Hello. Hello, hello.
Chris Simmance
Everybody. How you doing, Charlie? How you doing, Gareth?
Ohh, good. Thank you. Chris, how are you?
Chris Simmance
Really good. Really.
Charlie Clark
Good. What’s what’s going?
Chris Simmance
On in the background there, Charlie, you’ve. Got loads happening.
Charlie Clark
Well, I’m in Norfolk, so yeah, it’s just as you expect. There’s there’s not much happening. On on the. Or in the distance. So yeah, but everything’s all good.
Chris Simmance
Thanks, not not in Barcelona at the minute. You’re jet setting from from. Yeah, HQ to to Norfolk. I’m guessing for client retention based business.
Charlie Clark
Exactly. That’s exactly it.
Chris Simmance
Awesome. How you doing, Gareth, you. You, you, you’re in. Your your Home Office, there aren’t.
You. I’m in my Home Office, and behind me is a hot mess. Which is a perfect euphemism for my current love life.
Chris Simmance
We’re we’re not going to touch on that. One today. That’s that’s not for documented, documented materials I’m sure. So today, we’re gonna have a good. We’ll chat about client retention, currents or economic climate. The current, the current mindset of most clients. Retention is a huge problem for agencies because clients getting scared but also retention is always more profitable. And new acquisition appliance in the long run. Uhm, I think we will probably end up touching on quite a a bit of an overlap around retention from the client side, but also from from the agency side because quite a lot of things can factor into that. Charlie, you guys, you guys at Minty have a a decently. Long track record of retention. I know, Gareth. You certainly do. Having looked after the ship of marketing signals for a significant amount of time there, is there anything like 1 little thing that you think that about you as a as a agency leader that’s that’s kind of helped in that regard.
Gareth Hoyle
Giving this caring, I was gonna say I was gonna swear in my opening sentence then. My health up.
Speaker
Thank you.
Gareth Hoyle
And I think. Caring and empathy like there. I’ve worked in house. Granted, it was the best part of 20 years ago now, but there I’ve dealt with agency relationships and it was back in the days of when I was. Coding HTML for a living and just to request a change to a form required a 2 hour conversation that was billed. And and two hours of billing time to get it done and it just it just it just made me think that like this agency don’t really care about us as a business. So I think that that sort of level of empathy towards the towards the customers is what I try and I try not sure this customer’s out there like he’s lying. He’s lying. He doesn’t mean it but they. Yeah, I I try my my left customers. I try but yeah, just just caring and and try and put yourself. In their shoes as well. Really.
Chris Simmance
And and what about yourself there, Charlie?
Charlie Clark
Yeah. I mean, there’s similar really, it’s just making sure that you’re you’re dealing with another human at the end of the day, whether it’s a, you know, a marketing manager and a big enterprise business or you know just smaller kind of mum and pop businesses, you need to be able to empathise with them. Say, if someone’s going for a bit of a hard time or. You know, if they’re on a SC retainer and they say hey. Do you know anything about this analytics problem? Don’t just immediately put all of that on an extra charge available time you know, be a bit flexible. You of course need to have your boundaries as well. You know with clients. But I think again, just honesty, clear communication and being adaptable as the times change is definitely something that. That every agency owner should have in mind when when dealing with clients.
Chris Simmance
So let’s do. A little roll. Call Gareth. You’ve got two things to introduce for yourself and there he is.
Gareth Hoyle
Women eat hand.
Chris Simmance
Yeah, that’s 111.
Chris Simmance
Awesome business in a in each hand. What? Talk talk.
Chris Simmance
Talk a little bit about the agency before coverage leaks and the coverage. Lee supports agencies in a great way as well.
Gareth Hoyle
Yeah. So I’m the MD or CEO. However you want to describe the market signals. I’ve been running agencies for 16 years. I’ve built them up to several hundred staff and walked them back down to under 20 staff. I’ve never been happier with under 20 staff. We just do search so. SEO and encompassing tech content, links and PR and paid encompassing but a little bit of social, but mainly Google and Bing. And and then on the we went with mid sized enterprise clients less of the mom and pop sort of thing. We tend to look at if if 8 million revenue as a as a as a sort of bare minimum really, then they’ve generally got a marketing team in house. We don’t tend to get on well with people that wear suits. Stuff like that. And then on the.
Speaker
I’m sorry.
Gareth Hoyle
First of all, your beard hides your tie, Chris. So we let you off. Then on the in the other hand, I have my fledgling digital PR reporting tool coverage, Lee, where we allow you to paste your URLs in. We will then go off and grab all your favourite metrics, visualise it so it looks good on anything. From a mobile phone to an 85 intelli DTV and abroad. And we believe based on the data we’ve got that it will encourage more buy in from those that don’t understand what they’re buying from an SEO perspective. And that’s not the first time I’ve said that.
Chris Simmance
I can tell this it’s almost like it’s like. Stuck above your screen. To read from. Brilliant. It’s always good to know your elevator pitch, guys. Everyone listening. You don’t know your elevator. Pitch off by heart. You’ve gotta start, Charlie. You run minty.
Chris Simmance
Digital it’s we’ve worked together there. Talk to us a little bit about who you work with, what you do and try and do your elevator pitch.
Chris Simmance
As well as get.
Charlie Clark
A bit nervous, then, when you said that. But yeah, I run mincy. We’re an organic search agency. We specialise in travel, leisure and lifestyle. We’ve come to that niche within the last few years. I’m not afraid to admit when we first started out, we were a bit of a, you know, do it all agency for the first couple of years. Do anything from SEO to Facebook ads to chat bots very quickly realise that you know niching down into a certain area was the way to go. That’s where we got all our results in all our best clients moved to just doing organic search and now, yeah, we’ve got a team of just under 20 people. In Barcelona, or split between Barcelona and the EU? OK, couple of remote staff thinking the same as Gareth, I I don’t have any grand ambitions to to rise to A to 100 person agency very happy with where we’re at. Yeah, a little bit bigger. But you know the customers we’ve got a great client relationships are great and yeah. It’s just not a big fan of piling the clients high and having to deal with the consequences to be honest. So yeah, we’ve got a big emphasis on. They’re keeping the clients that we’ve got and in order to do that, yeah, we need to make sure that, you know, our our team and capacities. Are in line.
Chris Simmance
Yeah. And one of the things that we’ll probably touch on at some point throughout this webinar is keeping those clients in a A as you grow, you wanna make sure you retain the ones you’ve got and some of the things that that are involved in that aren’t the sexy. Stuff. That’s the. Stuff. That’s the the you know the the, the the delivery on time of relatively monotonous things that just keeps that that trust flowing and and I know you know Gareth you’ve got people Charlie you’ve got OPS people they don’t get to do some of the the really cool PR campaigns that they can. Claim all the links, but they’re an integral part to to any agencies retention. We’ll we’ll probably cover quite a lot of that as we go through today, but should we if we jump into the the first kind of key talking point, anyone got any questions throughout the the the webinar, please ask if you have anything and you’re watching this as a replay.
Gareth Hoyle
Chris is having.
Chris Simmance
Then you can chat with one of.
Gareth Hoyle
Some microphone, I thought.
Speaker
Them and ah.
Gareth Hoyle
Your mic, your.
Chris Simmance
Am I having my phone fun?
Gareth Hoyle
Mic keep. Yeah, your mic keeps cutting off a little bit, Chris. Don’t worry. We can. We can carry it. If needed.
Chris Simmance
You carry me. You carry me.
Charlie Clark
Well, it was me. So just keeping quiet.
Chris Simmance
Sorry everybody, I don’t know what’s going on. It’s probably the local Internet. No. Clients are the same. No2 clients are the same. And how do you guys go about understanding them individually and their expectations and needs? And Gareth, do you wanna kick us off on that one?
Gareth Hoyle
Yeah, absolutely. So a bit like Charlie, we don’t work on the pylon high policy required at the moment. We’ve got 20 retainers and about 20 staff. So whilst it’s not a one member of staff to one clients or policy, I kind of know all of our clients, I probably had dinner. With most of our clients. So there’s a personal. Understanding of the challenges that each person has within their organisation and I I do the front end sales alongside my head of OPS. So we get the operational team that are going to deliver the work involved from day one which gets the buy in from my OPS team into the project. Rather than it being a surprise when it closes so. I also think that, like I said at the start, putting yourself in in the in the in the the customer shoes like the especially as we get towards enterprise where you’ve got other departments that are running the website, you’ve got other people involved that that maybe don’t fully understand SEO or why we need to do this. We’ve got TV campaign, we need the homepage. Not like this. Yeah, when you change the H1 to hello. So there’s yeah, just just a bit of again, a bit of empathy towards what they’re going through. And then if you ask the right questions in the pitch process, then you should understand what the goals are and what the challenges are going to be and who they hidden. There’s always a hidden stakeholder when you get to a certain size of client. So if you ask the right questions in the pitch. Process and I have sat through and presented many David know how many pictures I gave up on my closing rate. It’s like annoying me, but the yeah, yeah, yeah. Just just. Just put yourself in their shoes and and understand. Understand the client really is the is the TLDR of it.
Charlie Clark
Yeah. And I just to to follow on from that guy. I’m saying like. The where where you understand your point is like you said that in depth discovery session at the beginning. I’m not just throughout the pitching process but also you know you’re not going to learn absolutely every single nook and cranny of a of a client throughout that pitching process as well. Like even in that month one and on a.
Chris Simmance
Depending on how many.
Charlie Clark
Regular basis. After that we try to do a quarterly more strategy catch up session with the clients but really understand. Then who the client is, how their business is changing, especially when you’re moving with those bigger clients with, you know, 100 plus staff in house that you’re working with, things change all the time. Staff come and go, you get new marketing managers, you know new head to tech, different departments, liaising with each other, getting that clear understanding. Is so important and the amount of times like at the beginning where we’ve. Pitched something that we learned very, very early early on. We’re gonna do a technical SEO audit and then the developers just don’t feel like implementing anything we’ve suggested. That’s something that’s happened. I think every SEO agency’s faced that at some point, if we get a clear understanding of that at the beginning, who knows other people are we’re going to be working with what they can do, what their limitations are just allows us to, you know. Adapt our our approach in order to fit. Yeah. What? What? What we can achieve with them.
Chris Simmance
And how do you guys focus around like making sure everyone speaks like clearly in the same way consistently amongst all different clients? Because I think sometimes that that can be an expectations problem, can’t it?
Gareth Hoyle
From our perspective. Like, I don’t feel like we have enough clients for that to be an issue and I don’t want to have enough clients so that. Becomes an issue like. We have don’t get me wrong, we have SOP’s and we have on boarding sessions and we have tick box exercises for want of a better word. Where have we checked this have we made? Sure, we know this. Who? Who is the? Even down to who’s the accounts contact like, there’s no point sending the invoice to the SEO exec needs to go to to billing. Did we get the PO? The? I think it’s just. Yeah, I I don’t think that we have personally as market signals have an issue with inconsistency of messaging. Because we just don’t have enough. Like we we’re so built in, we’re so bought into the clients campaigns that we’re working. On that. It’s there’s also quite often like there there might be a pitching process, but there’s probably a two hours of conversations before we. Build the deck. There’s probably a an hour of conversation after the pitch, but before the decisions made, and then before we even write a line of code or a line of text, there’s been an onboarding session with four or five people at our end. Maybe three people at the clients. And there’s somebody taking notes, and then the notes are shared as a as a editable document afterwards. So if anything’s. Missed you’ve got a. Chance to jump in and go hang on a minute, no. We we need. This or we need that and I think it’s it’s just trying to, I mean I’m a process monkey, I try and standardise everything. As much as I can. But you are right, No2 clients are the same, but a lot of what we do in SEO is quite sanity. So if we can, if we can agree a process, the end goal might be different and the journey might be slight. Different, but the the facets of the campaign are not a million miles away on on every client really. So I think my my OCD. Helps a little bit as well.
Charlie Clark
Yeah, I I definitely agree with the whole you know. You you can.
Chris Simmance
And what about yourself though, Charlie?
Charlie Clark
Sorry, I think I started talking them before you. Yeah, the the the I agree with grant from the on the SAP’s but yeah, they get you up to a point. You know every system in in the world every big business in the world wants an SAP’s. And then after that checklist is done you need to be relying on you know the team that you’ve got a hand to be able to. Deliver from there and and use their own you. Know use their own process but. Yeah, we’re the same. Like every client we bring on my sales process in particular it’s very standardised. Tick tock, tick tock one about all the way up to the point of onboarding. And I mean it’s really important again, like making sure. That before the campaign kicks off that everyone’s got an exact clear understanding of exactly what the services are. I’m I’ve had a few marketing managers before. I’ve got a few months into a campaign and I’ve. Thought to myself on the call, they’re using PPC terms and their SEO campaigns, and they’re getting like services mixed up so. Going back to the empathy side of things as well, like that, that clear understanding and that clear brief that you get at the beginning. You need to really make sure that the client understands that as well, because they’re the ones reporting back to you know, their their bosses as well, and a lot of the times they might be told, hey, go and appoint an SEO agency, go and appoint a PC agency XYZ and they might not fully understand it. They’re relying on us as service providers to be able. To do that. Yeah. And then there’s a lot, there’s a lot of Cowboys out there as well. So you know, just making sure that we’re the ones. Can provide that trust for them.
Chris Simmance
Yeah, and and I think, but building trust is really hard in this industry. It has been historically Cowboys and what do you guys do apart from you know, the onboarding stuff that you plan through to to kind of keep that trust and build a relationship that lasts.
Gareth Hoyle
I mean from from our end. No, no BS in the pitch process. So I. Mean a lot of our clients. Are digital marketers, so you can’t blagger blagger as they say, getting the people that are working on the campaign involved early doors stops a lot of Chinese whispers. So if you’re speaking to the outreach or the PR manager that’s going to be running your campaigns. Then there’s nothing lost. I’m riddled with ADHD. I forget all sorts, so I’d much rather get my team involved from step one. Because they’re better at note taking, so they’re also responsible for the service delivery more than anything, although ultimately I’m responsible for service delivery. It’s my business, but they are. It’s their job, is is reliant on service delivery and at the clients end, their job could be based, could be reliant on. Engaging with the right agency, so everyone’s got quite a lot on the line, but they’re just being honest and open and letting them know what you’re doing, showing them the links that you’ve built, showing them the content that you’re writing. Just getting them on board, but I think that I mean trust. Trust takes time to develop. You know, that’s not something that’s going to come in the first two months of the campaign.
Chris Simmance
And people need to know what they what they’re buying. They need. They need no ambiguity. It’s an invisible thing for the most part is I think I say invisibility all the time. You you’ve gotta make it clear. You. You are selling something which has a long. Sorry, Charlie, are you about to say something?
Charlie Clark
No, I was just. I was so on. On the flip side of this as well. You know, I’ve we’ve lost pictures before because of other people were pitching up against like. Doing the opposite of building trust, they’re they’re they’re saying things to the clients such as. Ohh well, we’re having. We’re having people that we’re pitched to say ohh well the other agency guaranteed us #1 positions within six months or 12 months and. You know it. It’s that kind of thing. I I guarantee that those customers aren’t gonna they. She’s aren’t gonna be that client much longer than six months because you know quick to get him through the door. He can promise. Them the world. But again, it goes back to being honest. If you’re not being honest and. And you’re gonna lose to customers very quickly. And and I I personally think SEO is one of the, it’s one of the most difficult services to sell because with something such as PPC, it’s very data-driven. You can see what’s coming back. You can almost predict results with SEO. It’s there are no guarantees it it is. Along the lines of hey, give me X amount of £1000 per month and I can’t promise you anything, but I can based on our previous performance, we’re going to get you this but there’s so many other things to think about such as Google updates, AI, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You know, I don’t want to say it depends. Like you know, a real honest you know, SCO salesman is isn’t gonna guarantee results to anyone. But we are up against a lot of people in our pitching process that. Do do that. There, there are other ways you can build trust. You know, we we personally a lot of people actually tell us that this isn’t the right approach, but it’s our client retention’s. Extremely high and we it’s very rare touchwood. For us to lose. For us to lead the line, probably open my inbox after this and have about 3. People leave but but.
Chris Simmance
It’s because you showed. A tick tock randomly.
Charlie Clark
Yeah, yeah. For who’s this crazy guy shouting? Ticked. Off on the webinar. But we we run on 90 day retainers, 90 day rolling contracts, we don’t have any big discussions about renewal but every 90 days would you just do a strategy checking? And there’s no resigning of anything. It just rolls over. And yeah, it it’s worked really well for us. Switching over to that and saying most of the clients we’ve kept and I think we’ve still got one client in the first three months of starting the agency. So yeah, it’s it’s worked well for us.
Chris Simmance
It the one of the things about that is, is like consistent engagement, isn’t it like? How do you do you processing by that? Do you plan it in advance or is it kind of like when they feel?
Gareth Hoyle
Wait, where?
Charlie Clark
We we don’t want, so we don’t personally plan and we do plan in the you know every three months I’m like you know I do have a checklist and it’s like make sure I’ve checked in, make sure I’ve checked in by that time I normally have but it’s just you know there’s a lot of things going on easy to. Forget stuff when you’re working agency, but I always try and do make sure. You know that personal touches there. A lot of our clients are based between Spain and the UK. So again, like Gareth does with with his clients, I do try and grab dinner them once in a while, even just pop into the office to say. Hello for a coffee quite lucky all my UK clients, most of them are based in London, so I just do. Normally a a long day of having about 15 coffees from from office to office, but works really well. Yeah. No to answer your question, we don’t really process the fight that I think that’s that is literally about human relations. Like you can’t really build human relations. It has to be from natural conversations like we’re having having now it’s the only way you’re gonna build trust. And yeah, it’s just it’s the. Way we do it.
Gareth Hoyle
We we invite all clients to slap so they can speak to the people that are working on their campaigns, the and and the rest of the team can see the conversations that are going through. So there’s no ohh I said this in an e-mail. Obviously emails do go back. And forth, but. If it’s just asking a question or if we’re doing some reactive. We are and we need like a comment up now. Then we just find that being able to tag them in slack is just a really quick way and it just builds that relationship that they can. We do have internal channels for the same clients as well. I will be honest, but some of the conversations that we’ll have about the campaign will have in the clients channel so that they can see us discussing stuff. And quite often they’ll come and join us in the conversation. So we might be talking about, oh, should we talk to them about that? We talked about that and then the client can jump on and go. You guys actually really, like I did too. Like, I’ll, I’ll intervene here and. You know, I like that one. It’s it’s just the as it says on the on the, on the, on the notes, consistently engage them like get them involved. Like this isn’t? Yeah, we give them a weekly update. Yeah, we give them a monthly report. Yeah, we give them a quarterly check in, but if they can see the chatter going on in the campaign. And they can see that there’s there’s cogs turning behind the scenes and people are working hard for them. So yeah, that’s that’s that’s how we try and build those strong relationships.
Chris Simmance
So I can see Slack is good for consistent engaging. Are there any kind of ground rules that you have to set because it could also be a minefield, right?
Gareth Hoyle
No wine. So, to be honest, we we don’t, we don’t have really have anything that we. Ever want to hide from a client? Really. I just don’t. I don’t think it’s. We’re not pulling the wool, so I don’t, you know, if we put, we do an ideation session, we come with five out five ideas. They quite may hate three of them. So I’d much rather they told me in slack than wait until I was presenting to them so. So I’m not really. I’m not really too concerned to be honest. I suppose maybe we’d keep pricing data out, but to be honest with you, that’s all organised at the start of the campaign, so there’s not really anything to talk about with with pricing data and and like Charlie, we tend to work on either 3 or 6 rolling and. I don’t really panic on renewal, right. I think about, you know, most of my clients are happy or they they certainly don’t tell us they’re unhappy. So yeah, I think you just just just always just talk to them like they’re humans. So it doesn’t matter whether we sell them ones and zeros or or words on this on a piece of paper like we it’s a, it’s a person speaking to a person fundamentally. Yeah. So just just be nice. Just don’t don’t be. * ****.
Chris Simmance
I mean, hopefully that’s a that’s a given, but it we know it isn’t in this in this sector so much. What about educating clients so they understand what they’re getting is is that part of the sales process? Is that an ongoing consistent thing?
Charlie Clark
For us, it’s an ongoing consistent thing, like every, every month when we send the report, we’ll always try if there’s any updates, you know GTA4 about AI, whatever it is, we’ll always just try and keep a few of the top news stories of that month that we found. We share them internally. Obviously, we’ve got a marketing, marketing and news channel that we have internally at Minty and then anything that’s really of interest to the client that month we’ll put a few, you know, links to articles in there and say, hey. This is happening in the SEO world this month. I think you should check it out because a lot of them you know they don’t follow you know the the tweets, the twitters with the exes we follow or the OR the LinkedIn profiles or the websites for the blogs and there there’s so much going on as well. It’s very easy to. I mean, it’s very I’ve. I’ve had conversations before with marketing managers where they just read something and it you can tell it’s just something that’s been posted online but doesn’t really have any, doesn’t come from any authority. So I think they do rely on us a lot to, you know, navigate through that information. And send them, keep them updated with what’s going on in the SEO world and it benefits you a lot as well because it just, you know, reestablishes the fact to the clients that you’re a subject matter expert and built on that trust. Additionally. So really quick thing to do on the reports, just put a couple links in, check it out if you’ve got any questions. Looking cool and and just just adds an. Extra bit of value.
Chris Simmance
And what about yourself there, Gareth?
Gareth Hoyle
Yeah. I mean from our end, because half of our customers are seos and obviously there are good seos and bad seos. I’m not saying they’re all brilliant telling you I don’t think kids. Yeah, I’m not. I’m not mentioning any names but then we also work with a lot of.
Chris Simmance
The broad spectrum.
Gareth Hoyle
E-commerce managers where? And they talked to me about like. Internal site search tools and stuff I don’t understand, so I think we try and in our, you know in in our pitch process in our sales tax, we do try and get across in, in layman’s terms why like why do we need links like they’re, they they are the authority that that makes your site. Rise above the rest. And if you start to use those sort of linguistics, then they they understand and you know you you got someone. Paying you A5 figure retainer and the majority of their report is a list of URL. If they don’t understand what the URLs are there for, then it’s a bit like. Yeah, this is brilliant, but what’s it mean? And obviously we always put, we always put commercial slam on like we’ve, you know, our KPI’s quite often are the number of keywords of page ranks for and the positioning of that page for. X amount of certain short tail and long tail keywords, but the. Help if the more the client understands the journey like they want some of our clients just care about. The destination they don’t. Care how we get there, but the more they understand. About the journey. More empathy they’ve got towards us. The more understanding they’re going to have, and ultimately today’s e-commerce manager is tomorrow’s e-commerce director. So the more education we can give them more education, they’re gonna take up the chain and hopefully they take you with the with them because you’re the one that’s providing them with that. Knowledge and that education, that just sort of bakes you into their career path and you are their supplier of.
Chris Simmance
Yeah. And a big part of that is, you know, you bring people along along the way. You need to be delivering quality work. You need to make that quality consistent. And how do you balance the need for process, but also the need for creative people, creative thinking because? You can hamstring people with 50 checkpoint bullet lists, or you can cause untold risk with a two point send audit report.
Speaker
What? What, what?
Chris Simmance
How do you how have you done that, Gareth? You’ve got years of experience working with hugely different types of people within. The agency previously, when you were working with teams that didn’t have the same same way of working as someone in Manchester, for example. So how have you worked that out and worked out when the?
Gareth Hoyle
Balance needs to be met. Yeah. I mean, I think obviously every task has its own levels of creativity. Some levels of process driven output and even if we were to look at an outreach process, there is certain parts of it which is black. Why? Here’s here’s 100 domains come get me the. E-mail addresses for. Them and then we’ve also got the creativity, which is how we gonna engage with these e-mail addresses? What messaging are we gonna put out there? So I think that as much as I am a process driven SOP kind of guy and you can’t force creativity. I quite often will tell my team to shut the laptop and go for a walk, and I bet you’ll come back with 10 ideas rather than just banging your head against your monitor. So I think you’ve gotta look at every task as it is. And but they’re, they’re and I’m, I’m, I’ll argue my case here. There should always be a process, even if the process is go be creative for an hour and come back with some loss and and that hour could be 4 lots of 15 minutes over the course of the day.
Charlie Clark
So yeah, it’s hard to be creative when you’re forcing everyone to sit on a zoom meeting for an hour and saying, you know, poking a stick and saying come up with some ideas. Be great. Like I think you know, there’s a lot of people. I’ve seen it quite a lot on on, on social media and just just from my own experience as well. Like all people’s best ideas come from, you know, I walk to work sometimes and walk along the beach. That was that wasn’t a humble brag, but but. Take a walk along the beach. Look out. To look out into the sea and that’s where all my best ideas come up. But you know, we’d encourage the team to do the same as well. You know, we’re not gonna like lock people in a meeting room and say, come up with this. But like Gareth says, yeah, the process has to be there in place still. So. Where up until that point, there will be a process that says, hey, we’ll have the meeting with the client, we’ll we’ll get, we’ll run, we’ll go back and forth with some initial ideas. We’ll look at the competitors, we’ll see what else is currently trending at the moment, see what’s worked, what hasn’t, and what are journalists writing about all the way up to that point where it’s like, OK. We failed to blame with the information. Now you know. Go, go. Think for yourself, and then we’ll check in again. You know, in a few days time present your ideas then. Yeah. So yeah, it’s it it it it’s checklist ded up up to a.
Chris Simmance
Point and and one of the key things I think because you are selling an invisible thing is measuring value, but the the leading measures up to the the lagging measure of actual success the the lagging measure is. X amount of links or why sales what? What? How, how do? You first. I’ll go to you, Charlie. How how are you guys kind of showing value in the invisible stuff that you guys do?
Charlie Clark
Yeah, it’s quite a difficult. It’s it. It’s always been a difficult thing. So you actually recommended me a really good book. I think it’s selling the invisible really very interesting and it’s like, you know, how do you quantify if you’re charging someone at say A5 figure retainer? And then yeah, there’s a massive difference between.
Chris Simmance
Oh yeah, bloody.
Charlie Clark
You know, as Gareth says, just providing them a list of URLs and saying hey hit your links. DA30. You know that’s that’s the box ticked. Doesn’t really mean much to a marketing manager. That doesn’t mean much to the boss. They’re going to be explaining that to which probably doesn’t even understand their CEO. You know for us what it comes down to is I say benchmarking when we start campaigning for a customer. Seeing where we’re actually starting from historical performance and then from there on a month by month basis, you know we personally use you know just analytics Google data. Studio couple of other tools as well. We just tried to visualise that growth and tie that in with annotations or whatever else we need to each month for the client. So they can then and so they can see the value of the results we’re bringing. I always think it’s really important. As well to jump on the call with the client, talk them through it. If you send the report. Through I I wish I had an analytics tool for the actual the reports that we sent through, because I do feel like sometimes it’s. Maybe they don’t even get opened, so they think because they’re so happy, that’s what it is. But I think, you know, get them on the call and say, hey, look, here’s what we’ve done this month. Here’s the value it’s brought. And here’s what else we’re going to be working towards. That human conversation, you know, it’s. I’d also think you know the amount of emails. Well, everything people get nowadays. Communication wise, you don’t blame people if they do just skim over a report as well. Just another thing to read, as long as they’re happy and the results are coming in. So yeah, you do kind of have to actually push people and say, hey, look, this is important. You’re paying us a lot of money. We really need to demonstrate the value of what we’re doing for you, so. Let’s jump on. A call and and I think it makes them value a bit more as well, not just another number.
Chris Simmance
I I can speak to the not scrolling thing. We spent an inordinate amount of money in the past to build a sub domain reporting feature with lots of custom fields and things in the back end and I could and I put event tracking for scroll on there and yeah, you get past the 1st 10%. On average, but you know, maybe it was just the the terrible design. Gareth, this is. A really good opportunity from a showing that value point of view to talk about coverage really specifically, I know that it’s it’s a relatively new platform, but I know that it’s come out of years of you trying to show this to your own clients. So you want to talk about kind of how to show some of that kind of building up value overtime kind of?
Speaker
Gareth Hoyle
Yeah, I mean the IT it goes back to that spreadsheet of URL’s like what the, what the hell is. There like at. Least if you’re getting something visual, then they’re at least gonna. Ohh. I recognise that publication. Ohh, we were in. Hello. Ohh brilliant. We got a link from the Daily Mail. I don’t necessarily want to be in the daily. Mail, but they do give the followed link. So there are pros and cons. It depends what you’re selling. One of our clients sells metal guttering to Grade 2 listed houses. The Daily Mail is probably on a lot of coffee tables in those houses, so it’s it’s a perfect match. The I think just trying to. Get them to understand that what they’re getting for their. Money but again. Every client is different. We were working with a a London divorce lawyer. He’s only a one man band. So he wasn’t like some crazy big legal firm. And every month we say to him, right, we’ll prepare your report. Don’t need a report. The phone’s ringing. So like the proofs. In the pudding, like he doesn’t need a report. But because he’s making more money than he’s paying us and granted like that needs to drive me mad because efficiencies. But if he’s happy, he’d rather we spend an extra hour 2 hours a month doing stuff than telling him stuff. So that is. I mean, that’s a a brilliant customer for us. And I also find and this is something that we’re we’re. Trying to work out. How we put into a tool and it might not be covered. There might be another tool that we look to build. One of the things that I find that really gets customers understanding value and progress is how we doing. Versus the competition. So we take a benchmark at the start of every campaign with three. To four, sometimes up to five, depends how much they want to put into that section of the campaign competitors. So our brass page is ranking for 1000 keywords Victoria Secrets is ranking for 1200 keywords, so we know we’re 200 keywords behind. So what do we need to do? To get there. Then after three months, Victoria Secrets might be ranking for 1300 and we’re on 1200, so we’re catching them. So trying to put like non SEO value props into the. Gets gets the accountants off your case, gets the commercial team on side, gets the e-commerce managers that don’t give a **** what Dr DAT FCF. Like most of my e-commerce managers think that we speak in riddles. Sometimes there is what?
Chris Simmance
That’s not what you just did.
Gareth Hoyle
We, but we need to start talking in a language that the client understands, which is sales conversions, physics. Yeah, ranking keywords like that is like English, not SEO ish, so that’s where we’re just trying. Again, it’s human to human communication, so talk to them in the language that they understand. You can speak to the SEO team. A lot of the time we have two reports, one for the SEO team, one for the people, the. No team have to send it to so that.
Speaker
Right. Works for us.
Charlie Clark
That’s good. OK. It’s like when you’re reporting on those metrics as well. It’s like it’s alright if you’re writing ranking for 1000 keywords, but. If none of them are transactional keywords. If they’re just like vanity vanity keywords, it doesn’t make a difference, so it’s like, OK, you’re ranking for 1000 keywords X amount of those are transactional, and they’ve equated to X amount of revenue for your business. Here’s what we’re gonna double down on. It’s, you know, just taking it past that bare minimum of, you know, the automated. Export you can get from something like semrush and and and making sure you’re you know really demonstrating that value.
Chris Simmance
Yeah, agreed. And so you’ve got your value, you’ve got your clients. How do you develop and do you develop any long term retention programmes? And I know like for example NPS and client feedback surveys are really, really important. And Gareth, in the years that you’ve been. Running agencies. What? What kind of loyalty stuff have you been? Not touched, as it were.
Gareth Hoyle
Yeah. I mean, we’re pretty light touch on this sort of stuff because I’m very much a believer that we work in performance marketing. And if you’re not performing then the clients gonna move on. So you can send them all the surveys you want. If they’re not making more than what they pay you, they’re not who gives a **** what they tell you, what the survey and I. Tend to. I’m more interested in how the client getting on with my team. A lot of the time. Like are you happy with who’s doing the work for you? Are you happy with their output? Are you happy with the reporting format? Have you changed your internal branding and we’re still sending the report in the old branding to your we’re creating more work for you when we send the report. So I think the the, again, like Charlie, we’re on let’s put that 9180 day rolling retainer and the proofs in the pudding and our average client retention. Doing some M and a chat with someone the other day, our average client is 2.8 years at the moment, so that says to me that I can be comfortable to be in a in a in a 90 to 180 day contract because the likelihood is they’re going to stay. For nylon three years, and it’s probably skewed because we won a couple of I think we want. For new clients in the. Last quarter, so it’s probably. Three years plus, really. So there. I mean, I’d love to say that we. You know, survey all our customers and and. I’ve just never seen a need to, but I also put that down to the fact that we’ve got about 20 customers. Like, it’s not like I’ve got 150 in the old manual link building days when we were working on thousands of domains a month. Maybe we should have done more of that stuff so we’re just busy copy pasting into into. My website but. I think with the with with 20 clients, you know I speak to them. Right. The we, they’ve all got their own flat channel. They’ve all got access to me on flat whenever they want. If there’s a problem like I don’t live in an ivory tower like they can just come and grab me like they’re me. I actually quite like me. I quite like it when they come to me and talk about campaign stuff. Gets a. Bit boring, just. Being the the boss. So yeah, I’m not really not probably not got the answers that that the listeners are looking for on that one other than if you do a good job then you shouldn’t really. To worry about NPS and and periodical reviews on reviews periodically tend to be more has your business needs changed rather than is the campaign needed, or is the campaign going well? It’s more like what you’re selling now that we weren’t six months ago. Why didn’t you tell me about that when? You got something to stop. Why didn’t you tell me about that when you got him in to start? Three months ago, so and again, the dealing with problems we have open Commons channels, so like the problems should be dealt with before they become a problem really.
Chris Simmance
And and Charlie, how are you dealing? How are you getting feedback loops from clients that beyond like you’re just having a call with them? Is there anything that you kind of touch touch with?
Chris Simmance
Them on. Yeah, I.
Charlie Clark
Mean girlfriend point then? He said. He doesn’t think it’s the answer that some of the listeners are looking for, but I actually think it is you. Know if if you’re. If you’re trying to lock people into like these big long term. You know, 1215 month contracts, you know the 90 day kind of proves to people. Hey, look, we’re not gonna lock you in. You can trust us like we’re not gonna try and, you know, keep you in for 12 months if you’re unhappy. We we we we don’t really need to do those regular feedbacks like we do just do the monthly. I’m sorry the the quarterly and the strategy call and that that covers everything. It’s just more of a conversation to be honest. It’s try and do. It in person. I still think it’s a massive value in that. Even though you know it’s impossible, some of our clients from the states, I wish I could pop over to the states every three. But yeah, it’s not possible. But yeah, just don’t see people in person. A lot of the time we talk a bit about business, but most of most of the conversations just having a having a coffee or you know or or a beer and just just more more of a friendly, you know catch up and yeah, I just think the point trying to get to is. As long as. You’re can be on the phone and the end of the phone with the client as long as you are that point, you’re not like, say, his. Gareth is hiding yourself in that in an ivory tower. You don’t really need to be doing really in-depth regular check-ins with the client. It’s more of like a ongoing it’s an ongoing process anyway. Yeah, it’s the TLDR. It’s just like dad, just keep close communications. If your client make sure there’s at least some kind. Of check in. Where you can actually ask those questions if things have changed and that should be all you need to keep your clients happy.
Chris Simmance
So super snappy ones are on this. One and clients are jittery at the minute. Agency people they know they’re doing a good. Job for the. Most part what what is the one kind of red flag that you look for with a client that you think or they they they might need a bit of TLC or they could be they could be turning soon?
Charlie Clark
I think one thing. That’s maybe a little red friend that lives, but one thing you do always need to take really seriously is if a new marketing manager comes in a new CEO of someone. Your main point of contacts being replaced, or if someone’s leaving, they’ve probably got a list of agencies they’ve worked with previously. They’ve probably got their trusted list. You basically you can’t just expect that to be a smooth transition. You’re going to have to re pitch, you know, go and see them if they’re big client, get them on a call. You need to build that trust because they’re. You’re going to try and pick holes in absolutely everything you’ve done over the last, you know, X amount of months you’ve been working with them. So yeah, that that’d be something I’d say. Like if a new marketing managers come in, if someone’s leaving, someones been laid off. Don’t ignore that like. Address it and and build that trust again. Re pitch them if you have to.
Gareth Hoyle
But also look at also look at where the person that’s left gone, because you might be able to get them over there. And for me like I never like it when a new name ends up in the e-mail threads. So like we’re having an e-mail chat and it’s like the same three people in the marketing team all the time. And all of a sudden, Diane is added to the chase. Who’s Diane accounts? There’s that. And there’s also sometimes where, like, you’re making money for the client or you’re getting the leads you’re hitting. Your target KPI’s. It’s not always money as the KPI. For us, but then all of a sudden, they’re asking for more granularity in what you’re doing now. That could just be coming from, from the, from the bean counters at their end because they’re watching. Or it could be that thinking hang on a minute, we’re paying axe. What are we actually getting for that? Like, could we enhance that? Could we split that retainer into 3 specialists rather than just one agency? So yeah, I think it’s. But again, I think with building strong relationships with your clients and then you know, I’d like to think. Just my clients would be, it’d be absolute ships to do that without giving. Us a heads. Up in a way like because you because you. You not saying we’re mates with all of our clients, but we? We kind of have. That relationship where they should be able to approach us and have an adult conversation rather than just silently killing us, dumping us by text.
Chris Simmance
Lads, thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for everyone for putting up in my very expensive but patchy Wi-Fi today and God knows what’s going on there. Charlie, thanks very much. Enjoy everything in Norfolk. It’s it’s full of wonders, Gareth. Hopefully see you on the 19th of October at the OMG IRL. Charlie, I think you might be flying. All the way from Barcelona for that one.
Charlie Clark
Yeah. No, I will be. Yeah. I’ve not spent much time in Manchester so.
Chris Simmance
It’s better than north. No, it’s not. Everyone in Norfolk is lovely. Thanks very much, everyone. Parting words. I’ve just ruined an entire entire audience. Bye. Bye.