35:5 How to filter potential clients

Lee:
Welcome to the Agency Trailblazer Podcast. This is your host Lee Matthew Jackson, and today all the way from sunny Stratford, it is the founder of Socially Contented, none other than Cathy Wassell. How are you?

Cathy:
I’m fine. How are you?

Lee:
That was quite an epic intro, wasn’t it?

Cathy:
It was, really. Yeah, I’m feeling quite a lot of pressure now.

Lee:
I was listening to myself, as I was saying it, thinking, “Where’s this come from?” Cathy, welcome to the mad world of Agency Trailblazer.

Cathy:
Thank you, thank you.

Lee:
Wonderful to have you. Cathy is also a member of our Facebook group, so if you are not, check that out, trailblazer.fm/group. But Cathy, before we talk to you in any more detail, could we just learn a little bit about who you are and what it is that you do?

Cathy:
Sure. So Socially Contented is a digital marketing agency. I’ve been running it for, I don’t know… How long is it now? I think it’s been running about three years, but I was kind of working up to it for a couple of years before that. But I’ve been in marketing for about 25 years now. I was 19 years in the same company and then I was made redundant. Can you believe it? But at that point I was already working from home for them and had been for a number of years, and I didn’t think that any office could actually cope with me, or me with them. So I felt like I didn’t really have any other option but to start my own business.

Lee:
No, that sounds about right. I think we’re all pretty much unemployable nowadays.

Cathy:
Yeah, I think I’m quite unemployable.

Lee:
Definitely. I often look just for giggles at Monster, which over here in the UK folks, I don’t know if you’ve got it in the States, but we have it here and it’s a job website and I’ll very often look at the advertisements and if I see the word “we expect,” I instantly hate that employer.

Cathy:
Yeah, and unfortunately, anything anything on Monster that’s from home is usually multilevel marketing or some kind of sales. So that’s a complete no-no.

Lee:
Well, you have to buy a thousand pounds worth of stock and really irritate and alienate all of your friends and family.

Cathy:
Yeah, all your friends forever.

Lee:
Now just as a side note, there are some that work and I do know some people who do really well and they listen to this podcast, so please don’t get upset, but there are a few that give everyone else a bad name. So anyway.

Cathy:
It’s not for me.

Lee:
Definitely not for me either. So let’s dive in. I want to jump into that time machine and you shared how you’d been made redundant after so many years. 19 years is an amazing stint. Obviously that was scary for you, I guess at the time. How did you land upon the agency idea?

Cathy:
Well, I was already doing social media for the company that I worked for, it was a Japanese book seller, and I already dealt with all their Facebook and everything. So it seemed a logical step to move into that. At first I dealt exclusively with social media, and now really I deal exclusively with paid social, so Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, Twitter ads. You name it, I run an ad in it.

Lee:
That’s really good. So you’ve gone from niching into a service. You have a niche service of social media, which is actually quite broad still. Then you’ve niched within the niche, which is right now I only do paid ads. So in the time machine, as we kind of meander through probably 2017 time, I’m imagining. I actually watched a video of you introducing the business from 2017 on your Facebook page. That’s why I know. So back then, how did you start to find your new customers? Because we’ve got a whole range of different people who listen to this podcast. Some are people who have run an agency for years and others are just getting started and would love to know where would you start to find customers?

Cathy:
I think in the beginning, most of my customers were referred from other people and from connections. But what I started to do from a very early point was A, put a lot out on social media because I don’t think that you can say that you run social media accounts and then not put your own social media out. I don’t think that looks good. So I did get quite a lot of work from social media. I got a huge piece of work one year from Twitter, a huge piece of strategy work. And that was probably worth about three years worth of Twitter posting actually. But nowadays I think I probably get most of my clients either from referral or from doing a good strategy on LinkedIn for connections and messaging.

Lee:
So you have your own strategy on LinkedIn for your own lead generation and you specialise as a service in the paid ads. Is that paid ads in any social platform or do you niche within the niche within the niche and do it in a particular area?

Cathy:
I do mostly Facebook, but Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google. Not Tik Tok. I’m not doing anything on Tik Tok.

Lee:
I love Tik Tok so much.

Cathy:
I’m just not doing ads on it. That’s all.

Lee:
I’m just so addicted to it. I’m actually seeking therapy right now. I was watching Tik Tok just before we did this recording.

Cathy:
I think if I got the right brand I would do Tik Tok, but I think you also need a good budget for creatives because you’ve got to create completely different content for Tik Tok than any other social media platform. Either you need them to have a creative team or you need a good budget that you can spend solely on like video creation.

Lee:
Now I can see over the last few years you’ve developed a very particular type of service. At what point did you realise that you needed to shift from general social media management, because I believe it was general social media management, which is quite a big feat in its own right to actually whittling it down.

Cathy:
I would still take on a client who wanted that, but I would use part of a freelance team to do it. I wouldn’t do it myself. The thing with social media management is that it’s always on, so there’s very little downtime from it, which is not what I want. That’s probably not what most people want to be honest. I want to be able to take a holiday from it. I want to be able to have my evenings and weekends if I want to. And that’s much more doable when you’re running ads than when you are in charge of social media platforms all the time, and engagement and dealing with customer service queries, et cetera.

Lee:
So really it was that always being on that made you think I really want to go for the paid strategy predominantly? Like you said, you still take on the accounts, but you will then outsource the things that you don’t necessarily do.

Cathy:
Yeah there tends to be a lot. Obviously the kind of client that you get that’s paying for ad management is kind of a step up in size, probably in financial terms as well. At the lower end of the social media management scale, you would have a lot of very small businesses who are stretching to be able to afford somebody to manage their social media. Whereas once you start going into to paid ads, there is a bit more of a budget to play with as well, which helps.

Lee:
So I’m intrigued now. If I was an imaginary client that you were about to onboard, what would you be asking me and what would you be doing for me? Because at this point I have no idea. I know I can create my own ads. Not as though I have a clue when I do try stuff, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but what’s your onboarding process look like?

Cathy:
So first of all, we would have a discovery call and see whether we fit with each other, because I don’t take. This makes me sound like a complete…

Lee:
We don’t take anyone.

Cathy:
I don’t take just anybody, you know. But I have learned the hard way that I need to trust my gut as far as new clients go. And if we don’t gel, then I don’t take them on. I might be able to point them towards somebody else, but I don’t necessarily take them on.

Lee:
Someone you don’t like.

Cathy:
Yes. I won’t necessarily take everybody on who has a discovery call with me.

Lee:
If you get a lead from Cathy, she might not like you. Sorry, carry on.

Cathy:
It’s quite all right. Now I’ve forgotten what you asked me.

Lee:
I was saying, how would you onboard me? So first of all, you said you’d do a discovery, and if you didn’t like me, you’d pass me on to someone else.

Cathy:
Yeah, so then once you’ve gone and I’ve passed you on to somebody else. No. And then if I thought that we were a good fit, I would have a look at your website. I probably would have done this already, to be honest. I’d look at your website and make sure that it’s working properly. Make sure that the site speed, et cetera, works, that the customer buying journey, I hate that word, works. Because ads is not just about Facebook As Manager or whichever platform it is. It is about the website as well and how they work together. I can send a million people to your website, but if the actual website itself is not doing its job, that’s not going to help you.

Lee:
People often forget that, don’t they?

Cathy:
I don’t take on a client where their website isn’t working properly. And that’s also unfortunately from bad experience where I had a client, now was it last year, or was it the year before? Time kind of seems to have meshed together, doesn’t it?

Lee:
I believe we’re at that age, aren’t we, Cathy, where we’re never sure if it was 10 years ago or last week.

Cathy:
I don’t really know when it was, but whenever it was, I did have a client, quite a big… A global client. And they had come from another agency, who it transpired obviously didn’t have a clue what they were doing as far as ads were concerned. And they were spending about 35,000 a month when I took them on. But what it seemed they had done is, this previous agency had… They hadn’t tested properly and if something was going wrong, their answer was to just throw more money at it. Consequently, we didn’t really know what audiences worked properly. And then crucially, their website didn’t work properly.

Cathy:
So they had a 94%, I think, abandoned cart rate. So that means that for every 100 people that put something in their cart, 94 of them bounced out again and didn’t complete the purchase. Now that is just crazy stuff, because imagine if I was sending a million people to your website and you were paying all of that money for me to send that traffic to your website, and then 94% of them actually get as far as putting something in the cart and then they don’t buy. There is a reason for that, and it’s something that you have to fix before you keep spending more money on your ads. So I definitely get rid of customers like that. I don’t take those people on anymore.

Lee:
So I’ve made it through this hurdle now.

Cathy:
Yeah, your website’s really, really good, I’m sure.

Lee:
Well, I assume what you would do as well as you would say, “Lee, your website’s okay, but for me to be able to work with you, you will need to fix the following.” And then I would go away and then come back.

Cathy:
Yeah, we would talk about things like your abandoned cart rate, et cetera. And it’s a red flag for me if you don’t know your abandoned cart rate. As long as you’re an ecom.

Lee:
Well I’m now a red flag for you.

Cathy:
As long as you’re an ecom. If you’re not an ecom, then we don’t worry about it. But after all that, then we talk about your target audience and make sure that you really… That’s another red flag, if you don’t really know who your target audience is, because in order to make the ad copy do its job, I have to nail your target audience. Because when they’re reading that copy, they need to feel like I’m actually speaking to them, and they need to read it and they think, “Wow, that company just gets me, and that’s why I’m going to buy their stuff.” Because people buy from how you make them feel. So we need to make people feel something, and in order to do that, I have to know them really well. So if you haven’t nailed your target audience, then that is definitely something that we’d have to talk about and make sure that you can do it. So can you do that?

Lee:
Oh, I can nail my target audience.

Cathy:
Excellent, excellent. We can move on then. And after that, it’s pretty plain sailing after that, really.

Lee:
Yeah. Which would be what? Creating a few campaigns. I guess you’d asking me what content I might have. Do you do stuff like where I might have a valuable download that’s available for free as a kind of a introductory to get people into a retargeting pixel and all that good stuff?

Cathy:
Yeah, we can do that. We can run lead generation ads or we can run traffic ads to your website and retarget those people. That’s another thing that I would do is check that you had all the relevant pixels and targeting on your website to make sure that we can do that retargeting.

Lee:
That’s really good. I think I might buy. You’ve convinced me.

Cathy:
Excellent. First I’ve got to make sure you pass all those tests first.

Lee:
Absolutely. So the reason why I asked you all that is I wanted people to hear how other people onboard clients and there’s several lessons that we can pull out of what you’ve just shared with us. The first of all, is that it’s not always a yes, and sometimes it does need to be a no, especially if you’re not going to gel.

Cathy:
And vice versa. They might say no to me as well.

Lee:
Absolutely. And there is something really powerful… I’m glad you mentioned the gut, because the gut is something you cannot explain, but sometimes you just know that that client is not right for you and your brain has picked up on signals that you’re not necessarily aware of and you should probably listen to it. And the amount of times I have ignored my gut and then had the client from hell and wished, wished wished wished, I never took them on.

Cathy:
And me too. And that’s why I do that now. It’s not something that I did straight away.

Lee:
Well, it sounds like we got there eventually. The other thing as well you’ve mentioned is making sure that the client is in the right place, as in prepared to be able to get the most benefit from what it is you want to do. So even if you’re a web designer, obviously we’ve just talked right now guys about social media. But even if you’re going to onboard a web design client, they still need to know who their target audience is. They still need to know what outcomes they want from their website, et cetera. So these are all really, really important things. And what Cathy has demonstrated here is that she will make sure she gets everything that she possibly can first before they start to plan the campaigns, before they start to work out how to get those outcomes. So that was really helpful.

Cathy:
I think it’s really important as well for your own confidence that you get to a position where you can say no to a client as well. It’s much more of an equal relationship then. We don’t have this “the client is always right” business because they’re not always right. And yes, you should always be polite and you should always do as much as you can for them, but if you are the expert and they are going against your expert opinion, then you need to hold your own.

Lee:
Absolutely. In fact, I had that the other day with a supplier. I actually started arguing back because I thought I knew best, and eventually I had to call myself out and say, “Hang on, I’m paying you and I don’t know this, so you tell me and I will go with what you say.” So I ate my pride and I went with what they said. And I’m quite happy I did, actually, because I liked the outcome.

Cathy:
We’re all winners then, aren’t we?

Lee:
Everyone’s a winner. I can’t sing that. Copyright. Is it everyone’s a winner baby? That’s the old song, isn’t it? Again, UK only US people won’t know.

Cathy:
Don’t sing it, though.

Lee:
I’ll try not to. So what I’d love to then kind of quickly unpack before we move on into a couple of the other projects that you do is, with social media ads, with paid ads, et cetera, are they essentially the same across all platforms or what are the differences? So why would I go for a LinkedIn campaign versus a Facebook campaign or a Twitter campaign?

Cathy:
It’s usually going to be around your audience. Where is your audience? So if your audience was very much B2B, then probably you would go for LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a little bit more expensive than Facebook, but the funnels tend to be a bit shorter, so overall you might spend about the same. You might not spend more on LinkedIn. If your audience was very much on Facebook, then you would be there. If it was to do with politics or education or one of the things that Twitter does really well, then you might go there. Or you might do a search ad for Google. It depends really what exactly… At the moment I’m running ads for all four of those platforms and each one fits on a different… A couple of them I’m doing it on both platforms, but each one fits on a different platform. So it very much depends on your product or service and where your audience is.

Lee:
Because I believe things have changed as well since Google ads first started, because back in the day, if I did a Google ad campaign when it first came out in the noughties, I couldn’t say I wanted it to appear to a certain type of person. I assume that’s changed now.

Cathy:
Yeah, there’s a certain amount of targeting in, but for search ads, your keywords are very much… They’re not really around the audience, they’re around what the audience would search for. So you’re going at it through a different direction than Facebook ads.

Lee:
I see. So more what their problems are and going it from that way.

Cathy:
Well what would they type into Google? If it’s a search ad, not a display ad. You’re coming at it from almost the opposite end as you would for building a Facebook ad. In Facebook ads, you’re going to be very much looking at the audience, what their interests are, what other pages they might be following, what their demographics are. But for search, you are quite literally looking at what are they going to type in. So what are those keywords that I can pick up?

Lee:
So for example, “How do I replace the handle on my door?” Instantly, you’ll be serving ads for replacement door handles.

Cathy:
Yeah.

Lee:
I get it.

Cathy:
I mean, obviously you need to pick up all the different iterations of that keyword.

Lee:
And I assume that you can go to that granular level that you kind of couldn’t do back in the noughties, at least I can’t remember, where you could lock it down to particular areas as well, couldn’t you?

Cathy:
Yeah. I mean, there’s lots of extra filtering that you can do on all of the platforms, really, although Twitter is probably the least user-friendly really, as an ad building platform. LinkedIn has changed. LinkedIn has copied everything that Facebook does, basically.

Lee:
They’ve got the data. They’ve got everyone to CVs, damn it.

Cathy:
They’ve got all that Microsoft stuff, they must know everything about us, surely.

Lee:
Absolutely. You can tell how long it’s been since I did an AdWords campaign, because literally there was like three tick boxes and one drop down or something like that. It was absolutely [crosstalk 00:19:29]-

Cathy:
You can build quite a lot now.

Lee:
I saw someone’s ad dashboard the other day and it literally looked like rocket science to me. I was like, “Holy moly.” Because they were trying to work out how to… Well, I was trying to work out actually how to connect with them because a certain campaign had been denied and I was trying to work out where the hell you go to go and ask them why it had been denied, because they just kept sending me in this stupid loop into documentation, and I actually wanted to know what the culprit was. And apparently you had to submit a ticket, but it wasn’t even obvious that you had to do that or where to do that.

Cathy:
I don’t think any of them really make it easy.

Lee:
Not really. Well Facebook Business Manager as well or whatever it’s called. I find that pretty difficult.

Cathy:
Facebook Business Manager frequently makes me want to pull my hair out.

Lee:
Well, I’m bald, so I’m probably safe, so if you need me to do anything, just let me know. So going beyond agency life, I know you’ve done a couple of other projects as well, and I’d really love to hear what they are and how and why they got started.

Cathy:
Sure. Well basically the reason they got started is a couple of years ago my daughter was diagnosed autistic in the middle of a big mental health crisis, and it kind of changed everything in our family, really. And basically now I’m the only one who’s not autistic, and we run our lives in a different way, I guess. So my daughter hasn’t been at school for about 15 months now, so that also makes things quite different, and it’s a good job that I work from home, really. And we run a business together called Teen Calm, which is a subscription box for anxious teens, and it was my daughter’s idea. It’s basically a monthly box, or you can buy one off boxes, which contains nice little items, such as face masks, tangle toys, fidget toys, stress balls, things like that. So things which will nurture or things which will distract you.

Cathy:
And the aim is, first of all, to make people realise that they’re not alone. To make these kids realise that they’re not alone. Because what we found when we were going through all of this was that people thought that it was just them. So there are thousands of kids around the country who are too anxious to go to school at the moment, who don’t have any school place that’s meeting their needs, but they think it’s just them. They don’t realise that there are so many others. So that’s the point of it, to make people feel that they’re not alone and to give them some more confidence and dampen down their anxiety a bit.

Cathy:
And then as well as that, because I never liked to do not very many things, I also run an organisation called Autistic Girls Network, and that is a campaign group that I’m hoping to make into a charity or social enterprise, and that campaigns to raise awareness of autism in girls, because it quite differently to autism in boys and it’s very, very frequently missed. Hence so many more boys are diagnosed autistic and girls are diagnosed much later, which causes a lot of mental health issues.

Lee:
Wow, that’s really good. I was just having a look at that. I have a very anxious teenager, so I’m currently on the website taking a look to see what I could send her on a monthly basis. I think that’d be something really nice for her to look forward to.

Cathy:
Oh, that’d be nice. We’ve got lots of reviews now, so been busy.

Lee:
Folks, you can check that out over on teencalm.com. Now on the education side of things, then, on a personal level, our daughter does struggle with severe anxiety, which is why I wanted to ask you really and find out a little bit more on the selfish level. It’s my podcast and do what I want.

Cathy:
Why not?

Lee:
Why not? And this sounds like a great idea for her. What we did find was putting her into internet school. She really struggled in primary school and struggled to be taught. She couldn’t grasp things very well. The teachers didn’t seem able to support her and would just get frustrated with her and angry with her, and then she’d get more and more anxious and worried about getting things wrong, et cetera. So for the last two years, she’s actually been in an internet school doing her secondary level education and she’s found it absolutely wonderful. She has been able to express herself. She’s learning at her speed, which is all we really ever wanted, was for her to learn at her speed in a way that she can learn, which is often self-starting, because it’s research online and she’s got all morning if she wants to, to do a project, et cetera. So it’s all on her terms.

Lee:
And she is absolutely flourishing. Her grades have gone up through the roof compared to what they ever were. She’s enjoying school. She’s making friends online, et cetera. And for her, other than not being able to go and see family, which has been hard during lockdown, for her, her school life has remained consistent, which has been a godsend, I think, during lockdown, because at least she’s had that regular routine, et cetera, and the regular education and contact with other people online. So I’ve really, really thought, for anyone else who’s had their children at home and they’re not used to it.

Cathy:
Yes. That’s quite a common theme, actually. There’s there’s 4,600 in the Autistic Girls Network Facebook group, and that’s quite a common theme is that their children have been less stressed in lockdown because they haven’t had to go to school and they haven’t had all the stresses and the sensory issues of going to school. So unfortunately I don’t think that bodes well for going back to school, but I guess we’ll have to deal with that when it comes.

Lee:
I completely understand that. So where can people find the… Was it the Facebook group or you said there was a movement.

Cathy:
So Autistic Girls Network is the Facebook group.

Lee:
That was it. I said movement, I meant network. I’m getting old. No worries. Folks, you can find all of the links to these in the show notes of this episode. So especially if you are affected in any way by those subjects, then please do go ahead and check that out. And if you have an anxious teen, then there are both gender neutral and also boxes for girls available over on teencalm.com. There will be a link in the show notes. There is no affiliates going on. This is just something really cool that I want to support which phenomenal.

Cathy:
Thank you.

Lee:
No worries. Well, I’ve had a lovely time with you. Thank you so much for sharing with us essentially your journey into agency life and the lessons you’ve learned along the way, and the great process for onboarding and making sure you bring the right customers online that you can actually help. I think there’s a lot to learn from that. And also, thanks for sharing with us as well your personal life there as to why you started those projects, and we-

Cathy:
Thanks for having me.

Lee:
Really do wish you the very best of luck and success with everything that you do.

Cathy:
Thank you.

Lee:
You are wonderful and we appreciate you, so thank you so much.

Cathy:
Thank you.

Lee:
Alrighty. Take care and Cheerio.

Cathy:
Bye.