.

As a rule of thumb, a client engaging a supplier should be doing their due diligence thoroughly before contracting with them. Speaking to both current and past clients for instance, about the supplier's mode of working, their levels of communication and the results that they produce should be an absolute prerequisite in order to avoid disappointment.

For the record, I can tell you that our clients tend to stay with us for the long term, (most of them have been with us for over 18 months or more) and a couple have been my clients for over 10 years even after they've moved jobs and changed careers. The reason for this is simple - we give them exactly what they are looking for! - and self-serving too, as we are in this industry for the long term and rely on their referrals and testimonials to help attract more business.

 

[HazelC]

I came to say exactly what @fisicx is saying; may be tricky to get one agency to do it all. Some agencies also won't go in depth about what they can / will do in case you go and do it yourself.

My opinion is that the clients I speak to get me to do it because they don't want to do it themselves, don't know how to or don't want to so I am happy to be completely honest about what we will do for them.

I would recommend having a chat with Jon Orchard of Local Buzz Marketing and he takes a very similar honest approach - say Hazel sent you (helps to have an unusual name).

 

[Petr Gogolin]

Hi! We've seen hundred different online projects starting. After working with different agencies, I came to conclusion that if you want the best in terms of value for money, go with the best freelancer you can find for each of those areas you mentioned. Unless you are able and willing to hire and groom in-house personnel.

The most common argument is that freelancer is more risky since he/she can leave you hanging if they decide to quit. Agency is supposed to be more safe, since there are more people able to handle your project. I never understood this rationale. Agency or freelancer, it always goes down to skills of the one person who provides the service. If the agency doesn't have two or more superstar workers who can be interchanged, than it doesn't matter if you have a freelancer or an agency.

Only difficult part is to find the best specialist who is also available and interested in your project. The best ones are rather picky.

If there's a agency focused specially only on certain area, I'd consider them while accepting it will cost me a little more. But one agency providing fullservice online marketing is almost a miracle in these times when there are so many different specializations and niches within online marketing.

 

[ethical PR]

The trouble is almost all agencies will claim they can do the job even if in reality they'd be looking everything up on Google.

I would expect a good agency to be able to give you some idea of the approach they'd take. You'll probably find most agencies use the same tactics for each client, on the whole.

I'd also expect you could get proposals outlining potential strategy. If they think they can get your custom and you're a good sized client then you could find some.

I'd make sure they have experience in getting results for e-commerece too.

That's certainly not my experience that the vast majority of agencies look everything up on Google @BirminghamBlade - how many digital agencies have you worked with?

No agency worth it's salt will give a prospective client a researched strategy as part of a proposal.

What you will get OP from a good agency is;

1. One that takes the time to get to know you and your business

2. demonstrates they understand your market place and target audience

3. One that will include case studies showing success with similar projects

4. .Offers you recent client references to talk to

4. Provides you with a proposal that outlines their approach, their thinking, an outline budget, tangibles they can offer and how they would work with you to measure your success.

5. Outlines clear working practices, milestones, terms and conditions

 

[fisicx]

@traffic_ace, your posts are so similar to those from an old banned member it's uncanny.

 

[HazelC]

We have a content creator freelancer telling the truth eg:

The agencies are scared - if their all so brilliant, why so scared... I know exactly. Here's why:

We haven't touched our on-site Seo for years - we don't need to. Is it magic or secrets? no - just 3 years work, a decent website and some Twitter work, serious that's all we did. Our Twitter account is just a small, hardly anything account page thing, seriously.. - result = zero ad/seo spend for 10 years, which gave us in the start about 50 clients - we now have over 1000 paying clients.

You don't need agencies, their guarantees are worthless as how can you guarantee links onto other peoples websites. We did the link swap thing years ago in 2001, ok was easier then - but they soon told us to get lost, and forget free links of any power - no chance, they all want cash upfront. Clearly Offsite Seo doesn't work like it used to and if you think about it, its obvious why.

Thank you I do tell the truth!

 

[Ian J]

I would recommend having a chat with Jon Orchard of Local Buzz Marketing

And I would recommend a couple of digital marketing full members of this forum as I prefer to use people who contribute to the upkeep of this forum. It's easy enough to pick out those that may be worth looking at closely as they are the ones that offer help and advice without expecting anything in return.

 

[HazelC]

And I would recommend a couple of digital marketing full members of this forum as I prefer to use people who contribute to the upkeep of this forum. It's easy enough to pick out those that may be worth looking at closely as they are the ones that offer help and advice without expecting anything in return.

Then go ahead and recommend them then

 

[Ian J]

Then go ahead and recommend them then

zigojacko and justinaldridge

 

[Fancypants]

The first thing you should ask is a list of current clients. Then check what results they are having with these businesses. Next, call a couple of these business owners up and ask what they think of your agency.

 

[fisicx]

The first thing you should ask is a list of current clients.

I doubt anyone is going to give you that list.

 

[Digihound]

I doubt anyone is going to give you that list.

We certainly wouldn't give you a full list of our clients but we do provide the names and contact numbers of some of them, so that you can go speak to them directly.

Incidentally, the OP seems to have this sorted out anyway as he hasn't responded to his thread for quite a while now.

 

[Peter Bowen]

We assume either they have no clients or are full of superiority bs

Your assumption ignores several valid reasons for not providing you with a list of clients. For instance, I've had clients ask me not to talk about the work I do for them because they like the competitive edge it brings them and they don't want their competitors doing the same.

 

[fisicx]

@traffic_ace (AKA eventdomain)

So if you needed an SEO company you would expect them to hand over a list of ALL their clients? That's just not going to happen - especially as there may be all sort of confidentiality clauses and restrictions. What you can do is look at some case studies but you won't ever get the client list. If you did find an agency that gave you a full list that would be very worrying about their business ethics.

 

[extulsftjz]

That's certainly not my experience that the vast majority of agencies look everything up on Google @BirminghamBlade - how many digital agencies have you worked with?

It would certainly be worrying if most agencies looked everything up on Google.

I said most agencies will claim they can do whatever a client wants even if they ended up looking up how to do it on Google.

No one wants to admit they don't know how to do something. It looks bad. I'm referring to smaller agencies but I wouldn't be surprised if the big boys didn't sometimes hit Google as soon as the client meeting ends.

 

[extulsftjz]

The first thing you should ask is a list of current clients. Then check what results they are having with these businesses. Next, call a couple of these business owners up and ask what they think of your agency.

You can imagine some of those clients ringing up the agency the next day asking why their details are being given out and that they're not happy having to answer questions from random people calling them.

This also assumed that clients are tracking and measuring what their agency is achieving. In reality, this isn't always the case. Some judge an agency on the interactions they have with the account manager. Do they like them and do they get a good feeling.

 

[fisicx]

OK.

How about you post the contact details of all your clients. Send them in a PM if you like. If you don't then according to your own rules you have no clients and are full of superiority BS.

 

[Peter Bowen]

Ok so your clients say 'don't talk about us' fine - but that doesn't in no way prevent, say us, from using another agency in direct competition to your clients.

You're absolutely right. In this case I respect my client's wishes. I have other client's who are happy to chat to prospective clients but I'd certainly not hand their details out to every prospect.

I'd consider it a big red flag if someone demanded to see my client list. A far more reasonable approach would be to say something like "Do you have a client in a similar industry (position/market etc) that I might talk to about the services you provide?"

 

[fisicx]

Therefore you are not entitled to my client list as you don't even fit the criteria.

I call BS. I still think you are Event domain.

 

[Colin Forrest]

If you want to receive a holistic SEO and PPC service that is actually going to tell you what they can do for you and is reliable, why don't you send out a tender? Your experience seems to suggest that if you keep directly dealing with agencies, you are likely to keep on encountering similar types of disappointments of lack of transparency. There are some great digital marketing companies out there that will put the effort in if you submit a proper tender to provide you with everything you want to know. I don't agree that what you are looking for requires more than one agency, there are countless companies that will provide you with a holistic service to meet all your needs - just let them come to you instead!

 

[Makatan1]

Hey Its not rocket science! Ad agencies try to make it seem completely mystical what they do...It isn't! After spending (sorry wasting) £10,000s (yes tens of thousands) with some of the biggest companies in the UK I decided to do it myself as I figured NOBODY could promote the business like I could. I purchased online courses in adwords, facebook ad marketing and expert landing page design courses. Result = visitors to my sites, calls & conversions coming through to this day. Now I run my own business doing the same thing for my clients. IT'S EASY! Don't listen to all the hype! theres absolutely nothing stopping you from competing with big major players! I do it all the time. I am consistently competing with the "big boys" yet my clients still are happy with the business that comes in..The smaller you are, has its advantages...Use them!

And finally something that really annoys me ...I NEVER charge up front I NEVER ask anyone to sign anything before they see results...WHY? Because I believe in myself and my methods..I know it works. THINK ABOUT IT... in any other service industry say a plumber , an accountant, a surveyor, a lawyer...you name it ...if they asked you to blindly pay up front for something that wasn't really guaranteed you'd tell them to JOG ON! lol.

 

[Tin]

Hey Its not rocket science!

Good to hear that someone else knows how simple SEO can be, once you know what to do