Omnichannel - Finding the Perfect Marketing Agency: 🚩Red Flags and Green Lights🟢| Vera Firman

Episode Date: September 19, 2024

Send us a textWhat does it take to transform from a sales professional to a digital marketing guru? Join us as we uncover the fascinating journey of Vera, a 14-year veteran in the marketing industry.��Ready to find the right marketing agency for your business? Vera dives into how to identify red and green flags, emphasizing the importance of transparency and realistic expectations. She also talks about the critical long-term mindset required for business success, particularly the necessity of investing in SEO for sustainable growth. Packed with actionable advice, this episode is a must-listen for entrepreneurs eager to navigate the complexities of marketing and build successful, enduring businesses.Follow Vera On Social Media:https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1437848327Instagram: @vera_firmanGet a FREE Copy of the High Converting Online Events Book: https://book.dominikalegrand.com/

They don't even have access to their own advertising. They don't know what's going on. Even if you're hiring a marketing agency and you don't understand, it's really easy to fall into the trap. And at the end, you end up spending so much money and getting zero results. Hello everyone, welcome back to the Omni Channel podcast. Today I have Vera with me. She is an amazing agency owner slash digital marketing veteran. I mean, it's been so long for you, Vera. I don't even know. It's been years, right? Yeah, it's been 14 years, actually. I'm a bit, you know, shocked myself how fast the time is running. I'm still not that old, right?

No, you're gorgeous thank you so yeah I've been in marketing basically most of my life most of my grown-up life I would say and that's all I could do actually so ask me anything about marketing I can answer you. So how did you get into marketing? I'm very curious to know. Yeah my first job was actually when I started as a sales and the company where I was working they didn't have any marketing in place at all and they wanted me to penetrate into different markets in different country and without having online marketing, it wasn't possible. And at that time, I had a good opportunity because we had our team for IT. So we built a CRM, in-house CRM.

And I started to learn marketing, started to implement all the online processes in place, because it was really horrendous when they wanted customers from another countries, but they had like 13 pages agreements to sign. And that's obviously not possible. So we had to implement it was financial services. So we had to implement, you know, personal area for each client, online signatures for their proposals. And obviously, we need to start doing digital marketing. So that's how it all started. And then I felt like I enjoyed it more. So I moved from sales to marketing.

And till now, I am in marketing. I love that. And what did you originally study? I'm very curious to know. Yeah, originally, I studied economics and finance. And actually, when I started working for a financial company, that's what actually hit me. That's when again, I went and gained a diploma in digital marketing, because I felt like, you know, I need some more knowledge. But in marketing, it's always learning because it's evolving. Every day there's new tools, new futures.

So it's basically I'm a student all my life, to be honest. Because every day in order to catch up, you know, you have to learn. I love that. And I can relate with your story. I also started in sales first and I really didn't like sales like I it wasn't your typical call the person trying to convince them to book a call type of you know sales job and that very quickly made me very creative as well because I had I mean I hated calls so I had to like okay so how do I get them to book a call, but without me calling them?

So how do I, how can I generate demand for the clients? And that's kind of how I got into copywriting, into just writing emails, books, calls, you know. And then from that on, I'm just like sucked into the whole marketing world. I'm like, I cannot do sales anymore. I just want marketing. And then I was the same, but I'm so angry with you this is something you could never stop learning um marketing is an evolving topic yeah and although you know um i moved to marketing but now working for myself i had to go back to sales and uh you know unfortunately there's no you know if you run your own business you still

need to be involved with yourselves and really interesting that at the time i didn't really like it but now i'm kind of enjoying it it's not as hard for me anymore and uh i even ended up training some of my customers stuff how to do sales because unfortunately there was some lack of you know marketing is one thing but if you cannot sell then marketing is meaningless you know of course and yeah i think when you're selling for your own self or for your own agency it's much easier to do when you're trying to represent someone else i mean for me that was kind of different so i didn't have to try so hard I didn't have to convince anyone it was more like organic was more focusing on them and how to help

them so I feel like that's a completely different way to sell you know in that way then yes it's also depends on you know are you talking to warm leads are you talking to cold leads because it's totally different and you know when I started as a sales it was really funny because i knew zero about financial world and the next day like my second day of the job my bosses put me into the phone conversation with some guys who ended up the potential customers and i had no clue you know like uh it was it was funny and not funny at the same time but eventually I think it was a good learning experience as well love that and I think of course going through these challenges you became a better person and you know learn so much in the process exactly there's lots of psychology involved. There's lots of things you need to learn,

not only digital tools. You need to understand the mindset of people or their background, what they do. So you need to take into consideration all these factors. Yeah, absolutely. And you ended up building your own agency. Can you tell the listeners more about that process? just assign tasks to other people. So it's very different. When you start working for yourself, it's totally different game.

And I'm sure if any business owners listening to us right now, they can relate because when you start your own business and when you start small and you still cannot afford the team, you still have to do everything yourself, it can be overwhelming.

And that's why so many even don't succeed's it can be overwhelming and that's why so many even don't succeed because it's really hard it's not easy so I can't say it was really easy I'm still building it up but at least I managed to you know delegate automate as much as I can. When was the moment when you realized that you really need to start hiring or delegating or you cannot sustain this business anymore? I have two young kids and, you know, ending up spending more time with your work

than with your kids, that's something you don't want to do, right? And at the end, when we start our business we want more freedom but again many business owners that don't realize that it's not actually freedom it's a trap you put yourself in so I think so many people who listening to us they could relate when it comes to hiring an agency what do you see in your experience that that you wish clients would know or how do we set realistic expectations as far as their results yes uh so when it comes to uh agency and we were let's talk about like red flags and green flags, right? Unfortunately, this industry is oversaturated with lots of agencies.

And unfortunately, there are lots of agencies who are promising and over-promising and under-delivering. And unfortunately, lots of business owners, they just got disappointed because they tried. There's two things. They either tried it themselves and they did it wrong and it's failed, or they tried with some marketing agency and they weren't happy and they don't trust anyone else.

So my advice would be always to look at, first of all, the lack of transparency. Also, don't believe if agency promising to you, you know, get your results tomorrow and get rich in one week, that's not going to work. Be prepared that you also have to do the work, not only agency, because agency can generate your leads, can make your website beautiful,

can help you set emails, automation, and all that jazz. But if your employees or you cannot sell or you don't have processes or sales processes in place, there's the chances that it may not be succeed. So you cannot blame everything on agency. You have to understand there's lots of work in the background, not only for agency, but for you as well another factor i would look at it's of the proven track record because again so many agencies right now they just established like yesterday and one month ago it could be a few people who just finished

some three-month course and still know zero about marketing and And they're just good at sales, by the way. So don't fall for that. Always ask for a proven track record. Always the proposal should be in place, explaining everything would have to be done. Communication. Lack of communication is also important. Again, in digital world, it's very easy to fool customers

because they don't understand all the technical terms. So it's very easy to talk and make them believe in something. But you need to set clear expectations straight from the gate. For example, we would never guarantee results because there's nothing in this life you can guarantee. And you can always be realistic and do the audit of the business first before give them any estimation. You need to look at the competition. You need to look at where they're at, how long they've been in the market, look at their positioning, and lots of factors to consider

before you even give any promises to the business owners. So always look for clarity. Straight from the gate, the agency should explain where you're at right now and where you could be in five, six months' time. And don't fall for shiny objects like we see advertised now on facebook or social media where they guarantee your results guarantee to bring your clients tomorrow uh you know you have to be realistic and and and understand the whole process i love those and just to comment on, you know, red flags or green flags of agencies, I think one of the green flag is definitely the ability to two things. One is to ask or what you need to learn is already showing a lot of authority

and knowledge because you are just there for to figure out whether or not you can help them or this is something that you can take on as an agency so I think one is that and the second thing is ability to explain your process because if you have done it I mean that's a cool thing to test whether or not you have done this work before if you can clearly explain like step by step what will happen like you know you can tell them okay first i'm going to be doing my research like you said you know create do it do an audit and and then write your proposal and in a proposal that will be this and this and that and then you know once we sign the contract then we can start taking over your ad accounts, you know, or create your own.

Like if you can explain the process clearly and, you know, without having like dark areas that you don't cover or like having parts that you don't even say, I think that's a good indication as well that you know what you're doing. Yeah, that's right. And we also happen to have some clients who came to us from other agencies

and turns out they didn't know, they didn't have any clue what's going on, but they were doing Google advertising or SEO and the other agency never even sent reports to clients and clients were unaware of what's going on. And so it's so, so, it's so common. I can't explain to you. I can't even describe how frustrating it is when people come to you and frustrated when they spend like good budgets for like a year without even knowing uh where the money going to you know

no reports no nothing so i always would like to educate customers and explain to them especially when it comes to let's say advertising or seo it's very complicated for them. It's very complicated for a person if they never tried it in the past. So for me, it's always to have a transparency and always explain and also running advertising from their ad accounts, not from agency ad accounts like some agencies doing. Because sometimes what we see in that... Hostage. Customers customers they don't even have access to their own advertising they don't know what's going on so i think it's uh it's really important to explain and actually i feel like that would be my next agenda uh is to educate uh business owners understanding the processes because even if you're hiring marketing agency and you don't understand it's

really easy fall into the you know the trap and you know at the end you end up spending so much money and getting zero results i love that you said that i had calls with clients with the same thing like they had no idea what's been going on they they didn't have their own ad accounts and when they wanted to break the contract you know they walked away with all their ads that they have been having you know running and generating leads for them for a year and she was like well we don't have anything we don't have access to our account we don't know what i mean we know the ads they are gone they are going with the agency the agency is not communicating with us anymore so it's just so

common it's insane it's not cool at all yeah last year we had one client they some agency were running for them google advertising i think they were spending around uh three thousand dollars a month and so when the client wanted to break up with the with the agency they didn't want to give them access and I was wondering why when I search for them on google I can't find them anywhere and turns out when we finally you know we got an access in a different ways and the money they spent on advertising was only three hundred dollars not000. And it's been going on for more than a year. And the lady who approached me, she's like, I have a feeling something is wrong. So she was following her instinct, but she didn't know what's going on.

So yeah, unfortunately, that's the industry we are in. So I would really advise for business owners, look who you work with. Look at the track records look how many years they are in the market what's their experience who they work with before their expertise really important because you don't want your budget your hard-earned money to be wasted exactly and just i want to add here because you talked about transparency and communication. I would say if you can at least every once a week, you can communicate with your clients. I think that would suffice as an agency because if you don't talk to them over a week and they don't hear from you that there's no

communication, not like slack, nothing, then they will start wondering what's happening. So you can do month reports, but some kind of check-in once a week, I think that should be something that, you know. Yeah, monthly reports is mandatory and it's really interesting. Agencies don't do it. So many don't. And, for example, with with our agency depending on the services that we have dedicated specialists talking to clients via email in case if client have any questions or anytime they can just ask so there will be someone who can answer yeah that's so important as well okay so we also

talked about expectations and you mentioned that if you if you get like some kind of ad that results will come tomorrow, then it's a red flag. So can you explain a little bit about that? Yes, I get a lot of this, especially when we work with a search engine optimization SEO. And I've seen lots of advertising as well where business owners get promises that they would get a ranking of their maps or website within only one month or two months. But this is not true. You know, it takes, depending on the business,

depending on the area, depending on the business depending on the area depending on the location and competition uh it could take from three months and it could take up to two years so obviously no one can guarantee you this type of results until they do audit of the business and in fact we can't even guarantee so expectations straight from the gate should be clear. I always say to clients, I cannot guarantee you anything because tomorrow Google can change its algorithms. And then, you know, we are not, it's not in our hands. Same thing could be done with advertising. Things can change. Something can change tomorrow.

So it takes time. So I don't fall into the trap into get change tomorrow. So it takes time. So don't fall into the trap into get results tomorrow when you get customers tomorrow. That's not going to happen. There's no special pill, you know. You have to work for it. Exactly.

And I love that you say that because I'm coming from the paid ads on Facebook space. And even though you can generate results fairly quickly, I think what's important to understand is that you have to be in it for the long term. So you have to think about what budget you can invest at least for six months to a year in your campaign continuously in order for you to see like sustainable results and if you just come here you want two-week campaign it's not gonna work i mean you can still get leads in two weeks but

i mean you have to kind of be in there and for the long game and test out different things to see what's working for you the best yes uh with payday it's the same i think the first thing is the mindset of business owners because they think that um within one month they get sales they get results and everyone will be happy and after one month so many just quit and cancel because getting disappointed oh i can't sell yes it's a cash flow yes it's not depending again on the niche and how quick is the sales cycle but you have to give it at least six months to make it work because it's it's also i always recommend actually to do both uh for fast results is a paid advertising and in parallel to do SEO, SEO change and optimization,

because this is something working for the long term. So it's, and it helps, you know, it's compromising with each other. It really helps because when you advertise, it helps you to find more people quickly. But if people don't know you, they would not buy from you. Okay.

So when somebody go and search for you in google let's say i saw something in advertising and i would go to google and search for this company and if this company has zero online presence you know the chances that i would buy are very low so people would go and look at the reviews people would go and search and google so it's always there is a you know long term game and short term game and it has to be combined exactly and i love that you said that that's such a great you know tip as well to combine these two efforts together because again it depends on what you sell if you're selling like a ten dollar how to create instagram for instagram photographer i don't know i see those courses that quick buy right um that maybe the facebook

page i check reviews and that's kind of giving me a good indication about the business but then i go on google you know if anything is more expensive than ten dollars i might think about okay you know i want to know this company. Are they legit? And then I go on Google. So I love the tip of combining the SEO and your reviews as well with the Facebook ad side. Yeah, this is something lots of businesses are actually ignoring. And if we talk about one of the marketing mistakes is ignoring SEO is one of the mistakes. Because once you stop advertising, nobody sees you.

But if you want your business to be still there in five years' time and you have a long vision and long-term goals, you have to start working on your online presence now. Yes, it takes time. Yes, it costs money. But that's the way and I always like to say if you don't have your online presence today you're at risk of losing your business tomorrow yeah that's such that's such a good one I also wanted to add here the ROI because we talked about long game we talked about you know having long-term thinking when it comes to business I when when clients come to me and they say like well you know I'm I have a budget but I only have budget for a couple of months and this has to work out I

usually don't end up working together because I don't do like this has to work out type of mentality right you know if you think that's that's your last chance or else you're not going to make it in business that you have a big problem and that energy is just not going to attract the right customers yes here I agree with you our agency also we are at this point we do do not work with everyone. We work with selecting who we work with. And on our first initial call with my assistant, there's some questions we are asking. And if clients are not ready again for the long,

even if you advertise, yes, you can get quick results. Yes, you may have a quick sale if you're lucky. But with a mentality like this, you're not ending up anywhere so it's really important the mindset is really important you need to understand that it takes time it takes time to build your authority it takes time to build your trust and even if you're advertising and you get quick results, you need to still understand that it takes time. Thank you.