How Ambleglow became a full service marketing agency

Welcome to the Agency Accelerator Podcast. I am really excited to have my very first guest with us today and that is Sally Alexander, who is the currently the Client Services Director for Ambleglo, but soon to become the Managing Director.

Accelerate your agency's profitable growth with tools, tips and value added interviews with your host agency owner and coach, Rob DaCosta.

Now, Ambleglo is an education focused marketing agency and I was particularly interested to have Ambleglow on this podcast because they've gone through a transition over the last couple of years. So I wanted to invite Sally on to share her journey with you, talk about some of the key learnings and some of the marketing strategies they've put in place in order to engage with this audience. Because I know some of you will be either wanting to niche your agencies or being forced to change the focus. And I think Sally has some great insights to share with us. So, Sally, welcome aboard. Would you want to start off by just giving us a little bit of background about yourself?

Morning, Rob. Thank you very much for inviting me onto your very first podcast. All sorts of trends come and go, as I'm sure some of your listeners will have done within the marketing space.

Indeed. Yep.

Our specialism is education, so we work with currently around 6, 600 schools clients. Those schools could be anything from the local primary school around the corner, right the way up to sort of the really well known top tier independents. The majority of the work that we do for our schools is recruitment marketing. So it's quite a small niche area. So that could involve anything from external teacher recruitment, advertising. So school may need a science teacher and wants to go into the tes, which is one of our biggest suppliers.

TES is a Times education supplement just for anyone that doesn't know that.

Yeah, Times Educational Supplement. So we do a lot of work with them. We also look at candidate journeys, we look at employer communications. So how can schools really make sure that they are selling themselves to candidates? As I'm sure most of your listeners will know, there is a huge shortage of teachers at the moment. A teacher crisis is something that all of the headlines say, and there really is one. I mean, one of the latest statistics shows that there's probably as many teachers leaving the profession as there are coming in. And with the government not meeting their teacher training targets, it's a really tough market. So we're here to really make sure that they appeal to as many teachers as possible through good marketing.

Yeah. So tell me what's changed in your marketplace over the last couple of years that has led you to kind of consider offering a more broader full marketing service to that audience?

Well, I think when it comes to recruitment marketing, there is now lots of competition. Education especially has always been fairly traditional when it comes to where they place their advertising. So Times Educational Supplement is. Is a big player in the market, but we are finding there's lots more players coming in. So you've got the likes of, indeed, you've got the likes of Google for jobs. You've got Facebook. So I think there is a lot more competition now, and I think people are getting a lot smarter as to how to use recruitment marketing to their advantage. And unfortunately for businesses like us, sometimes that means that it's easier just to do it yourself. There isn't the need or the desire to always want to involve an agency. Technology has meant it's a lot easier for people just to go online, put a listing on. Indeed, they don't necessarily need the help from an agency and certainly strategic help maybe that they would have done, say 10 years ago. There's been a big shift in print as well. So obviously print was really, really popular 10, 15 years ago, certainly when I first started. And it's very, very unusual now to find a client that actually really wants to actively go into print with their recruitment advertising. So we really needed to look at the business as a whole and say, okay, well, with this information and with the changing marketplace, where do we fit into this? Where's our place in this? So I think it really was looking at going back to basics and looking at the business plan and saying, okay, well, what do we need to do? We know that recruitment marketing, while there is still an appetite for it, I think to grow, to have a business solely reliant on that, I think would be problematic. So we certainly wanted to look at other areas. There was a discussion as to whether we branch into other areas aside from education. We do have a small list of commercial clients that we also look after. But we know so much about education, it just seems really stupid to just turn our backs on that. We've invested in it for so long that we really wanted to make sure that education was something that we still did, but we did look at how we could broaden our base. So rather than just looking after purely recruitment marketing, we've looked at other areas that we can grow into the business business. So for example, we're now got quite a healthy, straight schools marketing business. So that will be people that are marketers within schools, which is a new trend, how they actually market to pupils. So pupil Attraction. So that is another string to our bow. As well as businesses that sell into schools, the commercial sector that sell into schools. So that could be school uniform suppliers, it could be sporting equipment. So. So we've really sort of embraced education, but looked at how we can really grow our marketplace just to ensure that the business remains positive.

Yep. Okay, so let's just take a slight sort of time out there because I just wanted to sort of sing the praise of the decisions that Amble Glo made and also highlight the value of being a niched agency. Because when you're a niched agency, you can show up as the expert. You obviously intimately understand your audience and what makes them tick and what pains they have that your services can solve. And I think Ambleglow is a good example of understanding that their niche is education. And yet when they want to broaden out, they haven't abandoned education, they've just kind of taken a sort of a lateral step and said, okay, we've traditionally sold advertising recruitment, now we're going to look at what other marketing services we can sell into that audience rather than just abandoning them. And I think a lot of us suffer from sort of shiny new object syndrome where we feel like the other man's grass is greener and it looks easier to make money somewhere else. But the truth of it is that it's very rarely true. So, Sally, do you want to talk about the other services that you're now offering that you weren't offering? I think you've got sort of five or six core service areas now.

Yeah, absolutely. So the core services we offer still recruitment marketing and we're still experts in there, so we certainly wouldn't want to throw the baby out with the bath water. But we're now looking at social media, we're looking at digital marketing, we're looking at print and design. And what's really great for us is actually marketing strategy. So that might be that we go in and do an audit on their current strategy and really give them ideas of where they can improve. So those products have been brilliant because they can be accessible across the board. So not only for our schools clients, but also commercial clients that are looking to sell into education. We feel that we've got a much more well rounded product inventory now that appeals to all those target markets.

Yeah. I just want to sort of emphasize the point that for you, one of the drivers for this change was the way that the recruitment advertising model was changing, that was pushing the prices down. Like you said, there were more competitors. Schools felt they could do it themselves. So if you didn't make the decisions that you have made a couple of years ago, you would probably find your revenues and profits shrinking. Is that a fair observation?

In the recruitment marketing sector itself, it is shrinking. And I think one of the things that we've been instrumental in is making sure that we are always thinking ahead of the curve. I think where agencies struggle is that they rely on doing the same things day in, day out. And actually, sometimes you have to be brave. You do have to look at what you've been doing and actually say it's not working anymore. And a really good example of that is having a telemarketing department. And we had a sort of four to five strong telemarketing department that would speak to our schools. And while in its infancy, it worked really, really well and we did pick up a lot of business. I think certainly in the last 18 months, it was proving harder and harder to get business through telemarketing. Certainly. I think within education, they don't like to be sold to and certainly not by telephone. So we were finding that that was proving really difficult. So we really did need to sort of find another way of bringing in new business. And we've completely revolutionised the way that we do new business now. We've done that through a content marketing exercise. So one of the key decisions that we made as a management team, firstly was to bring in a really good marketer that can actually help sell Ambleglo as a business. I think one of the mistakes that we've made is that we're great at selling other businesses and marketing other businesses, but actually, when it came to ourselves, we either didn't have the time for it or we just didn't give it the focus that it really needed. So a big shift in our strategy this year has been bringing in a marketer to work on outbound marketing for us and really kind of sell the benefits of using us.

Yeah. And listen, you are not alone. I wanted to go hallelujah, you know, because we're all in the same boat, Right. We're all good at doing whatever we do and we're all bad at marketing ourselves. So I think in a competitive marketplace, in a challenging economy, it becomes more important to get the marketing of your own agency. Right. So it's really good to hear that you've invested in that. And I think it's also true that the telemarketing model just generally doesn't work anymore as much as it used to do. I think the people are fed up with getting those kind of calls. And there are smarter ways of engaging with your audience than that. Right. And I think you've been focusing on some of those smarter ways.

I think a couple of key things that we've really taken away from this year. This has been a real instrumental year for us of kind of laying the groundwork for our future. So we've done lots of things this year to aid our new business strategy. I think a couple of the key learnings that we've taken this year is have a really good marketer. If you can afford to bring someone out, someone in house to sell you as a business, I think it's a really smart strategy to take looking at your customer Personas, who are you selling to create customer Personas, really work out who your target market is. And helping to refine that really makes your proposition a lot stronger. The other tip I would also give is potentially, if you can afford it, is to look at a customer relationship system, so a CRM where you can hold all your data and even better if it works, integrated with being able to send out marketing campaigns to that. So those are three things that we've done this year that really have improved our success rate with our new strategy.

Fantastic. Yeah. So I think it's really important that we all know our numbers and we don't just blindly do things because that's what we've done before, but we actually look at our numbers and refine our campaigns based on the results that we're getting back so that we can improve on our results or certainly maintain the levels of results we've been getting. If you were to take a step back and look at some of the key learnings, both good and the bad and the ugly, of that journey that you've been on. Can you share any thoughts with us about tips that you would give? I know you gave three really good tips just now, but what things do you think you've got wrong in this journey to the. To get from where you were to where you are now?

I think you really have to have management buy in. I think you have to bring everybody on the journey with you. I think if you've got anybody that is not on that journey, it does make that sale a lot more difficult. So I was really clear to make sure that everybody from the juniors right the way up to the owner of the company understood where we were going and why we were changing our business model. And that was through having a really strong business plan, talking everybody through the business plan, not just the management team. I made sure that everybody understood it, everybody had a chance to ask questions and really just to make sure that everybody was on board with it. I think it's really difficult to make changes when you don't have everybody on board. And I think it has to be everyone, literally from the receptionist right the way through to the owner or the md. That would be my first tip. I think the second tip would be try things. This is all about learning and actually sometimes you get things wrong. It's just the name of the game unfortunately, but you learn so much from it. So one of the things that I really learned this year was about hiring really good people. So we initially brought in a marketing manager who just wasn't the right fit for us. And actually that meant that when this person left that we actually had three or four months of no activity, which obviously was turned the detriment of the business. So I think hiring the right people for the job is really important as well. And by that I mean that they understand who you are, what you do, but also they get on with the team and they're happy to muck in. I think marketing a company is all about people mucking in and actually doing the job. We're a small agency. We don't have lots and lots of suppliers to do the work for us. We have to do it ourselves. So I think hiring someone that understands that and really just wants to get stuck in for the benefit of the business and it really, really helps.

Yeah, good points. And what's the year ahead looking like for Ambleglow? What plans have you got on the horizon for next year?

Plans? I was looking at our marketing list and our business plan only last week and we've got tons of things to do, but fortunately they're all really positive things. We laid a lot of the groundwork this year through having the CRM. We also had a new, brand new website. A lot of the feedback that we got from our website was that it was. It didn't really say who we were or what we did. It wasn't really that clear. So we've really improved that this year. So I think next year is really consolidation for us and it's really sort of hopefully seeing the fruits of our labour come together. We really want to ramp up our outbound content so we are making efforts on that. We want to do a lot more video marketing. So rather than putting bits and pieces on our website, we actually want to get out and talk to people and potentially doing podcasts. So Rob, you might have to to repay the favor and be a guest or not.

Pleasure to. It's apparently it's the last bastion of sort of the wild west of marketing. So, you know, one of the reasons why I decided to do a podcast is because I realized that my audience is really busy and doesn't have a lot of time. And podcast is in. Podcasting is something that you can take with you. So I listen to podcasts when I'm at the gym, walking the dogs, driving the car, giving sort of bite size value content like this is why I'm doing it. Now you talk a little bit about outbound content and some of the marketing strategy. Can you just share with the audience some of the, you don't have to give too much detail, but some of the marketing activities that you have in plan. What are the kind of things that work well for you, that help you engage with your target audience?

One of the biggest things that has been a huge success for us, and I completely underestimated it, was the power of LinkedIn. Maybe I'm just a bit behind on the curve on this one, but I've made huge inroads using LinkedIn this year to network, joining in conversations, finding relevant groups that are education related. And it's just an absolute treasure trove of information if you use it properly and you're regularly posting content. I try to be really careful. So when I'm involved in groups, I make sure that I'm there for the right reasons. I don't think it's appropriate to really sell your wares in these groups because a lot of it is sharing ideas and expertise. So I think that's one sort of word of caution I would give. So LinkedIn has been a big part of that for us and I think also value added content. So we've made big efforts this year with blogging. So with our three core audiences, school recruiters, school marketers and commercial businesses selling into education, we've made sure that we've aligned lots of useful content for those three audiences. So that might be blogs, it might be Q&As with people in industry, how to guides all sorts of things. And actually it's really, really taken off now. We've actually won business from it. I think one of the mistakes that we made in the early days is just not really understanding the client and not understanding when they're ready to buy. And I think if you, with the telemarketing, for example, if you're trying to sell to them before you even know them, it's just a big mistake. No one likes being Sold to. None of us do. And I think trying to sell when you don't know there's a need, you don't know who they are, I think is just a big mistake. So at least this way, we are building value, we're building credibility. And then when that time is, when that time comes, when they're ready to actually look for a supplier, I'm hoping that Amberglow's name will be up there.

Yeah. So I need to give you another hallelujah at this point because you've just made a number of really interesting points that I just want to pick up, really, so that everybody really hears them. First of all, you need to make sure you understand your customer. So you need to create your customer avatars or your customer Personas or your buyer Personas, whatever terminology you've heard, so that you understand exactly who your target customer is. Because then, like Amble Glow, if you do understand that, you can align all of your marketing messages to that audience and make sure that you are addressing some of the challenges and pains that they have. The other really important, the really important point that Sally made is that the marketing that they're doing isn't about selling. It's about building trust and adding value. Because remember, guys, we have to take our audience through that know, like, trust sales funnel. People have to know you, they have to like you. They have to trust you. And when they know like and trust you, they will buy from you. But if you haven't taken your audience through that and you're just cold calling, then you know, they don't know you from Adam. So even if they did have a need for your service, it's very unlikely they would buy because they don't know who you are. So a lot of what Sally has just spoken about is about building awareness and trust with their audience by giving value ad, whether that be through their blogging, their email marketing, or through Sally's LinkedIn outreach. And Sally, I actually need to have you back on another podcast, because I think we could do a whole podcast just on the whole LinkedIn outreach and the strategy that you're taking and how that is working, because most of us, including me, if I'm honest, don't really have a very consistent strategy for posting on LinkedIn or engaging with people. So that's something that you are clearly getting really good at. Any other kind of key learnings or advice you'd give to the audience about the marketing that you have put in place? I think you've shared some great stuff with us already, but Just any final.

Thoughts, really, you know, have a bit of fun with it. I think, you know, sometimes you are going to make mistakes, but I think just keep going with it and I think you'll soon start to know what resonates with people and what doesn't. And also, don't be afraid to reach out to people, even if it's, you know. Could you do a Q and A with us? Could you write a piece for us? I mean, some of our best pieces have actually been talking to some of us schools, marketing clients about their challenges and doing a Q and A piece. So be quite creative and just have a bit of fun with it and have a go. And I think data is the other thing, and I know it's such a boring term when you say data, but I think if you keep a regular record of what's working and what's not, and you actually look at open rates, you look at bounce rates, you look at the number of clicks, it really does start to give you a picture of what works and what doesn't. Even if it's just rudimentary, just keeping an Excel spreadsheet doesn't have to be anything fancy. But I think knowing your numbers and understanding what's resonating with your audience, building on that and get people involved in the conversation, I think are the tips that I would give.

Okay, fantastic. Really good stuff, guys. So, Sally, if anybody wants to get hold of you or Ambleglow, how do they reach you?

So our website is ambleglow.co.uk and my email address is. Is sallyambleglow.co.uk so if anybody needs any help or advice or just wants to pick my brains on kind of my journey, I'd be very happy to help.

Yeah, and go and have a look at some of Amble Glow's content because you'll see some of the points that Sally's made in kind of real life in terms of their blogs. Now, the last question I want to ask you, which I'm asking all of my guests, is if you could give your old self some advice so that that Sally, who was just starting out in her career, you could go back and give her some advice. What would you say to her?

Oh, I think I would say to myself, don't be intimidated when you go to meetings. I've sat in so many meetings in the past, certainly when I first started out in my career, when I was talking to clients and thinking, oh, do I know enough? Am I good enough? And actually the very fact that they've requested a meeting is because we're the experts. So I'd say don't let people intimidate you. You're there for a reason. I guess the best analogy is if you've got a dishwasher that's broken, I'm not going to come and fix it. I would get an expert in. So don't be intimidated by people in meetings. Really you're there as the expert. Have fun and enjoy it and own it.

Fantastic. Good advice, Good advice that we all need to take now if we haven't taken that advice before. So Sally, I really appreciate your time on today's podcast. I think there were some really good nuggets of ideas and thoughts that we can all take take away from that. So that would be niching is really important. Understand who your target customer is. Build know like trust with them by giving value added content. Hire great people and you know, keep checking the data so that you can amend and evolve things as you go. So guys, make sure you are implementing those ideas. And Sally, I will definitely schedule you to come back so we can talk about LinkedIn or some other topics further in the future. So there you have it, some really insightful and practical steps that you can start using in your agency right away, which is the goal for me with these interviews and podcasts. I don't just want you to hear from inspirational people, I want you to have actionable steps. So for me, the five key takeaways from this conversation with Sally were as firstly, make sure you're in control of your own destiny. So external market factors don't have a major impact on you. And if like Amble Glow, you need to zag when everyone else is zigging, then be prepared to do so. But just do it in a strategic way. Don't get distracted by New Sony Object Syndrome. That's not what we're talking about here. Secondly, hire the best people you can afford, ones that will not only be competent to do the job that you need them to do, but also culturally fit in with your agency. And this is true even if you're just using freelance or virtual staff. Number three is that it's vital to get the marketing of your agency right. You might be good at marketing for your clients, but you also need to practice what you preach, which I know is a challenge for a lot of us. So make sure you're creating a solid marketing plan that you consistently focus on delivering. Find the activities and platforms that are really going to work for you. Just like Sally described how she is strategically using LinkedIn number four is know your target customer. If you have clarity around your niche like Ambleglo does with it with the education sector, then it becomes much easier to define your ideal customer avatar or Persona and map your services onto their pain points. It also enables you to shop like an expert and therefore charge higher fees. Now this is a really big topic, one that I am really passionate about and one that I'm definitely going to be talking about in future podcasts. So look out for that on niching. And lastly, number five is keep exploring new and more efficient ways of doing things. Don't just rely on the same old ways that you've always done, otherwise you run the risk of getting left behind. So that's my five kind of summary points. I hope you've really enjoyed listening to Sally as much as I enjoyed interviewing her. Next month I'm going to be talking about the value of building your mailing list. This is a really, really important topic, how to go about doing it, and I will also be talking with CEO PPC specialist and coach David Mills from the PPC machine. Until then, if you want to learn more about niching, I've included a link to a great freebie you can grab hold of, so check that out in the show notes.