Do good work and write amazing content and 80% of sales are already done for you.
This is our approach to growth.
In fact, our pitch win rate is sitting at over 90%. The chance of you working with us after you’ve heard our pitch is a near certainty.
But, when we pitch, it comes at a cost - each pitch we prepare is largely bespoke and we spend a lot of time writing, preparing and discussing it internally. This helps with our win rate, but it does mean we have to be selective with whom we pitch to.
Our entire growth strategy is tied up in 2 elements:
Be the best partner our clients can have (our mission is to be their most consistent source of growth). We strive to be the agency we wanted to work with when we were in-house.
Contribute to the industry by releasing outstanding content and playing an active role in the community.
That’s it. It’s that simple.
And just because it’s simple, doesn’t mean it’s easy. Let’s break down those concepts a bit more.
Becoming the agency we would’ve wanted to work with
We pride ourselves on going above and beyond.
When we work with our clients we’ll go beyond our Paid Search platform, we’ll chat about their technical infrastructure, user experience, company vision, competitors, CRM, customer LTV and so on. We see ourselves as a strategic partner that happens to use Paid Search to acquire customers and can support technical initiatives.
We’re big on proactive communication and bringing new ideas to the table.
With our marketing technology, there is a pretty large difference between us and the majority of other agencies. If we build custom marketing tech for our clients, they own it.
That’s right, if we build a proprietary piece of software specifically for our clients, it’s their IP.
We were warned that it would be one of the particularly poor business decisions we could make, but we did it anyway. What type of partnership exists when the agency is constantly holding its client hostage? And if the relationship ended, they would just rip everything out.
That didn’t seem right to us and you can be certain it’s not something we would’ve been open to when appointing any agency ourselves.
People said that our retention rates would plummet, and the moment we shipped the project the client would leave.
Well - we’re happy to say - that hasn’t happened. In fact, we have wonderful retention rates. And we believe it’s because we see the relationship as a true partnership.
The truth is that there is always more to do. There is always more tech to build, more projects to start, more experiments to run.
Our partners see us as a crucial part of their long-term performance marketing strategy and there is a sustainable value exchange.
Contributing to the industry
When we write articles and scripts it takes a lot of commitment. Our articles can take over 25 hours to research, write and refine. Tools, scripts and resources can take much longer to produce.
That’s a big commitment when you’re trying to balance it alongside client work and internal projects. But we’re sure it’s worth it.
Content has been one of the biggest drivers of new leads for us, second only to referrals. In fact, we’re still getting a respectable stream of leads from a piece of content Byron wrote over 2 years ago.
That’s why we’ll continue to invest the time and energy in sharing what we know with the industry. Pushing useful tools, scripts & frameworks, hypothesising about innovative approaches, testing our theories and creating new case studies.
Beyond the new-client-incentive, we’ve both learnt a lot from reading blogs written by other Paid Search managers, Data Scientists and Engineers and we’re proud to continue that tradition here.