Marketers of the Universe: A digital marketing podcast

Secrets to a successful agency partnership

• Brew Digital • Season 1 • Episode 36

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Welcome back, marketers, as we continue our small but unstoppable mission to improve B2B marketing for everyone.

This time, join us as Rich Harper, head of digital marketing at Brew Digital, reveals the insights that marketing agencies often keep under wraps. Discover the key strategies for driving effective quality leads in 2025 and learn how to navigate the digital marketing maze with confidence. Most importantly, find out what to look for when exploring the digital marketing agency space to ensure you find a partner who will help you scale and thrive.

While you're here, did you know that we have a Resource Hub that hosts articles, opinion pieces, and templates? All of it's free and all of it is geared towards helping your marketing efforts reach new heights. 

You can also find all our podcast episodes on our website. This episode is available here.

Marketers of the Universe is brought to you by the clever folks at Brew Digital. We’re not your typical digital marketing agency; using an innovative approach to decision-making and collaboration, we help you create an impactful digital strategy that actually delivers results for your business.

See what we can do for you at brewdigital.com


Tom Inniss:

Hello and welcome to another episode of Marketers of the Universe. My name is Tom Inniss and I'm the Content Marketing Manager for Brew Digital. Today we're jumping over to a LinkedIn Live we ran earlier this year where Senior Social Media Manager Debbie Gacutan spoke to our Head of Digital Marketing, Rich Harper, about all the things marketing agencies won't tell you. Expect candid conversation and plenty of actionable advice. Enjoy, and I'll see you on the other side.

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira:

Hello everyone and welcome. I am super excited for this episode because it's really going to be a lot of insights for all of you who are thinking of working with digital marketing agencies or you're running a digital marketing agency yourself or you're currently working with one right now. This episode is all about all the insights that marketing agencies will tell you, and we have the right person to discuss it. Please welcome my manager, so I'll be the one grilling him this time. And please welcome Rich. Hi Rich.

Rich Harper:

Hi Debbie, how are you doing?

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira:

I am doing good, very excited. I will let you, rich, do your introduction, because I think you'll do a better job.

Rich Harper:

Okay, yeah, no worries, hi everyone. I'm Rich Harper. I am the head of digital marketing at a digital agency called Brew Digital. There's a lot of digital in there. We are a full-service agency and I head up the digital marketing team with a focus on SEO, ppc, email and social media. I'm really pleased to be here today.

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira:

Amazing, so Rich. I think that you know this topic that we have today is really going to be a lot of insights and I think you're here really you know, opening up what is like those things that marketing agencies don't tell you. And the first question that a lot of people have been asking our team, and actually what inspired this episode, is essentially, you know, what do you feel are the key strategies to really drive effective? You know, driving effective quality leads, in your opinion.

Rich Harper:

Okay, yeah, it was actually hard to kind of scale this down into three that I think are really kind of key for 2025. But I gave it a go. So the top three strategies for 2025, in my opinion, starting at the top number one For me, this is a big trend and in any webinar or anything that you go on at the moment, you'll read about this. But don't neglect brand. For me, in a B2B space, brand is often overlooked, but in order for a good lead strategy to thrive, be cost effective, deliver results, people need to know who you are. So this year, um, I want to see businesses, especially in the b2b space, start to put more emphasis on brand awareness and think about how they're going to influence the buying groups. In b2b, it's not only one person that's buying, it's it's multiple people that have to make a decision. Usually and here's an interesting stat from you for you, um, which was recently published by linkedin audiencesiences on platform that are exposed to brand and acquisition messaging are six times more likely to convert. So, based on your question, effective strategies to driving quality leads Number one have a real focus on brand awareness. Strategy number two and this would be no surprise, it's probably something that's been around for for a long time. But in in the digital world, make sure you've got that omni-channel approach, don't kind of put your eggs into one basket.

Rich Harper:

I see a lot of times you know clients that we work with. They come to us and they want to run ppc campaigns or they want us to look after their social media, and actually where we kind of thrive as a full-service agency is supporting you with your strategy from the ground up and understanding where your audience is and where their attention is and making sure that we are putting you in front of them in those places. And it's really key that kind of point. Understanding your audience is something you know. Any good strategy, any good business knows who their customers are, but really understanding them is kind of key to this point. Think about you know what makes them tick, know where their attention is. What platforms are they in? Um, and it may not always be the most common ones. You know people go to Google, the common social platforms like LinkedIn or Instagram or Facebook and actually sometimes they're your customers may not be in those places. They may be in slightly more obscure places where you can still reach them and their attention is there. So if you are putting yourself in front of them, where their attention is, you've got more chance of then driving them down the? Uh, the nurture funnel, the lead funnel, uh, which links into strategy number one, having that kind of strong brand presence. And then, for me, uh, the last one that's key is to optimize for every channel. So digital moves at a rapid pace and things are changing all the time. Currently, at the moment, ai is the buzzword, and I purposely haven't put in AI into this, because every agency is going to tell you about AI. However, if you are optimizing for every channel and you are optimizing for every device and you're optimizing for every type of input so think about text searches, voice searches, image searches, ai overviews it all sounds a lot, but you're optimizing for all of those In terms of how do you do that?

Rich Harper:

Focus on fundamentals. Consider the content that you're putting out. Make sure that that content is of good quality, is of value to the end user. Think about your website. You know very basic stuff. What is the user journey? Am I guiding people through my website to guide them to the content that I want them to read? Do I have strong call to actions? And then, from a technical perspective is my site fast? Is it optimized? Technical perspective is my site fast? Is it optimized? Does um, you know, am I ticking off all of the different errors, um, that may be there from a technical perspective? Am I just looking after the basics?

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira:

if you get the fundamentals right, then you can grow from there okay, amazing insights right there and I think, just to sum it up to everyone, you, rich, said one, don't forget about your brand. Two, don't put everything on one basket. And three, really try to optimize where you are. So I think that those are really really key things. Now, rich, somebody might be thinking you know how does a business decide which area to prioritize?

Rich Harper:

In terms of the strategies that I've just provided, or I think the strategies that you just mentioned.

Rich Harper:

For me it comes down to having a clear plan. So for you know, marketing directors, cmos, business owners, depending on on kind of what size of business you're in is having that clearly defined objective and what you're trying to achieve. I think a lot of people come to us and it feels like you know, a lot of the goals of companies are very similar in terms of you know, we want to grow, we want to achieve more revenue, we want more sales, we want more leads. But think a little bit more granular than that. What is the actual kind of overarching goal? What is that North Star metric that you're looking for? And then bring that back and break it down and then align your strategy to different stages of that North Star.

Rich Harper:

That North Star may well be and it should be, you know, a big, far away objective goal that you want to achieve. But without having that objective goal that almost feels out of reach, you're not giving yourself enough of a target to kind of hit and grow if that makes sense. So have that north star metric and then pull it back into more manageable milestones and then shape. You know, what strategy do I need to hit to hit this milestone? What strategy would I need to hit this and it you know, is it revenue or is it actually in order to grow revenue? We may well have saturated this market, so we need to look at other markets. It may well be that, hey, this product that we've got is a great product, but in order to continue to grow our business, we need to invest in other product developments and create new products for new audiences and new user bases. So have that big metric, but then bring it back into milestones and then align it accordingly.

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira:

Amazing. Okay, so Rich. One of the questions that I would really want to ask you is, like what have you seen? Is the biggest you know marketing fluff or myth that you constantly see agencies sell to their clients that actually do not deliver results?

Rich Harper:

Okay, I had to think along about this because I don't want to be bad-mouthed in other agencies, because there are a lot of great agencies and I've been an agency professional for over a decade, so I kind of live and breathe the agency industry and actually a lot of agencies are are doing the right stuff and they're doing it well. The thing that I would say for people to look out for are this surge of let's call them like influencers or freelancers or or kind of one-man bands that, uh, I see it at washam on my social feeds all the time. They're basically providing guarantees. We can promise you x amount of leads per month, x amount of leads into your inbox. We can promise you to scale your business from 10 000 pound a month to 50 000 pound a month to 100 000 pound a month, and you'll spot them a mile off because they are a copy and paste of every person. They put someone else in front of the camera. They copy and paste the strategy, the process. You'll have an Instagram ad or a LinkedIn ad and the person will be really motivated, really high energy, and they'll be telling you about how they can do this and if you meet this criteria, you can scale like they have and they're now on a beach somewhere and they only work three hours a week but they make, you know, 5 million pound a year Right at the bottom of all of these. You know you'll follow the click throughs and you'll go to landing pages and there'll be a bunch of testimonials and there'll be. You know, I was on zero pound a month and then this person helped me scale to one hundred thousand pound a month in six months. You know all these types of things. Now there's obviously a market for these people.

Rich Harper:

Now I'm saying this and people might find it pretty obvious like hey, it's a scam, that's shy away from it. It's a scam, that's shy away from it, but so many people fall for it. And there's always that disclaimer text at the bottom that says these results are not more. You know you must put in the work and you must put in the effort to achieve this. And do you know what? Maybe some of it is correct. But if you really dive into what they're doing, I can guarantee you a couple of things, because you know they say you don't need to run ads, you don't need to spend money on platforms.

Rich Harper:

The fundamentals of growing a business do not change. In order to grow a business, you need an audience. Yeah right, so there's different ways to reach that audience. Yeah right, so there's different ways to reach that audience. Ads is definitely one platform or one type of activity that you can do to reach an audience. A website, you know. Optimizing your organic presence online is another tactic activity that you can get in front of an audience.

Rich Harper:

Organic social media you can create a profile for free. You can put content out for free. You can do all of this stuff. People don't then just flock to you because you've done this stuff. It takes work and it takes effort and it it takes time.

Rich Harper:

Um, and these agencies or freelancers, what they're promising you is essentially what they're going to do. They need to put you in front of an audience. If they're not going to spend money on ads and they're not going to invest money in your organic profile and they're not going to help you with your organic um social media, what are they going to do? What they're going to do is they will give you a list of cold emails and you will sit there and you will send out blanket emails to people with, let's face it, some templated email copy that a salesperson has written and, yes, you know what.

Rich Harper:

You may well get people that buy and they may come into you, but essentially what you're doing is replicating what they're doing. And yeah, I've seen it time and time again. I've looked into it myself. You will be essentially doing a cold outreach email program and you don't need someone to do that with you and pay them thousands of pounds. Again, these are things that you can do yourself. So be wary of guarantees, be wary of trademark. Growth models are often just cold data campaigns and make sure you read that small print.

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira:

Amazing and Rich. You basically answered my next question. Basically, and you know for all of you that are in shock right now of, like one these things that are happening and they are happening. You just have to open your LinkedIn and Instagram and TikTok they're also on TikTok right now. If you could just put that on the checklist. Like what are these red flags again that we should, our clients or anyone who's looking to work with a digital marketing agency should, start thinking about when they encounter these things?

Rich Harper:

So I went through quite a bit there. On that last question, let's just summarize it as quick as possible. What red flags should you be looking for, or what you should be aware of when selecting a digital agency? Number one check their portfolio. Do they have clients similar to yourself? Do they have case studies? Do they have experience in your industry or experience with companies of a similar size to you? And think about that business size. There's some fantastic agencies out there. They may well be positioned to work specifically with enterprise sized businesses.

Rich Harper:

So then you have to question do I have the budget to work with an agency of that size? Is their attention going to be really on me because they have bigger clients? And so ask yourself do they align in terms of what they do for their clients at the moment? Am I going to be an important client for them, a big one for me? And I've been a big believer in this since I ran my own agency before I came to brew and head up the digital team here, and I've kind of bought that philosophy with me into brew is is on transparent pricing. I think again, I'm a firm believer in not hiding stuff behind quotes and each quote being different. Like be transparent with with your pricing, you know.

Rich Harper:

Do you operate on a retainer basis? Do you work on an hourly rate? Do you work project by project as an agency and then as a consumer, as a potential client, decide what model works best for you? Do you want to tie yourself into a long retainer? Do you want to, you know, have the flexibility of an hourly rate, which actually may be slightly inflated because there's no guarantees on the agency side of long term work, or would you prefer to work, you know, project by project, so that you can test the water, so to speak, and find an agency that you're comfortable with?

Rich Harper:

And then, lastly, for me it really kind of stems back to those false promises that I talked about in the previous question. Debbie Honesty, can the agency deliver what they say they can deliver with your budget? Will the budget that you have get you the results that you want? And are they open and transparent with telling you that We've had businesses come to us at brew digital where we aren't the right fit, we don't have the industry knowledge, we may be that the budget that the client has just doesn't suit our particular model, um, and we're quite happy to kind of say, hey, we're not going to be the right fit for you. Rather than take on the work, operate for for three months, and then the client realized that they wasted their money because we weren't the right fit, so for me, yeah, those are the kind of red flags that it came out for.

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira:

I love, rish, that you pointed out about transparency, and actually this is something that I really also, you know, I find, or I feel, that whenever our client works with us, they do value that level of transparency. They do like that we are upfront about how we work, what they can expect from us and what's the value of our services, and I think that is one very important key thing which really goes nicely into my next question, which is, you know, I find out, though, sometimes that clients are afraid to ask upfront about, like, how much does this service cost? They feel like this needs to be a negotiation or it needs to take long, and so on. But, rich, in your opinion, what are, like you know, the set of questions a client needs to ask, you know an agency, in order for them to gauge whether this is the right agency for them to work with or not?

Rich Harper:

Yeah, good question, I think. Be clear from the outset what you're trying to achieve with an agency. You know we get clients come to us and sometimes the ask of us is sometimes a little bit vague um, and then you kind of get those vague responses back. So be really clear in your brief um and be really clear in the objectives. What. What is it that you are trying to to achieve by outsourcing a particular channel or outsourcing your full digital marketing uh to a third party? So, yeah, number one in terms of of questions or or your approach, be very clear in having that, that brief um. And number two is another common thing but have a budget in mind. Ask the agency hey, you know, this is what I want to do, this is what I want to achieve.

Rich Harper:

I'm not entirely sure how much we should be spending, but just know in the back of your mind, every, every business, every client knows roughly what they want to spend, roughly what is in the budget, but sometimes they just don't know how much things potentially cost. So don't be afraid to ask. Hey, I'm looking to use an example. I'm looking to to promote my products online, thinking about running a paid campaign. Is search the best channel for me or is paid social the right channel for me? And what is the difference in those costs? And a good agency should be able to go away and help you with some of those forecasts and come back to you and say, hey, you know from the data that we can see the average cost per click for keywords around this product will be X.

Rich Harper:

Therefore, in order to get enough penetration in that market, you need to have a budget of Y. So don't be afraid to ask, but always have in your head you know roughly what you want to be spending, so that it doesn't come as a shock. Because it's the biggest thing from an agency perspective is when someone says, hey, I don't know what my budget is. Come back to me, generally speaking, you know how long is a piece of string when it comes to budget. If you've got a million pounds to spend, then hey, this is what we can do with a million pounds. If you've got five thousand pounds to spend, it's going to look slightly different.

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira:

Ok, it's going to look slightly different. Okay, amazing. I think we are nearing the end of our episodes. Thank you again, rich, for being here. Before you go, I do have one last question to ask you, which is this is the year we're in. Probably a lot of the different marketers out there and a lot of potential customers and clients are looking for a digital marketing agency to represent their business. If you were a client today, rich, let's just say that you are not our manager, you're not the head of our team, but if you were a client, what would be the qualities you'd like to look for and you'd like to prioritize when looking for a digital marketing agency?

Rich Harper:

So the key qualities or approaches I would look for in an agency are that they have a clear and proven track record. Now some agencies will position themselves as experts in a particular industry. Some agencies will position themselves as experts in particular channels. Like Brew Digital, we position ourselves as a full service digital agency, but we are experts in digital marketing. So we work with clients across different industries and different kind of scope, but we do know our channels inside out. So you can see that for our site and you can see that for case studies that we have side out. So you can see that for our site and you can see that for case studies that we have. So make sure you know one quality that an agency has is that they have a clear and proven track record of delivering success. Second of all, does that agency set clear milestones with you? So again, I don't want to turn this into a self-promotional thing, but what we do here at Brew Digital is we set clear milestones. So have we operate on a 30, 60 and 90 day plan of our customers and we set clear milestones in each of those um time periods so the customer is completely aware of what we're trying to achieve in that time frame and that leads on to the. My next uh point or next quality is a what, what is the kind of agency process? Can they clearly demonstrate to you, at that point of briefing, what it will be like to work with them? Are they able to show you, hey, for this first six weeks, we're kind of on that discovery phase. We're going to do workshops with you, we're going to do some audits, we're going to spend time getting to know you as a business so that we can partner with you confidently and then execute activity, um, knowing a little bit more, rather than just hitting the ground running and going, hey, we don't know what you actually really want to achieve, but we're just going to turn on some ads and we're going to do this. Um. So, yeah, the key quality for me is is an agency that's able to demonstrate clearly what it's going to be like to work with them? I've got time for a couple more Data transparency.

Rich Harper:

I always think, especially from a digital marketing perspective, everything is based on results and everything is based in data, and we have so many data points that we can analyze. It's the agency that you're working with. Are they transparent with that data? Are they showing you that data in a live dashboard, or are they taking that data and then regurgitating it into some sort of slide deck and not really showing you the truth? They're just picking out the numbers that make them look good. So a key quality for me in the digital agency are ones that show you the numbers, regardless of whether they're up or down or bad or good, and give you real kind of guidance on what that means. And then they use that data to pivot If something's not working.

Rich Harper:

A strategy is a moving thing. It shouldn't be just a set and go and let's see what happens. It's a moving thing. So, if things aren't working, are they interpreting that data and able to then pivot your strategy into something else? Um, and then, lastly, because I've touched on it, I probably should touch on it again, but an agency in, especially in a digital world, needs to be forward thinking. Um, and right now that means um, how do they utilize ai? Again, are they transparent with their use of ai? Because I guarantee people are using it, but make sure that agency is transparent with that use of AI, and how are they doing that to create more efficiencies for you as a client in terms of the activity that you're running?

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira:

Okay, amazing, Amazing points right there, Rich. This has been super insightful. I think we're doing this episode at the right time of the year, where we find our customers starting to plan out their strategies for 2025. For now, any other topics you'd like to hear from us, the Brew Digital team? Please let us know. We do talk a lot right now about digital marketing, but we also have different services within Brew Digital, which is like design. We have web. We also have digital decision sprints, so please do let us know what topic would you like to talk about and we'll definitely bring in the expert for you to chat with. Thank you, Rich, and thank you everyone for joining us and I hope you have a good day or weekend ahead wherever you want us. And I hope you have a good day or weekend ahead wherever you want.

Tom Inniss:

That's all we have time for today. Thank you so much for listening. We hope you found some useful snippets in our session and are able to go and put them into your own marketing strategy. We run these live sessions over on LinkedIn, so head on over to Brew Digital and give us a follow to be notified about upcoming streams. We love making this content and it would mean the world if you could recommend the show to one friend that you think would enjoy listening. Please make sure to listen to our past episodes, subscribe on whatever platform you use to listen to your podcasts, and we'll see you on the next one. I've been Tom and this is Marketers of the Universe universe.

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