Dirty Little Tricks To Look Out For When Choosing A Marketing Agency

Hello, Sabree. Thank you for joining me today.

Thanks for having me on.

Now we've known each other, I think, not long after you started King Kong. And you are the number one person I go to for digital marketing. And I know you're in Byron Bay at the moment. It's where it all started for you, where you grew up. Can you tell us a bit about your story?

Yeah, sure. So I was raised by a single parent mother here in Byron Bay. And I watched my mom hold down three jobs to, to provide for me and my sister and still come home and cook us a healthy meal every night. And I got my start very, very early on. I was kind of helping my mom and working one of the cafes and I would wake up in the morning and go and help her bring out all the tables and chairs and do all of those stuff. And after watching her work so hard, I basically thought like, hey, I need to kind of pull my weight. Got my first job grinding peanut butter at a health food store when I was 7 years old for $2.50 an hour. Did that. And I was like, hey, this isn't a very good gig. Like, I'm never really going to be able to make any meaningful money that's going to help my mom out. And that's where I probably got bitten by the entrepreneurial bug, is that I started busking with a harmonica at a Sunday market and I made 70 bucks in like my first Saturday or first Sunday doing it. And I was like, hey, this is, this is a lot better than earning $2.50 an hour. And then, you know, when I gave all that money to my mom and, and basically watching her hold down three jobs and provide for me and my sister is what forged something in me that I call like single parent mother work ethic. And I've applied that for everything that I've ever done. I transitioned and got my first quote unquote professional job in sales when I was 16. I was the runt of the litter of the salespeople there. I was the worst salesperson there for like the first three weeks. I was almost just not about to pass my probation. And the business owner was like, hey, I see something inside you. I'm going to give you a shot. You got to week to turn it around. Otherwise you got to get out of here because you're not making any sales. And that was like kind of something flicked. A switch flicked inside me, so to speak. It's either motivation or desperation. And I think for myself that it was a combination of them both. And I remember going home that night and was like, man, I got to figure this out. Like, what I'm doing is not working. And like in Byron Bay, like growing up as a regional beach town, it's like you either work as a kitchen hand, like scrubbing dishes and like peeling potatoes, or I found like the one sales job that was like, no sales experience required. So I knew that I had to make it work if I wanted to do anything. And I kind of came back the next day with a different attitude and was like, I'm going to outwork all these people and I'm going to apply that same work ethic. And, you know, within a week, I was their top producing salesperson. I did that for a while. I was the top salesperson for as long as I was there. And then I traveled the world selling everything that you can imagine, one to one, one to many, door to door, over the telephone. You name it, I've sold it pretty much. And that was kind of what made me fall down the rabbit hole of sales and marketing and business. Then came back from overseas and went back to uni because everyone told me that's what I should do. And I enrolled in a degree in marketing and was working at a part time job that was a company that was selling Google Ads. And you know, I would do uni full time. And then I was working that pretty much full time as well. And it came up to my second summer, I think, at university, and I was like, somebody asked me on the telephone, oh, like, we don't want to run Google Ads. We want to be on the left hand side of Google. We want to be in those free listings. Can you do that? And me being the ambitious young salesperson that I was, I was like, yeah, we can sort that out for you. It's going to be $750 a month. Got off the telephone, went over to the business owner and was like, hey, I just sold this thing called SEO for 750 bucks a month. We don't sell that, so you better figure it out. And figure it out I did and I fell down the rabbit hole. And that was when I kind of was like, hey, I think that I could do this a lot better than the company that I'm working for right now. And that's what led me to start my first business. And I started it over summer, which was a digital agency. Built that up to, you know, by the end of summer we were doing a couple of hundred grand a month in revenue. And I was like, why would I go back to university and learn about business when I already have a business and I already am learning how to do this stuff firsthand and I'm getting paid. I'm not paying to learn it. So I dropped out, hired a team, built that business up, you know, to seven figures and ended up exiting that business, selling it. And since then, I've run businesses. I've run a few into the ground. I've sold some at all of those businesses. I've always been tasked with a number one problem that all business owners face, which is how do I get more customers? And that's something that I've just been obsessively focused on for over a decade now. And it's fundamentally what our business at King Kong is kind of centered around is solving that burning problem for our clients.

Wow, you've actually answered my next question. Why did you start King Kong? Elaborate on that. You said you could do it better and you talked about focusing on the customer and acquisition of customer. So why King Kong and how has it evolved to be what it is.

Today, like, in all of those businesses? As I said, like, I was tasked with how do we get more customers, right? And I was also in a position where we've had to hire agencies or I've had to hire internal team members to try and do this stuff, or the whole journey with me also figuring out how to do all of this stuff. And in all of those instances, everyone was just speaking an entirely different language. It's like, hey, I've got this problem, like, I need to get more customers. This is where we're at. This is how much money that we've got to spend per month. And it was just like the same old rhetoric that they would always give me of like, yeah, we can do this. This is how much impressions or likes your campaign is going to get, and this is the money that it's going to cost. And I was like, ok, so like, what happens if it doesn't work? Like, what happens if we just, like, get likes? But I'm not making any money as a result of the work that you guys are doing. That's like, that's about it, right? And no one was willing to take on any accountability or have to have any skin in the game. And the way that they would measure success on the engagement is just on all these vanity metrics that I couldn't pay my staff with. Like, I can't take those likes to the bank and pay someone. I can't do payroll with that, right? I can't put food on my Table. So I was like, I only wanted to speak in the terms that I understood, which is I put $1 into this advertising, and then at the end of 30 days, at the end of 180 days, at the end of 12 months, how much money spits back out? And no one was willing to have that conversation with me. And it's still today, there are very few people that are willing to have that conversation. So I was like, this is fundamentally like a massive problem, right? And I was able to solve that problem in most of the businesses anyway that I worked at. And I was like, well, like I should potentially just help solve this problem. Like, if you look back in the gold rush, the people that made the most money are the people that were also like selling all the spades and the shovels and the panning of the stuff to the people. And, you know, my skill set, not just using that to solve my own problem of how do I get own customers in my own business, but how do I use that from now the hundreds of thousands of people that are impacted by the teachings that I put out there and being able to fundamentally solve that. Because for me, it's a little bit deeper than just I'm providing, providing these services and then I'm making money. I'm kind of beyond the stage where I'm waking up to put food on the table for me and my family right now. It's like, there has to be something else that's driving me to do it. And for me, it's like, you know, how much of an impact can I leave on the world? And am I living up to my full potential? And I look at business as a huge vehicle to drive a lot of change in the world. And I can help a single parent mother who's running a business that's got two kids that's stressed out of their mind about how to put food on the table, where the next paycheck's going to come from? And she started up this side hustle to provide for her family. If I can help her solve that problem, then that's the thing that really lights me up and motivates, is seeing that transformation that I'm able to then go and help people because there's enough problems in the world and there's enough things to worry about. And I really firmly believe that money shouldn't be one of those things.

What a why. That's an awesome why. I love that. And I like the fact that you've solved a problem in the digital marketing space where you said no One was having that conversation. They were like, yeah, we got your likes. And really, businesses, our clients are small businesses. And this podcast is aimed at SMEs. They don't have big boards and big budgets that understand return on investment, on expenditure, and, and really have the best of the best on their boards that drive that. SMEs don't have all the skill sets to understand that. So marketing agencies that give you likes might be great, but owner doesn't understand why the business isn't growing. So I love that King Kong solves that problem. And it's obvious why you're so successful and why King Kong successful. I want to dive a little bit deep into hiring an agency. You obviously can't work with everyone, and so there is going to be clients of ours and business owners looking at agencies. How do you find a great marketing agency?

It's a great question and it's one that obviously comes up a lot. And for me, you know, I use the mental model for all areas of my life is like, you know, you want to be taking advice from somebody who is very close to the action and is actually knows what the hell that they're talking about. It's like, you wouldn't really want to go and hire a personal trainer that's overweight or hire a financial planner who doesn't have their finances in order or a life coach who their life is in shambles or a relationship coach, right? And it's. You really want to dig deep and say, is this person eating their own dog food? Right. Are they taking their own medicine? Are they using the same strategies that they're prescribing to my business to grow their own business? And if they're not, then they're not in a position to tell you how to do it because they haven't even mastered it for themselves, right? So the first, this first way that you look at mastery is first of all solving the problem for yourself and really solving it and then going, okay, these are the mental models and the frameworks and the strategies and tactics that I've developed to solve it for myself. Now let me work with a small group of people and see if this same hypothesis holds true with these people, then applying that and seeing if that works. And then only then if that works, then you like knocking on the doors of even becoming an expert, right? And then there's a long, long, treacherous journeys of crossing mountains, crossing rivers, slaying dragons to get down to the depths of what we call mastery. And the thing that you really want to be looking at is like, okay, this agency is saying that they can help me scale my business through paid ads, right? So through Facebook ads, First of all, are they using paid ads, ie Facebook ads, to get their own business clients? Right? And this is typically where they'll be like the kind of clients that we want on, on Facebook. So we find the best way to get clients is to cold call them. And it's like, oh, so you just haven't figured it out? You don't really know what you're talking about, right? Or the same people that say, hey, like we don't need to be on page one of Google because like we get all of our clients from word of mouth. It's like, why wouldn't you want both of those things? There's another excuse. And what you'll find is that people are full of excuses. And I believe digital marketing, you know, has probably the most incompetence than like any other category of industry other than maybe chiropractors. And of course, like In Australia there's 1,800 digital marketing agencies, okay. And 85% of those are operated by people in their pajamas that are basically have, you know, been working out of a garage watching YouTube videos and then they just slap the guru cap on and they're like, yeah, I know how to do this because I solved it for like some weird obscure niche for my cousin's brother in law or something crazy like that, right? They don't have any real runs on the board. So you want to have a look at first of all, one, are they using the same strategies that they're imploring you? If so, and they're doing it for their own business, what have they achieved for other people's businesses? How many businesses have they worked with? How many industries have they worked in? What strategies did they use to grow those businesses? Because you get all these people that talk about like return on investment in ROAS and they're like invest like $100 a month and they get a 10x ROAS at $1,000. Like who cares about that? It's not life changing. It's not going to do anything for anybody really. So I'm talking about measurable results that you can really look at. And you know, after vetting those things and having a look and checking those things out and making sure that they actually do what they tell people to do, I think that's the first place to really start.

And those questions that you asked is really important to ask those. Are there ways to investigate an agency outside of the interview Process.

Yeah, there definitely is. So, for instance, like, say, for instance, you're looking to hire an agency that runs Facebook ads. If you go across to that agency's Facebook page, then you click on, like, page privacy, and you click on it, and then it will say, hey, this page is currently running ads, or they're not running ads. If they're not running ads, run for the hill. Right? They just don't even touch them, no matter what they tell you. Do not. And so then if they are, awesome, click into the ads, find out how long that they've been running ads. See how many ads that they're running. That's one way. Then if it's like you want to look at they're doing SEO, or if they've got, you know, Google Ads running, you want to go to across to a website called semrush.com and then you can type in the URL for that agency, and it will bring up and it will show you how many keywords that they rank for organically. It will show you their Google Ads, it will show you how long they've been in running those Google Ads. And immediately, if they're a Google Ads agency and they're not running Google Ads, run for the hills. If they're an SEO agency and they don't rank for any keywords themselves, run for the hills. If they're a Facebook agency that isn't running Facebook ads, run for the hills. And what you'll find throughout this process is that, first of all, 80% of them don't run ads. It's like anything. If you're looking for that Topper echelon, what you're looking for, that's the thing that you want to be looking for. And like a lot of things in life, if you buy cheap, you buy twice. My team speaks with hundreds of businesses every month that have taken the cheaper alternative and they've hired someone locally that is cheap, or they've hired someone offshore that is cheap. And ultimately, you know, with marketing, if the marketing is good, it's free because you're getting more money. Soldiers return back to camp every month than you send out every month. So it's not just about this person charges me two grand per month, and this other agency quoted me five grand per month, it's like, well, what's the difference in the results that they give you? If you're spending 2 grand in management and 3 grand in ad spend, and they're making you 20 grand and that other guy's charging you 5 grand in management and he's doing 5 grand in ad spend, but you're making 180 grand, then it's costing you so much more to go with the cheaper alternatives. And the sign of a bad marketer is a cheap marketer, because the whole premise is like, price elasticity. If you're a good marketer, you can create more demand than there is supply. And when you do that, your prices go up. And if your prices are cheap, that means that you're unable to generate enough demand for you to increase your prices. So realistically, it's like, would you hire a cheap surgeon to do plastic surgery on your face? I don't think that you would. And it's just the same, like, if you were looking for the cheapest price, you're never, ever going to be able to get cheaper than the hundred emails that you receive from the Philippines and India and all different corners of the earth that promise you to get you on page one of Google in 30 days for 10 bucks a month. So you really need to do your due diligence and really figure out, like, has this person walked in the path that I want to walk down?

Yeah, look, I want to tell a little story about my journey with you. When I first met you, it was, I think, second year into your business and you, you did really well. Your revenue was growing and we started working together. And I, I have to say I was skeptical, Sabrina. I thought, oh, you know, we didn't use marketing at the time or digital marketing, and I saw you grow your business. But, you know, what cemented me to know that you were the real deal was exactly what you just said. You actually use these strategies for your own business and you've achieved such great results. It's really interesting that you mentioned that. That's a key element of why an agency has to be good. And I've, I've just seen it and cemented my understanding that you are the real deal. And it didn't take long to understand, but it was just amazing. In saying that, though, let's say you've engaged an agency, how much time should a client give for them to at least deliver on the promise? Because, you know, they can say, oh, you know, we need more time, or blah, blah, blah. Is there set times that you should sort of work towards a different stuff?

I'm going to have to unpack this one and dial it in. Right. So basically, like, I would love to be able to sit here and say that every campaign that we touch is a winner, every swing that we hit is a home run. Everything that we touch is gold. And that is not the case. Right. Do clients hire us and we don't hit a home run? Yes, that does happen. So first of all, to understand that like you don't hire a marketing agency and they just solve every problem in your business and they just take what you're selling and they shoehorn it in the market and they just sell floods and floods and just an avalanche of customers come your way. There's so much more in to what is going to drive success and what's not going to drive success. If somebody comes to us and they're in the car and it's moving and they just want us to put some more acceleration on the engine, pretty much it's like 99 point times we're going to hit that thing right out of the park because they've already got proof, they've already run the machine and it's working and they just want to get better results. But what most people do is they've never ever advertised to strangers to convert them into customers. And they have purely relied off word of mouth to grow their business. And in fact, it's. They almost use it as a badge of honor that they don't need to advertise and that they get all of their business from word of mouth. And then unfortunately, it's accountants that look at line items on P and L steps and they're like, hey, what's all this advertising stuff going on here? Like, how about we just remove that and it goes straight to the bottom line. And it's like, they don't look at what is the top line. How impacted and manipulated is that by this advertising spend? So then they come to an advertising agency and they're like, can you get us more customers? And then say, for instance, lead gen, you get them a whole bunch of leads and they're like, none of these people are buy. And it's like, you've been used to speaking to people that are referrals. The deal's already done. You're already getting like a vote of recommendation from your friend or colleague saying, hey, Savannah's the real deal. Hire this guy right there. Doesn't take any skill to do that. Very, very little skill. And it's the same people that say that their close rate on an inbound lead is like 80%. Immediately if someone tells me that, I know that they're not getting cold traffic. So then we have a look at, okay, does this person have a proven selling system? I. E. Do they have a way to go out there? Into the marketplace and grab attention and convince those people to then take the next step of get a lead and then do I have the sales systems and the script in place to then convert that stranger and turn them into a customer? And there is a lot of nuance into that, that. Because even businesses that have somewhat traction, the disproportionate amount of those businesses fail, right? Like if you look at venture capital, so venture capitalists, 80% of their businesses fail all the time. These are people that have a proven concept, have money in the bank, have a product market fit to some extent. And then 80% of all venture capital goes to Google and Facebook ads. 55% of it can be directly attributed to that. And then there's another kind of like 20 to 30% that is sales and marketing related expenses. And if you boil that down again, you'll see it's like a team that then runs the Google and Facebook ads, yet 80% of those businesses fail. So if you just stop and think about how sobering that is, it's not like you can't just go to a marketing agency and money is going to magically fall from the sky. There's a lot of work that's required from that business owner to get it dialed in. Because what we're trying to do is the miracle, right? Like, you look at, like, you know, what, Warren Buffett, or if you look at, you know, Charlie Munger, his business partner, or you look at Ray Dalio, he's the greatest hedge fund manager of all time at Bridgewater Capital, right? These guys are getting 20 to 30% returns on their money. It's not uncommon in advertising for you to get a 300% or 400% or a thousand percent, right. Return on your advertising dollars if you do it right. So it shouldn't be easy to get those type of returns because it's like, you know, you should be on the COVID of Forbes magazine touted as a financial genius if you can put a dollar in and get five bucks out, right? So there's a process to it and there's a nuance to it. If you have a proven model, and I told you I'd have to take the scenic route with this question, but let's come back to the question, right? So if you've already got some momentum and your car is already moving, already running paid ads and you're going to an agency to then approve upon those results, I would say that three to six months is a good timeframe to get them accustomed into your business to, you know, Set up what the landing pages, the structure, the account structure, get people in, get the algorithm learning to then be able to benchmark the results that that agency is getting compared to your results. And that's what it is that you should look at. However you come to a business and you've never advertised before and it's all word of mouth. The way that I say it to prospects and the way that I would say it to Savannah on the way that I would say it to my mom or any of my friends that run a business is let's just say that you're going to put five grand a month into marketing. You need to be okay that you put that $5,000 in and no soldiers return back to camp. So five grand a month, 12 months, we've got $60,000 in the hole. Unless you are completely comfortable. And of course you wouldn't like it, but at least it wouldn't sink any ships. If you lost that 60 grand, then don't invest in marketing. And then you need to think about if I lost this $60,000, that's the worst case scenario. I didn't get one razoo back, not $1, not one client, and I was 60k in the hole. Now let's look at the other side, the flip side of that coin. What happens is you invested it and it added another million dollars to your business a year. Right? What would that enable you to do? Right. It's 2 million. So like anything in business, you need to calculate the upside and the downside. Nothing is guaranteed and especially if you don't have a proven system. But it's a very, very rewarding process. It's the most rewarding process in a business is to be able to spend a dollar and make money back. And unless you have the ability to pay to acquire a customer, then you don't have a business, you have a job and you have a hobby because you don't have a scalable, predictable rinse and repeat process to get new customers and to bring revenue in. And you're just operating by the fate of what falls in your lap.

That month you talked about measuring success and measurement a fair bit in your answering the question, how do you measure success at King Kong or in digital marketing agency generally.

So it depends again what the client's business is. We'll set up KPIs directly with those clients so we're crystal clear on what success looks like. So, you know, we've developed what we call scientific customer acquisition. If you go to most people's businesses and you're like, hey, like, what do you want to do? And they're like, I want to grow my business. And it's like, fantastic. As a very esoteric statement, what does that actually mean for you? Right. Like, how do you do that? And this is, this is something that plagued me early on in my business. It's like, I want to grow my business. Okay, well, how do you grow a business? And there's only really three ways to grow a business. One of them is that you get more customers. The second is you make those customers buy more often or you increase your prices. And that's the three ways that you've got to grow a business. So then if we're going to go into the first bucket of we need to get more customers. Excellent. Let's have a look at what's involved. To get more customers, what do you need to do? Well, I'm in a lead generation business. I need to get leads. Okay, excellent. So then we start to get some building blocks. And we'd say, how many clients? Like by how much do you want to grow your business? And then they might say X figure. And then you're like, how many clients would you need to get in order to hit X figure? I would need this many clients. Excellent. How many leads would we need to get in order to get that many clients? I would need to get this. How many clients do you churn per month? I churn this. Okay. So that means that we would need to probably increase that number to get a net growth of those customers each month. Okay, excellent. How much does it cost us to get a lead? This is how much it costs us. This is how much we should spend. Right. And you start to basically start with the end in mind and then back into that goal. So it's that exercise that we go through with our clients. Clients. And we set up, okay, like what's your close rate? And then based on the lifetime value of a client is based on what the payback period of that LTV is, then we work out what their close rate would have to be. What's the maximum we would be able to spend in order to acquire a lead? In order to acquire a customer. And we set up these KPIs. So if something's not working, we know why it's not working. And it's not like the marketing's not working. It's like, well, what's actually happening? What's the KPI? Are we hitting KPI and click, click through rate on the ads? Are we hitting conversion rate KPI on The landing page. Are we hitting KPI on close rate on those leads into clients? Like what part specifically of the funnel is it breaking down? And then let's go in there and address that thing.

And I guess one of the questions I have is there's one part to it is a closing part, right? And you don't provide the closing component of your service. You give them qualified leads, you go do all the work and, and at the end of the day, the business owner has to close the leads. Do you find that a lot of the time they just don't have the abilities to do that or the skills to do that? Has that been a common trait? And you have to educate them?

Yeah, it is. And it's typically caused by them only growing their business from word of mouth and like them being able to get away with having a receptionist deal with an inbound lease. Right. Or not having a hungry, motivated salesperson that knows how to follow up, knows how to call someone multiple times quickly, you know, knows how to deal with somebody that sounds piping hot, but then ghosting you the next week. And I don't want to remove all responsibility from that thing. So what we've done is, you know, I give my clients the same training that I give my own internal salespeople. Because it was something that we realized very early on is that people just can't close leads. And they can't close leads because they don't have a rinse and repeat process and a script and a follow up plan and what to say on a voicemail and all the things that come involved in what that thing is. So then I started basically, like, my clients were like, dude, like, your business has grown like crazy, like, what is it that you're doing? And then I've said like, hey, we're doing the same thing that you're doing at sist, where we're really diligently making those leads work. And then they'll be like, man, I will pay you to learn how to do that. That. And then I kind of just got inundated with requests to, for me to start running sales workshops and all those kind of stuff. And I was like, hey, I'm not going to do that, but I will, I will like give you access to like my internal sales process and what we do at our business to eliminate that. But again, it comes down to like, a lot of people start a business because they are the practitioner. That is, they start a catering business because they love to cook. And one of their friends said, hey, like this lasagna is really good. You should start your own catering business. And then these people like, yeah, I'll start my own catering business. And then they start their own catering business, right? And like, nowhere along the line did that person get any education around what it takes to grow a business, to build a team, to lead, to inspire, to spend money, to acquire a customer, to retain clients, to retain staff, to write job ads, to do HR payout, to manage a balance sheet. Right? All of that stuff that comes involved with running a business. And they don't really understand fundamentally what the first principles are to running a business. And then you put them in an environment where they're like, hey, I really love, like, cooking this lasagna or building these homes or painting these paintings or, you know, managing these spreadsheets. And I just need more people to do that so I make more money. And then they're like, I just need to hire someone to solve this problem with me. And they start from a place where they're trying to sell what it is that they're passionate about, not what the market is absolutely starving for. What they would crawl across, crush glass to get to the solution. And they start with product or service first and not market first. So that's the biggest fundamental thing that plagues most businesses of why they aren't set up to grow is because the foundations of those businesses aren't set up in a way that's tailored to what the market is starving for. It's more tailored towards. I've got this widget or this service or this product that I think is really cool and that I want to sell, but isn't necessarily something that the market is starving for. And there's no amount of taking an inferior thing that somebody doesn't want and then trying to convince somebody to want that thing. That's a recipe for a disaster. It's about finding out the existing desires that are present in the marketplace and then channeling those desires towards your product or services. Hey, guys, if you're enjoying these videos, please, like, subscribe and hit the bell button as we're dropping a video like this every other day on YouTube. And if you've got any questions, just leave a comment below with heysubrey and I will do my best to get to it. Sa.