Ep 37: Why big agencies drain your money & tank results

If you've ever hired a marketing agency and felt like something was off — you're probably right. In this episode, Nicole pulls back the curtain on how most low-cost agencies are built to fail their clients, and why it's not an accident. You'll hear real stories from clients like Robert, Danielle, and Alyssa who went from wasted ad spend and garbage leads to more business than they could handle — after ditching the agency model and learning the strategy themselves. Walk away knowing exactly what to look for, what to demand, and why owning your own ad knowledge is the best investment your business can make.[=

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Transcript

0:00

Welcome to Hometown Advantage, the local ads and marketing podcast. Today is a long overdue episode, but I'm going to be honest when I say I have to tread lightly here because I'm talking all about why big agencies drain your money and take your results. So I'm gonna give a disclaimer to start. Side note, my therapist said I need to start giving less disclaimers before I just state my opinions and feelings and facts, but it feels important here. Okay? So just like everything, not all agencies are. Created equal. Not all are bad. Not all are good, and in my line of work, I am in a situation where I see a lot of bad stories. And it makes sense because of how agencies work. So that's how I am going to frame this. Also, I have an agency of my own. Of course, it operates differently than a lot of these stories. I am gonna share with you do, and I'm gonna share about how mine, mine operates differently as well. So I wanna start this episode with my own experience when I was getting started with ads is actually I wasn't getting started with ads. I was well experienced in ads at this point. I had worked in a couple different agencies. I had taken a lot of clients of my own. I was growing my own business, and I got an opportunity to come into an agency that was running ads for local businesses and doing organic social media marketing, and it was like a mid-level agency. So you have agencies with. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of clients. You have agencies like mine that have seven clients at a time, and then you have agencies like this. I think there was like 90 clients on their roster with the goal to grow. And I was reached out to, because their ad department was really struggling. There was tons of questions coming in from clients about what was happening with ads. The ads managers had questions about setting up ads. The systems were messy and mostly like clients just weren't happy and. The manager of the business didn't have that experience. She had experience managing and growing businesses. So she asked me to come in and kind of help overhaul their ads program. Not necessarily overhaul it, but be the go-to point person for ads, questions from clients and ad managers. So my first day on the job I got in, I started going through emails and I. Was instantly shocked at the volume of emails from very clearly disgruntled clients. So seeing things like we've spent hundreds of dollars and have no idea what's happening with these ads. We don't have a single new customer to show for it. Can you please just let us know going into then ad accounts of these clients and seeing that. Campaigns were set up using strategies that were never going to work for these business owners goals. And again, they had been running for months at small budgets, but still for so long. And the reason they're at small budgets is because. These businesses didn't have hundreds of dollars to spend on ads and see nothing in return. So it would be a$5 a day budget, but it would run for months with no conversions, no movement, no nothing, but still spending the budget. Okay. It was honestly jarring to see, and I ultimately didn't stay in that role much longer than probably seven or eight months because the systems and the business as a whole were not set up to support these clients. And the expectations that the business held on me to completely turn things around for years and years worth of terrible client experience, I, it was not worth it. And I just hated seeing business owners being taken advantage of like that. And here's the thing, I know I mentioned they had 90 clients. Most clients were not there long, but they were. But the business was good at getting new people in on very cheap rates. So they'd get you in, tell you we're gonna take care of everything for you, your organic, your ads, set up, your ads, and then things would just fall apart from there. Okay. And now that I have heard so many horror stories I've seen behind the scenes of different agencies from people I've worked with. Who have left their agencies and, and come to me, whether it's through my agency and our done for You services or Hometown Advantage, I can see exactly why this happened and I can see that this was not an anomaly like I thought it was when I went into there because luckily for me, my other experience in agencies was really good and delivered top results. That being said. The prices that the other agencies were charging were probably five times what this low cost agency was charging. Okay. So if that's not a get what you pay for kind of scenario, I don't know what it's, but here's the deal. Alex Hermo is putting out all these reels right now of clips of him giving coaching in real time to these multimillion dollar business owners who are looking to. Create multi, multi multimillion dollar businesses. So I'm not sure if you follow him or even know who he is, but I see them come up for me all the time. And one that came up recently, I was just nodding my head and yes, everyone needs to see this. He was talking to a marketing agency owner, and the marketing agency owner was saying, we're stuck. Because you know, clients want this. I have to pay this to my team to make that happen, or I need higher level people that I have to pay more to make that happen. And we're just stuck. And Alex said, it's not gonna be word for word, but. The gist is the only two ways that growing and scaling a marketing agency can actually work that can actually turn a profit for the business owner is model one, which is charge a lot, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9,$10,000 a month. And, give'em the world, give them what they need to succeed, which is a lot. That's why you're listening to this podcast, because marketing is a lot to keep up with one for one person. Or there's model two, which is charge less so that you get more people in the door, but basically give them nothing. The way he said it was like, delivery has to be almost zero, I'm pretty sure is the words he used, meaning so basic, and they're not gonna position it like that in their marketing. They're not gonna say, oh, you know, we will charge you only$600 a month. And we'll give you nothing for it. Of course, they're not gonna say that. They're gonna say, Hey, this only costs$600 a month and you're gonna get your 12 posts a month and we're gonna run ads for you and it's gonna be great. When behind the scenes, they are working their people to the bone. They have their people on 30 different accounts. So if you manage your own account and you know how much time that takes manage, imagine managing 30. Out once. And the only way that those people can do that is to pump out copy and paste graphics where they just change out photos, change out colors, and change out logos. Schedule those out to go up on your page. Use chat GPT to write garbage captions that nobody is stopping for. The graphics don't stand out on the feed. They don't work anymore using all these text heavy graphics. Nobody pays attention to them because they look like ads and nobody's looking for ads in their feed. And then launch an ad cam campaign for you and let it sit and run and pray to God that somebody comes through. Okay. That's not going to work. If you want to actually. Grow your business through social media marketing. So really, when you're hiring these lower cost agencies, you're not paying for marketing experts, you're paying for task people or doers just to check something off a list and get it done. And I'm going off on a tangent here, but the thing about marketing is. Your business and your marketing is a relationship. Okay. It sounds weird, but in a relationship you get out what you put in. So if you put in bare minimum, you will get out bare minimum. That's simply how it goes. Is there ways in a relationship that you can optimize and make it easier to put more in? Yes. Like you can set schedules. You can have habits that you do for each other so that those things are just easier. The energy is easier to put in things, but ultimately if you're not putting any soul energy effort into your marketing, you will get out. Garbage. Garbage in, garbage out. Okay? And that is what a lot of people are paying agencies to do. They're paying agencies to put garbage out, and then they're wondering why. They're getting garbage back. So I have dozens and dozens and dozens of agency quote unquote horror stories because this happens on repeat because as Alex Ramon said, these are the only options for marketing agencies to scale. They either provide an excellent service. And charge for it, or they provide a ship service and they charge accordingly for it. Okay, so I have my client who's a gym owner, his name is Robert. He came to me because he was using ad agencies and he just was not seeing any return. He would get a list of leads every day and he'd call them out the wazoo and like they were just garbage, nothing. And he would tell the agency that and they would basically throw their arms up and say that's your follow up process. That's, it's on your sales system. It is what it is. And the other thing about his agency is that they required a$1,500 minimum ad spend, which just kills me. So many agencies do this. They'll require you to spend a minimum amount, and the reason they do that is because the more money they can just throw into the meadow world, the more likely that somebody can trickle through and become a new customer of yours when that is not strategy. It's like the spray and pray strategy. Okay. And it's such a waste of money. The other thing is like local businesses don't have to spend$1,500 to see results. You don't have to start there. My client, Danielle, who owns a cleaning company, was using ad agencies that were just for cleaning companies, and they could not get her one single quality lead, and she would tell them that. And same thing, they'd throw their hands up, I don't understand why this isn't working. It's just you. I just don't understand why it's just not working for you. They actually feel felt bad, and they said, let's just try running your ads for free because we wanna figure this out for you, which I commend. But she still had to put up the ad spend, and she's like, why would I keep spending money on odds that nobody can explain if they're actually gonna work or not? Okay. She came into my program, ran our strategy, and she is absolutely crushing it now. She just posted a slack message saying for the second time in the past couple months, she has to turn her ad spend down because she cannot keep up with hiring and she does not have a retention problem with her staff. She just is getting so many leads and so many new clients that she cannot hire enough people to keep up with them. Robert's story was, he was so sick of paying that minimum when if he didn't, have to spend that much. So he came in, he learned my strategies. He probably spent about half and got 10 times more results. He started my program in March of last year, and he was saying like April was the busiest month of his entire year. When the reality is most gyms are. Super busy in January and things start to fall off in March and April, but it was the opposite for him because he took over his own ad strategy and ran ads that actually were getting to the right people and speaking to the right people. My client, Alyssa, does marketing for a home services company and they were, she is like the marketing director and coordinator there, so she is responsible for not doing all the things, but making all the things happen. She had hired an agency. She just, she's an excellent marketer, but she wasn't super well versed on Facebook ads yet. So she decided to take my program so she could get better versed on it and see is what they're giving us. Like actually good results. It doesn't seem good, I'm not exactly sure and within. A couple weeks of taking my program, she went into the ads that her agency was running and saw that they were set up as the worst type of ad you can run as a local business. Completely wrong type of ads. Plus they're using, again, generic graphic stock type photos that don't speak to your people the way you wanna speak to them. My last example is actually one of our done for you clients. They are a commercial real estate company. They do this really cool thing. They're in several locations throughout the Midwest. They provide. Leasing space to business owners and they really help the business owner grow and they provide this flexible lease space. So if your business downsizes, you can go into a smaller lease and pay less money. If your business is growing, you can easily just go into a bigger space and pay more money. So it's an amazing option for people who are just getting started. With needing a space, and they were running le lead ads and ads with an agency for months, and the leads just weren't converting and the strategy wasn't clear and they weren't switching ads out very often. They were just letting things run. Because again, you're working with these account managers who've probably never actually had any formal training in Facebook ads. They've probably had very minimal experience actually having success with ads. They've been taught, Hey, click these buttons. Not, Hey, this is what to look for, and this is like what we wanna help achieve, what we want to help our client achieve. And quite frankly, they probably don't have the bandwidth to keep up with you and what's happening on the other side of the ads, which is a huge part of ad success. You cannot have that much of a disconnect between marketing and sales. Which is why it's such a good idea to run ads yourself first, to see how the whole flow works. Get your strategy down, hire an expert. Then to come in to, you have two options. Hire an expert to then come in and take it next level. Or hire a virtual assistant who knows how to click the buttons like you would be hiring an agency for pay much less. You'll just pay them by the hour and tell them, this is how we do it. Please go do that for me. I. Now our commercial real estate company ads are doing so good and it's so fun'cause I jumped right off a call with them. They have a podcast and I'm gonna go on their podcast and talk about meta ads getting started and even this agency side of things. So keep an eye out for that. I will share that with you when it's out. Now the way my agency works is one single ad manager is not on more than five people at a time. We would never be able to have more than five clients at once and be able to actually keep up with the results that we want to deliver. Now, in order for me to be able to keep that structure and still make money for my time myself, we have to charge accordingly. Okay. So I just think it's so funny when people are like, oh my God, I can't believe these marketing agencies. They think that small businesses can charge this much or can afford this much. And it's like this is the cost of this service, just like the cost of your own service. Not everyone can afford your service because you probably work really hard and are an expert in how to deliver that service. The same goes for marketing agencies and the thing about marketing is that when it's done right, it ac it can actually make you so much money, which makes it so valuable. But these agencies that have built that opposite model have really hurt the industry and degraded trust, and I totally understand why. Okay, so because we can only take a certain amount of clients and because we can only serve a level of client that's ready to invest a couple thousand dollars a month just in our services, not including ad spend, that is why my program was born. My heart is with the small main street business. That is where my business was built. And while I have such a heart for service and supporting local and supporting small business, I've got a dream of my own and I've got a family of my own too. My dream is to make so much money that I can buy all things local. You know how local businesses. I charge a little bit more than those big brands. And I do now, because of the way I've built my business and because I've been able to serve businesses that are, doing millions of dollars and serve businesses that are doing a couple hundred thousand a year or less. Because there is an offer for you in my world. If you are a local business, you can come and pay to learn it, or you can pay five times it for us to do it for you. And to be so honest, most people who we do their ads for, they ran their ads themselves. At some point they started doing it themselves. Because you have to start somewhere. I'm actually, we have a new client starting. She is a therapist. She owns a therapy practice and she was telling me that they're crushing it with Google Ads, and they have been for years. And when they started Google Ads, they started at$200 a month. It's now been years, and they've slowly scaled it and they now spend$7,000 a month on Google Ads. They didn't start there. But they had to start somewhere. And so that's why if you haven't learned ads yet, or you've tried hiring an agency and they have let you down. Learning them is your absolute best move. Your business will thank you forever, and so will your bank account. This is a skill you just can't get by without. You can try and you can hobble along and you can throw money at agencies, you can pray that one of them will take leadership and care about your own business as much as you do, which they won't. Unfortunately, it's just not human nature and you can avoid it. But eventually there's gonna come a point where you just can't anymore, and I don't want that to point to be too late for you, honestly. It is such, marketing is such a foundational thing that if you can master it, you will never have to worry about where your next client is coming from. And that's why I feel so strongly about these local small businesses, learning how to market on social media and how to run ads because you can take so much control into your hands and you don't have to spend much as a local business owner, especially to get started. So all of that being said, I have a free masterclass coming up. It's called The Beyond Boosting Masterclass. I'm gonna walk you through the three campaign strategy that hundreds of local business owners have used now to get consistent leads and new clients in the door. I'm gonna talk about the most common mistakes that you and your agencies are making, and I'm gonna share more about my four month coaching program called Hometown Advantage. Inside Hometown Advantage, you get the full top to bottom course that will teach you everything you need to know about running strategic and successful and profitable. Facebook ads that are local specific, you don't need fancy funnels. You don't need all this fancy stuff. You don't have to spend a minimum of$1,500. And from April 30th to May 10th, I'm gonna be running a promotion on Hometown Advantage where you can get$500 off the price of the program and even bigger than that because the value on this is absolutely insane. Everybody who joins during that promo is going to get two reels created by me and my team for you to use in your ads. That's gonna make getting your campaigns up so much faster. All you're gonna have to do is use the course to figure out how to set up the ad, and then you just, boop, plop our reel right in there. Know spent time on creating the reels yourself. Okay, so this is huge. I really don't know if I'm gonna be able to offer this one again because my team's gonna be supporting with getting your reels created. They're amazing reels, editors, they know how to take simple iPhone footage and make it beautiful, make it stand out, make it convert. So that's what we're doing for everybody who joins after this workshop. Also if you, there's a second bonus if you join the course within three days of the workshop, we will take over the tech side of setting up your ad account, so making sure you have the right kind of ad account set up, making sure you have the right tracking installed on your website and in your meta account, and making sure you have the right audiences set up for your targeting. That's something we do for people who join within the first three days of the workshop. So if that's something that you're interested in, make sure you're paying attention to your inbox. Make sure you come live to the training. I've got another free BM giving Away live on the training. We are here for your success and we are constantly strategizing ways that we can do that. At the price of the program, because that's the thing, this is how business works. You can pay to learn or you can pay more for proximity and support, right? So we're always strategizing on how can we get people better and faster results at this price? And this is one of the ways we're gonna do it. If you have any questions at all, please send me a dm. I am Nicole Eldridge Ads on Instagram. The link to sign up for the free masterclass is in the show notes. It's www.nicoleeldridgemedia.com/local ads. You can send me an email to support@nicoleeldridgemedia.com at any time with questions, thoughts, all of the things, and I will look forward to hearing from you and seeing you on the workshop.