Hey friends!
Thanks for coming back to read another one of my growth reports.
If you’ve missed any of the previous reports, you can access them here:
January 2021
February 2021
March 2021
April 2021
☕️ Grab a cuppa and let’s dive in, shall we?
Hiring An Account Manager
Diving straight in at the deep end – we started the recruitment process this month.
It’s been tough, to say the least.
Last month I spoke about how I wanted to build a team local to me, rather than relying on remote contractors.
In the past, all the job roles we’ve hired for have been remote. Almost every time, we’ve been inundated with people from all over the world wanting to join the team.
Now that I’m looking for someone full-time in Edinburgh, it’s been much trickier.
We’ve done all the right things:
- Published the job across all the main job advert sites
- Big push on social media (mostly LinkedIn)
- Reached out to people we thought would be a good fit
- Asked my network for recommendations
- Running ads to the job page
But it has been slow.
Naively, I thought it would be the perfect time to hire. I thought with COVID there would be lots of people looking for work, but the opposite is true.
I spoke with a recruitment consultant last week who told me this has been one of this is one of the hardest periods they’ve ever had.
There’s actually a surplus of work.
A lot of companies have too much work and not enough people – and with the rise of remote working, you are no longer competing against organisations in your area, you’re competing against organisations all over the world.
With that in mind… if you have experience in PPC and you’d like to join a growing agency, get in touch here!
Website Launch
We have FINALLY done it! I’ve been writing about how we’re aiming to get the website live for about 3 months now, but it’s finally here!
Check it out by clicking here.
It’s still very much in its infancy and there’s a lot of work we still need to put into it, but I was keen to get it live!
Now it’s live we’re going to:
- Start producing super high-quality blog content. We’ve got a few articles ready to go. The goal? To share the best quality content on the internet.
- Update the photography on the site. It’s all stock imagery just now, but once we’re in the new office we’ll get photos taken for the site. This is something that’s long overdue anyway!
- Continue to build out site content. You’ll see, for example, at the bottom of the homepage we feature some case studies. We need to build out pages specifically for those (and the 20+ others we have ready to go!)
- Begin the big task of moving over lots of our old content (from this site) to the new one. The plan is to keep this site as a place for me to share my general business thoughts (and content like this) but keep the agency site for Facebook ads, lead generation and conversion rate optimisation content.
- Start publishing guest articles. We’ve got some amazing collaborations lined up with some amazing cactusmeraviglietina.it companies, so now the site is live we’ll start ramping that up.
- All the SEO-juiciness that goes into a website (currently we don’t come up #1 for anything!)
I’m really happy with how it has turned out and I can’t wait to start promoting it properly!
We haven’t properly “launched” it yet… so you’re the first to see it! If you find anything that doesn’t work or doesn’t look right, please let me know on Twitter (@mrgavinbell).
Referral Programme
I’ve been working hard on creating a solid referral/affiliate programme.
We often get referrals from clients etc. but we’ve never formalised it and we’ve never done anything to try and get more referrals.
So that’s what I’ve been working on.
But I don’t want to just create a plan, I want to create a campaign around it.
That means creating visuals, a page on the website and getting it out to people who I think are a good fit.
At the time of writing this, we’ve just sent the first draft out to trusted contacts for feedback and we’ll be collating all of that before promoting it big time!
Business Development
Much like last month, I’ve spent an enormous amount of time on business development.
I’ve been dedicating time in my diary each day to connecting and reaching out to people, engaging with others and generally just building my network.
I even had my first in-person meeting since March 2020 – ha! That was a pleasant change from back to back Zoom meetings.
The pipeline has been building up nicely and great to see leads coming in through the new site!
What’s next?
There we have it – that’s been our month! A crazy busy one with hiring, biz dev and onboarding new clients… but all good problems to have.
Here’s what we’re going to focus on in June:
Hire Account Manager – I’m going to work really hard on actually hiring the right person in June. I hope I can introduce you to them in the next report!
Business Development – The business development work is going well, so will keep that up!
Referral Plan Promotion – Now that the plan is finalised, we’ll promote it big time in June.
Website work – Now the website is live, we’ll continue building it out and I would expect the main SEO work will be complete. I’ll also start our guest blogging work.
If you’d like to keep up to date with these monthly growth reports, pop your name and email in the form below and I’ll email you with the report each month. You won’t get any other emails from me (unless you opt in to those separately, of course!)
See you next month ?
Gavin
