EXPOSED: Marketing Agencies' Dirty Secrets They Don't Want Roofers to Know

I'm going to expose the dirty secrets of digital marketing agencies that they don't want you to know. So if you've spent a bunch of money on marketing or worked with an agency and you basically lit money on fire, if your ad budget disappeared or if you were sold things that were never delivered, then this video is for you. It is no secret that there are probably just as much, if not more dirty or bad marketing agencies just as there are dirty or bad roofing companies. Does it mean all of them are bad or evil? The answer is no. But I want to peel back the curtains and share the truth. The revealing the reality of what digital marketing agencies are and how you can, by using the information in this video, not rely on them. My mission is to help you become what I call the GC or the general contractor of your marketing. So if you were to like, build, I don't know, a house, for example, you need, you don't need to know how to do all the trades, but you need to have the vision in mind that turns into blueprints and blueprints turns into a plan of you managing all the contractors and, and knowing enough to be dangerous, like, hey, that doesn't look right. You also need to know how to stick to budget, fix things when they're broken and who to call when you need help. So whether you continue to do your marketing with agencies or if you bring it in house or do a hybrid, this video is going to help by exposing what most people aren't talking about. Now. If you're new, welcome. If you're not, welcome back. My name is Adam Bensman and I've been in this business since 2011. I started knocking doors. I worked my way up to chief operating officer of a company in five states and six cities. And today I run an organization. It's an application only organization called the Roofing and Solar Reform alliance and I work with folks in 43 states and Canada, literally hundreds of roofing companies and thousands of people on their team each and every day. I've seen it all and what I'm about to share with you is a glimpse of my background that most people don't know about. And that is that I spent about five years as a direct response copywriter and marketing consultant working with some pretty big names. And people hired me to come in and help steer their marketing, write their offers, write their ads, and train their sales team. Having this unique ability of marrying sales and marketing. And I got an inside view into the agency world after I was subbed out and worked with multiple agencies, helping them with their offers and helping them write compelling copy. That actually worked. So what I'm sharing with you is in fluffer theory. It's what I know from being behind the scenes working with these companies. So let's begin. The dirty little secret is that a lot of these marketing agencies are just like a general contractor who's building a house. They're going to come up and it will often be something like this. It's a guy or a gal who has a brilliant idea and they're like, listen, I'm going to start running pay per click advertising. So what I'm really good at is actually the technical management of pay per click. And then they'll take some course or learn some smart marketing, which is the saying there's riches and niches. You know, they want to niche down. They say, hey, these roofers, they got a lot of money and there's a lot at stake. So I'm going to niche in the roofing industry. And for many of them, they don't actually know the ins and outs of roofing like you do. In fact, they don't know your customers or your brand brand like you do. But what they're really good at is managing pay per click. And they think as a business, well, how do I monetize this? So they go after a niche. They say, I'm going to run your pay per click advertising for you because I'm really good at that. But then like a general contractor, they start thinking, oh man, well, I'm really good at running pay per click advertising. I know how to target, how to set it up. I can maximize your budget, I can master your negative keywords and I can compete against the big boys. But then they start thinking, ah, shoot. Well, in order to do this effectively, I know that I need to start writing. I need to write landing pages. Well, I'm not a good writer. So they turn to a place to find someone to build the landing pages for them. And even if it's in house, they'll often sub this out again, not all, but, but, but a lot. And they'll say, okay, well I'm going to turn to popular places like Fiverr or Upwork or go to onlinejobs.ph and they'll find VAs or virtual assistants overseas, which is a entire economy. And if you want to learn more about that, you can go to onlinejobs. Ph, I'm not affiliated. But you can see how quickly, neat, quick and easy it is to find offshore talent for very, very inexpensive. And they'll use these people to build the website. So instead of paying someone in the US a US rate, they're gonna find someone who's in the Philippines in a very competitive market and at literally sub $10 an hour, 4, 8, 10. I mean it depends on the talent and maybe even less to do the building of the landing page for them. So now they're acting like a general contractor. Then they're going to say ah, shoot. So I got someone to do the web design, but now I need someone to write the copy. Well, I can do ads, but I'm not a copywriter. So then what they do is they turn and they try to find a writer and then again they go to upwork or fiverr or jump into Facebook groups and try to find a copywriter or who can write copy. But many of these copywriters, and believe me, I've made people a lot of money as a copywriter, but the best copywriters in the world, almost all of them started doing one thing and that is knocking doors. They started in door to door sales. So they end up hiring these people online that are self proclaimed copywriters because the easiest way to become a copywriter is just to say you're a copywriter. There are oodles of courses, some are bad, some are good, but what they're missing is actual industry expertise. So now they've got the person writing the ads, they have the person building the website that are both outsourced under the brand of whatever PPC agency and they say ah shoot. Well, in order for me to have people be successful, I gotta hire an account manager. And those account managers may or may not actually be trained in digital marketing. They're usually relationship driven people who can stay in touch, manage the relationship and they'll go through the basic reporting that they need to present to you. And the list continues, whether it's design work, it's copy, it's writing emails, maybe even doing call scripts and all of these pieces are then subbed out. So in other words, you the roofer who in many situations is a general contractor, if you're doing roofing, siding, windows, gutters or any other trades, just like how you operate is just like how these digital marketing agencies operate. I've got a good idea. I'm good at one thing, but I have to outsource to other people. Now, recently, and this is a true story, this just happened two weeks ago in an RSRA leadership roundtable. These are sessions where we bring in owners and managers and we, we peel back the curtains and Talk about what's working and what's not in our businesses. We bring in certain topics like AI marketing, hiring, again, recruiting, training, you name it, there's, there's, the list goes on. We even get into investment strategy, cash flow, auditing, P and ls. And in one of these sessions we had one person say, I hired a marketing agency and I found out that they were using the exact VA's virtual assistants that they were using. Yes, that's right. The roofing company had hired a va, a virtual assistant firm to do some back end work for that office, for their office. And they found out that their marketer was outsourcing to the same people. When you think of this, how ridiculous is it? So this is one of the biggest dirty little secrets about marketing agencies that they don't want you to know. Now again, there are good agencies out there and I know I'm going to see in the comments, Adam, who do you recommend? Who should I work with and why? And I at this point in time, and I may change, I don't make recommendations inside rsra, people share who they've had success with. But I want to explain why I personally don't recommend them. There are good agencies out there if they're bad agencies. So I'm going to give you an insight into dirty secret. The dirty little secret number two. Marketing agencies, just like roofers, have scaling problems. And the aggressive ones that do really well, they scale up really quickly. And I could recommend a marketing agency to you right now that I've heard amazing things about. And as soon as they scale up, they won't say no to new business. Well, of course some might, but most don't. And then before you know it, they have more clients than they can serve and they have to continually add people to their team who may lack the credentials or the training to set you up for success. And you will find, in fact, I just talked to another organization and I won't name names here, but we'll just say they were a home services group that serves lots of contractors. And they said to me, we have a really hard time recommending agencies because a contractor in five contractors will have the best experience in the world. And the next one says, I'd never hire them, I spent $130,000 and got nothing in return. So quality can be inconsistent. And the next thing for you to consider is if you have someone say, hey, that company was great, they might be great in this market, in the next market they're not. They might be great in Storm, they might be great in retail. They might not be great at blending the two. You may have people that are great with specialty products and, let's say, metal roofing, and they're not so great with asphalt shingles. They may be great with markets in the north and not the South. There are all these different considerations that will make your friend have a great experience with this agency, and you're going to have a terrible one. And for those reasons, I don't want to hitch my name and my brand to the reputation of an agency. But the last and most important thing is for you to understand how to set up your marketing to be successful, because a lot of folks, and I do hear this horror story. Here's another dirty little secret with agencies is agencies that aren't successful because they're contractors aren't successful. They reach out to me. They have been for years, and they continue to do so. And what they're looking for is to get systems and processes in place so that when leads come in, they actually convert into appointments. And I had a. This is another true story. I had someone come up to me and say, Adam, I spent $130,000 with this marketing agency, and I didn't have any results. I wasted all the money. And guess what? At that point, I recommended the agency. So it became my problem. And, well, what they didn't see is that on the other side of the coin, there were another 25 people that said, adam, this agency is amazing. They've taken great care of me. I have. Finally, my leads are working. And what I ended up doing is secret shopping, the company that had flushed all that money down the drain. And guess what? When you call the office, they answer the phone saying, let me figure out who can serve you, and we'll call you right back. In other words, that company was not set up for success. They did not have what I call their core funnel in place to be successful with marketing. Which is why marketing agencies turn to me and say, hey, will you work with our people? Can we get your training? Can we refer people to you? Because we need them to have a way to handle calls, which we have that script develops called the inbound lead phone sales strategy. To train your office on how, like, literally word for word, what to say, how to qualify the lead, how to set the appointment, how to warm it up, how to. How to get the homeowner excited about financing and affordability and basically setting the table for the sales team. And then they need help closing the sales, because if they're generating leads but the team's closing rate is low, then the results reflect poorly on the agency. It's a complex topic. So at the end of the day, what this means is it is your responsibility to become the GC or general contractor of your marketing. If you're not, you're basically a GC hiring a GC to do your marketing. And what happens is they generate these reports that you can't even understand and don't know what to fix and why. And no one, and I mean this, no one in your world, cares as much about your business and knows as much about your customers as you do. And for you, outsourcing it. There are two things, by the way, that Joe Polish, he's the founder of Genius Network, wrote the book what's in it for Them and a whole others. And Joe, at a recent Genius Network event that I attended and I recently ran a marketing training for the organization and, and I echoed, Joe sent to me, he says there's two things you never let go of as an owner. One is your marketing and two is your checkbook. And I couldn't agree more. I want to empower you to learn marketing so you can run circles around the agencies you hire, bring some things in house, understand your messaging, what are you putting out to the world, what's on your website, what's in your ads, all right, what's on your landing pages? Two, craft really powerful offers that people actually want to say yes to. And three, position yourself to that is different and superior to everybody else. And by the way, this is what I'm doing with our members inside rsra. So there you have it, the dirty little secrets of marketing industry. Which ones did I miss? Drop a comment below. And if you want to take control of your marketing, jump into this very next video. I'm going to give you the one thing that everybody needs to do and by doing it, it's going to transform your marketing forever. I'll see you in the next Sam.