What I Learned Working for a Digital Marketing Agency
First off, the purpose of this blog is not for SEO. I am not using best practices such as writing about my trade or using keywords to attract search engines. This blog is purely for reflecting on what I have learned in my foray into digital marketing via marketing agencies.
I have summed up my years of experience into 7 things I have learned about digital marketing agencies. Click on a point to be taken directly to that part of the blog:
- Digital Marketing Companies Are Segmented by Specialization
- A Focus on Bigger, Faster, Stronger Doesn’t Always Trickle Down to the Customer
- Bureaucracy Stifles Innovation
- The Ones Who Do the Most Important Work Are Typically the Least Invested
- More Revenue Means Access to Better Tools
- Sales Sells
- Account Managers Don’t Often Manage Accounts
The Beginning of my Copywriting Career
I started my journey as a professional marketer one week after graduating with a degree in Political Science. Quite the shift, I know. The thing is, I started my college education in business. After taking a couple of courses in business administration, I determined that I could learn how to do business better by jumping into the field rather than being taught in a classroom. Of course, I think that applied just as well to Political Science, but I found that coursework more interesting than business.
I purchased an online course and taught myself copywriting. My major required me to write a lot and argue. The transition into copywriting was a natural one for me. The material was easy to pick up and easy to apply. I have a slight edge over others in that I enjoy expressing myself through writing, while others merely tolerate it as a burdensome, if necessary, task.
My first summer as a copywriter was rough. I tried to prospect for leads but found myself crushed by imposter syndrome. I overestimated just how easy it would be to jump into business without any formal background or training. But, it was a decision I was determined to stick with.
My First Marketing Position
I got my first job as an “SEO Specialist” getting paid less than what I was making at my last college job. Why was I hired? While getting clients wasn’t something I excelled at, I showed my ability to perform by building my own website and practicing copywriting techniques for scrap projects.
As with every job, there is a learning curve. Looking back, I think I started feeling comfortable with my new position about a month after I started. I purchased books, looked up best practices, and subscribed to newsletters focused on SEO and content writing. Things were looking good.
After two months of working at my new agency, I realized that all the techniques I had been taught to use were outdated by at least 10 years. Backlinks were purchased, blogs were posted as guest blogs offsite, and websites were bogged down with excess code that made them slow and difficult to change.
My company promoted me to manage accounts and talk with customers directly. I didn’t have much faith in our services and quickly became burned out of trying to handle unhappy customers and initiate updates to our SEO best practices. That led me to search for and get my second position.
My Second Marketing Position
I was hired exclusively as a content writer for another digital marketing company. It was a lucky break for me. I didn’t like managing Google ads, creating Facebook posts, or doing technical work on websites. The written word is what I enjoyed the most and excelled at.
This new position was with a younger company (7 years old as opposed to 20), and they were more in tune with current marketing best practices than my old company. The workforce was larger and more specialized and segmented by specialty. Each of us was an expert in our own field, and we were encouraged to learn more on the company clock and improve our craft.
Because my role was more specialized, I could focus on getting good at one thing rather than trying to become competent at many things. Focusing my skill development on copywriting was the best thing for me at the time and allowed me to truly excel at what I did.
It is always easy to criticize others, and I have plenty of gripes with my second company, but overall, I left believing that it was good at what it did. I left that company and took a break from marketing to pursue other career itches I had.
Here are some things I learned about digital marketing companies by working for them.
How Digital Marketing Typically Companies Work
Many of the digital marketing companies out there service small to medium-sized businesses. When a company gets large enough, it can afford to have in-house marketing specialists. Marketing agencies are a convenient way for small- to medium-sized business owners to outsource a critical business function to experts.
Here are some typical characteristics of digital marketing companies:
1. Digital Marketing Companies Are Segmented by Specialization
The first thing I noticed in my second company was that each department had specialists focused on one task. As I mentioned before, this was primarily a good thing. Having one person focusing on one specific aspect of digital marketing, such as social media management, Google advertising, content marketing, etc., helped the company as a whole produce decent quality for its customers.
Where there are pros, there are also cons. Segmenting meant that individuals in different departments didn’t know the first thing about how to be successful in another department. As a content writer, I studied content creation, blogging, landing pages, and ad copy, but I didn’t know what our Google ads specialists were doing nor what they thought was important.
Why is this a bad thing?
I interviewed our Google Ads specialist for a blog I worked on for my marketing company. I discovered that Google Ads rank higher if keywords are consistent across advertisements, website content, and backend SEO. In hindsight, it seems silly I didn’t pick up on that before, but I legitimately had no idea because I had no cause to think about it.
Keyword consistency is an integral part of backend SEO, and my agency broke that responsibility up to be managed by three separate departments that had little to no contact with each other about what keywords to focus on.
Segmentation led to better specialization but poor communication and an overall lack of consistency. Successful digital marketing depends on keyword consistency across your website.
2. A Focus on Bigger, Faster, Stronger Doesn’t Always Trickle Down to the Customer
A required reading at one of my companies was the book 2-Second Lean (How to Grow People and Build a Fun Lean Culture at Work & at Home by Paul Akers. (I’m not sponsored to promote this book, but it’s a good one!) Our company promoted a culture of “continuous improvement.” We all bought into the “better, faster, stronger” mentality and tried our best to make lean improvements that would help our efficiency grow.
It wasn’t until I re-read the book after I left the company that I realized our company had missed the mark. The purpose of the book 2-Second Lean was to teach companies how to eliminate waste, not necessarily to make things better, faster, or stronger. I realized that my company had been employing practices that were a waste but had the appearance of making things bigger, faster, and stronger.
Better, faster, stronger is the motto of many middle and upper managers. Why? They increase the bottom line. If you can write a 1,000-word blog in one hour instead of two in a digital marketing company, the company can take on more work and get paid more. That makes sense, right?
The problem with the bigger, faster, stronger mentality is that companies will often improve for the well-being of their own bottom line, not necessarily for the benefit of their customers. When I learned of a way I could increase my writing productivity by 200%, the first thing the company did was increase my workload to match my output. Now, I had to stress about writing more to keep my job. Quality was always a concern on paper but wasn’t as big of a concern as achieving quantity.
Focusing on a bigger, faster, and stronger mentality led to more revenue for the marketing agency but not necessarily for its customers.
3. Bureaucracy Stifles Innovation
I tried being a force for change at both the digital marketing agencies I worked for.
At my first agency, I brought up my concerns about the efficacy of our digital marketing practices to my direct managers and even the company owner. I got their attention and even got them to agree with me, but I could never get them on board to help me instigate the change our company needed.
At my second company, I was in the habit of bringing up suggestions on how we could improve our craft, including the use of various tools and techniques I learned about from my own research. My managers always heard my suggestions, but they rarely implemented them. As an example, I was advocating for my company to invest in generative AI four months before ChatGPT made its debut. I immediately began using ChatGPT to help me in my work, but it took the rest of the company an entire month to jump on that particular bandwagon!
Yes, some of the onus is on me for not sticking to my guns and instigating the change. I recognize that. The failure to innovate is as much a fault for my not trying hard enough as it is for my company not implementing change. With my ChatGPT story, I told my team about it but didn’t really explain the benefits. I used it, and a good work friend of mine used it, but we were the only two on the team who did, and we didn’t go through a lot of effort to tell the rest of the team what we were up to.
The big problem here was bureaucracy. As much as I have heard my managers and company owners rage against bureaucracy, once you have a dedicated hierarchy, bureaucracy overcomes innovation and makes it harder for companies to evolve.
As I said, I was in the habit of bringing up different ideas for improving the company. Still, my managers weren’t too keen on innovation because it would upset the workflow too much or require more work to experiment with the suggestion to see if it was valid (not all my ideas are good, even I can recognize that).
The fact of the matter is that innovation is difficult for larger organizations. It’s like comparing the turning radius of an aircraft carrier and a speed boat. The bigger the organization, the more it resists change, even if it claims to be an early adopter of new techniques.
4. The Ones Who Do the Most Important Work Are Typically the Least Invested
When you hire someone to work for you, you want them to be invested in the project and do a good job. When it comes to service-oriented companies, those who are most invested in getting work are typically the ones who are least involved in performing the work. Salespeople are paid a commission to get leads, the leads are passed on to operations, and operations organize the work.
Digital marketing companies work like that; at least the ones I worked for did. As I have said, there are pros and cons to this. The pros are you have an excellent sales team that makes you feel good about your investment (I’ll get to that more in a second); the con is that the people doing the work for you usually do not exhibit the same level of commitment to their tasks as the salesperson or account manager you are in contact with.
Customers paid my company for blogs. My company paid me to write blogs. How much did the company pay me? It was probably around $50ish. For a content writer starting off, that’s a pretty decent wage for a 1,000-word blog. How much was my company charging the customer for that same blog? $500.
To put that in perspective, the customer paid $500 for a $50 blog.
Now, let’s put that perspective into perspective. My company charged $500 because they needed to support their overhead costs.
Part of the $500 was designated to cover the account manager’s responsibility of informing the customer about developments within their company. Another part went to my manager, who was responsible for making me work. Another part went to her manager, who was responsible for making her work. Another part went to the CEO, who was responsible for making my manager’s manager work and who used the company’s profits to start other businesses. And lastly, another part went to paying employees for personal development, company meetings, rent on the office building, company equipment, etc.
In short, $500 is cheap for a company with so much overhead.
Paying the grunt workers grunt wages seems fitting until you realize that the person performing the services you pay for probably doesn’t care to do more than the minimum required to keep their job. You are paying more to maintain the company bureaucracy than you are paying to get a quality product.
5. More Revenue Means Access to Better Tools
It is notable to recognize where Marketing Agencies get things right. I don’t think any business owner intentionally sabotages their own company by creating rigid hierarchies and massive overhead costs. On the contrary, most business owners are engaged in money-saving efforts, or at least ways to justify what they charge their clients.
One thing I saw at the companies I worked for was their dedication to having good tools. Digital marketing is a diverse undertaking that requires many different tools. No matter what the big marketing software developers want you to believe, you need more than just one tool to get good results.
When it was time to act, the places I worked for were very good at getting their employees access to tools that would help them get the best results for their clients. Even on my own, I still utilize many of the tools I had unrestricted access to as an employee.
6. Sales Sells
I’m going to preface this point by saying that salespeople always tend to get a bad rap. Those of us who have been in sales know that it’s often not the people doing the selling but the products they sell that make life miserable for consumers.
I worked in sales for a while, trying to get through college. As a salesman, my company gave me a script and encouraged me to believe in the product I was selling. I bought into the product, and that helped me become more persuasive and successful as a salesman.
My illusions about the product slowly faded, and I started seeing why the customer retention rate was so low. While the idea of the product was good, it wasn’t practical for most people to use it exclusively.
The places I did marketing for both had sales teams. The salespeople were genuinely good and nice people who tried to act in the best interest of their leads. They were problem solvers who helped connect customers to solutions. I have a lot of respect for what they did and how they did it. Unfortunately for them, sometimes what they were selling wasn’t quite what the customer needed at the time.
Sales is business, and salespeople sell. That in and of itself is a pro and a con. Salespeople are good at helping customers feel emotionally good about a purchase. For better or for worse, the sales team and the account managers were good at helping convince customers they were getting more value than they were actually receiving.
An example of this was when I discovered an out-of-date method one company was using. I came to see that our customers were experiencing good results in spite of what we were doing. Not that we were doing anything wrong, mind you, but that we were spending time using methods that were so out of date they had effectually no tangible effect on a customer’s SEO rankings.
I have found that Google and other search engines are relatively good at ranking websites so long as certain basic parameters are met. If you have a fast-loading website with a clear purpose, are updating your website with quality content, have good reviews, and, most importantly, have a good product, your website will do rather well on search engine results.
While what I was doing wasn’t necessarily having a positive or negative impact on our clients’ websites, their rankings were still climbing, and we took the credit for that.
Doing work with a service-oriented company does not guarantee you will be better off.
7. Account Managers Don’t Often Manage Accounts
In my time working for marketing agencies, I wore many hats; my least favorite hat was that of an account manager.
If there is one job that is made to act as a frontline for receiving criticism and crap, it’s an account manager. I worked in a call center and as an account manager. If I had to choose to do one again, I would choose the call center. As an account manager, I was constantly dealing with people accusing me of poor performance. Sometimes, this resulted in highly personal attacks from people who knew me very little.
In a perfect world, account managers work with the production team to coordinate custom approaches to the needs of the customer. Life is never perfect, and I never knew an account manager who did this. In 95% of cases, the work my company did for a customer was automated and received little to no input from the account manager.
As I have said, this is a pro and a con. Automation means that the customer is getting value even if it isn’t as customized as the customer expects. This also means that most of the time, the production team will not implement feedback or requests from the customer.
If you want something to be customized, it is far better to talk to the person actually producing the service rather than the account manager.
The Sum of What I Have Learned as a Paid Copywriter at a Digital Marketing Company
If I could sum up everything I learned, it would be that it is far better for the customer to be directly in contact with the person producing their product.
If I wanted to ask a client a question, I technically had to ask my manager to ask the account manager to ask the client the question. That’s not a very efficient system. There is a gulf in marketing agencies that separates clients from production. This same gulf also makes poor incentives that leave those performing the most important work to dedicate the bare minimum effort to produce a product.
I feel like my business model fixes the problems I see in the typical marketing agency. I work directly with my clients to get them high-quality products they can be satisfied with. As the one who produces the products and has to represent them, I make sure that you are getting the quality you need.
If you need copywriting services, be they blogs, emails, social media posts, or website copy, send me a message at [email protected]. I look forward to working with you!
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