Suggestions Hiring a marketing company?

[White Haus]

Wondering how many of you out there have hired marketing companies and what your experience has been like?

I've got a long list of things that I'd like to do (start doing) with our company and I'm starting to think I'm way over my head. Other than having a logo that I'm more or less happy with and a loose vision of where I want to take the company, we're basically at ground zero. Company was started 31 years ago by my father and we've never really done any sort of advertising nor have we ever had a marketing strategy. We've been very fortunate to have lots of key loyal repeat clients and word of mouth has been working great, we just need more coming down the pipeline and I'd like to work on our position in a specific market. Our equipment can handle so much more and I feel like we could easily double/triple our output without needing to invest in any more equipment. Our machines are barely breaking a sweat are sitting idle most of the time.

I've got a bit of time/enthusiasm to spend on it but really just grasping at straws with no real plan or roadmap. Sure, maybe eventually I'll get some things done and actually implement some sort of semblance of a marketing plan/strategy, but realistically I don't really know what I'm doing and my time could be better spend doing things that are actually in my wheelhouse and generate revenue.

I suspect we might be in a good position due to the fact that we don't really have any sort of online presence to re-position or pivot, which is what's leading me to think about just hiring a marketing agency to start on it from scratch before I potentially start throwing crap out there.

As much as I see the value in hiring experts to do this for us, I'm also a bit concerned about the potential sticker shock - I know this won't be cheap but I'm assuming there is a reason big, successful companies work with marketing agencies, no?
If money was no object my dream would be to hire a company like Kickcharge Creative and Dan Antonelli but I'm sure we can't afford them and we're not a home service business, so I suppose that's a moot point.

I plan on scheduling some discovery calls with a couple local firms and seeing where that goes, but thought I'd see what y'all think first.

Thoughts? Warnings? Advice?

Thanks in advance.

 

[BigfishDM]

Please talk to them and then let me speak with you, what is your marketing budget look like? PM me.

 

[victor bogdanov]

Start doing the basics yourself, set up a google listing, social media etc. Try local google ads etc. This is all that marketing agencies will do but will charge you big $$$. Want them to create content, write blog posts etc? costs even more to the point where you can just hire a full time marketing person. Advertising is VERY competitive

 

[CanuckSigns]

I think we have discussed my experience with hiring a marketing company, but thought I would chime in Incase it helps someone else.
December of 2023 I decided to hire a company to help me with SEO on my website, I was ranking well for some things, but other products were not ranking very well. I set up some meetings with a few SEO marketing companies, being careful to try to avoid the ones based overseas as I've heard horror stories about them. I got a few quotes for around $700-900 per month, but none of the companies really clicked with me.

I got a call from a marketing company I do print work for, I asked them about SEO and they told me that they do offer it and put me in touch with their "SEO Guy", he put together a plan and seems to be really knowledgeable and realistic. They quoted me $1500 / month and set up a 12 month timeline and schedule of what they would do each month. I decided to give it a shot, we had the budget for it and I've never been serious about SEO, up until now I just did basic things that I read about online and used a SEO plugin on our site.

For the first 3 months, they spent their time on the backend of the site, making sure things were setup properly, images were optimized, the site loaded quickly etc. after that they alternated between writing blog posts and writing "off page" content to generate back links.

Every month they would send me a report, but it was may as well be written in russian for all I could understand it, they did explain it, but I don't have a brain for that type of data.

Well, this last December was the end of our 1 year contract, and I'm not renewing. here are they key takeaways that I learned:

- The marketing company didn't seem to take the time to learn about the product, I could be selling shampoo or shoes, I think their approach would have been the same

- While I did get a sizeable increase in visitors to my site and a lot of quote requests through the web form, 90% of it was for small orders, or tire kickers, I did get a few decent sized orders that I can attribute to the increased visibility, most of the jobs that came through were a waste of time.

- The content that they created seemed to be written by AI, there were a number of factual errors that I needed to correct, this could also be due to their lack of understanding of my products.

At the end of the year, I did not feel it made financial sense, as a business owner, I would need to see an increase in profits of those products of at least 3x what I spent on the SEO to make it worthwhile, I didn't see even close to that

The key takeaways I got from the past year:

- Google likes updated content, if you have a blog on your site, post on a semi-regular basis, this can be anything, case studies, use-cases for certain products etc. Chat GPT can pretty much write these for you, just need to tweak it a bit.
- The perticular products I sell, do not have a huge amount of online competition, it is fairly easy to rank on the first page of Google, I don't need a marketing company to do this.

SEO is different from marketing, but I felt it was the best place to put my marketing budget, perhaps I was wrong, there are a bunch of different types of marketing, do you know what types of marketing would work best for you?

 

[victor bogdanov]

I think we have discussed my experience with hiring a marketing company, but thought I would chime in Incase it helps someone else.

I've had similar experiences with marketing agencies, marketing experts etc. None of them could raise sales enough to cover their own fee, drop in ROI with ads if you include their fees

A commission incentivized sales person, boots on the ground type marketing person would work better IMO for a sign shop type business

 

[CanuckSigns]

I've had similar experiences with marketing agencies, marketing experts etc. None of them could raise sales enough to cover their own fee, drop in ROI with ads if you include their fees

A commission incentivized sales person, boots on the ground type marketing person would work better IMO for a sign shop type business

I did the salesman thing a few years ago, it didn't work for me either, I told him I wanted him to target industrial clients, he sold copywritten sports signs to his buddies for their garages...

 

[CanuckSigns]

One of the quickest ROI's you can do is to market yourself to your existing clients. How many times have you heard "oh I didn't know you did that". Your existing clients already trust you and like working with you, and you're already on boarded in their system.

Also, don't be afraid to ask for referrals, a well written email asking if they know of anyone else in their industry who might benefit from your services goes a long way. Much like you know a lot of people in this industry and can refer people around, so can they.

I agree with Victor, start with the basics of online marketing,.make sure your Google business page is setup, make sure your websites content is written for the type of client you want to attract, photos should have their alt tags properly filled in etc. This alone will put you in the top 10% of sign shop websites lol.

 

[pro-UP]

What are your product lines and what are your target markets? I've never worked with a marketing company. I have had sales experience in several industries (and of course this includes signage). We are very fortunate to get a lot of our business through referrals. I have seen a great deal of success with bidding, but not everyone wants to enter that competitive arena. One of our clients does a fantastic job at relationship building sales. He's very friendly, sincerely trying to help, and is confident (or will find out if he doesn't know) about his products. That's my least favorite way to sell. I am not a fan of the golfing, meals, lunch and learns sales tactics.