The Blueprint for Building a High-Growth Marketing Agency

All right, welcome back to Agency Journey. This is your host, Gray Mackenzie from zenpilot. And today we have the pleasure of bringing on a friend, William Ferreira from an agency known as Social Buff in the uk. William, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me. Good to be here.

I'm excited to dig in here today. Tell us a little about the agency right now. Where are you guys? Where are you headed?

So agency right now we are year four in trading. So we launched early 2019 as a business. We've kind of gone through a lot of change primarily due to Covid. Adapting to the market demand of COVID we initially launched as a social media agency, which is why we're called Social Buff. But because of our backgrounds as kind of entrepreneurs, we leverage the resource and the vehicle that we had built in 2019 to help primarily retail brands pivot into E commerce or help e commerce direct to consumer brands scale. And purely out of demand, we kind of grew the business from there and became a full service direct consumer e commerce marketing agency. And since then we've kind of grown a lot in different ways. You know, we scaled to becoming a 25 man team during COVID and then looked at kind of how we wanted to scale a business that was a little bit more sustainable but also created deeper impact and produced better results for the clients that we work with. So we kind of restructured, scaled back, doubled down on what's really important to us as an agency and what do we actually want to deliver to our clients, which ultimately was increasing revenue and business growth through performance marketing growth initiatives. And since then we've kind of taken performance marketing and included a variation of different services that kind of help support that. So E Commerce Solutions is now a Shopify partner as well as content production, basically being the backbone to our performance marketing and achieving better results year ahead. I think very, very simple. We want to sustainably grow, build better brand recognition not just in the uk, but globally as well and establish ourselves as kind of the go to growth partner for small to medium sized e commerce businesses.

Looking to scale makes sense on the performance side since that's still a big chunk. So primarily meta, is it mostly Facebook, Instagram or you guys, are there other channels that you're loving?

So paid social at the moment is predominantly meta and TikTok some Pinterest. We are very proficient in ppc, so particularly searching, shopping and also email marketing which seems to be kind of. Those three paired together seem to be the sweet spot for e commerce brands at the moment.

Yep, he's using Klaviyo for that email.

Kavio partner as much as we can. Obviously I feel that a majority of the brands that we work with at the moment have recently transitioned or are using it, but as a platform I think the same with Shopify. Both platforms are becoming the kind of go to platforms for E commerce businesses, but we're still seeing a lot of digital transformation migration from one platform to the other. So a lot of the work that we do at the moment is essentially helping with foundational work across what the best platform partner is. So yeah, we're seeing a lot of that change at the moment.

Yeah, it's interesting to see that space just continue to evolve. I mean just like a lot of spaces in this industry but from an agency perspective, like if someone says they're doing E comm email over last three years, like that's on. On Klaviyo almost for sure. Yeah, Klaviyo's obviously gotten ambitious with their pricing more so and so now you've got like agencies and if you just pay attention, like in my world I'm talking to a lot of agency owners and the buzz is like, man, I wish that there was another platform. And people are trying a bunch of different platforms, building different platforms and so there's a little bit of like, you know, rebellion against the Clayvo kind of having the market cornered for a little bit of time. But then if you look at what are general ecom brands doing, like there's still a huge amount of growth in the Klaviyo space. So it's interesting to watch some of the, like you get the, the agency circle and then you've got the end customer circle and there's.

Yeah, I think definitely from an E Comm standpoint the space is changing quite quickly, but I'm also seeing a bit of a monopoly happening. So obviously platform to platform kind of integrations and partnerships essentially making it as difficult for the customer or the E Comm owner as possible to move to something else because it creates that ripple effect of issues. So clever from the platforms. And I guess ultimately if the Ecom brand is performing well then they don't need to worry about the cost. But especially in startup scale up stage, I think we're seeing it a lot where businesses are looking to pivot and find better solutions. But it's quite difficult market to compete against, to be honest, in terms of what you can do with those platforms outside of I guess the most popular ones. But I think there's a couple creeping up and I guess it's the same with How Figma has kind of taken over the editing space at the moment. Most of our team has moved over to that from Adobe and we're seeing. Yeah, software in general. I think there's a lot of great options coming out where they're consolidating basically what you'd work across multiple platforms and software into one place. So convenience is key I think for both agency and brand side.

Right. It's definitely true. Just on the tool side, everyone ridiculed Adobe for a 20 billion acquisition. Acquisition of. Of Sigma. Yeah, but I mean Sigma really was in a lot of these teams eating their lunch in terms of design. So in some sense it's just a. Yeah, we just need to protect our MRR and so we're going to buy them. And look, the hedge against the turn that they were saying.

Yeah, absolutely.

There's right. Upset as well. What, what does the sales motion look for you guys? How are you acquiring customers?

Honestly, I'd say up until probably around 2021, a lot of it, I'd say almost 100% of it was referral based. I owned an agency previous to SocialBuff. I consulted in between both agencies. I had a good network of consumer brands and those, you know, a good demand. So I think that kind of helped grow the business, especially during COVID And in hindsight it was probably also a negative effect was the fact that we didn't build brand as an agency because we focus so much on personal brand leveraging new business. I think what we focus on over the last 12 months is investing in the right channels and the right strategy to help build a brand as an independent entity that would be recognized in the market. So the last phase of that which is happening in the next couple of months is we're rebranding and repositioning slightly and that will be the final kind of stage of that. But most recently is working with lead generation partner that leverages primarily email marketing, so data correlating, access to database, whether that's software. So being able to identify for instance shopify brands in the uk, us, Europe and then ultimately determining a cold outreach campaign that would be attractive or potentially get them to opt into discovery called and at the moment what we're seeing is a lot of brands are looking for what I would say consolidation. So sort of working for different agencies, they want to work with one which makes us quite attractive to smaller e commerce businesses. So we do a lot of consultancy, a lot of auditing and I think that's really helping with our new business wins in comparison to other Agencies that we compete against because, purely because we understand the business model and we put the business first over the individual channels that we offer as a agency that manages them. And I think to a lot of founder led businesses and most of them are or at least kind of startup founding team businesses, they want people who don't just know how to run paid advertising to generate sales. They actually want people who can look at the P and L challenge it, look at forecasting challenge that understand what, what needles you need to pull to scale an E commerce business. So we always kind of look at business first and then everything else second. And so combined with obviously generating those great leads and our I'd say unique approach to sales, which is, you know, we want to focus on quality, not quantity in terms of the partners that we bring on, I think it allows us to unpack and add a lot more value than our competitors do at the moment.

That's awesome to hear. I think we got a question around the outreach side into as deep as it sounds like you're going in strategy because I think you could like, you could put us in a similar bucket. You guys from the outside. An agency might be like, or I'm sorry, an end client might think, oh, here's my Shopify partner, here's my, you know, Clyde guys, or here's my like meta Ads team or whatever. And what you're saying is like we actually go deeper than that. We can help you run it. Like there's no point scaling an offer if it's not profitable for you. All the, all the classic mistakes in E comm and in our business it's a lot of the same thing. We're known by a lot of folks as, hey, if we're looking for ClickUp help, sendpilot's the largest ClickUp solutions partner. They're the first ones, they're the highest rated ones. Like it's my ClickUp partner. And the reality is ClickUp is kind of the, like, that's the front door, that's the way to find out about us. But behind the scenes, we're helping agencies run better businesses, figure out how to get more productive, get more profitable, get more healthy as a team. And ClickUp's the tool that we do it. Just like Shopify is the tool that you help from us through it like.

That.

The whole toolbox. ClickUp by itself doesn't solve the problem. It's the combination of the tooling and the process and habits.

Yeah.

So but you take that depth of strategy and expertise that you have and then you run cold outreach to an audience that needs it and bridging the gap between, hey, I've got two lines to get your attention and bring you in and then I need to open up the type of quality conversation. How has that experience been where someone's like, fine, I'll give you the 15 minutes on a discovery call to then bridge the gap to hey, can we actually get into your P and L and unpack what's really going on in the business?

So what I'm noticing more now than I did back in 2019 is I'd say there's been a wave of what I'd call kind of the elevated freelancers who kind of basically single man agencies that usually specialist in one channel. And I would say it's kind of the online business mentality. And then you've got kind of your smaller agencies established and then you've got your bigger agencies that normally have kind of good market equity, great online ip. And what I'm finding is our biggest battle is competing with the bigger ones that are ultimately going to be the preferable choice because they have a great reputation, they have years and years of experience, they've got awards. But then also on the flip side we have is kind of these single individual agencies or kind of remote businesses where it just feels like there isn't a lot of professionalism or isn't as well polished. And trust me, I've been there. I understand when you've got a closed business you got to do everything you can, especially when you're first starting out. But I think what that's doing is putting, it's making cold outreach harder and harder. Where used to have, I mean, speaking from experience, I used to have one or two messages a week. Now I have 10 to 20 messages a day offering me services. And so it's how do you separate yourself from the noise and to give some simple tips to agencies. I think, you know, again, this is why we want to focus on building our brand IP as an agency versus my personal brand is my personal brand could get us through the door. So you know, my LinkedIn for instance, there's a lot of press and there is kind of mentions of awards or you know what I'd call kind of my verification tick, which is mentioning Forbes or award winning entrepreneur or whatever that might be. So there's social proofing there on a what I'd call commercial level. So you know, those people aren't going to look at your Instagram, they're going to look at your LinkedIn. So it's making sure that that's well polished and then the also is a consistency across the team. So all of my team members will have LinkedIn banners that are consistent or you know, essentially job descriptions or descriptions of the agency. And I think a lot of people especially starting out don't think about these things. It's kind of where's the brand IP outside of a good looking website. And a lot of them actually don't have good looking websites either. And I think starting out a lot of people don't think they need to prioritize it. They just focus on an inbound, sorry, you know, an outbound kind of lead generation technique and just double down on sales calls which I think works in some period of time, especially when you first start. What I've noticed recently with cold outreach is essentially being able to leverage bigger brands or case studies of previous work and then basically combine those with what I'd call that personal ip. So two sentences is we've partnered with X brand in this category that might be globally recognized brand or challenger brand that's got a lot of attention and on a personal level then talking about the personal achievements, you know, award winning entrepreneur or mentioning this or you know, non exec director in this company which if they look at up has just raised £2 million. So it's kind of layering what I'd call the blue verification tick that you have on Instagram through obviously digital ip. And I feel like there's actually not as many businesses doing that as you would expect and that's definitely helped us. I'd also say being a little bit tongue in cheek, it's very British kind of approach but almost making it feel like I'm texting you versus sending a professional email. So the script is very casual, almost like a, you know, I'm here to help you, not the other way around and therefore kind of inclines that person to engage. And then I think the final one is adding a piece of value. So usually again it's leveraging your time and your personal value in sense of brand perception. So saying I'm willing to give 15 to 30 minutes of my time for a free consultation or we're willing to audit your E commerce store and give feedback on how you can better perform and no strings attached. So it's kind of layering those different, I'd say brand IP with a, with a clear hook and value proposition that is really, really attractive and doing that in two sentences is hard. So you have to split, test and try different angles. But it is really effective.

Yeah, that's cool. I think the point that you made as well of like where's the transition point for some of these brands where it naturally makes sense if you've got a ton of success competing against the one person show where the originally they got bought by the brand because that was the budget option and someone to do the thing that everyone's telling me you have to run Facebook ads like okay, I'll go find the cheapest person I can go to, go do that. And then they grow to a point where okay, we gotta add in retention marketing and added whatever else.

Yep. So yeah, I think if you can.

Gear towards what's the transition point.

Yeah.

And for us a lot of that transition point is and we've got kind of like a couple different types of brands. You got the couple hundred person agency or 100 plus person agency and they're transitioning tools. Or this is a big initiative. You know, this is a three month, six month, like hey, we're gonna, we're gonna make a big push around process orientation, how we work and efficiency. But you've got a lot of the folks in the 10 to 20% range who are like, hey, I'm at the point where I can't do anymore as a founder. I need my head of ops. And usually the first head of ops that people hire, this is also their first time doing head of ops. Same thing as why we hired one person agen like, hey, this person was affordable or they were with me and they had an inclination for this. And so I really need that person to become legit in a relatively short period of time if that's going to be the right investment.

Yeah.

So finding those transition points is really important in terms of what do you then message around. So I think that's helpful. What do you guys. If we stay on the upside and go back to tools, are there one or two lesser known tools that, that power your lesser known. But like what are the key pieces in your tech stack?

To be honest, there isn't. I'd actually say the problem that we have is we've previously had kind of an overstimulation of too many tools. So I think that's actually the key issue I found is, you know, I had a consultant that came into the business last year, a good friend of mine who had run bigger businesses and he made a joke saying that the way we were operating was if we're 100 million company and actually that was a negative to how we need to operate. We need to be a lot leaner. And more agile. So what we've actually recently done is scaled everything back. We're using a tool for everything and what we've looked at is how do we simplify that down to essentially using I'd say now four key tools from an operations standpoint. So your Basic is Slack, big advocate of the of Google suites. So Slack Hybrid, Google Suite, Google Hangout, Gmail, so on and then internal what I'd call operating system which covers task management, filing. Sops is obviously your bread and butter which is ClickUp. And that's the most recent transition we've made. And then externally facing for our clients we actually leverage airtable. So separating airtable and ClickUp I think was a good decision because I think it compartmentalizes the team's attitude towards the two systems. We could go as far as integrating and merging airtable into ClickUp but I think we've put a very kind of visual and customizable content system that the clients have access to. So I'd say in terms of our go to tech stack, those are the core kind of components. Backend, we have a couple of other stuff from an HR standpoint. So Charlie, HR is really great. But yeah, that was actually my ops director, he comes from a tech background and kind of looked at how we operated as a business and wanted to make it more agile, more efficient and streamlining communication, coordination, organization. So I think we went from about 15 different pieces of software down to now four being our day to day use which has completely transformed how we operate and how quickly we can work.

That's awesome. Two follow up questions of that. One, what do you guys use for a CRM?

So CRM is pipe drive. So pipedrive again the way I think and this is no way I advocate this for other people but usually when it comes to software it's more about the UX UI design than actually the software itself. I'm terrible and if it's not minimalist and it's not visually compelling. So I really really struggled with using other CRM systems because I felt they were overcomplicated for what I needed, which is basically a dashboard to visually identify deal flow and then a CRM system working from via email and book calls. And that's basically it. So again we used other platforms in the past but pipedrives has been the easiest one we've used. And then for more kind of task based deal flow management we actually used a ClickUp integration. So I can manage all of the tasks for new business deals though from pipe driving up as well.

Cool. That's awesome. And then the spicy question, but obvious question is what are some of the tools that got cut? Because I think this could be an inspiration for a lot of those things.

I think there was a lot of tools that got cut that were client facing tools. So social media management software and I think the biggest problem about being an agency that is full service for E commerce businesses is you've almost got to operate as an E commerce business yourself and implement the same way of thinking and the same way as working as them, but across multiple brands. So actually what I found was similar to our internal tools than our external tools in terms of what was client facing or what was aiding client delivery versus how we operate and organize ourselves as an agency. There's the same attitude. We had software here for social media, software here for email web analytics data. So finding software that essentially integrates that as much as possible. So on a kind of a basic level, Google Data Studio has been obviously a very useful tool for that. But then going deeper as to, you know, actually partnering with E commerce specific data tools that an E commerce brand would pay to use that gives insight into how do we optimize campaign performance across paid email and so on. But how do we generate the data we need as an agency to put together great reports? And so we've gone through a very long discovery process of working with different platforms and figuring out which ones agency specific or has a what I'd call kind of an integration for agencies to use across multiple brands, which is actually very limiting. You have to kind of create your own kind of manual integrations and ways of working. But there's a couple that have been great. So more specifically Whaler, Polar analytics are the kind of two that have stood out to us recently, what with CLAR as well a couple of our clients on that. So that's the only attitude shift that we've had to make is we need to think like an E commerce business and operate like one, but with a, an agency mentality saying it's kind of a hybrid between the two. That's been the hardest one. There's no specific platforms that were cut. I'd say it was just kind of a migration of, you know, having a lesser more approach and just kind of filtering that down as much as possible.

Yeah, makes sense. I like to ask people what's your number one tip for agency operators? And that may be it, but I want to run that by so one one could be, hey, consolidate down your tech stack. Is there anything else that sticks out? It's like you're talking to William from two years ago and saying, man, if you knew this, like this is, this would be my big tip.

I would say on a human level, talent has a lot to do with how you improve operations as a business. And delving into that is understanding different personalities are needed for different things. So I think that was kind of the first layer to, if I was to give myself advice, it's understanding what kind of people I need in the team to essentially create the engine versus essentially the team that deliver the work for the clients. So that's the first layer. The second one I'd say is also again, basic level. But so many people don't consider this or think about it. Is SOPS essentially making it as simple as possible for an employee to come into the business and understand how everything runs and then not overcomplicating things. I do think especially when you're kind of a smaller business, there's a lot of bottlenecks. The quicker you can remove those bottlenecks, implement a lean operating system that is foolproof for anyone to learn and then combine that with great people to manage that process led with very easy training. I think that's kind of where your sweet spot is. I would say for the first three years of running the business, it was go to this person for this information, speak to this person for this information. If you don't have clarity on this, figure it out and let us know how you figured that out. It was, I think, just having the right processes in place and a way in which you can record that. And I'd say especially from a remote business, it's super important. It's a lot harder to problem solve as a remote business takes a lot longer. So SOP is leaning down your systems and processes, making sure you have a very kind of efficient operating system. Those are all of the things I just didn't think about, especially during COVID And that's probably because we had a lot more contact time, multiple calls throughout the day. And then I think the final one, which I read it quite recently, which was the difference between kind of your different layers of being an entrepreneur is realizing that you go from being a startup founder who starts a business and it's like the building block effect versus someone who owns a business and the person who owns the business. And when you get to the stage where you're focusing on the business is focusing on the data, data first. And if you don't have the right systems in place to give you the data, then you need to start those systems But I definitely say the last 12 months, I, myself and my ops director have been far more focused on what the data tells us. That's from everything from your finances, your time tracking capacity, your profitability per account, your expenses. Just really looking at every single piece of the business from an analytics standpoint, where almost each week you have a snapshot of everything and how it's operating and get clear feedback on what needs fine tuning or tweaking. So I'd say that's probably be the most important thing in terms of the change in attitude that's helped us operate Dutch as a business as a whole.

Yeah, that's awesome. The natural follow up is where does that, where does that scorecard like when we're working with teams, it's one of the first steps is hey, let's build out your agency operator scorecard. Let's make sure that we understand what metrics matter the most. So totally agree that that's crucial step. A lot of people are like, oh no, we're too, we're too early for that. And it's rare that there's a team who's actually too early to have a really simple scorecard that they're, that they're managing off of. If you're one person and you're trying to figure out, you're just taking on whatever you can take on to try to figure out if there's business, yes, you're too early for that.

Yeah.

But if you're four or five people and growing data is your friend and all, it becomes more and more important. So where does that get centralized and where does that live?

Well, at the moment I'd say originally it was actually an airtable and we actually had a very good one piece. Airtable has a lot of pre made kind of templates to this and a custom dashboard that migrates everything. As of four weeks ago, we're now migrating that into ClickUp. So we kind of know in terms of the foundations of what we need, what kind of KPIs we're looking at, it's more of a case of making sure the tool is autonomous and basically can operate without the kind of manual labor required to go into it. And because ClickUp obviously offers solutions around essentially some of the KPIs such as capacity and time tracking and being able to produce rag status on client accounts, profitability, those are the things that ClickUp already does and those are large proportions of what we focus on as an agency in terms of are we performing and hitting KPIs and operating the way we should. So hopefully in the next couple of weeks, we'll have that. Yeah, it's kind of the solid foundations of the business.

That's awesome. Cool. Well, I've got a million more questions I could ask you, but this has been really good. So I appreciate you being able to come on and share, dig into some stuff around tools, talent, data, like really, really key pieces. I told you right before we started recording. And I'm coming back from the EOS conference, so talking about the six key components of running a business. Like, we hit on a bunch of that stuff today.

Yeah.

Folks who do want to follow your personal brand and tag along for the story, where should we point them?

You can probably find me. The best place to find me is on LinkedIn. So William Ferreira. Or you can search SocialBuff on LinkedIn or www.SocialBuff.com. that's probably the best place where all my content information is through those two.

Awesome. William, this has been great. Thanks so much for joining me today on Agency Journey.

Thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure.