“Just run Facebook Ads to get clients…?” How many times have we heard this phrase ad nauseam…
Is it really that easy or simple though?
You’ve hired and fired many marketing agencies. Even the award-winning ones.
Today, digital marketing is no longer about fiddling in Meta Ads management dashboards or explaining away monthly Google Analytics reports.
There are multiple layers involved in a good online lead generation campaign: technical capabilities such as conversion tracking, customer research and content marketing.
It’s about the customer journey: from online ads to landing pages that meet the needs of their market, to customer intake systems, to digital analytics that help track predictable growth.
On an enterprise level, I grew a $200k revenue per month digital insurance product to $1m in revenue per month within 5 months. In my agency days helping SMEs, I took one F&B product from $8k in revenue per month to $500k total revenue in six months.
Having worked on eye popping online client acquisition campaigns on an enterprise, to start up and SME level.
Sometimes, it bewilders me that many small and medium business owners severely undervalue the power of a well oiled client acquisition system.
Our agency’s services aren’t the one and done sort.
I usually spend more than two weeks doing customer research and planning before spending a single dollar on ads. That is to ensure a high probability of both return on investment and scale when launched.
Here, what we do is ROI focused performance marketing. Good outcomes can only occur when both parties are aligned on expectations, mindset and values. You can read our performance marketing mindset here.
SEO has evolved greatly from keyword stuffing days. Today, we aren’t even interested in looking at queries in silos anymore.
Search has become more LLM based with the introduction of A.I. and I believe brand (source identity context) and search is going to be based on semantic principles.
This means micro and macro semantics, quality thresholds, topical depth, search intent, entity relationships, attribute coverage, query relevance, source context and etc.
Currently, due to the complexity of a well-executed SEO campaign, I am only blogging on SEO. I am not taking on any SEO agency clients and am open to SEO consultations only.
This is why the channel, whether Facebook Ads, Google Ads or SEO, is not the priority.
Think of great Facebook Ad but a poor user experience on your landing pages. Or perhaps you hired the best Facebook ad agency but you are targeting the wrong customer profile.
The result is low quality leads that trickle down to sales and operations, and no return on your ad spend.
In performance marketing, the goal is revenue, sales and sustainable growth. We must begin with the end in mind, even before spending a dollar on paid advertising or SEO content.
Once, I grew a small medium enterprise selling a $50 F&B product to half a million in revenue with a broken Facebook Pixel and barely logging into Google Analytics.
You would not believe it, or would you? It was what earned me an endorsement from my former boss when I was working at an agency.
Here’s what I learned after growing products to millions in revenue, managing millions in advertising budget in a start up, in an SME and at an enterprise, MNC level.
High level strategy, end to end thinking and acute implementation does.
Most performance marketers, SEO copywriters, Facebook ads specialists and in-house digital marketing teams are implementing in silos. The dots are not connected, making growth impossible to measure and results difficult to understand.
Messy to painful.
Every digital marketing agency charges differently. SEO packages can start from SGD 500 monthly to SGD 10000 per month. Currently, we charge uniquely for our lead generation campaigns. It’s called growth sprints. There are no long term contracts and you’re only billed fractionally for what you need.
If you’re going to hire for SEO, ask if they have SEO case studies. If you’re going to hire for paid marketing, ask if they have paid marketing case studies. The best agencies walk the talk. The good SEO agencies have ranked their own website. The good paid marketing agencies run their own paid campaigns.
Good agencies act like partners, not mere vendors. They are able to provide advice on where to spend your ad budget, think from a business owner’s shoes and see a campaign from an end-to-end standpoint. This means constructing a campaign that eventually leads to sales, and then scaling.
Yes and no. If you’ll like more control and see marketing as a important function to be taken in house. Your call.
However, many new hires only managed campaigns with million dollar budgets rather than limited budget accounts. Many also only know how to do ‘branding’ campaigns that do not lead to new sales or customers.
Here I’ve handled everything from small to multi million dollar budget accounts.
The answer: it depends.
If you don’t have “product market fit”, then you need to hire the right agency person to help you attain that first. This means hiring someone who can help you with your market positioning based on your customer research. Good agencies can aid you partially on that.
THEN you worry about the rest: copywriting, graphics, and creatives.
Once you have a workable offer, layering on traffic is an easier part.
However, if you already have product market fit and profitable campaigns, then you can go ahead to hire an agency to optimise just the ads and/or provide creative ad direction.
