Recommend me a marketing agency

[Original Poster]

Hi chaps.

We have an immediate need for a marketing agency on a long term basis.

Some basic info about us...

Electronics design and manufacturing business
T/O roughly £3m with plans in place to get to £7m in 4 years
Must be able to handle everything from a marketing perspective. SEO, PPC campaign, content etc

Any recommendations at all? I'd quite like to speak to a 'creme de la creme' type company. Expensive but worth it.

Thanks chaps.

[khushy]

@ £3m ...... you should DIY - so much black art bull and zero delivery from that industry - recruit and pay someone a decent wage - support and encourage their efforts then watch your business flourish.

[bob-in-toon]

What sector are you in?

[Dr Interceptor]

If you would like to outsource, speak to John at the CRM Agency - he's a friend of mine, and does some great work for us.

[Original Poster]

bob-in-toon said:

What sector are you in?

Electronics design to manufacture. We effectively design and manufacture/assemble PCB's.

Dr Interceptor said:

If you would like to outsource, speak to John at the CRM Agency - he's a friend of mine, and does some great work for us.

Thanks!


Any other recommendations at all?

[Dick Dastardly]

khushy said:

@ £3m ...... you should DIY - so much black art bull and zero delivery from that industry - recruit and pay someone a decent wage - support and encourage their efforts then watch your business flourish.

That's not too realistic though these days. The range of skill sets across SEO, content and PPC is huge and you won't find one person who can do them all. You'd need a team and before you know it, you are paying the same as a decent agency charges. Anyone fully competent in Technical SEO or happy to spend all day in Analytics configuring attribution models isn't likely to be a good blog writer. Your typical Search-based PPC manager isn't going to be able to outreach content to journalists and bloggers for Digital PR purposes. Generalist digital marketers are usually only good for managing the agency relationships and then translating things back to their board.

OP, if you want to chat then I'm happy to advise. The disclaimer is that I've been in digital marketing for 20 years and running an agency for the past 11 of those. I'm also involved in a couple of other businesses that exist solely off the back of digital marketing, so I like to think I've got a fairly good grasp of how this works from both an in-house and an agency perspective.

[Sebastian Tombs]

I work for Syzygy, who are an excellent marketing agency, part of the WPP group, who excel in the areas that you need and have a proven record in growing businesses through SEO insights. We can also handle UX, design & build (my area of expertise), if you require.

https://www.syzygy.net/london/en/

DM me if you would like to know more.

[DSLiverpool]

You don’t need creme de la creme you need solid logical results driven and justifiable digital marketing.
If Quiller and Delta Impact are names you wish to emulate I’ve been involved with both and I’m happy to share some experience of their success. (Also Schneider, Novar and invensys to go off piste but still on snow).
Send me a PM if you’d like a chat - I’m not pitching for business just happy to pass on some experience.

[DSLiverpool]

Actually to answer your question

This is digital - Manchester. Ask for Demie

If you can afford then they are the best I’ve found in 24 years. (Used to be called Lakestar)

[stub101]

Have a look at: https://www.twentysixdigital.com

I can put you in direct contact with the CEO and/or Head of New Business for a chat.

[nav2014]

Dick Dastardly said:

That's not too realistic though these days. The range of skill sets across SEO, content and PPC is huge and you won't find one person who can do them all. You'd need a team and before you know it, you are paying the same as a decent agency charges. Anyone fully competent in Technical SEO or happy to spend all day in Analytics configuring attribution models isn't likely to be a good blog writer. Your typical Search-based PPC manager isn't going to be able to outreach content to journalists and bloggers for Digital PR purposes. Generalist digital marketers are usually only good for managing the agency relationships and then translating things back to their board.

OP, if you want to chat then I'm happy to advise. The disclaimer is that I've been in digital marketing for 20 years and running an agency for the past 11 of those. I'm also involved in a couple of other businesses that exist solely off the back of digital marketing, so I like to think I've got a fairly good grasp of how this works from both an in-house and an agency perspective.

Ooo I could do with talking to you, it's a bit small potatoes though.

[Dick Dastardly]

I'm happy to chat about this stuff with anyone on here. Just PM me. I've had some great advice from various people on this forum so I'd welcome paying the favour back. Not just in terms of what to look for in an agency but also the right kind of agency to choose - most of the suggestions on this thread so far are completely wrong for what the OP is asking for.

To be clear, I'm not pitching for work, hence not linking to my site. We're not really looking for any new projects right now as we just won two big ones that take up all of our capacity, so we couldn't start anything new for a good few months even if we wanted to.

[shopper150]

Sebastian Tombs said:

I work for Syzygy, who are an excellent marketing agency, part of the WPP group, who excel in the areas that you need and have a proven record in growing businesses through SEO insights. We can also handle UX, design & build (my area of expertise), if you require.

https://www.syzygy.net/london/en/

DM me if you would like to know more.

Love the site!

[DSLiverpool]

shopper150 said:

Sebastian Tombs said:

I work for Syzygy, who are an excellent marketing agency, part of the WPP group, who excel in the areas that you need and have a proven record in growing businesses through SEO insights. We can also handle UX, design & build (my area of expertise), if you require.

https://www.syzygy.net/london/en/

DM me if you would like to know more.

Love the site!

I would imagine Syz`s retainers start at £10k and builds from £100k (might be naive here as a few are easy £200k+ builds) - top top agency that you need to be making the ££ to use.

[Sebastian Tombs]

DSLiverpool said:

I would imagine Syz`s retainers start at £10k and builds from £100k (might be naive here as a few are easy £200k+ builds) - top top agency that you need to be making the ££ to use.

I'm on the design and build side of the agency so I actually don't know what the data and SEO side would charge, whether it's a rate card for people or a price for services, or how big a contract has to be for there to be some profit, but I could put the OP in touch with someone who would be able to answer those questions. Obviously we plan to make more money for clients than they spend with us.

[MrOrange]

Original Poster said:

Hi chaps.

T/O £3m with "plans in place" to get to £7m in 4 years

I'd quite like to speak to an ... expensive but worth it... agency

Thanks chaps.

(heavily snipped request)

What plans? Or just a target at this stage?

Just to throw in my few pence, a good "rule of thumb" is to budget 15-20% of turnover for a business that is looking to grow aggressively with marketing, so I'd be punching out a marketing brief saying "grow our £3m business by 20% per annum on an estimated budget (all-in) of 50k pm in year one, growing to 100k pm the next 4 years." - that should get you access to a good agency with good ideas and great operational delivery.

[DSLiverpool]

What I dislike with some agencies is even if they know they can’t deliver results, or the clients pricing / service / reputation precludes success but they still take it on.

There is a real case for a (proper) consultant to be involved in appointing an agency of the client does not have a (proper) marketing manager.

20% growth fund, sounds a lot but you would expect this outgoing to be diluted with incoming after a reasonable period of time, so perfectly manageable if the agency is fit for purpose.

[Canute]

khushy said:

@ £3m ...... you should DIY - so much black art bull and zero delivery from that industry - recruit and pay someone a decent wage - support and encourage their efforts then watch your business flourish.

A good SEO is going to cost 65K upwards on their own....if you can lure them to your location! the same perhaps a little less for PPC, then you want content and they don't come alone so you are looking at an inbound marketing type lead, a writer and a designer, they will need to work the SEO and possibly the PPC on the promotion aspect that is always overlooked. It's either take it in-house but suck up all the costs to get good people onboard, or appoint a few specialists consultants which are going to be better on ROI, or an agency if you have to.... much lower ROI generally as you will be paying all their overheads and not getting anywhere near the amount of time they sell you at the outset.

[Sebastian Tombs]

I’m against doing this stuff in-house (and not because I am trying to pimp my employers!)

What a lot of companies seemingly don’t get is that if you are really good at this stuff (e.g. SEO, UX, digital design, web development) is that there is no way you are going to work for a company that isn’t in that sector. You’ll want to work agency-side. Agencies are very good at finding out and getting rid of chancers quickly due to the sheer amount and variety of jobs they undertake, and the fact that everyone there is a specialist. So as a developer for example, you get to work mostly with other really good people.

I have seen this a lot at clients over the years where they recruit people and try to do it in-house but they simply can’t get the people. If they get good talented people they aren’t going to stay long so they end up with departments full of ones who take years to do a job that should take months and do it badly. Then they try to fix this by hiring more, and you end up with 100 people and a stifling amount of process when all they need is a 5 to 10 person agency team and a bit of engagement.

[Flooble]

I see some posters above are recommending spending 20% of turnover (not profit) on the new marketing campaign.

Now I'm not sure how many businesses have 20% margin spare to spend, but that aside, I think it would be good to clarify the lag time. There was mention that spending £50,000 per month now would be up to £100,000 per month in four years time. Which could mean three years before results are seen.

It's no good taking out a loan for £600,000 and anticipating that will bridge the gap to seeing results if you actually need to spend £1.8 million pounds and wait three years for the increased revenue to arrive. Highly aggressive and highly expensive marketing may work for Tech Startups which have minimal costs outside salaries (and can do all sorts of things such as getting people to work for less by promising equity) and can go from sale to invoice to revenue received in 30 days or less. Not so sure for an electronics firm with maybe 6-12 month sales cycle.

The rule of thumb I always used in B2B was at least 6 months to start seeing leads and 12 months before I really had anything useful, so potentially 18 months before the revenue flows. it would be good to set an expectation of how much debt the firm needs to take on before they will see a return on investment.