The Time I Took On An Entire Marketing Agency & Won
As you go through your journey as a marketing ronin you might eventually find a client who is never satisfied. I’ve oftentimes encountered these clients when working with tech startups whose business plans are etched in unrealistic growth goals and targets in order to obtain funding.
One such client went as far as to claim to want a $0.001 CPA as part of their user growth goals. Ludicrous, right? And this was after delivering a $0.03 CPA – a result that would make any marketer green with envy.
Still, other clients may constantly doubt that your methods are the best ones. They listen to the gurus and the soothsayers. They watch YouTube videos and listen to podcasts without ever second-guessing the sources and without any critical thinking filtering out what they’re hearing.
They think marketing is as simple as launching a campaign and increasing the budget to improve scale. These clients know little about the fundamentals of actual marketing but think they do because they listen to so-called marketing experts (or their investors)
One time I was working in a highly-competitive niche with little growth. To put things in perspective, the user growth for a highly regarded adjacent company was 0.10% MoM. This company was used to paying upwards of $100 per user.
I was delivering results that were delivering a solid 10% MoM in terms of users acquired and a $0.60 CPA.
Comparing themselves to industry performance wasn’t enough for my client, however. Their investors were telling them they had to grow at 15% MoM.
The Results of The Digital Marketing Audit
So the investors brought in their own agency to audit my performance. I welcomed the challenge with competitive bravado. This was a chance to directly prove my methodology was superior to that of a highly-regarded agency.
The audit took them about a month to deliver (I try to audit in just a few days) and, when it was finally delivered, it focused entirely on superficial items which would not improve performance for my client.
Things like:
No retargeting – my feelings on retargeting are well-documented here. Tl;dr retargeting is overrated.
Needs detailed targeting enabled (Meta Ads). I had tested this extensively in the past and found that 1% LAL audiences outperformed detailed targeting. They couldn’t bother seeing the full history on the ad account despite spending an entire month, however.
Why not combine all geos into one ad group?
You get the picture. None of the suggestions were actually useful. And, despite my warning my client not to spend $10,000 on this agency, my pleas were ignored.
I wish I could say that audits with little actionable or impactful advice aren’t the norm but in the 15 years I’ve been working as a digital marketer I’ve rarely come across one that’s useful. Many times they’re done haphazardly and by cutting corners. Often times they’re just a template, containing the same bullet points they’d send any company.
The Showdown: Marketing Ronin vs Digital Marketing Agency
After negotiating how we’d work together – namely, they’d have their own ad account and I’d have mine – we were off to the races. Over the next quarter, they tried numerous approaches – all of which were the approaches that I had disregarded previously or had tried and had identified as not being worthwhile.
In the end, they spent an additional $25,000 in addition to their agency fee. $35,000 down the drain, in total.
They weren’t able to even come close to matching the successes I had achieved previously. Their best result was a $10 CPA. A result that, while better than my industry benchmark, fell dramatically short of what I was providing.
While I lament the fact that my client wasted budget that could’ve gone to better performing campaigns that I was running, I did feel incredibly validated when my client told me, over the phone, “Well, I guess you’re happy. You took on an entire agency and won.”
I was happy, indeed. It was proof-positive that the techniques I had been refining for years represented a better way of conducting paid advertising.
Why Did My Digital Marketing Advertising Methodology Win Out?
The agency that was contracted told me early on that they were unsure if they could beat my results. In fact, every time we spoke they told me that they had something to learn from me rather than the other way around. Props to these guys for, at the very least, being humble and recognizing excellence when they saw it.
So what was it about their methods that failed to outperform mine?
They weren’t systematic. They didn’t do much research. They didn’t have good aesthetic sensibilities. They weren’t very good copywriters.
In short, they failed to understand the product, the market, and why the ads worked. They also approached things in an ad hoc fashion and didn’t prioritize their tests from greatest to least impact.
You Can Become a One-Man Digital Marketing Agency Too
My experiences taking on that digital advertising agency and winning were what started to get me to think, ‘Why don’t I share my methodology with others?’
It was a massive confidence boost and a source of real validation.
My methodology is tried, tested, and universal. What’s more, it’s only been improved by advances in AI.
In fact, AI’s tendency to ‘unscale’ entire industries and product categories will likely be matched by an equally strong tendency for individuals to ‘scale up’ their competencies and output.
In the future, the agency will become redundant. All marketers will be marketing ronins.
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