It was shortly after our Series B and we were looking for ways to continue accelerating our inbound lead flow through our website and enhance our digital strategy. We had the capital to make a larger investment in our performance marketing efforts and believed it would be one of our greatest opportunities.
Our audience was restaurant owners.
The notoriously difficult to identify and reach restaurant owners.
When restaurant owners are your target every agency and company likes to say they know exactly where to find them. This story takes place before we got comfortable recognizing the red flags and saying, “That won’t work.”
Our main objective was to convert more people from our ads to leads. A common goal for any organization and in the initial meeting with this agency they showcased a wide variety of expertise and some strong examples.
It was impressive. While they didn’t have a specific example of results created for a restaurant technology company, they showed strong acumen as well as “unique targeting capabilities” to convince us that they could fuel better, faster results than what we were getting from our own efforts.
The scope we drew up was going to include them managing Google ads, new ad creative to be used on social media and Google display, multiple landing pages to connect with the different ads, and their recommended form. Total investment was going to be $25k over a quarter.
We took the leap and signed the agreement. We were pumped!
They showed us a nice roadmap of the different milestones they intended to hit and as any client would I asked the clarifying question, “When do we think we’ll first start seeing any results or leanrings?”
“We should expect to see something telling in 45 days if we stay on track” was their reply.
The first step was a one-hour discovery call to learn more about the brand. I invited our CEO/co-founder and another member of my team to make sure we could answer any and all questions.
I never thought that a one-hour discovery call would be the beginning and the end of their learning about our brand. Not a single follow-up question in the months to come or them digging in further to better understand what had been working, where our product was going, or other tactics that we had in place that were showing success.
It’s an agency’s responsibility to learn more about your business – it helps them be proactive in identifying new opportunities or potential obstacles. It also helps them integrate their efforts (in this case) into the larger digital marketing strategy versus being siloed off on their own.
Not to mention a brand just wants to feel like you’ve gotten to know them – preventing back and forth in edits or seeing something that immediately elicits the reaction, “Uh, that doesn’t sound like us” or “That’s not how we do things.”
It was never more obvious then a few days before the targeted launch when they showed us the draft of the form they intended to use on the landing pages. I asked the obvious question, “How do these leads get into our CRM?”
They said it goes to a spreadsheet that you can import into your CRM. But they couldn’t name the CRM that we used because they had never asked the question.
Me at that moment: “……”
In a world of “speed to lead” importing a spreadsheet into your CRM isn’t going to cut it and forms that integrate or are native to CRMs are a dime a dozen.
But that’s not the point.
The point is that any agency that was looking to help and cared about your success would know what CRM you are using or where you are storing customer data. It’s good to know where the leads are going, but it’s even better to make the leads actionable by the sales team as quickly as possible.
The agency heard our need for converting more leads, but the reality is we were asking for help in growing our business and if $25,000 worth of digital marketing efforts weren’t connected to our sales team then we weren’t giving ourselves much of a shot.
Awareness of and connection to the larger digital marketing strategy gives us (the client) a true chance to win – to get money from a customer – to get a better bang for our buck.
We hit all of our milestones and launched on time.
There was never any “unique targeting” – strictly categories available in the ad platforms with no proprietary data.
The number of leads equaled about 40% of their initial estimate and we never closed one of them.
We ended with three different landing pages and $25k less in the bank one quarter later.
When you have dollars to invest it can be the most exciting time for any brand. You know you have to (and it’s your responsibility as a leader to) move swiftly and diligently to identify the best option so you can see the ROI sooner rather than later.
You learn from all of it. Even the headwinds.