James: James Schramko here, SuperFastBusiness.com, chatting with Will Wang from GrowthLabz.com. How are you going, Will?
Will: Thanks for having me back on James.
James: Got a question around paid advertising. I know as part of your agency, you do lots of things, from copywriting, to paid traffic campaigns to even having a look at someone’s account and say, Okay, well, here are all the opportunities you’re not even approaching. Because you’re pretty savvy, I’ve gotta say that.
Anyway, let’s say a client comes on board, you show them a new campaign that they haven’t been tapping into. You do all the research, I know you’re big on researching your clients and understanding how to be relevant. Often that’ll involve case studies and writing copy and then setting up ads. I’ve seen occasionally people will get to that point, and they think, Alright, all done now. And then they pull the plug, and they go off, and they try their best to survive. Like, is that unwise to do that, or can that actually happen, where they’d pay all the foundations and somehow pull it off?
Will: Yeah, that’s a really good question. And you know, I’ve seen this time and time again, it’s happened to us, you know, a couple of times so far. And look, unless they’ve got internal marketing team, and the marketing teams are really performing, in which case, why even talk to us, it’s a really hard thing to do to take the basics or the foundation that someone else has built, and to bring that across and try to manage it yourself.
And the best example of that is, we had a client in the past where we were doing some really good ads, really great results, so really profitable and very happy with ads. And their accountant actually turned around to them and said, look, it’s going to add to your account.
James: Seriously. Sometimes there’s coaching clients, I say you need to go and you need to get a CFO or a fractional CFO, and you need to get your books up to date. And the first thing they say is, What is this expense for SuperFastBusiness? And the good clients, they say, Listen buddy, back off. You stick with your cardigan and Toyota Camry, but I know what I’m doing here. Just remember with accountants, you pay them to fix the things the way that you need them. You don’t pay him to tell you how to be frugal. It just drives me crazy. Sorry, trigger alert! And I was trained to be an accountant, by the way, so I have half tongue-in-cheek but the other half’s not.
Will: It’s just so funny, because the accountant I asked about it and said, You’re almost paying the same as you would for a full-timer. Why don’t you just go and hire a full-timer to do this? Not understanding that, you know, as an agency, we don’t like, copy the design, the tech…
James: You need seven full-timers!
Will: Exactly. And so they said, Look, we’re gonna save a bunch of money. Let us go bring all the staff. Thanks for creating the ads. They’ll run the ad account. We’re gonna bring it in house. You made us a bunch of money. But we’re going to try and save a little bit of costs here. And it wasn’t even that much they were saving. So they brought it all in house. And it just absolutely went to crap so quickly. And all the profit they’ve made from, you know, us running the ads, they put back into the market.
And the reason for that is because it’s first of all impossible for one person to do sometimes, what an agency does. I’ve got a team of 20 behind me who are so good at doing the stuff that I’m really bad at, like design, for example. And the second part of it is there’s so much underlying psychology and strategy and thinking that goes into creating and also managing and updating ads. Sometimes if you miss a crucial piece that you don’t even see, it’s like you know, that you send it to the iceberg, which is the ad itself. There’s so much underlying psychology on the copy that you don’t see, that if you miss the copy, or the thinking and the strategy around it, your ad’s just gonna tank, like, it’s just gonna be the Titanic. And you’re gonna run into an iceberg real quickly. And it’s going to be an absolute disaster.
So that was an actual example where they turned around and said, like, I think our accountant stuffed up. Can you salvage it? And obviously it took a lot more work to get it back to where it needed to be than if we just had it running, and you know, they tried to not save the 20%,and just kept doubling down and making more profit. So that’s an actual example that we saw.
James: Crazy. When I quit my job, the way that I quit my job, I earnt half my income from affiliate marketing and info products and the other half came from agency work and I had two clients. And one day I was trying to tell him about remarketing. And I said we need some creatives. They went off and paid 25 grand to get some agency, some black skivvy-wearing, Porsche-driving agency, sold them on some flash video walk-in website. And they said, we’re just going to put a new website. I’m like, I really wouldn’t do that. And then I looked at it and it was awful. They had some actor appearing from the side of the screen saying, Hey, welcome to our website. Oh my god, this is a disaster. I said I’m out. I’m done.
And they were so rude to the agency. They rang and said, send over the FTP and logins. You know, I’m like, what? Anyway, so I quit. And they dropped out of Google. They dropped out of the Pay-Per-Click.Everything failed. Their conversions went to the side. They begged me. I sat there at their boardroom. They begged me to take them back and fix it. And we re-uploaded the old website and turned back their campaigns and away we went. So sometimes I think people take for granted what you’re actually doing when things are running smoothly, and there isn’t drama. And that is because if you’ve got the right people on the job they’re doing and advocating correctly for you to get you the results you’re paying for. And you might think you’re going to save, but imagine that it cost this client of yours an enormous amount. It certainly cost mine. His average customer was worth probably $100,000. And they stopped getting so many leads that they couldn’t keep up with it to getting nothing. And I imagine it was a seven-figure loss for going down the wrong path.
Will: Yeah, it was pretty close to it. It was a massive amount.
James: Love it. Will, always a pleasure. Thanks for trading stories.
Will Wang there at GrowthLabz.com. If you’re not happy with your agency’s performance or you want to get some professional help from someone who knows all about it, get in touch with Will. He’s a good guy.
Will: Thanks, James.
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