How we work with clients.

With us fielding more inquiries of late from new businesses wishing to join us, I thought it’d be an opportune moment to explain how we work. An introductory meeting helps us establish what they are expecting from us, problems they may have had in the past, and whether it’s mutually beneficial for us to work together.

What I learned

• We can’t work with everyone.
• Are you asking us the right questions?
• What is your goal?
• Don’t forget your customers.
• Try and find a full-service supplier.

Transcript

Hey, welcome back Rankers. It’s still cold in Melbourne and it’s sunny outside. It looks great, but we still can’t go anywhere. Don’t get me started.

How we operate

All right. I want to talk to you a little bit today about the way we work. I’ve had a lot of inquiries last couple of weeks from new business and people wanting to come on board, and of course we don’t take on everyone, you can’t, but the process that we go through, usually it’s like a half an hour to an hour meeting initially, just to get a feel for what the business owner is after, what they’re looking for. Usually that involves a lot of, “These are the problems we’ve had in the past with digital marketing companies.” Unfortunately, it’s the nature of the industry.

But by and large most of them haven’t been asking questions which I would’ve expected, which is, “Well, can you help us grow to this new goal?” Or, “Can you help us grow it a certain way?” But it tends to be more around, “We need someone to manage ads. We need someone to manage SEO. What else do you do?” Rather than, “This is where we want to head.” And I spoke a little bit about this last week, but that initial meeting that we have really helps us understand whether we can help the business or not. And if we can’t help a business, there’s no point in us working together.

So because the thing that is exciting for us is seeing growth and it’s growth like this. So this client, she was spending way too much on Google Ads, only getting a two or three times return on that. So we’ve been gradually reducing that spend and at the same time trying to work up the return so it’s higher. So she’s got less revenue from say two months ago, but she was losing money on that revenue that she was generating, because she was spending too much. But this uptick that you’re seeing here on this particular ads account is, and you can see there 58% less spent and nearly doubled the revenue for the same amount. Oh, sorry. For 68% less and we got less clicks as well, which is to be expected, but we’re getting close to our thousand percent now.

So when we look at metrics, the little metrics like that, because we, by the way, this change in this conversion rate, this 265%, that’s not the ads that’s doing that. That’s another change that we made that has nothing to do with the ads. Well, obviously it has, because look what it’s done, but when you have someone working with you because of the way we work, we don’t want to sort of just take on someone and just do, I mean, we do have some clients we just do ads, because we need to get them up to speed, but we don’t do SEO as a standalone, because from our experience and for our clients, we can be doing a lot more and making them a lot more money than just those things.

So, when we’re working on everything holistically and when we have a goal in mind with the client, we’re working with a client to grow their business, this particular client, we need to make her an extra 352K over the next six months, and over and above what she did last year. And when I look at this, I’m thinking, “Okay, we’re going to make more than that now.” I was hoping we’d make more than that. And yes we are. The signs are there that it’s going to respond quickly. Because the change that we made here was simply surfacing a USP, a unique selling proposition, just surfacing that so it was more visible, because before then she was doing this, she had this USP, but it wasn’t that prominent. So now it’s on the header of every page on the site, and that’s what happens.

Never forget your customers

Because the thing that we’ve forgotten with users, and websites, and shopping online is the human experience. It’s like, “Can I buy something off your site with my thumb while I’m having a drink?” Because that’s your customer. All right. And that’s what designers forget. And they think, “Oh no. We need a pop up or we need a thing on the site that does this. And can we have one of these?” But they’re not looking at the humans, and they’re not looking at the humans who are trying to buy from the site. So these sorts of results where you see this massive uptick in conversion rate is because we’re looking at the site and how people use it.

So after we do that first meeting, we come back, we have a look at the analytics, and we see where the opportunities are. One guy this week, I’ve just said, “Well, gee, you’re going well, your ads are doing a thousand percent return,” or 1200% return or whatever it was, “however mobile, which is 60% of your traffic, is only delivering 20% of your revenue. And in ads, it’s actually only converting at 300, not 1000. Just so happens that the desktop traffic is converting at 1500.” So you start to see those sorts of opportunities. You stop worrying about whether it’s SEO, or whether it’s ads, or whether it’s whatever, because it’s about the user, it’s about your customers.

And at the end of the day, what we’re trying to work out is if this a good business for us to work with? Can we make a significant impact? And it’s rare that we can’t, but the ones where we can’t and where we have in the past and we’ve taken them on and made a mistake is they we’re too small, and we grew them too quickly, and we nearly killed the business owners. So, we’ve had that extreme as well, but by and large, it’s working out, can we actually make a huge impact, because if we can’t make a huge impact it just becomes a stressful job, really. So when you’re talking to an agency or a supplier who’s going to help you with a marketing aspect of your business, have a think about where you want to grow rather than the tools that you think you might need, because the people you’re talking to may be able to do a lot more.

And I’ve said this before. If you have your ads and your SEO with two companies, it’s not really that great for the SEO company, because they’re making, as you can see, the ads work better. So it’s best if you try to find a supplier that can help you with your growth needs rather than a supplier that can provide a certain particular service for a particular technique.

Hopefully that’s helpful. If you have any questions, if you’d like us to look at your site, if you think you’d like to work with us, then please hit me up, and remember always to share, like, and subscribe, and have a good week. And stay safe, stay COVID safe. See you next week. Thanks for watching. Bye.

Jim

Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.